One thing nobody tells you about building SaaS.
You spend months thinking the biggest challenge is building the product.
Then you launch your beta…
…and realize building was the easy part.
Now you’re learning about distribution, talking to users, collecting feedback, fixing edge cases, prioritizing features, and trying to convince people to trust something new.
As a first-time SaaS founder, that’s been my biggest lesson.
Every conversation with a founder teaches me something I didn’t know the day before.
I’m documenting everything I learn while building in public, and I’m excited to see where the journey goes.
For founders further along than me:
What’s one lesson you wish you’d learned earlier?
Nudge
You did the work. Now get paid for it.
Comments (4)
For me, one of the big realization was that when you show a product to a group of people and they say it’s good, congratulate you, and support you, it doesn’t mean they’ll subscribe, start using it, or pay for it. People are kind during a demo, but when it’s time to actually use the product or pay for it, that’s when you really see whether it was truly needed.
Can't agree more, Mubarak! Building is indeed an easy part these days. The lesson for me is to start building the audience for your product even before the product is ready.
Absolutely agree with you.
Distribution being harder than building was exactly my experience too. I spent almost 30 years in organizational development before building FounderFlow, and even with that background, getting people to trust a new tool with visibility into their business was a much bigger hurdle than any feature I shipped. The lesson I wish I'd learned earlier: build the trust signal (showing your reasoning, not just conclusions) before you need it, not after users start asking "why should I believe this?"
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