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…
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Product
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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
Read the essay →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…
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