I’m working full time, have family of 3 and have hobbies outside my day job and SaaS projects. I often get frustrated already with my current situation, but when I start to think about future and possible success what could bring extra challenges, my brain tries to stop me from continuing the work on SaaS. I have asked myself multiple time – can I have it all?
I can have it all only if I set boundaries and I have decided that manifesto is good form of setting these boundaries.
For me as an independent creator, right mindset is very important. The journey could be long, and I should stay calm during this time to not burn out.
This manifesto defines principles for staying calm while building and growing my SaaS product.
I have created this manifesto to always remind myself what to prioritise and what not. But I’m happy to share it also with you.
Who knows…? It could help you as well!
Don’t force yourself into anything – use existing forces to your advantage. Keep calm by using existing market demand over forcing the market to adapt to something new. Use your unfair advantages over forcing yourself to do things you are not good at.
Force yourself only for a short period of time to adapt to new valuable habits.
Keep calm by consistently investing enough time in your product instead of having intense moments, where you have to sacrifice other areas of your life. Intensity is not a synonym for hard work, consistently putting in work is hard.
Shape you perception of time to your advantage when necessary.
Have intensity moments only when necessary to utilise some special opportunities.
Being grateful for what you have brings calmness to you life.
With absence of desire, progress is not possible. You have to set goals forward, but measure them backward and express gratitude for achievements.
The desire should be created from within and not created by comparing youself and product to others.
Keep calm by working on one product, one market segment at a time, one marketing channel at a time, narrow the technology stack, and go all in.
Diversify only where it is essential, for example, to guarantee the data safety of your product.
To keep calm, prioritise freedom over convenience. It is convenient to use dominant social media platforms over building your own audience, it is convenient to use a lot of code dependencies over writing your own code. Convenience is convenient in short term, but it limits my freedom in the future.
It is not reasonable to always do all by yourself. Use dominant social media to meet your customer where they are, but bring them to your platform which is based on open standards (email, SMS, RSS). Don’t lock yourself in because of convenience.
Use open-source software with unrestrictive licenses and reliable support structure behind them. Always consider option to write code yourself over gaining small benefit and critical dependency from external code provider.
While the customer is important, without a calm founder there would not be a great product and customers to serve. To keep calm, prioritise yourself and your team over customers.
The best customer service is provided by calm people.
In the short run you can win by focusing on marketing, but in the long run, focusing on product wins. Keep calm by building a solid product that needs limited support, can be maintained by a small team, and speaks for itself.
But you can’t succeed by neglecting marketing. Make it primarily as part of your product, part of your passions and make marketing easy to execute.
Grows without profit leads to stress and anxiety. To keep calm, have high margins, prioritise profit over growth, and pay yourself early.
You still must grow. Tomorrow always should be a bit better than yesterday for you and your product. But don’t prioritise growth if you are not profiting from it.
