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
Category: Product
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
When Privacy and Customer Value Clash
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
Sunk Cost Fallacy Engineering
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
Customer Lock-In and “Insurance Features”
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”
Positioning Is Where It’s At
You can position your product in different ways in many different markets. You may have started describing your product in a certain way, only to find that your customers understand it very differently. Many first-time founders make the mistake of iterating on their product but keeping their positioning the same. Even if they're capable enough … Continue reading Positioning Is Where It’s At
The Power of Omission: Killing Features for Fun and Profit
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
Made to Stick: Shaping an Extensible Product
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
