February 29th, 2020
I was chatting with Armin & Melanie from Placid about building a bootstrapped SaaS/app.

We started talking about how it really is a "grind". You really have to do so much work to get 1 customer. You have to do sales, onboarding, support, product development, etc - all by yourself. It's actually kind of crazy how daunting this is in the beginning.

But somewhere in this mayhem, I think there might be a "matrix" or "system" that can lead to a successful product.

This is a really rough concept, but let's call this the Talk/Fix/Improve/Automate process. It goes something like this:

  1. A customer tries your product and does not know how to use it
  2. Customer reaches out with a specific question or feature request
  3. You respond to the customer with the best possible answer
  4. You make a decision if you should change the product, add more documentation, add that new feature, move feature up on roadmap, etc
  5. You automate what you can to prevent that conversation from happening again

And that's pretty much it! If you do this over and over, effectively, I think you can build a great product and a successful business.

However, it's vital that you make the right decisions in this framework. Sometimes, feature requests should be ignored or put into your "someday" box. Sometimes, a small "Help" icon in your product that answers that same question you keep getting can save you hundreds of hours down the line.

Being able to code these small changes quickly is a superpower. Being able to make a change in 10 minutes based on a customer request feels almost magical for the customer.