How I owned and led the project of developing an Internal SaaS Application with Claude Code which is saving the business $200/m

Tags:

Project & Product Management, SaaS, AI, Claude, Development

My Role:

Lead Designer & Strategist, Developer, Product Manager

Outcome / Project Impact:

Time taken to generate certificates for batch - From 15 mins to 1 min
Email the participants - From 1 hour to 30s
Monthly Cost savings - ~$200/m
Reduced development time

Disclaimer

Due to a non-disclosure agreement, certain technical details — including code logic, and implementation specifics — have been omitted from this case study. However, the problem space, design process, and solution are presented at a level of detail sufficient to convey the full scope and impact of the work.

Context & Overview

Theseus AI Lab provides two core services - AI education & AI consultation & implementation. Under AI education we provide AI training to organizations (corporate employees, B2B) .

We made a decision to issue certificates to each of the employee who undergoes training under us.

Why Issue a certificate?

Increased Credibility & Trust: It demonstrates commitment to continuous learning and professional development, building credibility for both the participant and the training provider.
Motivation and Reward: Certificates serve as a tangible reward for effort, which increases engagement, motivation, and completion rates (studies indicate that certificates can improve completion rates by nearly 50%).
Validation of Skills & Knowledge: A certificate confirms that the student has completed a structured learning process and, in many cases, passed assessments that demonstrate proficiency in a particular field.
Boost to Resume & Career Prospects: It provides tangible proof of expertise, making participants stand out to potential employers and helping them secure jobs or career advancements.

Benefit for the business (Theseus AI Lab)

Higher Customer Retention: It helps build stronger relationships and loyalty between the instructor and the participant, encouraging them to sign up for future trainings
Free and Effective Referral Marketing: When students share their certificates on social media platforms like LinkedIn, they provide "authentic, word-of-mouth" marketing, which is highly effective in attracting new learners.
Increased Trust and Credibility: Issuing certificates shows that the training company takes its curriculum seriously and is not just offering "easy to get" documents, attracting more serious students.
Authority Building: Providing certifications helps establish the training provider as an authority or leader in their specific industry or niche.
Improved Course Evaluation: The process of earning a certificate—which often includes exams—allows the provider to monitor where students are challenged, helping them evaluate and improve their teaching methods.

But how do you certify the participants?

Where can you create one and share the certificate with the employees?

Manually designing on Canva for each participant & sharing them via email.
3rd party apps - Certifier, Credsure, Accredible

Manual Operation

Lengthy procedure
Time taking
Inefficient
Cumbersome to track and manage

3rd party application (off the shelf)

Negative ROI Not worth investing monthly ~$150
Additional fees for white labelling, branding, custom domain

So, why not build it ourselves in-house? A minimal set of functioning features. We anyway have no-coding / low-coding tools

Factors to consider

Time to build and ship
Effort it takes to build
Resources available

Success metrics to consider

Operational efficiency / Admin side: Time to generate a batch (training session with set employees) of certificates to sharing it to the customer
Boosting brand awareness & discovery: Public certificate / participant side:
1. No. of clicks on participant certificate redirecting to certificate page -> Theseus AI landing page
2. No. of participants who share on linkedin
3. No. of participants who add it to their profiles

Targeting the A & I in the AIDA Funnel Analysis

Awareness: organizations discovering us when a participant posts on social media along with the certificate link
Consideration: Exploring the certificate page and clicks on the Theseus website for considering for an AI training for their organization

Solution

Building the very 1st Phase

Developer cloned a GitHub repository of the project and we tweaked a little according to our needs. My involvement was relatively less in this phase except for the research of the operations and the flow design

V1 Scope

Timeline 1 week to develop and ship

1 day: Understanding internal operation and communication with the customer and the LC team
1 day: for testing & understanding 3rd party platforms - certifier
2 days to design & build
1 day to test and ship to start using

Functioning features

Admin side

Adding participants
Importing participants / upload csv
Generating certificate

Public certificate side

Sharing using public URL
Sharing via social media platforms
Downloading certificate

Current Problems with the product and the workflow

A literally one page admin application, create the certificate in the same page and manage them.

No proper way to categorize according to the customer, training and participants and also no way to track the email send

Time for an entire operation for a batch of 50 people

Creating certificate - 15 mins
Sending (Emailing) certificates to a batch manually - 1 hour

Upgraded Solution

The 2nd Phase - Optimizing & Scaling

My contribution here was at the maximum, I took the full ownership and scaled this project to a level where the improvements were much welcome and impactful. I Converted this one page application into an internal SaaS which helped team manage many customers, trainings, issue and certificates and also mail them easily.

By now, the developer's priorities were shifted and was not active in this project, I had to redesign and build the application. My capabilities were to be evolved at this stage. I was learning development using Claude Code. Following is what I did with minimal amount of time

Drafter a Detailed PRD
Setup Claude Code project & Claude Skills
Setup Version control system
Setup a Product Development Plan & Design system
Initiate the development & Deploy

The Tech Stack

Frontend
1. Tailwind w/ Shadcn and tweakcn theming
2. NextJS
Backend
1. NodeJS v18
2. Database - MongoDB
Dependencies
1. Mongoose 8 — MongoDB ODM
2. Nodemailer 8 — Email sending (cert delivery)
3. Zod 3 — Schema validation
PDF / Certificate Generation

pdf-lib — PDF manipulation / text embedding
@pdf-lib/fontkit — Custom font embedding (Garet font)
pdfjs-dist 4 — Client-side PDF rendering to canvas
@napi-rs/canvas — Server-side canvas rendering (for /image route)
@pdftron/pdfnet-node — PDF processing (Node.js)
react-pdf, pdf-to-img, pdf2pic — Additional PDF utilities

Behind the scenes

Dashboard with data such as brand awareness tracker, certificates and email tracker

Organizations Page semantically categorized as our customers

List of participants who are to be certified and emailed, along in bulk

Email that the participant receives

Public Certificate page. Notice the framing of the sentence - "How Theseus AI Lab helped" which convinces the visitors to click the logo and redirect them to the website, hence improving the CTR.

Participants posting their certificates on LinkedIn and other socials thereby increasing our brand awareness

Outcome

Lowered development time significantly
Convinced the stakeholders to have it built in-house, hence saving the business ~$200/m investment which does not guarantee +ve ROI.
Reduced the time in issuing the certificate by at least 60%
Increased Theseus AI Lab's brand awareness.