When we launched our B2B SaaS, we were bootstrapped and desperate for revenue. So when a massive 1,000-person enterprise reached out and offered us a $5,000/month contract in our third month, we felt like we had won the lottery.
But there was a catch: they would only sign if we built specific features for them. They needed a custom compliance module, a specific integration with their legacy database, and white-labeling. We agreed, thinking the money would fund the rest of our growth.
For the next six months, we essentially became their outsourced dev agency.
We paused all marketing and sales.
We ignored our smaller SMB customers (who started churning).
We dedicated 90% of our engineering time to building features that only one company in the world cared about.
Some time ago, I cleared off my entire desk getting rid of extra monitors, gadgets, and RGB lights and stuck to just a laptop on a bare table. No aesthetic plan, no productivity setup. Years later, I m still working this way, and my output has never been higher. Meanwhile, the elaborate productivity gear I spent hundreds on just created distraction. It taught me that removing friction beats adding fancy tools. Have you ever simplified your workspace and found it actually improved your focus?
Would you buy this Steve Jobs "innovation coin" for $1?
This design presents a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills. His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection, show how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself. Inscriptions are UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and CALIFORNIA. Additional inscriptions are STEVE JOBS and MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL.
For the past year, we ve been building a specialized SaaS tool. Our entire value proposition was a specific automated workflow that saved our users about 10 hours a week. We charged $49/month for it, and we had a solid base of 80 paying customers.
Then, on Tuesday, a massive, billion-dollar incumbent in our space announced their quarterly update. Buried in the release notes was the exact feature we built our entire company around. And they are offering it for free to anyone on their $10/mo enterprise plan.
It's almost the halfway mark and I would love to know some achievements you made that you are proud of. I got inspired thinking about how my year started and where I am now. The start of the year couldn't be worse. January and February were one bad thing after another. I was all caught up on the bad things but I started to reflect on the good so here are my achievements: - Got an awesome job with awesome people
- Held a session at a conference
- Read 3 books (as someone who never read anything)
- Got back to training, and am now in good shape
- Started waking up earlier
- Started creating content for LinkedIn
- Finished 4 exams
- Reconnected to old friends To some, these may seem small but to me, they are just the starting point to a great year.
I started timing every interruption I labeled a "quick question." Slack messages, DMs, taps on the shoulder.
The average was 11 minutes. The longest was 40. Most of them required context I had to rebuild from scratch because I had been in the middle of something else.
Anyone building voice AI agents knows how hard it is to stay up-to-date with the latest text-to-speech voice models.
We spend time testing and experimenting with all of the available paid and open-source text-to-speech voice AI models and consolidated our own notes and experience testing different models into a single guide for developers evaluating multiple models.
Every project felt like an opportunity small ones underpriced ones ones outside my expertise. My calendar was full and I felt important. Then the numbers came in. I started declining anything below a rate I set in advance. Income went up hours went down.
The opportunities weren't bad. I was using busyness to avoid the scary work of pricing myself properly.
For those who've started saying no: was it the requests' fault or your inability to prioritize? And what are you doing right now that you'd drop immediately if you were honest about its value?
We kept listening to customer feedback and adding features to make our product more useful. Every request seemed reasonable and shipping new functionality felt like progress. But over time the product became harder to navigate. New users struggled to understand where to start while existing users only relied on a small portion of what we had built. It made us question whether we were solving more problems or simply making the product more complicated.
For founders building SaaS products how do you decide which feature requests deserve attention and when is saying no better for the product?
