Build Your SaaS

Justin and Jon are joined by Jason Fried to talk about:

• The philosophy behind their new book Shape Up.
• Does Basecamp's approach to 6-week cycles differ for smaller teams?
• "Long projects destroy morale. When things don't ship, you get frustrated." – Jason Fried
• Why projects ship late (it's human nature).
• Why work is like a hill.
• How they make product decisions at Basecamp.
• How do you know what you should work on next?
• Why they don't believe in backlogs.
• "That feeling of 'there's nothing to do, but there's everything to do' shouldn't be happening." – Jason Fried
• "You need a system at some point. When you have two people, you can hack your way to anything. But as soon as you grow, you'll need a system." – Jason Fried
• "What we have is not a perfect system. And even if it was, we don't execute these things perfectly." – Jason Fried

★ Thanks to our sponsors:

• ProfitWell's podcast Protect the Hustle has a new season!
• New sponsor: ActiveCampaign! Get the world's most advanced marketing & sales automation platform. Use the code activecampaign.com/buildyoursaas and get two months free + 2 free One-on-Ones!

Show notes:

• Jon's launch announcement tweet (from 2018).
• Read Basecamp's new book Shape Up.
• Jason Fried commented on this Linkedin post.
• Hill charts.
• Listen to Rework Podcast's "Shape Up Roundtable."
• Derek Sivers' new article: My old clothes don't fit

You can reply to this podcast here:

• Leave a comment on Breaker, the podcast app for iPhone.
• Otherwise, get us on Twitter: @transistorfm or email us: [email protected]

Thanks to our monthly supporters:

• Ben from narrowr.com
• Noah Prail
• David Colgan
• Robert Simplicio
• Colin Gray alitu.com
• Josh Smith
• Ivan Curkovic
• Brian Rhea (Pronounced “Ray”)
• Miguel Piedrafita
• Shane Smith
• Austin Loveless
• Simon Bennett
• Corey Haines
• Michael Sitver
• Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis
• Dan Buda danbuda.com
• Darby Frey
• Samori Augusto
• Dave Young
• Brad from Canada
• Sammy Schuckert
• Dan Ericson
• Mike Walker
• Adam DuVander
• Dave Giunta (JOOnta)
• Kyle Fox GetRewardful.com
• ProfitWell
• ActiveCampaign
• ProfitWell.com
• GetRewardful.com

Thanks to our monthly supporters

• Pascal from sharpen.page
• Rewardful.com
• Greg Park
• Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
• Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
• Bill Condo (@mavrck)
• Ward from MemberSpace.com
• Evandro Sasse
• Austin Loveless
• Michael Sitver
• Colin Gray
• Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

We shipped our new feature!

• American Express called Justin twice at 5am
• The new enhanced podcasts feed is live.
• Pete Marcano: “I’ll be honest, when I listened to the Build Your SaaS episode on this feature being launched, I didn’t really think much of it. Listening to this episode connected the dots. This is awesomely game changing.”
• Now we’re technically in a “cool down” cycle” - is this how this should feel?
• When should you push back on customers' feature requests?
• We're looking into SSO - what a rabbit hole!
• What happened to Spots.fm?
• How could we help indie podcasts?

★ Thanks to our sponsors:

• ActiveCampaign. Get the world's most advanced marketing & sales automation platform. Use the code activecampaign.com/buildyoursaas and get two months free + 2 free One-on-Ones!
• Honeybadger. A web developer's secret weapon! Modern error management that gives you more than an email and a backtrace. They also have an amazing podcast: FounderQuest.

Show notes:

• What is Single Sign-On?
• Basecamp "Shape Up"
• Zapier
• The Spots.fm episode
• Art of Product: Becoming a Multi-Product Company (with Amir Salihefendić)

You can reply to this podcast here:

• Leave a comment on PodHunt; it's like Reddit, but for podcasts.
• Leave a comment on Breaker, the podcast app for iPhone.
• Interact on WhatPods.
• Otherwise, get us on Twitter: @transistorfm or email us: [email protected]

Thanks to our monthly supporters:

• James Sowers with UserInput.io
• Travis Fischer
• Matt Buckley, from Nice Things
• Russell Brown
• Evandro Sasse
• Pradyumna Shembekar (PD)
• Noah Prail
• David Colgan
• Robert Simplicio
• Colin Gray alitu.com
• Josh Smith
• Ivan Curkovic
• Brian Rhea (Pronounced “Ray”)
• Shane Smith
• Austin Loveless
• Simon Bennett
• Corey Haines
• Michael Sitver
• Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis
• Dan Buda danbuda.com
• Darby Frey
• Samori Augusto
• Dave Young
• Brad from Canada
• Sammy Schuckert
• Dan Ericson
• Mike Walker
• Adam DuVander
• Dave Giunta (JOOnta)
• Kyle Fox GetRewardful.com
• ProfitWell
• ActiveCampaign
• Honeybadger
• GetRewardful.com

Thanks to our monthly supporters

• Pascal from sharpen.page
• Rewardful.com
• Greg Park
• Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
• Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
• Bill Condo (@mavrck)
• Ward from MemberSpace.com
• Evandro Sasse
• Austin Loveless
• Michael Sitver
• Colin Gray
• Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In this episode Jon and Justin discuss talk about how you should think about your software product's competition.

Why you shouldn’t focus on the competition

• It’s a distraction. The main point by many folks is: “when you focus too much on the competition, it means you’re not focusing enough on your customers.”
• It causes anxiety.“Last summer, I stopped[reading industry news]. I had just reached the point at which I could feel an unhealthy level of toxicity piling up inside of me. I felt myself getting too involved, too absorbed, and a bit too anxious about what I was missing, and about what I knew or didn't know, but thought I should know. I was checking Twitter too often and reloading sites too often. If someone told me about something I hadn't heard of, I felt like I should have already known about it. Industry news was becoming an addiction.” - Jason Fried
• It’s too tempting to copy features. “Copying skips understanding. Understanding is how you grow. You have to understand why something works or why something is how it is. When you copy it, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.” – Jason Fried
• It can lead to feature creep. company A is doing this, company B is doing that, so let’s do them all. also, paralyzing indecision and no real thought about why you’d be building a feature.

“I wouldn’t advocate spending much time worrying about the competition — you really shouldn’t waste attention worrying about things you can’t control — but if it helps make the point relatable, the best way to beat the competition is to last longer than they do.” – Jason Fried

Why you should focus on the competition

• It’s a way of understanding your customers. You should be aware of why customers are choosing (or not choosing) the competition.
• It’s more competitive now. I wrote a post about this. “It's getting more expensive to build SaaS companies and exits are weak.” Mattermark, 2016. “We're not building these basic CRUD apps like we used to be able to. The stuff's too competitive now.” – Rob Walling. "No one wants to admit it, but the old ‘your product must be 10x better than existing solutions’ trope is dead. I think this is one of the most hostile times for startups that we’ve had, really. Products are better, and competition is enormous." – Zach Holman
• It’s a way of revealing opportunities. “Everybody's drilling for oil in the same spot because some other guy found oil there already.” – Nick Quah. What’s everyone else missing? Where’s the untapped well?
• You’re stealing time, attention, and money from somebody , and it’s not always who you think!(Article) When Uber launched, they stole customers from the taxi industry. When the iPhone launched, Apple took customers from Kodak and the film industry.

How to think about the competition

• SWOT. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are their opportunities? What are their threats? Do SWOT on yourself too!
• User interviews. One of the best ways to do user research is to interview folks who are actively using the competition! What brought them to start using it? How’d they find it? What was going on in their life at that time? Why do they keep using it?
• When people switch. If people switch away from you to a competitor, that’s a great time to ask questions. "The only two people who can give you real feedback about your product are people who just purchased it and people who just canceled.” – Jason Fried
• Think about how you can outlast them. What are practices you can put in place that will help you outlast the competition? “Whenever a startup goes out of business, the first thing I get curious about are their costs, not their revenues.” – Jason Fried
• Figure out how you can make things easier.How can you make your app easier to use than the competition?
• Look for unmet desires. What are the unmet needs of users using competitors’ products? Search Twitter, support forums, etc for instances of people complaining. What are they complaining about?

★ Thanks to our sponsors:

• Alitu.com: Alitu removes all the tech headaches associated with producing your podcast. They take care of processing, editing & publishing your podcast. Go to