#growth
Chapters and interviews tagged with ‘#growth’
Related Book Chapters & Interviews
Every business is unique, and every buyer is just as unique. However, there are some fundamental things that matter to buyers. Understanding them long before you sell can help you build a better business.
It’s tempting to make everything perfect before you share it with anybody, but this is a terrible tactic. If you build the wrong features, it doesn’t matter whether they’re perfect. Optimize for release speed, learning, and iteration. You can be a perfectionist once your application is healthy and profitable.
It’s hard but rewarding work. Your happiness and satisfaction will largely be a result of your expectations. Expect and plan for slow and steady growth, and be pleasantly surprised if your business grows more quickly.
It’s handy to have some money set aside to get your application off the ground, but you may need less than you think. More importantly, you may have a lot more options for gathering that money. Make sure you understand the pros and cons of whichever path you choose.
Like sales, marketing is a fundamental but often overlooked aspect of building a business. There are countless forms of marketing, and many of them aren’t even sleazy. Don’t do yourself a disservice. Understand and appreciate what marketing can do for your business.
At some point, growth will stall or even decline sharply. These moments can be incredibly scary or depressing, but they’re always temporary–if you want them to be. You just have to look at it as a problem to be solved. What have you not tried that could be the next thing to help you break through?
At some point, you’re going to put together a spreadsheet that illustrates your business plan making a million dollars in some random period of time. Remember that these aren’t real numbers, and then get to work.
It can be intimidating to see large companies that seemingly have more bandwidth and can eat your lunch without trying, but it’s important to remember that being small gives you strengths those other businesses wish they had again.
Valuing a SaaS business is fairly straightforward, but there are some ways you can work to improve your valuation.
Interview № 24 of 24
Brennan Dunn
Brennan is a co-founder of Right Message. In this episode, we talk about the path he’s taken that led him to create Right Message and what he’s learned about building and launching SaaS applications based on his experiences with his various products.
Interview № 23 of 24
Mathias Meyer
Mathias is one of the original founders of Travis CI. In this episode, we talk about the difficulty of leaving the company he helped start, and the challenges of moving on.
Interview № 22 of 24
Jaimee Newberry
Jaimee Newberry is the founder of Picture This Clothing where you can print a coloring sheet and design a one-of-a-kind ready-to-wear creation that they send to you. In this epsode we talk about making hard decisions and creating space in your life for ideas to take hold and give you time to work on them.
Interview № 21 of 24
Steve McLeod
Steve McLeod is the founder of Feature Upvote, a SaaS tool to enable your customers to suggest and upvote improvements. In this episode, we talk about and compare his experiences running both a B2C app and B2B app and the value of having a part-time system administrator on retainer.
Interview № 20 of 24
Ben Curtis
Ben and his co-founders started Honeybadger after a bad experience with an existing exception tracking tool. With a focus on customer service, they’ve successfully bootstrapped it into a healthy and sustainable full-time endeavor.
Interview № 19 of 24
Scott Nixon
Scott Nixon is the co-founder of Meal Mentor, a subscription-based vegeterian meal planning service. Scott handles the technology side of the business and works to keep the operational side of things humming with software.
Interview № 18 of 24
Matt Goldman
Matt and I talk about running a SaaS business after acquiring it, the mistakes they made early after taking over Churn Buster, and the common ways that SaaS businesses get dunning wrong and how they can do better. We also talk about the value of iteratively improving automation for tasks and how important it is to clearly document and explain manual process.
Interview № 17 of 24
Rachel Andrew
Rachel and I talk about what it’s like supporting self-hosted software, juggling a busy travel schedule to make time for work. She’s been working on Perch with her husband Drew for eight years, and they’re still going strong.
Interview № 16 of 24
Tracy Osborn
Tracy and I talk about her experience building and running Wedding Lovely, raising some funding for it, losing a co-founder, and even going through a heart-breaking acquisition process with Etsy. Through it all, she’s kept going and even published books to help others build their own web applications. She’s a brilliant example of someone that simply won’t give up, and while there’s no IPO looming, she’s making a great living doing what she loves with a small team.
Interview № 15 of 24
Josh Williams
Josh and I discuss what it’s like going from a bootstrapped small team to a team of 30 in a funded startup. We touch on what it’s like going from being a lifelong business owner to being an employee of a large corporation experiencing huge growth. And we talk about some of the differences between building a small profitable business and hitching your wagon to venture capital. Simply put, Josh brings some great perspective and deep insight to building and running software businesses.
Interview № 13 of 24
Nathan Barry
Nathan and I talk about the early days of ConvertKit, reaching a point where he had to make a decision to invest more significantly in it or walk away. He invested a significant portion of his income from other projects and really doubled down to make it work long before it was obvious things were going to take off. He talks about his sales process and how it simultaneously helped him better understand the needs of potential customers as well as build a relationship and find his first customers.
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