A 30 point checklist to help you research and pick your best idea. — For founders, this question comes up a lot: “I have too many startup ideas. I don’t know which idea to focus on.” It certainly did for me. I have been building SaaS products for the last few years, with bad to mediocre results. Each one taught me something new. …

Yes, people are looking…

There are 5 essential parts to a well-formed SaaS idea. This post helps you define the problem. This is a free 5 part series, taken from the opening section of my SaaS idea evaluation workbook, where we go through how to define your idea concretely. There are 5 essential parts…

There are 5 essential parts to a well-formed SaaS idea. This post helps you define your target customers. This is a free 5 part series, taken from the opening section of my SaaS idea evaluation workbook, where we go through the process of concretely defining your idea. There are 5…

And thoughts on a new bookmarking platform. We do not need apps to help us hoard more links. We need tools to help us consume information when we need it, where we need it, and in the right format. In August 2020, I launched a simple Twitter bookmarking tool called…

Systematically evaluating our startup ideas helped us pick one to proceed with confidence. After launching my last product (a Twitter bookmarking browser extension), I was ready to experiment with my next idea. The goal is to quickly validate what works and what doesn’t, so the approach is to build and…

Lots of people using a free product is validation that people want to use it for free. It’s not validation for a business model. Last September I launched Markfolder, a free Twitter bookmarking browser extension and web app. I built it for myself because Twitter’s bookmarking sucks* and I needed…

For most non-trivial applications, fixing a technical bug could take hours or days. In this case, fixing the actual bug should probably come last. First, fix the customer’s confidence, followed by the customer’s experience. Then the bug. Fix the customer’s confidence When something breaks, the first thing that happens is doubt being cast in…

It’s the sort of warning that makes sense but doesn’t seem serious until you’re on the receiving end of it: “Don’t create a business that your competitor can easily kill by adding a feature to their product.” With Markfolder I did just that mistake: created a business around a feature…