I launched SavvyCal to #2 Product of the Month in January and have since crossed $20k MRR — AMA!

@redrory Hey Rory, thanks for being a listener! Level (a Slack competitor I attempted to build) failed for a number reasons: * It required approval from too many decision makers. Changing the way a company communicates internally is a major barrier to adoption. * The top-level decision makers (managers) in an organization felt far less pain using Slack than individual contributors (makers). So there was a lot of convincing that needed to take place. * Smaller organizations (ones theoretically easier to sell to who were already in my network) didn't really feel the pain of an out-of-control Slack workspace. When I was vetting the concept for SavvyCal, I wanted to make sure I didn't run in these same challenges. * SavvyCal can be adopted by a single person in an organization and organically expand from there (single-player mode) * Switching costs are quite low. Most people are able to migrate from a competing tool in a matter of minutes. * I was able to build the SavvyCal MVP much more quickly than Level. The expectation bar is quite high for a communication tool (people expect native cross-platform apps, complex notification schemes, etc.). This allowed me to test market hypotheses much more quickly.

@gosquared @jamesjgill Hey James! Small world indeed :). Admittedly, roadmap planning is something I constantly wrestle with as a founder! We receive quite a variety of feature requests. So far, we've held pretty strongly to building things that we believe will benefit a majority of SavvyCal customers (and we remain pretty horizontally-positioned for now). If someone comes to us with a very niche set of requirements (e.g. a doctor's office looking for office scheduling), we've tried to be upfront about our product not being a great fit and pointing them to alternatives. Above all, I try to stay focused on excelling at basics, building the smoothest scheduling flow on the market. My hypothesis is that there are a lot of people in the market who care about giving their schedulers the best UX possible! Re: affiliates -- it's been a pretty slow build. We've invested a lot of effort into recruiting and working with some key affiliates. I've learned a few things so far: * Generally, a handful of affiliates with account for a majority of affiliate-driven revenue * It really takes some hustle & relationship-building efforts to get that engine going (I think I underestimated the amount of effort initially)

@robwalling great question! A couple things come to mind: * We zeroed in on a nagging pain point that a lot of people have with existing products (the awkward power dynamic of exchanging scheduling links). This positioning struck a chord with a lot of people who were otherwise pretty satisfied with the status quo. * We've been obsessively focusing on user experience. Once people become intrigued enough to signup and take SavvyCal for a spin, many are impressed by the usability ("Wow this is so much easier to use than X!") * We don't require you to start a trial right away when you sign up for the product. This means you can create links, get a feel for the product, and start to envision yourself using it before having to put a CC on file. * We have a "Scheduling by SavvyCal" link that appears on all booking links (unless you disable it on our Premium tier). This "viral loop" drives traffic and awareness -- every time someone uses SavvyCal, they are getting it in front of another potential customer. * People placing their SavvyCal links on their websites has resulted in relatively high domain authority for savvycal.com, which is helping out a bunch with SEO efforts.

@gabe__perez The biggest thing is shielding my time. For some, this means budgeting every minute of the day. I prefer to keep a lot of whitespace on my calendar and very rarely allow synchronous calls or meetings to slip in. I have a standing short meeting once a week with Corey to sync up (about half the time we kick that over to async) and I record my podcast weekly on Thursdays. Most other days are wide open to allow maximum deep work. If I do need to book a call, I try my best to put them in the afternoon (when I'm less productive anyway) or on Thursday (when I'm already breaking my normal flow with podcast recording). It's tough to say "no" sometimes to requests for my time mid-workday, but I've found it to be essential for me at this phase of the business.

@derrickreimer great advice! Could be cool to integrate a pomodoro timer or some sort of function within SavvyCal to help keep you productive and shield your time. Thanks for sharing 🙏

@jacqvon You're welcome! Fun question :) 1. Google Calendar, to see what's up for the day (I try to keep a very clear calendar) 2. ProfitWell, to check on business metrics (I probably check this way too often 😜) 3. Twitter, to see what's happening in the industry (also probably check this one too often)

@stevequatrani I think the most important thing is to develop a strong vision for the product (based on everything you know and understand about the problem space) and then relentlessly try to find reasons why your vision is flawed during your initial validation phase. When talking to potential customers (using something like Rob Fitzpatrick's Mom Test framework), if someone doesn't seem to have the problem that you expected them to have, try your best to get to the bottom of why that is. Does the problem not really exist? Is this person just a bad fit? Are you operating on some invalid hypotheses? It's so easy to go out seeking confirming evidence in this phase -- that's quite dangerous. Instead, you want to try your best to invalidate your assumptions. If your idea survives this vetting process, then that's the time to start working on an MVP, trying to get some commitments from potential customers, and shaping what needs to go into your first version.

@derrickreimer awesome advice. It changed my mindset completely from finding "yes" to chasing "no" and improving from there. Appreciate the response!

@5harath We recently installed Churnkey (https://churnkey.co/), which allows us to build custom cancellation flows: * We offer to let folks pause their subscription instead of fully cancelling. * If they just have some questions, we offer to help them out over email + get a free month of service * We gather some info about why they're canceling (too expensive, low usage, didn't work as expected, etc.) This has been pretty helpful to get a sense for why people are leaving (and to save some customers from fully churning).

@donkooijman Thanks Don!

@davecalnan good question! These are some of my favorite books: https://www.derrickreimer.com/bo... The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares Company of One by Paul Jarvis Obviously Awesome by April Dunford Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling Deep Work by Cal Newport Getting Real by 37signals The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your S**t Together by Sherry Walling Planning to @mjwhansen's book to this list as well: https://www.producthunt.com/post...

@mjwhansen @derrickreimer nothing better than being able to answer a question with a link to your website! Thanks Derrick!

@davecalnan @derrickreimer thanks Derrick! Look forward to hearing your thoughts :)

@jeffrey_fate I'm definitely aiming toward profitability, but raising some (non-VC) funds from TinySeed and an angel investor has allowed me to make investments in people and marketing channels ahead of our current revenue level. I use Summit (https://usesummit.com) on a regular basis to model my business and gain confidence that I can continue placing bets with my funds (without sacrificing the amount of cash buffer I'd like to maintain). So I'm less concerned about "thriftiness" right now if I can justify the expense as something that will move the business forward. Here's an example of what my Summit board looks like right now: https://cln.sh/jCWf8T

@jtormey early on, I identified around 10 people who were on board with my vision and were willing to migrate over to SavvyCal, and basically build enough to satisfy their use cases. I was careful to pick folks who didn't need too much functionality to get started but seemed to still represent the broader market that I was going after. My goal was to get them using the product as quickly as possible. During the initial build out, my marketing activities were mostly sharing updates with my existing audience on Twitter and over email, and talking about it on my weekly podcast. The goal was to build excitement and interest. I scrapped my way to $1k MRR and then took the leap hiring Corey (my part-time head of marketing) to keep things moving on the growth front while I stayed focused on product. I was only able to do this because I had cash in the bank from raising a small round from TinySeed (tinyseed.com). (If I didn't have investor money, an alternative path could have been partnering up with a co-founder who could focus non-product things while I continued to build. It's hard to wear literally all the hats.)

@aisflat439 It's a tricky balance for sure! I'm a proponent of taking the time to write automated tests (biased toward integration/system tests over unit tests), especially around important core functionality. I value velocity a lot (shipping sprees FTW), which means some areas of the codebase could probably use some refactoring that I've chosen to defer. I wish I had a better "framework" to share on how to make these little decisions while building! Some general principles: * Break projects down into small chunks. * Ship parts early into production (sometimes behind feature flags). Large, long-running branches are a smell. * Write integration tests that simulate reality as closely as possible.

@archisman_das The idea for SavvyCal came from my own experience using scheduling tools. When I'm in the idea mode, I often scribble notes down in my idea notebook in case they are worth revisiting. I also periodically reflect on the tools that I use in my day-to-day and think about pain points I've encountered using them. "Scratching your own itch" is definitely not a silver bullet, but it can be a great starting point to recognize a problem worth solving! Once I formed my own hypothesis about the need for a new solution in this space, I set out to try to find reasons why my hypothesis was flawed. I definitely received some signals pointing to "this is already an adequately solved problem", but also picked up on a healthy amount of discontent. At a certain point, I felt convinced enough to invest time into building the MVP.

@yangzi_jiang Glad to hear it, Yangzi!

@sarah_wright7 Hi Sarah! That's awesome :). Building Drip alongside my co-founder @robwalling was the best schooling I could have in building a B2B SaaS company. I was mostly focused on the technical side of things there, so I certainly grew as a product person, honing my intuition about how to build quickly but not sacrifice quality, how to incorporate user feature requests without bloating the product, etc. I also got to participate in quite a few strategic business discussions. A lot of specific marketing/growth tactics are not evergreen (what worked in 2016 may not work so well now), but this experience helped me become a better problem solver. Before Drip, I considered getting an MBA with an entrepreneurship emphasis. I ended up doing a few semesters and realized this was not going to get me the knowledge and experience I really needed. This is not to say university business programs are always a bad fit, but I came to really value learning by doing. After moving on from Drip (post-acquisition), I learned some hard lessons trying to launch Level. Ultimately, I didn't pay close enough attention to false signals I was receiving that this business was going to be viable. It was humbling to go through that, but I'll take it as one of those lessons I had to learn the hard way :). (For those who are curious about that tale, I wrote an in-depth retrospective: https://www.derrickreimer.com/es...)

@connor_lindsey This is always a work-in-progress :). Some things that contribute to staying healthy for me: * I'm regularly in contact with a small mastermind group, and we function as a sounding board for each other. Sometimes it helps to just rant about something for 5 minutes to get it off my chest. * I try to contain work within work hours and switch gears in the evening. Cooking is generally what helps me bridge over from work-mode to non-work-mode. * Getting at least 8 hours of quality sleep each night. * Strength training and cardio exercise several times per week.