---
title: 'Let''s Build a SaaS in Laravel'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=kk9Z9qs4tco'
video_id: 'kk9Z9qs4tco'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 157
---

# Let's Build a SaaS in Laravel

> Source: [Let's Build a SaaS in Laravel](https://youtube.com/watch?v=kk9Z9qs4tco)

## Summary

This Laravel SaaS tutorial series takes a unique, real-world approach by building Symposium, a production app for conference speakers. Instead of choosing an easy tutorial idea, it tackles complex, evolving user requests for features like revisions and multiple bios. Viewers will learn adaptive problem-solving, debugging, and how to handle unexpected requirements.

### Key Points

- **Real-world app focus** [00:00] — The tutorial series builds a real production SaaS app, Symposium, rather than a simple example.
- **Reverse tutorial methodology** [00:27] — The instructor flips the typical tutorial approach by starting with complex, real user requests instead of easy-to-code ideas.
- **Symposium's purpose** [00:54] — Symposium is a conference speaker tool that tracks proposals, revisions, bios, photos, and conferences.
- **Evolving features** [01:34] — Symposium evolved to include features like revisions, multiple bios, photos, an API, and conference favoriting/dismissing.

## Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome to Let's Build a Sass with Laravel. Like in many other tutorials, we are going to build a Laravel app from scratch, and
it'll be a software as a service or a sass. But in many tutorials, we as teachers pick the ideas that we're going to build based on ideas that are easy to represent with the code or the lessons that we're trying to teach.
In this particular lesson, we're actually going to flip at the other way around. We're going to pick a real-world production need with real user requests that are often complicated and difficult to map into database structures or whatever else, and we're going
to force ourselves to find solutions to those. It's a real app that has been in production for almost a decade. It's called Symposium. Let's take a look. Symposium is an application I built as a conference speaker to keep track of all the talks
I wanted to propose giving or had already given at conferences. For every single talk, it would keep track of what specific words I wanted to say around the proposal, how I changed it over time, maybe some notes for the organizers, or anything
else I needed to know to make it easy to think of what are the talks I could potentially give at any given conference. But it morphed over time. I originally didn't think about keeping track of revisions, and didn't think about keeping
track of my various bios that I was going to have at conferences, or the photos I'd use with those bios. Originally, it didn't keep track of all the conferences I could possibly submit to, and much more. But over time, my ideas, Adam Wathens' ideas as he was working with me, and the request
of various users made this application more and more complicated in ways that didn't always make sense for what I would expect to build in a Laravel app, and as time went on, we had even more requests, an API, favoriting versus dismissing conferences, and much more.
So as we build this app, we will cover all the basic things that you need to know in order to build every Laravel app. We'll do databases, migrations, and tests, and all the other things that are on the common Laravel app.
But then we're also going to take those specific and confusing and often unexpected user requests and figure out that translate them to database structure, or code flows, or whatever else is specific to this instance that we didn't plan for, that don't always easily map to things
that just exist in a Laravel documentation. It's going to be very valuable because we're going to learn how to think on the fly, how to deal with debugging, how to change existing database structures in order to map on specific needs.
So I hope you enjoy it. I hope you stick around and let's work together to learn how to build a SAS with Laravel.