Category Archives: Preceden

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.

Preceden in 2010
Preceden in 2019
Preceden today in 2023

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

Nick Kolenda Reviews Preceden

Nick Kolenda is an author, teacher, and consultant who specializes in the psychology of marketing and related topics like pricing optimization, sales psychology, and website behavior. He’s also happens to be a regular in a poker game I host each week.

A few months back he mentioned that he was starting a new business to provide psychology-focused website reviews. With his large 50k+ mailing list audience and 13k+ YouTube subscribers he frequently gets asked to do these type of reviews and so turning it into a business made a lot of sense.

And so when he graciously offered for Preceden, my timeline maker software, to be his first review, I jumped at the opportunity.

Today he’s officially launching his business and with it his review of Preceden:

I highly recommend checking out the video: it’s packed with optimization insights covering the marketing copy, the design, the presentation of the example timelines, and more, all of which will help you see your own site in a new light. Even if you don’t have a site of your own, the review is worth watching anyway just to marvel at its production quality and Nick’s unique style.

If you’re interested in having Nick performa similar review for your site and having it shared with his audience, you can read more about the various services he offers on the Submit Your Business section of his site. And if you want to see more reviews like this one, you can subscribe to his mailing list.

Timeglider Acquisition

preceden-timeglider.png

I’ve got some big news to share today: Preceden has acquired Timeglider, one of the other big players in the online timeline maker space.

Here’s the announcement: Preceden Acquires Timeglider.

This was my first meaningful acquisition: back in December 2017 I did buy and redirect the domain for Timerime, another timeline maker tool, but the site had shut down several months prior so it was merely a matter of buying the domain. Timeglider on the other hand is an active business with paying customers, recurring revenue, IP, etc – which made this quite a bit more complicated and required lawyers and paperwork and whatnot. I learned a lot, but am also very happy it’s behind me.

Now comes excuting on it and recouping the cost in a hopefully reasonable amount of time. I’ll probably write more about the data and analytics piece of this in the future, but for now, just wanted to share the news!

A Few Thoughts on Image Upload Usage at Preceden

One of Preceden’s most popular feature requests over the years has been the ability to upload images to Preceden and have those images appear on timelines.

A lot of competitors offer that functionality, but I procrastinated for almost 9 years for two reasons:

  1. It’s complex to implement, both in terms of actually handling the uploads and having them appear on the timelines.
  2. Most of the people that requested it were using Preceden for school timelines and that segment of users tend not to upgrade at a high rate. People using Preceden for work-related project planning timelines didn’t request it much. Therefore, it never was much of a priority because it likely wouldn’t move the needle on the business.

That said, since I’ve had more time to work on Preceden recently, I decided to finally do it. For handling uploads, I wound up using Filestack.com which simplified the implementation a lot. And updating Preceden’s rendering logic took time too, but in the end it all worked out.

I recently checked on the usage stats and – not surprisingly – it’s used most heavily by people using Preceden for education:

Screen Shot 2018-11-15 at 2.27.44 PM.png

For users that have signed up since this launched:

  • Teaching: 29% uploaded an image
  • School: 26%
  • Personal Use: 16%
  • Work: 12%

In other words, it’s used very heavily (which is great!) but not with the segment of users with the highest propensity to pay.

This dilemma comes up fairly often: do you build Feature A that will be used heavily by mostly-free users, or Feature B that will be used heavily by mostly-paying customers?

For better or worse, I never wound up focusing on one market or use case with Preceden: it’s a general purpose timeline maker that can be used for any type of timeline. As a result though, I often get into these situations. If I was just building Preceden for project planners, I’d never implement image uploads. If I was just building it for students creating timelines for school, I’d probably have implemented it years ago.

It also comes down to goals: if my main goal is growing revenue, I probably shouldn’t work on features like this. But if I want Preceden to be the best general purpose timeline maker then it does, but there’s an opportunity cost because I’m not building features for the folks who will actually pay.

I operate in the middle for product development: work mostly on features that will make money, but also spend some percentage of my time on features like this that will make it a better general purpose tool.

If I were to start something from scratch today, I’d probably pick a narrow niche and try to nail it. No general-purpose tools. I’d recommend that to others too.

Going broad is fun in a way too though, it just has it’s challenges :).