As you know, I run a portfolio of software products. My portfolio now includes Cart, Scrapebook, Timelygigs, Dealflow, Adagio and Groouply. I have so many SaaS that it's difficult to even remember them. As I blogged in the past, I love have multiple software products for different reasons. My approach is to ship a lot of products and see how they do, instead of focusing on just … [Read more...]
Our podcast
Just a quick announcement. We now have a podcast! It's called "Maker Mindset". I talk about building, launching and running a portfolio of profitable SaaS products. Go to https://rubini.solutions/podcast to start listening to it. It's mostly solo episodes and mostly for my own therapy, but I think what I discuss is useful to anyone on a similar path. You can subscribe to it … [Read more...]
About proxies
A lot of our products are created around collecting data. A useful technique for that is web scraping. Web scraping is essentially a form of data mining. Pretty much any information that you can see on a web page can be retrieved (scraped). We scrape a lot of data and I am personally very knowledgable about scraping because I have been doing it for years now. Proxies When … [Read more...]
The human component
There are more and more companies that try to hide behind people and complexity. Instead, there's something to be said about working in public and putting a face to your product. Yes, it's risky but it can also help build a powerful personal brand. You probably already know that one of my company's core principles is transparency. For me, that means that we share our journey … [Read more...]
The way of the monk
TLDR: making and executing should have priority on learning, and you should do it in solitude. #1. A world of inputs Today, we have a lot of inputs in our lives: podcasts, books, videos, courses, television, etc. In fact, in my opinion there are too many inputs. If you want to learn, you can do so using your preferred medium, whenever you want. You can listen to a podcast … [Read more...]
Why velocity
One of the core principles of my company is: velocity. Velocity is declined in many ways in our day to day work: we go to market as fast as we can, we try to ship features fairly fast, we try to have a minimal turnaround time on support tickets. I learned this from my co-founder on the Dealflow project, Ryan Kulp. I consider Ryan my mentor, not in a guru way but more in the … [Read more...]
Strive for boolean values
Life as a founder is complex. We have to look at different dashboards every day to get a sense of how the business is going. Then, when we are performing some tasks, we are probably working with at least a couple of online tools at the same time. We need to use less dashboards and less tools in order not to add complexity to our daily work. But, this is not a blog post about … [Read more...]
I launched Dealflow (2019)
I developed a new tool in the micro private equity space this week. It's called Dealflow and it's available here. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are starting to invest by acquiring SaaS businesses. For many, SaaS yield better returns than real estate, stocks, etc in a relatively short period. The platform I launched is a dealflow automation platform. You can build your … [Read more...]
How I cut costs for my startups
As you probably know, I don’t run just one project. I run several projects, you might say I run a portfolio of tech startups. One benefit of doing that is that I can use the same tools to run those products and then share the cost of a those between all of the products. That's not what we are talking about in this post. Today we are talking about automation. I was recently … [Read more...]
In praise of running parallel ventures
As you probably know, I don’t run just one project. I run several projects, you might say I run a portfolio of tech startups. I already explained a number of reasons about why I do this, here and here. Today, I wanted to talk about the benefits of doing multiple things, in parallel. I recently picked up a book called "The Parallel Entrepreneur" by Ryan Buckley. In it, the … [Read more...]
A rhizomatic approach to business (part 2)
As you probably know, I don’t run just one project. I run several projects, you might say I run a portfolio of tech startups. When running multiple projects it’s easy to just add more of them to your business and not simplify. That’s why I recently changed the mission of my company and set some guiding principles. A great method for knowledge management is the rhizomatic … [Read more...]
I launched Groouply (2019)
I developed a new tool to track your brand on Facebook groups. It's called Groouply and it's available at groouply.com Groouply allows you to get an email notification every time a keyword of your choice gets mentioned in Fb groups of your choice. This tool is a revamp of a previous tool I launched in 2018, called FbRadar, which basically did the same thing but … [Read more...]
A rhizomatic approach to business (part 1)
As you probably know, I don’t run just one project. I run several projects, you might say I run a portfolio of tech startups. When running multiple projects it’s easy to just add more of them to your business and not simplify. That’s why I recently changed the mission of my company and set some guiding principles. A great method for knowledge management is the rhizomatic … [Read more...]
I launched Treendly (2019)
I developed a new tool called Treendly and it's available at treendly.com The tool tracks world trends and sends you email reports about peaks and downs. You can track all kind of keywords. Technically it's a very simple software and it's a wrapper on Google Trends. It just adds the feature that Google Trend is missing, tracking trends. The tool sends you really nice email … [Read more...]
The Ansoff Matrix
Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about understanding competitive intelligence. —- Most people think competitive intelligence is about competitors, spotting the best products/services in your market and trying to copy them. There’s more to it. CI actually starts by understanding your company and your positioning into the market. A great and valid tool for this … [Read more...]
State Of Transparency
One of our principles is transparency. I previously wrote a blog post about why my startups have open metrics. Since that article was published, I went all-in on transparency. I wanted to recap what we share right now. For each of our products we share: Expenses Revenue Metrics Revenue Goals App Metrics Roadmaps Now pages All of the stats are updated in … [Read more...]
I changed my company mission and vision
I changed my company vision from "we develop custom solutions for niche markets" to "we help people inform their business and life decisions using data". That's for two main reasons: Through the years, I've discovered things about myself: I’m a starter, I tend to have a lot of things going on, I’m fast to go to market, I like data, I like scraping data in particular. In … [Read more...]
3 unglamorous ideas about building a business
There are some ideas about building and growing a business that are glorified by media. It seems so ultimately desirable to have an idea, create a business around that idea, grow the business with outside funds and then sell that business. In my opinion we have to challenge those ideas. Team size, offices and revenue vs Profit Most business owners focus on vanity … [Read more...]
Codebase
There are people who read books, and people who read code. Reading someone else's code is one of my favourite ways to learn new programming-related stuff, right after getting your hands dirty by actually making something. I also try to spot errors in the code, or things that could be better written for readability. On that subject, if you write any form of code I … [Read more...]
Don’t put too much emphasis on development
The most common mistake I’ve seen other developers make when they first start building a product is putting too much emphasis on development. You have to understand that what will make you successful as a maker is not how clean your code is, how beautiful your UI is, how many features your app has, how complex your system structure is or even if you use that cool framework … [Read more...]