Hey SaaS,
I owe this community a lot since this is where things started.
Been developing over 20 SaaS as an AI-first venture development company since before ChatGPT was a big thing.
I’ve reviewed more than 200 founders and how they approach launching their startups. Here are few things I saw and that could benefit anyone that wants to join.
- Stop looking for shortcuts
The path will likely be hard and longer than what you thought. If you’re after ease of life, you probably wont get that early on (I say probably because we can’t generalise). If you stay in the game long enough though, you’ll probably find yourself in that position though
Be mindful about the reason why you want to start a business.
- Look to learn, always, and put your ego in check
If you genuinely enjoy learning then I’m worried about your competitors. You’ll face many challenges and ways to do things differently. If you’re humble enough to recognise that you’re not doing it the right way and change then you’ll be at the top on the long term.
The best profiles are usually industry experience -> solve a problem for that industry (this can vary a lot of course)
Don’t follow the latest hype, you’ll always be one step behind.
Rather build your conviction, be contrarian, one thing that you think is not working well and you’re convinced you can change it. Keep at it until the market catches up to you, don’t do the opposite.
Again I’ve seen some businesses actually playing on the arbitrage of markets and launching opportunities in market that the technology didn’t reach yet.
- Don’t build from assumption
Be very careful about your assumption and test it against the market. What you should consider a propriety and get to the truth and distill your ideas back to their fundamentals
If you’re looking to build in the AI space, feel free to reach out and I’ll see if I can provide further advices! (Please be mindful I might take a bit long to respond)
Hope this was useful
Cheers,