A New Direction -> ADHD Startup becomes the SaaS Factory
I've been really bad at newsletters. That changes now because I've figured out what I really enjoy doing and writing about.
I’ve been really hesitant to start a new newsletter. It’s been really hard to decide where I want to dedicate my time. But there have been some developments in everything I’ve been doing and the time is finally right for me to make this work.
I spent a lot of time failing at various things I tried. I would attempt something, I wouldn’t be satisfied with how it felt, it wouldn’t build quickly, and so I would quit. But I’ve continued to make some progress and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that fact.
There are a few things I’ve managed to do consistently: meet cool people, tweet, and write code.
That code gets thrown away a lot as I try things that don’t work. But it also has started to build up and let me make fairly major changes rather quickly in a lot of cases. I’ve built up the experience I wanted around the tech stacks I’ve been using and I’ve learned all sorts of things about what it takes to make a successful SaaS product.
And all of that education has come the hard way. I’ve had to piece together all sorts of sources because most times, I can find the code for the specific thing I’m trying to do, some information about the business problem I’m working on, or some other snippet. But most of the learning that matters the most is a combination of all of those being deployed into some product that I attempt to get users for.
I couldn’t find much that was a comprehensive view of what it takes to create SaaS offerings. So here it is now!
I was hesitant to make this a paid source, but there are a few reasons I decided to do it that way.
It’s a pretty big time commitment for me. I have to break away from building, marketing, and shipping products to put this together. There’s definitely an opportunity cost there.
But I also think it will help both me and paid subscribers by making us accountable. If I’ve got paid subscribers, it’s a lot easier for me to dedicate time to posting detailed information. It also makes the information more valuable in your mind. I’ve had a really hard time getting people to take in information for free, because there’s a ton of information for free online. It gets lumped into everything else. But if you’re paying for something, you tend to value it more. This ends up making it more valuable for you as well.
At this point, I’ve got 1 SaaS product up and running. I officially launched on Product Hunt this past Friday, and that’s one of the things that kicked off this idea.
I realized that I need to prove out some of the ideas I’ve been building Feather with, because I’m not great at communicating the value proposition. When I chat 1-1 with people, they get it and they love it. When they view the landing page, they don’t.
But I can’t redo the launch for 6 months. And one of the biggest use cases is for launches on Product Hunt (or rather, one of the most obvious). So I decided I’m going to start trying to launch a new product every week. I want to collect data about the launches and get practice in launching.
So this should be fun! That’s the ultimate goal here. Any money I make is great, but I really just want to have fun with it! I’ve finally rediscovered a love of coding after going through a period of intense burnout related to coding, so this is a way I can celebrate that and share it with others!
Let’s get this factory pumping!