Building

What I'm building myself

For a long time I've been helping companies build successful software product businesses. But that doesn't mean I haven't wanted to build software products of my own.

I'm hugely interested in building great software products. This interest has given me great respect for people who create software products people love and driven me to work with SaaS founders to learn how they build software products successfully.

I'm currently working on my own software projects and continuing to build upon the skills I've identified as necessary to create great software product businesses.

Here are the skills I see as important to building successful software product businesses:

UX research
UX design
front-end/backend dev
product marketing

To learn these skills, I've:

interviewed experts in each of these respective fields (identifying best practices and most common mistakes)
consumed the best resources available (books, courses, videos, etc)
been a guinea pig for consultants (joined over a dozen focus groups, performed dozens of user tests, and took notes on what did and didn't work)
and then performed the work myself (interviewed hundreds of customers for different companies, recreated the UIs of popular applications, designed new ones, did user testing for over a dozen companies
and lastly taught myself how to code (front-end (HTML, CSS, and Javascript)

I've learned a lot along the way, way more than any one book will tell you. Much of what I've learned is what not to do. There are lots of ways founders can fail in any one of these areas.

My efforts have been very purposeful: learn how to do everything involved in creating a successful software business from the people who've done it themselves.

If you'd like to follow along in my journey and read more about what I'm building next, you can subscribe here.