Ho ho ho! Merry midsummer. Now, you might be wondering: why would anyone build a Christmas themed SaaS product in the middle of the summer? Well, let me explain...
How the idea came to me
I remember sitting bored in my room sometime in December 2025. I was scrolling through Product Hunt, TrustMRR, and other similar SaaS sharing websites, looking for ideas on what to build next.
Accidentally, I stumbled upon this site that allowed people to generate Christmas greeting videos with their own text coming straight from Santa's lips. I thought this was the coolest idea ever, but it was already too late to build it, as Christmas was right around the corner.
Fast forward half a year, I remembered this idea and decided to act on it, as I had nothing better to do. Launching it this early would also give me some time to build a little bit of SEO.
How the product turned out
If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do it on KaledinisSveikinimas.lt. I made it for the Lithuanian market, so just use the built-in Google Translate tools, if available, to make your life easier.
Use the built-in Google Translate for the English version.
There are 3 different Santa templates to choose from:
- Santa sitting in his cozy house
- Santa in front of his sleigh
- Santa on the roof next to the chimney
Here is an example of how a video generated using the first template looks:
I generated the Santa templates using ChatGPT, and the animation is provided by HeyGen. I have to give props to HeyGen for how good the animated avatar is. The movement is smooth, and the voice matches well with the video. But, unfortunately, it is not always sunshine and rainbows with HeyGen. Keep on reading to find out what I'm talking about.
What stack and third-party services I used
Like in most of my projects, I used SvelteKit for the frontend and Spring Boot for the backend, with a PostgreSQL DB for order storage.
This project has 3 external dependencies:
- Stripe for one-time payments
- Brevo for order confirmation and final generated video emails
- HeyGen for AI Santa greeting video generation
The HeyGen API implementation was probably the most frustrating part of the project. Now, you might be thinking to yourself: "It's only calling some API endpoints. What's difficult about that?" And you are correct, in a sense, but when the documentation is not the best, the complexity increases because you need to start guessing.
This guessing game got really annoying when it came to implementing a webhook endpoint for HeyGen to notify me when a video had been generated. The documentation provided one header name, while a completely different one was actually used. This had me pulling my hair out, not knowing what was wrong. To document this and save your time (and hair) I wrote a separate article on the HeyGen implementation which you can find here.
What my marketing strategy is
Firstly, we need to understand who this product is for and then target those groups.
Looking at this product, the first type of customer that comes to mind is, of course, parents who want to surprise their little ones.
Thinking further, perhaps friends or family members want to send a funny greeting on Christmas morning to their loved ones.
The last group that comes to mind is colleagues wanting to cheer up the team and bring some Christmas spirit into the office.
SEO
I created targeted webpages for each group to match their Google searches during the Christmas period.
- Parents
- Christmas greetings for children
- Christmas greetings for teachers
- Friends and family members
- Christmas greetings for friends
- Christmas greetings for parents
- Christmas greetings for mom
- Colleagues
- Christmas greetings for colleagues
You can find a list of these targeted pages here if you're interested in looking at them yourself.
Also, writing about the project on my personal blog and developer platforms like DEV.to or Hashnode helps more people discover it while giving me a place to document what I learned along the way.
Social media
In my opinion, the majority of customers are parents, so the main social media platform to use will be Facebook. In Lithuania, Facebook groups are very popular, and there are many specialized parent groups where advertisements can be posted.
Also, quite nicely, the product markets itself because you can easily create attention-grabbing, viral videos by using the tool. Videos like these can later be posted as short-form content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram to gain the attention of another part of the customer base: family members, friends, and colleagues.
Final notes
As a kid, I used to eagerly wait for Christmas to find out what kind of presents I would get. This time, the tables have turned. I am waiting for Christmas to be the one preparing the gifts, and I can't wait to find out how good of a Santa I am. If you also want to find out how well I do, you can follow my journey by putting in your email down below!