Building SaaS at Night and Weekends: Lessons from Aurelius

Executive overview

Aurelius is a research repository platform that helps UX teams organize, tag, and search customer research data. After five years and four product versions, founders Zach Naylor and Joseph went full-time during COVID, completely replatformed to React and MongoDB, and discovered that the rewrite unleashed explosive growth. The core insight: painful pivots and technical rewrites are worth it when you have strong customer validation and clear product-market signals.

The problem with early versions

Aurelius started in 2015 as an overly ambitious product strategy platform connecting research to decisions and analytics. The founders realized 90% of users wanted just the research repository piece, not the full platform. They spent years building different versions (2016 alpha, 2017-2018 rewrites) while working day jobs, with minimal traction.

From side hustle to full-time

When COVID hit in March 2020, Zach was furloughed and Joseph was laid off. Instead of panicking, they set a revenue target and agreed that reaching it meant going full-time. The pandemic created both crushing pressure (two young kids at home, homeschooling uncertainty, personal safety concerns) and forced focus—a combination that nearly broke Zach emotionally by summer 2020.

The V3 replatforming decision

By mid-2020, the old Angular/Riot codebase with Neo4j database couldn't support their vision. Zach and Joseph faced a painful choice: rewrite the entire product or abandon the vision. They calculated that moving to React and MongoDB would cut development time from a year to six months. Sunset the old platform and went all-in on the rewrite—the hardest three months of Zach's life.

The payoff

V3 launched in September 2020 with a complete visual redesign, rebuilt note-taking engine, and new features. Customer reactions shifted from "hit or miss" to "grand slams" almost universally. Since January 2021, Aurelius shipped 13 features—impossible on the old tech stack. Revenue and growth went exponential, and they were accepted to Tiny Seed.

Listening to customers without losing vision

Zach does research with customers constantly and incorporates feedback without blindly following feature requests. When customers said they needed "integrations," Zach reinterpreted it: they actually needed an easier way to consolidate research data scattered across tools. That insight shaped the product direction. His lived experience as a UX researcher for 15 years filters what he hears from customers.

Scratchpad-driven product innovation

The most popular early feature—bulk input—came from Zach asking Joseph, "What if I could paste notes and have each line create its own tagged note?" Joseph built it in one night. It's been a customer favorite ever since. The lesson: solve your own pain first, then see if it resonates.

Key takeaways

• Replatforming is brutal but defensible when you're early, have product-market signals, and competitive pressure is real.
• Going full-time during catastrophic personal uncertainty amplifies stress exponentially; business uncertainty alone is manageable, combined uncertainty is crushing.
• Feature requests often mask deeper needs; understand the why before building.
• Founder intuition filtered through customer research beats either one alone.
• Speed of development is a competitive advantage for bootstrapped teams; technical debt costs more than rewrites for 2-person companies.