How I Build SaaS Businesses

Building businesses is a skill. One that has to be developed over time through many many mistakes. 

My first business was Heartland Truck Driving Institute, LLC. This was a fun business for a 22 year old fresh out of his first Marine Corps enlistment. We trained displaced factory workers ( mainly) who had been recently laid-off from their failing factory jobs all over middle and West Tennessee. These were mainly due to NAFTA shutting down everything as it moved to low cost labor areas like Mexico and China. This was 25 years ago as of my writing this post. 

I expanded that operation to 2 locations, 17 employees, and 8 semi trucks before I had the rug pulled out from under my feet. The state, which had been funding my students, simply decided it didnt want to do that anymore and gave all that development money to well connected cronies with lobbyist. So I sold one location, shuttered another, and shipped myself off to fight in the first of two wars over the next 9 years. 

The next business was Tennessee Arms Company. A firearms manufacturing firm that made and sold AR style rifles using a special design I invented. This was how I got associated with coding and programming. You see when you work in firearm sales, nobody wants to work with you. The credit card companies, the banks, and especially those shopping cart companies that make listing products so so easy on the internet. 

We were finally able ( as a fully licensed, insured, and verified manufacturer) to sign on with Big Commerce (great company btw) and could finally sell our product. We sold millions with them. We only moved because sales were getting so good that the royalties we paid them were getting kind of rediculous. Thousands a month in fees. 

So I decided to make my own website. Started with WooCommerce but didnt like it. Seemed to generic and clunky. Tried a few more but they didnt seem to be what I was looking for either. The issue wasnt selling the thing. That was easy. It was keeping track of inventory, recording serial numbers, tracking shipping. Those basic business operations were adding days to every order and the normal hand keying of informatio were causing infrequent but highly irritating problems. 

So, armed with a $13 dollar Udemy course, a Indian guy teaching a YouTube tutorial, and a dream I started down the path of software engineering. About 6 months later I emerged from my coding cave with a half usable Python website that DID keep track of our sales, recordkeeping, and inventory. We had never had that before. I went down to the office and started implementing the new system. 

This caused a complete come-apart from my staff. They liked the old system bcause it was job security and learning something new was simply not in their plan. Within a few weeks 2 had walked out hoping I would go back to the old system once ( they hoped) we wouldnt be able to operate without them. We didnt, I just started coming in at 5am and doing their job and mine. 

The rest of the staff was great and shouldered my halting attempts at a smooth transition with grace that I didnt really deserve. It was a pretty rough system in all honesty. 

We went with that system for about two years before I got the urge to "fix" some of those issues in a new system. Honestly, I was just kind of bored and wanted a new challenge. So a few months later I took all my lessons learned and rolled it into a new much netter faster system written in Golang with pretty much all the kinks ironed out. The GsFiresite system is what we are operating on to this day. This is a SaaS company in its own right and other firearms dealers and manufacturers use it to sell their own products online. 

Out of an interest in being concise and not boring you I have left out many sites, side hustles, custom website jobs, and whole tech companies I have founded to end up here at SimpleSaaS. 

SimpleSaaS is a culmination and continuation of almost 3 decades of business experience wrapepd up in software. Im not a software engineer trying to do business. I am an experienced business owner who learned to code. That distinction has made writing business software much easier. 

My method os coding new saas companies is one of continuous learning and iteration. I change things constantly as I improve each and every codebase. My goal is to make the safest, most secure, highest converting products on the internet. I will do that by starting more companies than any other person has ever started. Those customer analytics they generate, and yes the problems that come with it will teach me more than any single saas business could ever teach me. 

While I will likely be the single most prolific software business founder in history. I will also inevitably be the biggest failure in history as I fully expect for most of these businesses to utterly fail in the open market. So, I will keep shipping until I see what works and what doesnt. Those that do work will get improved and tested. Those lessons will be applied to the rest and the dead will get culled. As of this moment I just finished coding my 30th application in this project. I have a few sales already but it is mostly silent. I am screaming into the dark until these apps run the course of Search Engine Submission lag time. It will likely be pretty quiet for the next 100 days or so. I will keep shipping until then and will see what happens.