A little personal news… I’m joining the team behind Maptia. Actually, I’ve been working with them for a bit over six months but I suppose I’ve convinced them to keep me around at this point. This post is mostly about the why part of the story and it’s fairly personal. If you mostly want to hear the more concrete stuff about what we’ll be doing and when it’ll be over on Maptia where I’ll be writing a lot more often shortly (you can subscribe here).
I’m killing my book project and moving it to the blog
More than a year ago I decided I would write an ebook on building Micro-SaaS businesses. I was really enjoying the experiment in radical transparency, sharing the metrics and details behind building my own small software company on blog. Readers were enjoying the long form blog posts and I felt I had enough material that was genuinely new and interesting to put together a longer writing project. On top of that I saw several folks having some real success with ebooks, and having just read Nathan Barry’s Authority ebook about selling ebooks, I also thought it would be cool to try out a new business/revenue stream.
After a ton of thought and feedback from friends and readers, I’m killing the ebook project and moving the content over to my blog, where it will be available for free. You can start reading the first three chapters now here.
Because I like to over-share. Here are the main reasons why I decided to kill the project despite really not wanting to give up on it.
SaaS Is Here To Stay
Justin Jackson thinks we are at peak SaaS. We are not.
Justin asserted on Twitter that SaaS is ripe for disruption. SaaS founders, like myself, piled on arguments against the theory in a fun exchange. What follows is a thought-provoking article with a lot of great points but a dead wrong conclusion.
In this post I’ll tackle two specific, very good, questions he raised:
- If you are currently bootstrapping a software business (whether you intend to raise VC later or not) should you be thinking first and foremost about SaaS? Yes, absolutely.
- Is SaaS losing appeal relative to other software business models? Nope.
First I’ll look at some of Justin’s specific arguments, then I’ll add some support for my counter-claim: not only is SaaS not about to be imminently disrupted, but the software industry as a whole is inexorably shifting towards the as-a-Service model.
Micro-SaaS talk at B2B Rocks Paris
I gave a short talk on Micro-SaaS businesses at the B2B Rocks conference in Paris (July 2016). I really had fun with this presentation since most of the conference program and attendees were focused on venture-backed, enterprise, “big” SaaS topics. The full video is below. Big thanks to Alex for organizing and inviting me.
Storemapper Update: $200k and Growing the Team
I’ve just published another Storemapper Update for Q1 2016 with full financial metrics over on the brand new Storemapper Blog. Highlights include crossing over the $200k run rate, growing the team to three people and a look forward to 2016 marketing efforts. If you run an e-commerce business you are really going to be interested in our Storemapper Interview Series coming soon.