Building 50 SaaS Businesses in 59 Days

Building 50 SaaS Businesses in 59 Days

Well this has been a learning experience. Many things I expected to happen and a few things I did not. For one, The apps are launching faster and they are getting better. The quality is improving with more features than the earlier applications. I am reminded of a story I read ( no idea if it is factual) of an art teacher who had two classes make a pot.

The Story (Short Version)

A pottery teacher split his class into two groups:

Group 1 — Quantity

• Graded purely on how many pots they made

• 50 lbs of pots = A

• 40 lbs = B

• etc.

Group 2 — Quality

• Graded on one perfect pot

• They had all semester to make just one masterpiece

The Result

At the end of the semester:

• The best pots all came from the quantity group

• The quality group mostly produced mediocre, over-thought work

Why?

The quantity group:

• Practiced constantly

• Learned from mistakes

• Improved iteration after iteration

• Built real skill

The quality group:

• Over-planned

• Over-thought

• Practiced very little

• Tried to "theorize perfection"

The Lesson

Perfection comes from repetition, not planning.

Why am I talking about pots instead of software? Good question.

I have done both. I spent almost a year making enterprise software. One product, constant tweaking long processes with lots of moving parts.

The applications I am making now are better in every way. Run faster, easier to debug, much better design.

I am beginning to see that volume is the key to building. I am less concerned with making the perfect product. I am building and shipping as much code as possible to find where the customers are clustering. This code is more of a market study.

Next lesson was it is really hard to keep track of all the moving parts when you have a bunch of companies. Every tracking system and infrastructure for watching your traffic/visits/revenue ect is designed around people having “A” business they are watching not multiple. I had to write the software I am using to track everything as a portfolio and it slowed down my launching for a few days.

Earlier this week I messes up. I got bored building boring business tools and started coding other things that were fun and exciting. I burned days doing it then I eventually came back to my senses and got back on program. Boring business applications with lots of web traffic and bloated overpriced competition.

As of now I am still shipping product. About one app per day. This is exhausting and scary but I think I am still on track. We will find out soon as my first cohort of apps will be coming out of the search engine sandbox soon and I will start getting web traffic.

Then we will see if this little project is going anywhere.