Keeping up with parallel SaaS adventures
Around Spring last year I started playing with the idea to create my own business, centred around a B2B SaaS idea I cared about. I had absolutely no clue where to begin. I was scared senseless to do this solo and take a big risk to fail and see my idea die, but I knew I’d feel terrible if I didn’t at least try. So in May I finally decided to give it a go.
At roughly the same time I was also offered a new opportunity at work: joining our newly born Made Tech R&D team, with the mission to deliver Made Tech’s first SaaS products to market. Call that serendipity! It was a long term engagement but I immediately saw the win-win situation: R&D would give me a ground to experiment and put ideas in action, and in exchange my role there would get value from what I’d learn on the side to get my product idea off the ground. The two journeys were fated to mirror and complement each other conveniently well.
Fast forward to today: we’re about to make our first Made Tech SaaS product live and get a second one in the hands of trial users, and I’m busy on the side building a proof of concept to get my own product in beta testing. As promised, these parallel adventures have delivered a lot of interesting contrasts and symmetries for the past six months. And some of them can be tricky to navigate sometimes…
Same problems, different aims
I’ve been facing similar challenges in R&D and in developing my product idea: framing a winning value proposition, validating hypotheses, delivering commercially viable slice of product to the market as early as possible, making the right technical and design choices, etc… I have to constantly remind myself that I’m working towards two different sets of goals though. In two very different environments. Which means that the way to tackle a problem in one world could be very different to tackling it in the other. Strategies and tactics fit for Made Tech SaaS products will likely not fit my product and vice versa.
Take the challenge of defining the right MVP for Beta testing. It’s currently at the front of my mind for one of our Made Tech products as well as my own. Do we have the right things in scope to demonstrate the value of the product? Will it do enough for users to make it worth the hassle to try it? Is the quality high enough? Where can we compromise and go leaner? Where can we not? I have the same questions and doubts on both sides, but I have to remember that these two products are going in Beta with different aims. And so the criteria used to shape their respective MVP need to differ. It takes some acrobatics to keep this straight in my head at all times and avoid taking one of the products in the wrong direction.
Sometimes situations in R&D and in my side-hustle look really closely alike and it’s easy to forget that the most subtle difference in objective and context could call for a radically distinct approach.
Whenever I’ve lost sight of that, it’s been a cause for discouragement, doubts and loss of focus. Here’s how it usually goes:
- We face a challenge or opportunity for our Made Tech SaaS offering,
- We decide on a particular approach or solution, with very well-thought-out and compelling reasons
- I realise that I’ve chosen a different road for my own product in a similar situation
- Panic. I immediately feel the urge to throw my plans in the bin and start over.
After a bit more reflection my stupid brain (if you haven’t met him yet, that’s Kevin) does calm down and I get my confidence and focus back. But it can be an emotional roller coaster.
And naturally this happens more often in the domains where I have the least confidence, like my technical strategy. Just last week, our Principal Tech Architect in R&D explained to our teams why it was sensible to keep our javascript usage to a minimum. While he was talking, and making a lot of sense, I started to feel ashamed about the way I built my own proof of concept, as a MERN Single Page App with little concern for the number of javascript dependencies my project relies on. That evening I barely resisted the need to spend some time cleaning that up. I had to remind myself that I have more important stuff to do right now to get to my objectives. Put it simply: I am not building a product meant to last, but a proof of concept. I want to get it to users as soon as possible to validate that a live product can address their need, and gather evidence that could help me refine the solution and get funding. Even if I make all the efforts to keep it as well architected as possible, I know the limits of my skills. It’ll still be bad enough that the first thing any engineer who joins me in the future will do is to throw my codebase in the bin. I try to keep that in mind and invest my time where it matters. I still take the occasional time-wasting tangents from time to time, unfortunately 😅
Product-filled Brain
Two SaaS offerings, with two different strategies and sets of goals: that takes a lot of brain power and space. And on Made Tech’s side, it’s not only the overall strategy for our SaaS offering. Each individual product in the suite (3 of them for now) naturally has its own domain, objectives, go-to-market strategy, stage of development, etc.
The result is that these days I live and breathe B2B SaaS.
I’ve enjoyed it so far, it’s been a fun and engaging time. Every week has offered new problems to solve and it’s kept me busy and motivated. I haven’t been bored in a long time! I love feeling that driven and productive, but I know it’s a balancing act. There are a few things that help me stay effective and sane:
- Over-communicating and sense-checking my decisions, ideas, instincts with my teammates and stakeholders
- Trusting Product Managers to look after Made Tech’s individual products (only one PM in our teams for now, hopefully more in the future)
- Dropping the ball now and then (sorry team), and trying not to beat myself up
- Balancing Big Thinking with staying focused on small achievable next steps. Especially essential in my side-hustle: if I spent all my time looking at the long term vision and the massive mountain ahead, I would never get anything done… There’s so much I don’t control about the outcome of my journey! (at least not yet) Whenever I lose focus and panic looking at the future, I bring my attention back on the present and what concrete things I can achieve right now to move in the right direction.
Solo vs partnership
Major difference between working in Made Tech R&D and working on my own product: teammates. I’m surrounded by a team of 20+ people at work. Outside, I’m on my own for now.
I won’t lie, it has its advantages. For one, I can do whatever I want. I’m the sole decision maker and I don’t need to get anyone’s green light or buy in before putting my ideas into action. No one around to slow me down, show me I’m wrong or criticise what I’m doing. How great is that? The control freak with a fragile ego in me loves it!
But the thing is, I’d love someone to tell me when I’m wrong, or at least question what I’m doing and why. I’m investing a lot of effort and passion into my product idea. I’d rather catch dead-ends, problems and mistakes early, and I can’t spot these all on my own. It’s also difficult to come up with a wide range of creative ideas alone. I’ve been getting regular feedback from people whose critical mind I trust, and from target users, but it doesn’t compare to having access to a team of multi-skilled and diverse brains every day at work.
Another obvious drawback of working solo is that I can’t share the workload with a team. I don’t have a partner at home, a sibling or a cousin to exploit, so I can only delegate tasks by taking on the cost of hiring someone or a service. For now I haven’t played that card.
You’d assume that working solo at least enables me to work at my own pace and set my own targets. It absolutely does. The problem is that I set these really high, probably much higher than they need to be, and I regularly get real close to burning myself out with self-imposed pressure. At work, collaboration prevents me from going overdrive. Shared goals keep me grounded: I like them to be ambitious, but I wouldn’t let them get out of hand. Because a whole team would have to work at an unsustainable pace as a result and I don’t want that to happen.
Having the right people around you makes all the difference. I’d trade my ‘solo hacker’ freedom any day for a team. Looking at how much we’ve accomplished since May, and how enjoyable the ride has been, I wish I could find partners in my side-hustle as excellent as the ones I’m working with in Made Tech R&D.
