On Daily Practices, SaaS Companies, Living in a Bubble & Design Systems + Entrepreneurs
Hey friends, happy Sunday!!
This week has been great, I took a slight step away from day to day none stop work and gave myself some time to reflect.
Having time and space to think helped me to gain clarity around what I want to be doing with my time and how I'm going to make daily progress.
There's a lot of work to be done but now I have the mental clarity to focus on work that will be fulfilling longer term. I'm excited to start making progress over the coming months/years!
Let's get into the Filter!
On Daily Practices
Occasionally I read a piece that makes me, re-valuate how I'm looking at things. This piece "Growth Without Goals" from Patrick OShaughnessy was exactly that.
In the post, he breaks down how goals are often useless because you're constantly living in a state of failure until one day you hit the goal, you're then happy for a day or two and the feeling fades.
Instead, we should focus on setting daily practices that align with who we want to be and what we want to do - completing those practices then gives us a sense of fulfillment everyday.
Success is about building a set of daily practices, it is about growth without goals. Continuous, habitual practice(s) trumps achievement-based success.
A lot of this post aligns with what James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, focusing on systems for continuous 1% improvements daily over goals.
This example of how Jeff Bezos runs Amazon is helpful to visualise how you can apply daily practices to your business aswell as your personal life.
In the famous 1997 letter to shareholders, which lays out Amazon’s philosophy, Bezos says that their process is simple: a “relentless focus on customers.” This is not a goal to be strived for, worked towards, achieved, and then passed. This is a way of operating, constantly—every day, with every decision.
From my own experience, I've found that completing my daily practices is much more rewarding and easier to stay accountable than setting long term goals.
Great habits and practices make a great and successful life. Cultivate those and the rest will take care of itself.
Here are my current daily practices:
- Exercise [Run or Lift]
- Write 1000 words
- Build Something [Design / Code / Webflow]
- Spend time outside [Run or Hike]
- Read
- Don't complain or be negative
- Level Up [Do something new or better than you've done before]
On Building & Selling a SaaS Company
HackerNews is a strange place. Last week Josh Pigford sold his company Baremetrics for $4,000,000 cash yet the comments were filled with a bunch of [presumably virgins] sat in their mum's basement talking about how they could earn more and do better. Weird place.
Anyway onto the article - The transparency in this post I sold Baremetrics is fascinating to read.
Josh talks about how the payout is structured, why he sold the business, how the offer came about, and what this means for Baremetrics moving forward.
Something that he talks about is being a manager and not a maker when growing a company.
"The majority of my time working on Baremetrics has been spent as a “manager” and not a “maker”. But at my core I’m a maker. I’m at my most fulfilled when I’m creating and am generally indifferent on growing or scaling things. Yet, as the CEO, I’m firmly in the role of a manager and do almost zero on the creative “making” side."
The idea of having to trade off being a maker when building a startup drives me towards the solopreneur / creator business model because it's much more aligned with the things I want to do day to day.
My favourite part of this whole story is his tweet right before starting Baremetrics 7 years ago. "Stripe analytics app. From idea to execution TONIGHT!!!!! Coffee brewed. Game on."
It's great to see that through 7 years of hardwork he was able to earn enough to "financially retire" of the $3.7 million payout directly to him leaving him with plenty of time to pursue being a maker again.
On Living in a Bubble
Sahil Lavingia moved from one of the most liberal cities in the US [San Francisco] to the most conservative city [Provo].
In this essay From Bubble to Bubble he talks about how even though the world seems divided most people actually want the same things they just express it in different ways.
"I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I felt like San Francisco wasn’t going to tell me. My days were filled with friends that thought like me, and meetings in which we patted each other on the back. We knew the solutions to the world’s problems — the rest of the world just had to catch up"
This post is a great reminder that we all live in our own little bubbles. Whether that be who you follow on social media, what you watch/consume online, or the city you live in. It's healthy to step outside your bubble every once in a while and try to understand people who don't believe the same things as you.
On Design Systems & Entrepreneurs
This week I've been doing a lot of work on improving my knowledge/workflow with design systems.
This post: Everything I Know About Style Guides, Design Systems, and Component Libraries is a great resource to learn from but whilst reading it I couldn't help but focus on how successful entrepreneurs use similar systems to build businesses.
Design Systems and Entrepreneurs have a lot in common. Successful entrepreneurs think in systems, they are constantly looking for ways to systematise repetitive actions and make them more efficient.
Design Systems + Component libraries are exactly the same thing but for designers and developers.
The longer I run a business the more I realise the difference between those who are constantly overworked and rushed and those who build calm profitable businesses is their ability to systematise processes, outsource and delegate work.
Recently this has lead me towards turning my one man design studio into something more scalable. Through building MakerFlow I'm focusing on reducing reliance on me to do all the work through creating systems that make getting the right things done easy.
This way I can build MakerFlow into a remote, asynchronous design studio - working with outside contractors to produce great work for clients and free up more time to write + create videos.
Best Tweet of the Week
Favourite Quote of the Week
"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." - John Cleese
Final Notes
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Have a great Sunday,
- Stephen