February 7, 2017

Old me vs new me

This past weekend, I burned some serious midnight oil writing a Chrome extension to solve a really annoying problem that I had been enduring from an extremely popular SaaS.

This satisfaction of fixing it was intense. I love coding, and I especially love squashing inefficiencies.

But what happened next was even more satisfying. I noticed how differently I reacted than I would have a few years ago.

What the old me would have done

The old me would have thought, “Hey, if I had this problem with this SaaS a bunch of other people MUST have the same one!” And then I would have started researching how to sell Chrome extensions. And dreaming up more features to add. And doing a bunch more development. And then maybe eventually launching something... to crickets.

What the new me did

Here’s what the new me did:

I reached out to a bunch of potential customers to validate my hypothesis before I did any more work.

I know a bunch of people who use this SaaS. I pinged them in Slack rooms, on Twitter, and via email. And I asked if they had experienced the same frustration that I had.

Guess what? Not one person had.

Not a single one.

In fact, a few of them insisted to me that I was using the SaaS the wrong way, should be using a different SaaS, or that my underlying business process was wrong.

You know what that means? There was no expensive problem. Not even an inexpensive problem. No value. Which means no customers.

So, instead of wasting a bunch of time on a wild goose chase, I got to simply enjoy the satisfaction of solving a problem that was driving me nuts.

I prefer the new me 🙂

Yours,

—J