That's super fascinating. I'm biased because I'm a dev who also happened to study AH at university, but it makes sense--the mileage I get out of cursor directly correlates to how well I understand the problem space and can guide cursor onto the right path. It's no surprise image gen is the same
Listening to your customer is really important and one of the highest leverage things you can do as a founder but it also needs to be contextualized. Use it as a guideline, NOT the roadmap. Building based on feedback only makes you build by committee, not vision.
www.linkedin.com/posts/willah...
You might ask "What % of users use this feature?", see that it's 10% (which might be, like, 2 people total), and decide it's a failure. But the RIGHT question is "Of users who *know* about this feature, what % use it?". Poor marketing and onboarding/discoverability is your problem, not the feature.
I think b2b saas operators likely shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to interpreting data. We want to be data-driven to believe we make the right decisions, but our sample sizes are so extremely small that the data often suffers from sampling and survivorship bias, let me explain:
Ex: I owe much of my past/present wisdom to Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), but I also think there are nuances to blanket advice like "keep charging more". It's great beginner advice, but bad at scale; it locks you out of entire market segments and forces competition against more sophisticated co's
Now that I'm where they once were, I've found MUCH more success leaning on my intuition and discarding the old guard's advice, mainly because a lot of it came from a vastly different time (pre-covid, pre-LLMs).
Plus, whether we succeed or fail, I'd feel better having followed my own decisions.
When I first started my SaaS nearly a decade ago, I was in my mid-20s with little experience, so I leaned heavily on the wisdom of those who had already been building successful businesses for years. Their advice became SaaS best practices.
Question, am I laughably behind if I'm still using webpack (in ruby on rails)?
Flipper's great, man, thanks
Bananas make smoothies taste better but they also have polyphenol oxidase which oxidize the (good) polyphenols in stuff like blueberries btw.
The inverse of this is when I introduce bugs to a feature and people complain and then I'm like oh ok people really do use this feature.
Product hack: If you're unsure whether or not you need to support a legacy feature, just remove it and see if anyone complains. This has saved me a ton of time and money (e.g. removing integrations that cost $ but no one really cared for).
That's not our sun in this shot, it's just a diagram to show the size of our solar system compared to a small bit of the Carina nebula, which itself is 7,500 light years away from us
Incredible content
One does not simply *ignore* the baby seal
New SEC clarity on crypto tokens should open up a new wave of startups in America. Not dissimilar to the deregulation of cannabis and consumer drones a decade ago.
www.sec.gov/newsroom/spe...
All companies at $0 MRR have the exact same problem, and companies after $20k MRR, $50k MRR, and so on have different sets of overlapping problems. Knowing what level of maturity a person's company is at provides the context necessary to give proper advice, introductions, actionable suggestions.
But yeah, /open started as a way to get real data on how companies grow and then became a justification for MRR brags. I still think MRR transparency is good, but rather than brags, to signal company maturity:
it's the lowest-hanging fruit. The ones who venture into other industries and do the hard work of figuring out a repeatable sales channel are far and fewer in between.
Moreover, selling SaaS to say, funeral home directors, isn't glamorous and doesn't yield a lot of clout ;)
The selling to other indies and reddit marketing also comes across as laziness to me. I, too, would love to sell to people exactly like me and wish I could sustain a growing business by simply posting on social media.
I think it's a sampling bias issue. We see a lot of these types because (cont'd)
I totally just reiterated what you said in your other post 😅 either way, totally agree. Where are you finding valuable discussions about building businesses now?
Totally agree. Post-covid, it seems to have been co-opted by a cohort that cared more about being seen as a maker than actually making. I still think there's a lot of value in dedicated, intentional, small communities, the main channels like Twitter and major subreddits are just saturated now.
I guess my point is, in a healthy community, I WANT to know what everyone is working on and I'd want to hear from them semi-regularly. The no-promote rule in subs really goes against this for the sake of less noise, which I think you can avoid in other ways.
I will also admit that there are a lot of inertia headwinds at play here (which is why people congregate on reddit). You can't just build-it-and-they-will-come, and I'm admittedly not great at creating and growing communities myself.
Even though my entire following list is all indie hackers (remember follow lists?), I still find bsky (and Twitter) pretty poor at organizing #SaaS discussions.
Maybe the solutions are:
1. Invite/verified-only SaaS subreddits
2. Invite/verified-only SaaS Discord servers
TL;DR various subreddits are getting overwhelmed by self-promos so they've instituted weird rules, leading to people revolting. I'm only fascinated by this because:
1. Reddit is fantastic for organically building communities
2. Reddit's startup communities are plagued by low-quality promotions
It's surprising that there are already ones listed from 2024, I wonder what the story was there (maybe a lot of pivots?). Some also still have sites so I'm not sure what qualifies as inactive here
When I realized this, I decided that the only thing in my control was how fast it took to ship and distribute each new feature. Easier said than done since the larger a codebase/product gets, the slower new features take to ship!
Haha no worries mate just offering some unsolicited feedback 😛
It does to me but hey, maybe I'm not your target audience :)
