Build your first SaaS inside your first customer

"What is this for?"

The scariest question when you show someone your product. And the most useful.

Here's what happened.

In October, a grassroots sports club started testing the fee management tool we'd been building. A real club, with real fees and real people. Not us imagining them from the sofa.

And they sent me a list of questions.

Along the way, the tool had picked up modules. A task list. Activities. A stopwatch. Things that seemed brilliant when we were imagining how a club works.

The club's questions about those modules were literally that. "What is this for?"

So I told them they were coming out. Tasks, out. Activities, out. Stopwatch, out.

Deleting hours hurts

Those modules weren't free. We'd spent hours on them.

Removing them meant admitting those hours were wasted. And partly, they were. No pretty way to say it.

We'd built them imagining a club from the outside. A stopwatch sounds sporty. A task list sounds organised. Like giving someone dumbbells because they're "very gym".

Neither came from thinking about a coach on a weekday evening with a group of kids and a list of names.

What the club did need was much simpler: knowing who came to training. So I got on with building training attendance tracking.

Boring. Exactly what a coach needs.

Your first customer isn't there to validate your product. They're there to show you which half of it to delete.

That same month we were getting payment by reference activated with two banks. Families pay once and the following fees are charged automatically. Software that handles payments has to work with real banks and real cards, not just in tests.

You can't launch the truth

Looking back, I think a real club should have been inside earlier. A tool like this was never going to feel finished without one. And without one, we'd still be adding stopwatches.

A launch gets you attention. A first customer gets you the truth.

We didn't have money for a big launch anyway. What we had was a studio paying the bills and time to build slowly with someone who'd actually use it.

That's what patient money buys you. Not speed. The chance to get it right with one club before trying with many.

After October, the tool was smaller than it had been in September. Fewer modules, one new one, payments on the way and a real club inside.

Less impressive in a demo. Far more useful on a training night.

"What is this for?"

Since then, if I can't answer quickly, I know what to do.

P.S. I still think the stopwatch is a lovely idea. For another product. Built by someone else.