Next time you're at a gas station or a convenience store, and you're ready to pay, look at all the things they shove in front of you, hoping to sell you yet another high-margin product: sugary snacks, soft drinks, processed foods, lottery tickets. They call this the "impulse sales zone:" every single item is a … Continue reading The Forever Transaction
Category: Product
Managing Expectations: Making Good (on) Promises.
https://youtu.be/91ZGnnR-O4U Expectation management. What is that? It sure sounds like mind control. I don’t think my expectations are anything that someone else can manage. Nobody can dive into my mind and magically alter what I believe will happen. The only thing you can do to impact what I expect is to make promises. There is … Continue reading Managing Expectations: Making Good (on) Promises.
The SaaS Market Maturity Paradox
SaaS businesses are most impactful in entirely new markets and the markets they have been serving for a long time. Anywhere in between, starting a new SaaS business has the potential to create a product with reduced effectiveness. There is a "small improvement trap" in every industry that many SaaS business endeavors fall into. While … Continue reading The SaaS Market Maturity Paradox
Make it Easy to Cancel
It is a great retention strategy to make it easy for your customers to cancel your product. You may lose a few payments, but you gain something much more important: an ex-customer who feels respected. I see way too many founders paying way too little attention to the last interaction with their customers. They're missing … Continue reading Make it Easy to Cancel
Of Tangibility and Lawnmowers
Ever since Danielle and I moved to Canada, I've been having a few new adventures. Getting to mow the lawn in our backyard was one of them. For a city boy like me, this was a novel and exciting activity, and it definitely impacted me. Danielle pointed out that I have been talking a lot … Continue reading Of Tangibility and Lawnmowers
Hyrum’s Law
Removing features is surprisingly effective for a SaaS founder. But the surprise of how much less maintenance there is for the founder is only the first one of many — and maybe the only one you can anticipate. At FeedbackPanda, we tried to quietly remove a feature that we had implemented to make transitioning into … Continue reading Hyrum’s Law
How to Kill Your Business
Most advice comes in the shape of telling you what to do to be successful. It's instructional, it shows the happy path, and as a reader, I resonate with that a lot. After all, I want to see how it's done right. I want to learn from the best. But that's not the only way … Continue reading How to Kill Your Business
The Line Between Stealing and Being Inspired
This week, a Twitter friend reached out to me and asked this question: "where's the line between being inspired by the competition and stealing?" That got me thinking. We don't have a clear code of conduct for this in our community. You often hear phrases like "ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything," suggesting that … Continue reading The Line Between Stealing and Being Inspired
On Offering Public APIs for Your SaaS
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
The Rewards and Perils of Being Your Own Customer
There are many risks and advantages to being your own customer. Today, I want to talk about how I am doing this with my current business, PermanentLink, and how Danielle and I did this with our previous company FeedbackPanda. So, what do I mean by being customer #1? I'm talking about using your own product … Continue reading The Rewards and Perils of Being Your Own Customer
