5 things I wish somebody told me before I founded my SaaS business

If you’re reading my article for the first time, you’d be forgiven for not realizing that, hey, I don’t just guru all day in my pajamas. My knowledge comes from real world experiences, running a business that is not in the business of teaching people how to start a business.

Crazy!

So yeah, Freckle Time Tracking is my first business baby. It’s a SaaS, and we ran our first billing cycle on January 2nd, 2009. Seven years ago.

2015 was Freckle’s best ever with $625k of gross receipts, and so far we’re on track to hit close to $800k annual run rate (ARR) before this year is out.

Those are some big numbers, but we didn’t start out there, and it hasn’t been all smooth sailing.

Here are five things I wish I’d known when I started Freckle, things that would have made my life so much more profitable and pleasurable.

5. There is always another inflection point coming

Inflection points are those knife-edges you tip toe along when things could go either way, when you are, say, trying to grow your team but lack the time/revenue to do it, but growing your team would help increase the time/revenue to the point where you could grow your team. Ouch. To me, that’s the prototypical inflection point.

Others include:

• You’re working on features to please a better set of customers, but at the same time, you need to be working on stuff to retain your existing customers.
• You’re trying to firm up all your internal business processes to save money, but you also have to, you know, work on your actual business (the part that makes money) at the same time.
• You need to master a new skill to get to the next level — which means you must practice, practice, try and fail before you can succeed — but you also have to keep doing what you’re doing because it’s working-ish.

Over the last 8 years running this business, I have said so many times: “We just have to get through this inflection point and then things will get easier.”

This is both a truth and a lie:

4. Teams are not “just add water”

3. 90 percent marketing, 10 percent product

2. Focus on your BEST Customers, 100 percent of the time

1. Just because it can make (good) money doesn’t mean you should do it

There you have it: 5 things I wish somebody told me