a pivot - making for me and R&D

I decided I'm not going to be releasing ScrollWise, and I'm not going to be working on any SaaS apps for a while.

Over the last couple years, I've been trying to be a SaaS founder. Not just in "trying to build SaaS apps and release them for money" but I've been trying to force myself to be The SaaS Founder type, the one that gives a shit about marketing a subscription app with questionable, likely negative ROI for the user that they could probably build themselves, the one that cares about authentication and scaling and all of the bells and whistles that come with SaaS development and deployment.

I think ScrollWise is useful, but I simply cannot convince myself to care enough about solving the problem of injecting scraped content into ChatGPT prompts to implement marketing strategies and authentication and security and the rest of it.

I simply do not Have That SaaS Dog In Me.

After realizing this, I did some introspection. Introspection has been one of the most valuable tools for my own personal and professional development. I journal and meditate a ton and really try to dive into why certain things motivate me and others don't, why I don't feel fulfilled doing certain things but do love to do others. I challenge myself regularly while I journal out my thoughts.

What I've found is that I really actually do not at all enjoy SaaS development, marketing, authentication, etc. I really love parts of it. Like for ScrollWise, figuring out how to scrape, store and analyze the data was a blast. The UI/UX was less fun but it was still an interesting puzzle to solve. But when the fun puzzles ended and the SaaS development quirks began, when I had to figure out authentication and payment and marketing... I just could not make myself care.

This lead to the realization that a lot of the reason solopreneurs are a very small class, and that many of them never hit a point of sustainability, is not always a lack of talent or a lack of capability, a lot of times it's a lack of interest. You hire folks not just because they're talented at marketing, or building auth systems, or doing business development... but because they're much more interested, and thus much more intrinsically motivated, than you are to do those things.

I simply do not care enough about those things to do the requisite jobs necessary to launch, scale and run a SaaS. And that is fine! And that may some day change! and maybe I just need to find a problem that I do care enough about to push through those interesting bits... but what that will take is a lot of research and development, the thing that is my bread and butter.

So, from now on, I'll be working on R&D for tools that I either plan to release for free and not worry about scaling, or things that I plan to use for myself. I'm excited about that, because it means I can stay in the lanes that interest me.