I agree with you. SaaS is in my opinion the hardest way to make money as a developer. Not only do you have to make working software, you also have to do every other thing a freelance business requires.

The path I often see is:

Developer builds an app in private with no monitization strategy or "we'll put on ads", releases to crickets/not very many users, and nothing then happens.

The question is then asked "why won't anyone buy my software?" Answer: "because you made something nobody asked for."

My recommendation is, instead of starting with a SaaS you come up with yourself and try to sell it to people, start with the audience. Learn about them and try to find a problem they'd pay money to solve.

To make things automatically twice as easy, sell to businesses instead of individual non-business owners. You can sell a $500 a month service to a business that solves a business problem. My family values software at less than $1.

If the problem you are solving is something the audience might also want to learn how to do, start a mailing list around the idea and teach them about the thing. Make info products, and services around helping them do the thing. Create a consulting service to manually do what your SaaS app might do automatically. Then build an app to automate the process.

Audience -> Freelance/Consulting -> Info Products -> Software.

Each of these steps are necessary for all the following steps anyway. Building a SaaS first is like jumping into senior year as a freshman - you _could_ learn everything all at the same time but that may take a lot of effort and frustration.

This is one of my soapbox issues because I have spent so much of my side project time flailing around doing exactly the opposite of what I said above and never making a dime from it.