DON'T Underestimate This When Building Your SaaS

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Hey folks, I'm just leaving the office on Monday. Um, was super busy all day and it's like just after 6:00. I got to get home for my live stream and if I don't start it on time, then it like doesn't work to some platform. So, got to make sure we get home on time. Um, I actually don't have a question to respond to. Uh, I did a scan through experienced devs when I was walking out of the building. Uh, I didn't see anything I wanted to talk about, so I figured I'm just going to talk about some software engineering stuff that's top of mind. This is probably going to be a little scatterrained, but um, why not? Um, I filmed a couple videos on the way into work this morning, and I had a bunch of time off from recording last week. a combination of uh I mean for for this channel at least just being I mean burnt out.

I didn't I guess the other thing is I didn't drive to the office last week um because I was backup on call and my on call shift was super busy even as a backup. But I don't like um I don't like commuting while I'm primary or backup on call because I I feel like it's kind of needless even as a backup. I don't want to leave my primary in a spot where for like 30 minutes to an hour I'm just like in a car when I could be helping them. And that's like two times in the day, right? On the way to work and on the way back. So, I just opt to not drive in when I'm back up. But that means that the normal like minimum four times in a week when I'd be filming, I now have to go fill that uh by recording at home.

So, didn't really have other time outside of work. Um, I got zero YouTube videos done for my main channel um over the past two weeks. I I just sat down and recorded two last night and those are resume reviews. So anyway, um just moral of the story is I, you know, have not been uh filming as much as I wanted to. So I figured just kind of blab about stuff. But if you're new here, uh on this channel, basically I try to answer questions that people write in the comments or they send in. So if you have a software engineering or career related question, feel free to write it in the comments or send it into Dev Leader on social media. It's also my main YouTube channel. because I was mentioning the main YouTube channel and the videos I filmed last night. They are ré reviews um that I was doing last night.

So, if you have um a resume that you want reviewed, if you go check out Dev Leader, look at the resume review playlist. Uh if you watch any one of those videos, even in the first minute, I explain how to submit your resume to be reviewed. It's totally free. Um I recommend you watch more than the first minute so you can see how the review looks. uh some things that I'll be looking for and stuff like that. Um you might even do a first watch a couple of those videos, do a first pass on your resume before sending it in and then I can review it. I anonymize the whole thing, by the way. So, you know, um if you work at a big company, I'll leave the name, but if it's a little bit more niche, um I will blank it out. Uh, same with like stuff that talks about location.

I try to remove that just because I don't think that shouldn't play into anything and no need to share that. So, anyway, check it out. Um, happy to try and help. Literally cost me money to to review your resumes cuz I have an editor edit them. Um, so, uh, just trying to do what I can. Okay. Um, so for me, this guy's going to try and pass. I will too. Why not? Um, some stuff that I'm going to be working on. I'll figure I'd talk about I can't talk about work specifically cuz that's proprietary. um unless it's really generic for work and uh so maybe I'll get into some of that by the end of this. But um I'm building Brand Ghost and Brand Ghost is a platform that I've made started off for me and that's to help post content to social media. So basically to cross-ost and schedule content.

Um so I'm building that in ASP.NET Core. It's hosted in Azure, uses MySQL. Front end is in React. I guess it's in NexJS. Um, so yeah, it's uh it's fun. been working on that and it's I think maybe now that I'm thinking about this maybe a direction I'll go with this conversation is around like um this balance between building software uh like on the side and all the other stuff that goes into like trying to commercialize it. So um this is not my first time trying to do this. I tried it in the past and failed at it. And uh I don't say that like um like it's a pity party or like I'm you know down on myself like we tried. Um but it's hard. So the I think what maybe a lot of people expect is like all it's going to take is a great idea, right?

And if you just have this really good idea, then all of a sudden like the success just comes because the idea is so good. But the reality is like ideas don't mean anything. Um the ideas don't mean anything because unless there's any execution, nothing happens, right? But it's even more than that because it's not just about executing on building the idea because I think personally that's where a lot of software developers go, man, I got this. Like I can build the thing, right? I think if you're listening to this and you are someone who isn't just getting into programming, you've been doing it for a little bit, you probably have that feeling of like, okay, like you know, throw a problem my way and as long as it's like something that's kind of exciting for you, like you're going to go build it. like nothing's going to stop you, right?

It doesn't matter how challenging it is, you're going to find a way. And uh if you're like me and some of the people that I work with, then it's almost like it's motivating to have a a challenge put in front of you that's like number one, it's got to be interesting to you. Number two, like I I kind of look at it like this underdog type of situation. Like, hey, like you say it can't be done, like we'll show you. Um I don't know. That's how I look at it. and it gets like really exciting. Um, you can probably tell if you've watched my other videos recently and how burnt out I am. Just talking about this kind of thing gets me excited. Um, so maybe that's coming through, maybe it's not. I don't know. But, uh, the the reality is it's not just it's not just can I code it.

It's not just can I build it, get it deployed. It's a lot more than that. And I think that often often times we forget this or if you're if your first time trying to do something like this where you're building something on the side and getting users um you underestimate how much other stuff goes into it. Okay. So, what I mean by that is that it's really easy to fall into the trap as someone who likes building stuff to just focus on the building. Even if it's a great idea, even if you're kick-ass at building stuff, it's not just enough to build. Um, sorry. I was getting work messages and there's some irony there. So, I want to address that when I get home. But, um, I just dismissed that so it's not distracting. The reality is there's so much more that goes into being able to try and commercialize things.

And if you're not like if you're not prioritizing that, it's going to feel like you're stuck. So, I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this because again, I I'm I'm thinking like if you're someone who's like me, right? You love building stuff. It's fun. Uh, you know, kind of feels like you're building Lego. Even better when it's something where you're like, "Hey, this is a great idea, right? Like, this is useful." Um, it's not just enough to go cod it. And I think like all software, it's never like 100% done, right? You can always find things to improve. You can always refactor code. You can always go rewrite it. You can there's always something, right? Make it faster. It doesn't matter. There's always something that you can do. And I think I want to say like even if you're prioritizing stuff that like you think is valuable in terms of like I think users will want this, you could even be right.

But there is so much more to do actively other than just writing code. So, what I've been noticing and uh to reflect on the first one of these that I I worked on actually I can go back two two versions of or versions is the wrong word. Two attempts ago. Um two attempts ago and this is going back I don't know maybe four fourish years ago. We got I got to pass this Tesla but someone's passing me before I can pass this Tesla. Um, two attempts ago I was building something and this was mostly um just kind of for fun. Um, but just kind of like evidence that it was not going to succeed commercially. Um, I was building something with a buddy and it was called Hangry. Great name by the way. Thought it was super cool. And hangry was basically Tinder but for going to restaurants, which sounds weird, but hear me out.

So, we've probably all been in this situation either with uh your significant other, with friends or like colleagues at work even, or it's like we want to go get food, but like no one can make the executive decision on where to go. So, the idea behind Hangry was that you would invite people into a session and kind of like using Yelp and Tinder together, you would swipe on the places that you are willing to go eat at. Okay? And then what Hangry would do was it would pick the winner. It's like just a voting system, right? but had like a a Tinder-like feel because you're swiping. Literally had the cards. You could look at the restaurant information, the reviews and stuff. I thought it was super cool. But we built it and I was spending time just like refactoring code, building stuff, making it better, but like no one used it, right?

We had it in the app store, no one used it. And why, right? Why did no one use it? Well, probably because no one even knew about it. I mean, I'm not saying that it was like groundbreaking, right? Maybe it wasn't even a good idea. But even if it was an amazing idea, if people don't even know about the thing that you're building, how are they ever going to like you're just hoping to God someone's going to stumble upon it, right? It's like it's not a good strategy. We put zero effort into marketing or sharing this stuff online. Um, I talked about it a couple of times, but man, like you really need to be focused on trying to advertise it. Okay, so that's one example where we were working on this thing and it was kind of like, you know what, like probably should just stop because we don't have like a business model that's figured out.

We don't have time to like go dedicate into the marketing. Oh my god. Um, sorry. Word messages. So, we just we gave up on it, right? And again, I don't look at that like a I'm not embarrassed to talk about that like I'm such a failure. I don't know. Like we just we didn't have the time and resources to put into that to go turn it into something that maybe could have been monetized. So give up on it, right? If you like the idea, go take it and run with it. I think it's I think it's cool. Um and then bring me on as a uh fractional CTO. Um and I would love to help see it come to life. So that's Hangry. Then the next thing that I built um was something called Meal Coach. And meal coach is actually an extension of a fourth year design project that I worked on in university which I thought was awesome.

Right. And the first sort of giveaway that I should have had that this wasn't going to be as successful as I thought was even though I thought it was awesome and I was a target user, I still wasn't using the core functionality, right? I was not using the core functionality. I don't think you necessarily have to. I don't think that's the um I don't know what's the right way to phrase this. I don't think that that's like a 100% requirement, but I think it's a good indicator. Like if you're like, "Hell yeah, I need to use this." You might be on to something. So, I thought it was cool. I thought it was useful because it modeled how I tried to approach things. And what Meal Coach did was um there's and it's not like I'm not going to say what it is, but it's not the approach isn't necessarily proprietary, but basically it would optimize foods for you to eat in terms of meal plans.

Now, I know some people are saying, "Well, I mean, I can do that with Chad GBT and AI, but like uh yeah, but like I will tell you this. If you download the the nutrition database that comes from the US government, it's totally free and open. If you go download that, um, what I want to say is like even that database of food is not in good shape as in it's really difficult to trust the data there because it's not normalized in a good way. and there are millions of records. So, you want to go trust Chad GBT to go make your meal plan. I'm not saying it can't work. I'm sure lots of people do this and have success, but um the way that ours would work was we uh I actually filtered down to the like the the sets of food and it would take recipes and you know could crawl the internet for recipes and stuff.

You could import your own whatever. kind of like My Fitness Pal and um it would generate meal plans for you based on your goals and then we were incorporating AI so that week over week depending on how you were progressing let's say you're trying to gain or lose weight whatever it was or you had other markers like your sleep health and stuff like that uh we would be able to feed that in and the automated coach would be able to uh guide you through how to make adjustments or if you were a coach coach or personal trainer. You didn't have to use the AI element to it. You could literally review it yourself and be, you know, be the coach. So, um, super cool. Um, but yeah, I mean, just wasn't We would talk to people, we talked to trainers, we talked to coaches, we talked to athletes, and they were like, "Yeah, this sounds awesome.

This sounds awesome. Would love to try it. Would love to try it." And then people would like either just not try it or they would like sign up and then just not do anything. So, what was really interesting is that I think we found something that was um seemed interesting to people, was potentially solving a problem, but with respect to coaches using it, we were actually creating more work for them when we thought and our main pitch was that we're saving you time, right? So the reason we were creating more work for them was a lot of the people that we were talking to are mostly using like cookie cutter templates for their clients. So now all of a sudden instead of just giving someone you know an Excel sheet, it's like plugandplay for some numbers and stuff kind of like telling people like hey you have to go like do this process get your you clients to sign up.

Um, basically it was just making more work for people in the end. Um, and I think that's why people were like it sounds cool and then would give up as soon as they had to start using it. So what we learned with this though and I think this was our first I say our it's different people on so at least my first learning um that the amount of effort that had to go into trying to market and sell this was nuts. Was absolutely nuts. And maybe not for people that are good at sales and marketing. I am not and I don't mean to I don't say that as like uh I try not to do like the negative selft talk. I am not experienced at sales and marketing. I don't enjoy doing it. I find it very challenging and uncomfortable. I know that if I practiced it more, it would become more natural.

But that's not where I'm at right now. And uh it's one of those things that like I will find other things to do instead of doing that even though I know I need to do it. Which brings us to Brand Ghost. So Brand Ghost is like I said at the beginning of this video, the uh platform that I'm making now to help share content out on social media. One obvious sign that I think we're in the right direction, aside from the fact that we have paying users for real now, is that this is something that I started building for myself and I used it regularly. It is the only way that I can share as much content on social media that I do because of how this is designed. I don't I don't even need to schedule posts on social media anymore. All that I have to do is create content.

Everything else at this point is done automatically for me. Um, not fair to say. I still have to go respond to comments and stuff like that cuz I'm not the person who's going to use AI bots to like just comment back on stuff and be ridiculous. So, uh, I create my content and Brand Ghost puts it out everywhere for me to the tune of like over 150 social media posts every week across my different accounts. So, I just make the content and it goes out now. Oh, come on, buddy. Sorry, someone was in a lane to exit and then like last minute put their signal on and I needed to move or else they were going to have a really bad time. Um, with Brand Ghost, I think we identified early on like, hey, look, like doesn't matter if the idea is great, like if people don't know about it, no one will use it.

Oh my god. Come on. What are you doing? Absolutely stupid. Merge onto the highway. No signal. Not going the speed limit. And then cut me off. Excellent. Um, we learned pretty early with Brand Ghost that we need to spend a lot more time than we would anticipate. marketing, selling to people, doing outreach, right? We need to do that. There's no stop sign here, people. You need to drive. Very, very stupid. There's literally a sign that says don't stop and everyone stopped. Come on. You can't really tell um unless you've watched the 360 videos, but um that spot basically there's a lane where you turn right and you don't stop and you have the right away and people don't know that even though there's a really big sign there and they stop and then everyone else that actually knows gets mad. Um, yeah, we figured out pretty early that we needed to spend a disproportionate amount of time doing the sales and marketing part because we're good at all the other stuff.

We're good at the building. We're good at the iterating. And that only gets you so far unless you're getting user feedback, right? I am one user. I am a power user, but I am only one user. So, we needed to start getting people to use it. How do we do that? We need to tell people about it. We need to find the people who are going to use it or be a good candidate for it. Never mind even selling it to them. We need people that are like, "Hell yeah, this seems like I want to use it." And then actually use it. So that was not trivial, right? It's like it doesn't matter if the idea is good if no one hears about it. So we had to go invest heavily into doing that which like I said it's we're not experts at that just the reality of it.

So, disproportionate amount of time into that, but once you start having some people use it, even if they're on trial periods, whatever, getting the feedback and having people go like like I could see myself using this if Okay, well, what's the thing? Like, tell us, we'll go build it. And I think one of our um I bet you if you could ask our users, you can call them all up and say like, what's like what do you love about Brand Ghost? I bet you maybe they would say like the feature set, but I bet you uh top of the list, maybe not number one, but right up there would be the fact that we respond to stuff like very very fast. Sorry, I got to get rid of these these notifications. Um, so yeah, I think for us getting some momentum with users and getting the feedback means that now we start having this backlog of things that people actually want, right?

It's not just, oh, let me refactor the code, let me just play around building stuff. It's like, no, there's a list of stuff that people are either like, hey, I am a paying user and I would like this, or hey, I would be a paying user if you could. Uh, and then there's other, you know, uh, data points. And as we're building stuff, we're going, hey, there's other users that use this other stuff. And I bet you we could build that. So now we have What is that sound? Sorry, there must be something outside that I'm driving past. It's making a sound. um we have these other data points that at least help us prioritize, right? And if we have someone that's like, "Hey, I would sign up for this right now if you could build X, you know damn well what we're going to go focus our time on, right?" Um and especially if we have paying users that are like, "Hey, um you know, this is great.

I would love if whatever we know like we're not getting a sale out of them because they're already paying us, but we know that they're actively using it. We know that they are our target audience, right? So, their feedback is very valuable. Now, as we have more and more paying users, there's going to be this opportunity where it's like, "Hey, could you build X? Could you build Y? Could you build Z?" And then we can start looking at slotting this stuff into other paid tiers because at some point there's going to be features that come up where we're like, hey, that's actually like that's a more advanced thing or that might even cost us money to go operate regularly, right? Like um AI features for example with token usage like that needs to be accounted for in the business model.

So as more and more more stuff comes in, we can start saying, "Yeah, we can build this, but this might fit into a certain tier of usage." Um, anyway, point of all this is to say that the amount of effort that has to go into the sales and marketing portion of this stuff is nuts for us. if you're working like if you yourself are very outgoing and you're like I have no problem reaching out to people and just like you know pitching things at them like great. I think that's a for this kind of thing I think it's a really awesome quality. Um I think sort of built into me is this like fear of rejection, right? So, I just like talk myself out of like out of these situations because it's like I'm already I'm like sabotaging myself, right? Like, oh, it might be uncomfortable if someone rejects me, but like who cares, right?

Like maybe like why why does it have to be a personal thing, right? If I'm like, "Hey, you're a content creator. You should use brand ghost." And someone's like, "Nope, no thanks." That doesn't mean like I'm a shitty person or I'm stupid. Maybe they just don't want to. Maybe they don't see the value. Maybe it's a them problem. I don't know. It could be anything. Um, so I need to keep reminding myself like that rejection is like it's a totally normal thing and it it's not a personal thing. Easier said than done. But I wanted to be able to talk through this a little bit. um when I thought about it as soon as I started rambling because I think if you're like me, you don't realize how much time has to go into these other things. It's not just the coding part.

I like right now off the top of my head, if I think about just the architecture of what I built and how different parts of the code are laid out, I bet you I could have a backlog of stuff to go improve and just clean up or, you know, reorganize whatever for months. That's not to say the code is crappy, but like it's evolving. It's growing. there are there are new like I don't know new things I could be including that would improve things like why would I not go do that right like there's a huge backlog of stuff I could be doing just on like the architecture and the current state of the code never mind new features but it's a trap right it's a trap because it's just busy work it's actually avoidance it's avoiding doing the difficult thing and the difficult thing in this case for me is talking to people trying to pitch things.

So with that said, if you are interested in posting stuff to social media and you want to try out Brand Ghost, Brand Ghost is totally free for people to try out. You want to schedule post and crossost, totally free. No strings attached. Go use it. It's awesome. Um, other platforms like Buffer, they're free for a couple of social media platforms or free for as many as you want. We'll probably have to limit it at some point. Then all the paid features are the more awesome things. So try it out. But thanks for thanks for being here. We'll get more videos later this week. So see you later.