Back in May we celebrated REVSYS' 19th anniversary. I of course mentioned it on social media and someone replied that they would love to see a blog post on all of the things I would have done differently now that I have perspective.
While I'm sure there are tons of things I could have done better, two things immediately came to mind.
Tools
Not investing more in our tools earlier was a mistake. I had a bad habit of not spending $25/month here or $50/month there for various SaaS products that I felt would have provided SOME value, but maybe not ENOUGH value.
For the first few years I invoiced everyone by hand, using an OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) spreadsheet template. Emailed them or now that I think about it some I had to physically mail in the USPS or believe it or not FAX them.
Before you make fun of me, this didn't take up as much time as you might think in our early years. Most of our projects are of decent size so we don't send out a ton of invoices. All in I probably spent 2 to 3 hours per month on this.
Then I switched to using a $40/month SaaS tool. It made my life easier and cut that down to closer to 30 minutes per month now. Factor in my hourly rate and it's a steal every single month!
When it was just me and Jacob Kaplan-Moss we tracked our time however and he feed me the data at the end of the month. I tended to use a text file in each project folder and edited it in vim as I switched between projects. I think he used a spreadsheet.
About as low tech as you can get and still be using something nerdy like vim.
As we added more team members I needed a system and we started using one that was perfectly fine. No one liked using it, I didn't like the hoops I had to jump through to pull the data out in the ways I needed to for the invoicing system, but it was fine and only $40/month.
Then we switched to one that is about $1k/year.
I was worried it wasn't going to be worth it, but gave it a shot. It immediately highlighted some missed billing (whole days by some staff) that paid for the next THREE YEARS in the first month. It's also nicer to use, has a decent API and the mobile apps are even nice.
It was such a good investment they could double their price and I'd likely keep it. I owe those folks a drink for sure!
In the last few years we've spent more time building tools for ourselves, things we can re-use across projects. Things that make our lives a little easier and again we should have done more often and sooner. This continues to pay dividends. If not directly financial, at least emotionally for me and the team.
Trusting my gut
While I just gave you a very large example of where trusting my gut instinct was wrong, my gut is usually right and I should have listen to it more.
In retrospect, my gut is correct about 80% of the time. There were lots of little decisions where something felt off:
- There was something off about the client
- Or the project goals
- The expectations
- The team we were going to be working with
- The sub-contractor
- The timeline
- The vibes
Something was off and I should have listened to my gut. The vast majority of the time I've regretted it and now I try to listen to that little voice far far more often than I used to.
Listening to your gut instinct is tricky, but it IS wrong sometimes. For example, it is constantly telling me that I should replace BOTH of those tools I just mentioned with a hand crafted (er well LLM crafted) versions integrated into our client portal.
Think of all the benefits! Think of the savings!
I have to remind myself that keeping these running, updated, and working doesn't cost $0 and when you really do the math I don't think the SaaS-pocalypse is going to happen in the way people think. Unless I specifically want to get into the invoicing or time tracking business (or hell both wheee!) it makes no sense for us to build bespoke versions of these when what we have is excellent and cheaper than a couple of days of care and feeding per year.
I do think however some SaaS companies are going to die because they aren't easy to use or provide enough value for their price point. I think many $200+/seat/month business tools ARE going to get replaced by custom versions because at those levels it does start to make sense to build vs buy.
Hope you found this helpful in some way!
