Many bootstrapped SaaS founders see other successful SaaS businesses and think, "Hey, they offer an API, I should do the same" — But should they really? I believe that there are two answers to this question, and they're determined by which phase of your business you're in. For companies in the Survival Stage, adding public … Continue reading On Offering Public APIs for Your SaaS

This week, I want to talk about a critical decision in the life of my new SaaS project PermanentLink. I've been doing some research on competitors and competitive alternatives. I looked into link forwarders, link shorteners, link branding services, pretty much anything that could technically compete with my core product, which boils down to branded … Continue reading When Privacy and Customer Value Clash

While working on permanent.link this week, I ran into the same issue twice. I had built something that was working great, only to scrap it for another solution a few days after. The first time this occurred, I had just finished my infrastructure for allowing custom domains to be used for permanent links. The other … Continue reading Sunk Cost Fallacy Engineering

Over the last week, I have metaphorically left the building and had several conversations with the audience for my most recent project permanent.link. Since this is a product aimed at authors, I've been chatting with writers about their experiences with links in their work. My service can theoretically solve any number of problems, but I … Continue reading Customer Lock-In and “Insurance Features”

If you add features to your product indiscriminately, you will end up with a gigantic bloated mess of software. One way to deal with this is to be very careful when deciding if new features should be added. Another rarely used approach is to remove unused and outdated features. Removing the cruft from your SaaS … Continue reading The Power of Omission: Killing Features for Fun and Profit

It won’t take long before customers start asking for one particular kind of feature: integrating into other tools that they use all the time. They have adopted your product into their routine and their workflow, only to notice that something is missing. Some steps need to be taken to get your product to seamlessly join … Continue reading Made to Stick: Shaping an Extensible Product

A bootstrapped founder will have very little time to devote to building things that don't matter. Everything you do in your bootstrapped business should have a meaningful impact on moving your company towards a state of stability and growth. Bells and whistles are the least of your concerns when you're trying to get to profitability. … Continue reading Build for Value, Not for Applause: Product Management Under Heavy Constraints