From “You will fail” to 15,000 GitHub stars: The story of Wasp, a "Laravel for JS" full-stack framework
"What you're building is the holy grail for developers. No one has succeeded so far." 🏆 ☠️
This is the feedback from Y Combinator when Martin (my twin brother) and I applied with Wasp for the second time in May 2020. At that point, we had worked on Wasp for 1.5 years, the last nine months full-time. We had quit our previous jobs and gone all in.
Today, Wasp has over 15,000 stars on GitHub. Even more importantly, developers of all backgrounds have used it to develop thousands of web apps, from side projects that have grown into acquired or revenue-generating businesses to venture-backed startups and internal tools deployed within Fortune 500 companies.
Some people have grown to love Wasp and the vision it pursues. Thanks to them, we enjoy working on it. Without the community that gathered around Wasp (>4,000 devs in our Discord), we wouldn’t have been even close to where we are today. For them, we keep pushing towards the holy grail we promised.
Our work has just begun - but we’re more excited about it than ever.
The journey - getting from 0 to 15,000 stars
As with most success stories, the success rarely happens linearly. It usually starts with a long period of "drought" with occasional signs of life, and then there is a moment when things click together and start moving really fast. We experienced the same, and it looked something like this:
The inception - “Why not?”
In the beginning, Wasp was just an idea—or rather, a question: "Why hasn't anyone built this yet? What would we discover if we tried?" After spending a decade building web apps and using every major tech stack (from PHP to Java and Node.js on the server to Backbone, Angular, and React on the client), we were feeling the pain of "framework fatigue," aka reinventing the wheel with each new stack.
So we set out to start thinking about it and put things on paper (ok, Google Slides). This is how the original idea for Wasp was born - can we create a framework that removes a lot of boilerplate by offering higher-level abstractions, but is still flexible enough and is not strictly bound to the specific stack and architecture?
Now looking that, it really does sound like a holy grail.
Getting in YC and things getting real
We had already quit our jobs a year ago and were quite exhausted and doubtful of the whole concept. We were getting some early traction and received promising feedback from Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt, but we also started realizing how much work is needed to bring a full-stack web framework to a state where it’s usable, especially with the ambitious requirements we set for ourselves.
Finally, we got into YC the third time we applied for it. They were following our progress for the last year and, having seen the community excitement, decided to take a bet on our crazy idea.
Beta and beyond - MAGE and OpenSaaS
Looking at the graph, you can spot two key inflection points. The first one happened in July 2023 when we launched MAGE, a GPT SaaS starter that uses Wasp under the hood (you can think of it as one-shot Loveable/Bolt). It was among the first LLM products that could generate a working full-stack web app, bringing many eyes to Wasp.
The second major growth catalyzer came in December 2023 with the launch of OpenSaaS, our open-source SaaS starter built on top of Wasp, which now has almost 10,000 stars on GitHub.
We realized that most builders really want to start working on their idea as quickly as possible without picking out and patching together all the different features every SaaS needs - authentication, payments, admin dashboard, sending emails, blog, …
And this is exactly what we provided - a 100% free & open-source, high-quality, SaaS starter based on React, Node.js, Prisma, and Wasp. OpenSaaS basically became a “killer app” for Wasp as it attracts developers to try it and realize how helpful the framework is.
Open SaaS also pairs extremely well with Cursor - given Wasp’s robust structure and higher-level primitives, many developers have found it as an ideal combo for getting their SaaS-es from an idea to a production-ready app in a matter of days.
Language/DSL vs framework - so which one is it?
As you can see from the examples above, we used to refer to Wasp as a language, DSL - a Domain Specific Language. It was for these reasons that we originally set out to have an abstraction layer that can, in the future, work with any language, library, and architecture.
For this, we needed to introduce our own compiler that would first analyze your app’s specification that you defined via Wasp (e.g., your routes, async jobs, db operations, …), combine it with the “native” code you wrote in React & Node.js, and finally generate a React/Node.js app. That effectively meant we’ve invented our own language, albeit very limited and simple.
This is how we initially presented Wasp, but we learned that is the wrong way to think about it. Wasp is by its function a web framework, just like Laravel, Rails, or Next.js. The fact that it uses a compiler under the hood is simply an implementation detail that gives it its superpowers. For example, thanks to this approach, we can easily visualize the topology of your whole app, from database to server and client components:
The road to 1.0 and building the next-gen framework
This is the story of how Wasp came to be where it is today. For more details on the very early days (getting from an idea to the first 1,000 stars), you can check out this post.
What’s next? After almost five years of building and getting feedback from you, we have a pretty clear picture of what Wasp 1.0 needs to look like. Simply put, we have set out to build a full-stack framework with the best possible developer experience. We want you to focus on building your product and spend as little time as possible fighting your stack.
Think what Rails and Laravel did for Ruby and PHP - we’re doing the same for the modern, AI-powered, JS ecosystem.
To follow our story and support us, star Wasp on GitHub and join our Discord - we can’t wait to see you there!