A lot of business advice you read these days is bad. It may not be wrong, per se, but it originates from a small number of sources, suffers from extreme confirmation bias, and has been so codified and calcified over the years, it may as well have been handed down on tablets. Worse, this advice is often given to you by people who haven't actually learned or confirmed the lessons themselves, only heard them enough times that it must be true, right?

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to this, and are casting a more critical eye on business articles.  Is this just old advice, regurgitated in a different way? Has the market changed sufficiently that this old chestnut no longer holds true? Does the author even know what the hell they're talking about?

Well I sure don't.

I don't have any successful IPOs or C-series (or B-series or A-series) investments. I don't have an appreciable MRR to brag to you about.  Hell, I don't even have a running SaaS to back up my words with.  (I do have Nodewood, but that's technically more of a digital product, I guess?  Anyway.)  I don't have a library of successes to draw on at all.

But what I do have is a graveyard of attempts.

I have tried - and failed - at launching a successful bootstrapped business so many times. Some of them I launched and ran for years, plenty never got off the drawing board. And while I haven't really yet learned about what worked and what you should do, I've learned a whole lot about how to screw up. At this point, I'm practically a master about what not to do.

Plus, there's all kinds of other spectacular failures out there to draw from, as well. Life's too short to make all your own mistakes, you gotta learn from everyone else's, too.

So please, let's learn from my mistakes, and those of others. Instead of jabbering on and regurgitating the popular wisdom, I'll instead be writing a series of articles about the various awful mistakes you can make when trying to start and run a SaaS business. And for convenience's sake, I'll keep a list of them updated here:

Photo by Konstantin Evdokimov on Unsplash

Oh, and if you're looking to make your own fresh and interesting mistakes when running a SaaS business, can I suggest avoiding a classic one, and don't spend weeks or months of time building out your application skeleton? Instead, try Nodewood, a SaaS application starter kit.  It comes with user authentication, susbscription payments, team management and more, allowing you to start writing your business logic today and launch much sooner than if you'd had to build it all yourself.