Going Full Time on My SaaS After 13 Years

In January 2010 I soft-launched launched Preceden, a web-based timeline maker tool, followed a few weeks later by a larger launch on HackerNews:

Today – almost 13 years to the day since the initial launch – I’m going full time on it and I couldn’t be more excited.

A brief history of Preceden

At the time of Preceden’s launch, I was serving as a first lieutenant in the US Air Force and about halfway through a 5-year service commitment I incurred by attending the Air Force Academy, a military college. I knew I didn’t want to make the Air Force a career, so decided to start learning web development with the hope of eventually working full time on a startup after my service commitment ended in 2012.

The first web app I built during this time period was Domain Pigeon (a domain search tool), followed by Preceden, followed by Lean Designs (a WYSIWYG web design tool), followed by Lean Domain Search (another domain search tool I built while deployed to Iraq), plus a few smaller ones not worth mentioning.

By the time I left the Air Force, I had shut down all except Preceden and Lean Domain Search. I did go full time for a few months, but focused entirely on Lean Domain Search. That tool was eventually acquihired by Automattic in 2013, where I joined full time as a software engineer helping with the domain name experience on WordPress.com.

With Lean Domain Search in Automattic’s hands, I was left with just Preceden, which at that point was about 3 years old. It didn’t make much money at the time, but I decided to continue working on it as a side project and see where it went.

Four years later in 2017 I left Automattic to join Help Scout as their first data team hire (during my time at Automattic, I gradually shifted away from software engineering to more of a data analyst/analytics engineer role). I continued to work on Preceden (then 7 years old), and in 2018 I switched to a contractor role so I could put more time on Preceden.

And now, after 4 years of contracting, I’m finally going full time on Preceden.

Here was my announcement at Help Scout from a few weeks ago:

Why not sooner?

It was a combination of things:

I made a lot of rookie mistakes over the years that limited Preceden’s growth including not focusing on a specific niche, not spending enough time marketing, not talking to enough customers, trying to do too much myself, and just in general picking a difficult product and business to build (something I didn’t give any thought to initially).
I was learning a ton, doing a lot of interesting work, and enjoying the camaraderie I had with my teammates at Automattic and later Help Scout.
Financially it made more sense to keep Preceden as a side project.

On the last point – it’s much easier to launch a SaaS than it is to grow it to the point where it can replace your income. As the sole breadwinner in our household with 4 young kids, I was not comfortable going full time and merely being ramen profitable or anything close to it. I wanted to replace or mostly replace my other income, and with Preceden’s SaaS metrics being what they were, it just took a really, really long time to do that. The long slow SaaS ramp of death is something I now have a lot of experience with 😂.

But here I am, finally.

What’s next?

I plan to focus mostly on Preceden, but will spend some percentage of my time on other pursuits. I recently launched LearnGPT.com, a fledgling GPT education site, and will likely work more and more on AI projects including integrating it into Preceden itself.

Also, it’s been a busy few years, and I’m very much looking forward to relaxing more and spending more time with my family including my two younger kids who aren’t in school yet.

I don’t know what my future holds long term. Preceden’s finances are good enough for now, but not at a point where I can just stop working on it and coast for years. With a little luck, Preceden will continue to grow and will continue supporting me full time to either focus on it or other pursuits. There’s also some chance I get bored with it or stumble across some promising new startup and I wind up going back full time somewhere else. We will see!

I do hope to blog more frequently so if you are interested in following along, you can subscribe via email, RSS, or just follow me on Twitter at @mhmazur.

Thanks for reading 👋.

Comments on HackerNews

I’m speaking at JOIN next week!

Screen Shot 2018-10-03 at 8.52.19 AM.png

Next week I’m excited to be speaking at JOIN, Looker’s annual user conference in San Francisco.

My talk (at 11:15am on Wednesday the 10th) is about how we use Fivetran, Looker, and email to get more people at Help Scout interested in and engaged with our metrics, a topic which I’ve written about previously on this blog. Huge thanks to Fivetran for sponsoring this session.

I’ll also be at the dbt meetup on Tuesday the 9th.

If you happen to be attending either the meetup or the conference, drop me a note – I’d love to say hey 👋.

A New Adventure: I’m Taking the Leap to Focus on Preceden and Analytics Consulting

As many of you know, I’ve had a long-running side project called Preceden, a tool that helps people create professional-looking timelines:

I launched Preceden back in early 2010 while I was a still lieutenant in the Air Force and kept it running as a nights-and-weekends side project throughout my time at Automattic and Help Scout.

Over the years its revenue has slowly grown to the point where it’s a healthy little business these days. As its revenue has grown, the amount of time I have to put into it has dwindled to an hour or two each week. Between my work at Help Scout and my family (three kids under four now!), I basically have had time to do support and not much else, despite there being so much more I want to do.

There was never going to be a perfect time to take the leap to focus on growing Preceden, but with its revenue and growth being what it is, my wife and I have decided now’s the time to do it.

For the foreseeable future I’ll be focused on growing Preceden, but also doing some analytics consulting on the side. Going all-in on Preceden was an option, but I really enjoy analytics and business intelligence work and want to continue leveling up there. I’m thrilled to have both Help Scout and Automattic as my first consulting clients.

With my hours now reduced at Help Scout, we’re looking to hire a new analytics lead. Help Scout is an incredible company and you’ll get to work with an amazing group of people who care deeply about building a business and a product that people love. As the lead analyst, your work will have a huge impact on the direction of the business. If you’re interested in this role, check out the job description here: Data Analyst at Help Scout and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions.

I have no idea how this will all play out long term, but I’m really excited to see how it goes.

Building a Looker-Powered Daily Metrics Email Report

One of the main ways we evangelize metrics at Help Scout is with a daily metrics report that is automatically emailed to the entire company every morning.

In the email we highlight the performance of our key business metrics (New Trials, New Customers, etc) for the day prior and for the month to date. We also include our projection and target for the month to help us understand how we’re doing for the month.

Here’s what it looks like (with a shortened list of metrics and no actual numbers):

Screen Shot 2018-06-26 at 10.50.17 AM.png

Because the report is delivered over email and doesn’t require logging into a separate tool, it makes it easy for everyone to keep up to date about how the business is doing. It’s also a frequent cause for celebration in Slack:

In years past a prior version of this report was generated with a lot of PHP code that was responsible for calculating all of the metrics and delivering the email.

When we adopted Looker as our Business Intelligence tool last year we ran into a problem though because we had refined how a lot of our metrics were calculated as we implemented them in Looker. As a result, Looker would sometimes report different values than daily metrics report. This obviously wasn’t ideal because it caused people to mistrust the numbers: if Looker said we made $1,234 yesterday but the metrics email said we made $1,185, which was correct?

Our solution was to rebuild the daily metrics email to use Looker as the single source of truth for our metrics. Rather than calculate the metrics one way in Looker and painstakingly try to keep the PHP logic in sync, we rebuilt the metrics email from scratch in Ruby and used Looker’s API to pull in the values for each of the metrics. This ensured that the numbers in Looker and the daily metrics email always matched since the daily metrics email was actually using the metrics calculated by Looker.

Building a Daily Metrics Report for your business

If you use Looker and want to build something similar for your organization (which I highly recommend!), I open sourced a super-simple version of ours to help you get started:

https://github.com/mattm/looker-daily-metrics-email

For this demo, it assumes you have a Look with a single value representing the number of new customers your business had yesterday:

Screen Shot 2018-06-26 at 10.46.43 AM.png

When you run the script, it will query Looker for this value, throw it into a basic HTML-formatted email, and deliver it:

Screen Shot 2018-06-26 at 10.48.33 AM.png

You will of course want to customize this for your business, make the code more robust, style the email, etc – but this should save you some time getting it off the ground.

If you run into any issues feel free to reach out. Good luck!

Edit: Here’s a recording of a talk from JOIN 2018 I gave on this topic.