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Cory Zue

Founder of SaaS Pegasus and Place Card Me, Chief Accelerator at Dimagi

Cory Zue is a software developer and entrepreneur who founded SaaS Pegasus, a Django-based SaaS boilerplate for founders.1 He's also the creator of Place Card Me, an app for generating wedding place cards.3 Zue transitioned from being the CTO of Dimagi, a 200-person company, to becoming a solopreneur.4 He now runs a portfolio of revenue-generating technology products, including SaaS Pegasus, which has been used by over a thousand people to build hundreds of real products.4

Zue's career path includes:

  1. Starting as a CTO at Dimagi (2006-2017)5
  2. Taking a sabbatical to explore solo entrepreneurship3
  3. Creating Place Card Me, his first successful product4
  4. Developing SaaS Pegasus, which now generates about 80% of his income4

Currently, Zue holds the position of Chief Accelerator at Dimagi while running his own businesses.5 He's based in Cape Town, South Africa, and is known for sharing his experiences and insights about solopreneurship and using coding skills to generate passive income.42

SaaS Pegasus, Zue's main product, is a configurable Django codebase that helps developers launch SaaS applications faster by providing pre-built features like user accounts, billing, and team management.1 The product has been successful, with Zue reporting over $100k in profit in 2024.1

Highlights

Dec 3 · twitter

If you're a contractor and you find yourself making a sandwich while Claude codes a feature, is that billable time? 🤔

Dec 1 · twitter

Solopreneurship introduces constraints that make this the simplest path for many.

I always had what I called a "pager test" for any product I was considering building, which is basically "will this product require me to get up in the middle of the night if something is down?" If the answer was "yes" I mostly ruled out the business. Solopreneurship for me is mostly about freedom, and being handcuffed to supporting a product just felt like swapping an obligation to a boss for an obligation to a customer. Still not free.

The pager test eliminates most good B2B saas applications! You're left with things that are require no support (e.g. books, courses), are low-stakes enough that support can wait (e.g. cheap B2C apps), or are natually asynchronous (e.g. downloaded/installed apps). Of these, info-products are the easiest to make money from.

There's also a selection bias at work. The solopreneurs you hear about most are the ones with audiences. The ones with audiences have the most incentive to sell stuff to their audiences.

Plus, everyone loves when people want to hear their thoughts and ideas. Even many of the best builders have books or blogs. I think once you're financially successful you start looking for other forms of validation. Lots of examples of this out there.

Related Questions

What inspired Cory Zue to create SaaS Pegasus?
How did Cory Zue's experience with Place Card Me influence his work on SaaS Pegasus?
What are some unique features of SaaS Pegasus compared to other boilerplates?
How has Cory Zue's background in Django benefited his work on SaaS Pegasus?
What challenges did Cory Zue face while developing SaaS Pegasus?
Cory Zue
Cory Zue, photo 1
Cory Zue, photo 2
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Location

City of Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa