First I scheduled a thirty minute call to discuss something that needed one paragraph. We spent the first ten minutes on pleasantries and the last twenty on something that would have taken four minutes to read.
Not to optimize. Just to see where the time actually went.
The result was humbling. I spent about four hours a day in tools that were supposed to help me work and about two hours actually working. The rest was switching between them, checking them, and recovering from being interrupted by them.
A client used to reply to my emails with one line answers. I would send three paragraphs, they would send back "sounds good" or "will check."
For a while I thought they did not care. Then I realized I was writing for myself. Long emails felt thorough. They were really just me thinking out loud and calling it communication.
I am planning out my next project for a hackathon. As I previously completed two vastly different types of products, DukaanMate and LeetSeek, I want to focus on being more thoughtful with validating the next idea as opposed to just beginning coding. Instead of asking individuals for new features, I think I will ask them to tell me the most recent time they had to accomplish a task that caused frustration, and then use those responses as inspiration. To all Makers that have created and sold a SaaS product: What drove your conclusion that this is a "real" issue? Were you able to see the same work-around over and over again from users? Or were there some users that expressed their willingness to pay for a solution? If either of these are examples that fit your experience, please provide a specific example of how you validated the problem and what you learned.
Has a press release ever actually brought you a customer?
For a recent launch I sent a free press release out through a handful of distribution sites. One of them got it onto AP News, a couple hundred local news sites and Google News within a few hours. No journalist wrote about it though, it was all automatic reprints.
What did come back was a bunch of sales pitches, an affiliate network asking to list the product, and a sign-up from a company that found us through ChatGPT. I'd done the same thing for my Mac apps before and got nothing like that, so my guess is people watch those feeds for B2B tools.
Have you tried one for a launch? Did anyone actually reach out because of it?
It happens in client work more than people admit: a small change that is called urgent, sent at the end of the week, on a live site. Most of the time it is a text edit, but sometimes it touches checkout, a form or a plugin.
My own rule is still changing. I lean towards doing it only if I can test it and undo it quickly, and otherwise offering Monday morning. But some clients lose money while they wait, so it is not always that simple.
