Expedition Signals: Episode 6
On Why Blindly Starting With SaaS Can Hamper Your Entrepreneurial Career, Will Bill’s and the Jobs of Premium Soda, Shape Up Version 2, and Basecamp’s Runaway From the Cloud.
Hey friends,
Welcome to a new issue of Playing the Long Game.
Here is what I have to share with you this week.
Things I'm Thinking About.
Why Blindly Creating a SaaS May Not Be a Smart Move to Begin Your Entrepreneurial Career.
"Have you been trying to grow your SaaS-based startup but still find yourself at the starting point, but worse?
I know how that feels.
When I first jumped into the entrepreneurial journey, my focus was clear. I wanted to grow a SaaS business that led me, and my environment, to the moon and beyond. Technology was my thing, and I couldn't stop seeing startup successes everywhere around me. I had lived that firsthand as the first hire and CTO of Facephi —a brand-new startup in the AI space. It seemed obvious. Innovating in tech was my key to success.
But here's the (counterintuitive) thing: a SaaS is often the wrong type of product to begin your entrepreneurial career."
In this week's article, I dig into why starting with SaaS can be a costly mistake and show you other instruments that may suit you better in the beginning.
Want to have a look? You can read it here.
Gems I Found.
Wild Bill's and The Jobs of Premium Soda.
This week I stumbled upon this piece by Andrew Glaser.
I didn't know Andrew before, but, I just found out, he co-founded Laser Ventures, a hybrid consulting VC with Bob Moesta.
Bob has been one of the most influential people I discovered in recent years. He's one of the creators of JTBD. His work and teachings have profoundly shaped the way I approach creation nowadays.
For those who don't know it, JTBD is a tool for studying consumer behavior. It helps you uncover why people buy one product instead of others. And as such, it's a game-changing tool for shaping solutions people will be willing to buy and adopt.
They studied Wild Bill's Premium Soda and the jobs that people hire it for. What did they find out? Well, definitely not what they expected.
Want to see JTBD in practice and the revealing insights you can get with it? If so, you can read the whole article here.
Stop Going in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.
Ryan Singer and Chris Spiek have greatly influenced my understanding and approach to product and innovation in the last few years.
In this talk at Fintech Devcon 2022, they come with a new iteration of Shape Up, the approach that the folks at 37Signals (and many more companies and teams nowadays) employ for product growth.
From their work at Autobooks, they show how, as a startup now entering the scaling stage, they faced a whole new set of challenges that the original method was not well suited for. So they had to introduce new changes. A must-watch if you're interested in learning new ways to improve your product development efforts.
Want to know what the new version looks like? You can watch the talk here.
And if you've never heard of Shape Up, here is a short video introduction by Ryan.
Don't have enough yet? You can also take a look at the book where Ryan introduced the idea to the masses for the first time. Grab your free copy here.
Why We're Leaving the Cloud.
Basecamp’s leaving the cloud.
In this article, DHH, co-founder and CTO at Basecamp, gives the reasons behind their choice.
The first reason is cost. From his perspective, harnessing the cloud only makes sense when your load is highly unpredictable. According to him, it's not their case.
The second is its negative impact on society as a whole. From a broader systemic standpoint, the “everything running on the cloud” philosophy is leading to re-centralization and the end of the Internet as it was initially conceived. And that’s a dangerous thing with potentially dramatic consequences.
“It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed!”
Definitely, a switch against the current that’s worthy of reflection.
Are they right? Are they wrong? Or, more precisely, are they making the right tradeoffs? We’ll follow them closely to see how this movement plays out.
Want to know more? Read the whole article here.
Brilliant Quotes.
"The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught." —Richard Feynman
Don't blindly follow what you've been told it's right.
Be skeptical. Question everything If you want to make more sustainable choices for yourself...and your environment.
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And that's all for now folks.
Have a creative time.