Bootstrapper's Paradise

AI are developing at light speed.  They provide us with a HUGE opportunity to build more powerful B2B SaaS products faster than ever. 

One skill in particular will be critically important to continually develop to prepare you as best as possible to succeed in building B2B SaaS products.  Let's talk about it.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is what I feel will be the single most important skill to master if you want to continually succeed in B2B SaaS, and in particular, leveraging the micro SaaS strategy. I've been talking a lot more about recently, so I'm sure you're overwhelmed with information in terms of AI and especially chat g p t.

But obviously the rest of some of the larger competitors out there are scrambling to try to get their AI tools to market like Google, for example. Regardless, we're gonna continue to see a lot of innovation here, which I think is exciting and I think really important for those of us out there looking to build more B2B SaaS products.

Having said that, I feel like the most important skill to master for now, and something I'm working pretty diligently on at the moment is what was referred to as prompt engineering. It's a concept of essentially how I would describe it, getting good at asking these tools the right question to get the answer that you're looking for as consistently and most effectively.

So prompt engineering is all about figuring out what to ask, chat, G P T in order to get essentially the best version of the information that you're looking for. Because of the capabilities of these tools, they can help you.  quite a bit of progress very early on in whatever it is that you're building. So if you're thinking of building a product with these AI tools built in, and I've been doing a lot of this most recently.

In fact, I might continue to specialize on it in in it moving forward because, It just has pretty dramatic capabilities, then you're gonna need to get good at figuring out how to interact with it in order to get the information that you need. So over the weekend, I watched a few really interesting YouTube videos, and one of the ways that they recommended you refine these skills is actually to use the tool itself.

the technical version of this is referred to as recursion, where basically a program calls itself over and over again to help you with whatever it is you're trying to do. The movie version of this might be Inception, , but either way you get the idea, right? Using the tool to get better at using the tool.

It's pretty cool. So you would issue a series of commands to chat C B T to tell, tell it that you're going to be conducting an exercise with it, as in. I want you to continually provide me with feedback or ask me questions to learn more about what I'm trying to achieve, and then make recommendations for how the prompt should be updated in order to continually make the result that I'm looking for better.

It was a really interesting exercise. I'm gonna go through it probably today, but definitely this week in order to improve some of the tools that I'm.  that have the chat, G P T and other AI tools integrated in them. But I wanted to share that with you because I think it's a great way to develop a process or a routine for yourself to figure out how to get better at leveraging these tools and in particular, how to continually develop what I feel will be coming increasingly important skillset moving forward.

That being prompt engineering.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Micro SaaS is my favorite design pattern.  I want to talk about why it's so powerful by first defining it for you.

Free email course on product-market fit - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is defining what micro sass is. So in a few episodes ago, I talked to you about why micro SaaS is one of my new favorite strategies, and I'm working on building multiple micro sass businesses simultaneously at the moment. And I'm gonna continue to keep you posted as I'm building.

Because I'm putting a process together that I want you to be able to follow as well to achieve success building B2B SaaS using this micro SaaS essentially design pattern, right where your SAS is gonna fit into this mold. But first question is, what is the mold? How do you define micro saas? Well, there's some other content on the web out there about this topic, but I don't love it.

So I'm gonna work on my own version and hopefully that is easy for you to understand. If you have any questions about that, of course you can always reach out to me. To me, what Micros is, is looking at a, and I'm gonna compare it to what most people are typically doing today with SaaS, in that they're building more complicated, fully featured software applications available over mobile or the web or whatever.

But it's a typical software as a service, and B2B is a real common one. So that's, Now. There's a lot of problems with that though, and that's why I think micro SaaS is so exciting because it simplifies everything. If you simplify everything, you can speed everything up. And in today's world where everything moves at light speed, especially with what we've seen from the world of AI now, and open AI and chat G P T and all these developments coming out and all the other bigger players getting involved, that process I feel is only going to accelerate.

I want you to be able to be more agile in responding to the changes in the market. That way you can get out ahead of the competition. That can give you a leg up when you're competing against some of these larger companies, these other startups that have a ton of funding and a lot of resources. The one thing that you will always have over them if you are a smaller, more agile organization, is that flexibility, the ability to respond.

You're going to be able to be faster than them. There's a simple analogy there. It's like a tugboat versus a cruise ship, right? Which one can turn faster? Well, the tugboat can turn on a dime, and that's what's gonna give you the advantage. Now we need to lean into those advantages, uh, because trying to compete against a, a cruise ship in pretty much every other category, it's gonna be really difficult to say the least.

But let me get back to my original point in defining what micro SAS is, how I see it. It's comparing those typical B2B SaaS products and businesses against. A much simpler version of that. So what do I mean by that? I mean, in a typical B2B SaaS product, you have a whole multitude of features and workflows and all kinds of things being managed in there.

The micro SaaS variation of that is to take the key feature out of an application like that and turn that into the application. So that's how I define micro saas. Micro SAS is built around one feature or one work.  and from the perspective of your customer, your user, your buyer, whomever, right? Whatever problem you're solving for them, you offer one solution and that is your entire application, right?

You can. Now, that doesn't mean you don't have other things like authentication and billing and all that kind of stuff. You still have those, right? But I'm not considering those core pieces of unique functionality that doesn't really go into your value proposition. So your unique value pro. Is focused around this one key feature or this one key workflow that you're helping your customer or your user with.

That's micro saas. And if you're going beyond that, you're not leveraging the strategy correctly. And I can't tell you that despite how direct I'm being about what this is and what it isn't, people still are going way beyond that. It's like, well, what if we had this or what if we had that? Wouldn't it be nice to have this as well?

You. , you are taking away all of the advantages of this model and this design pattern. And I'll tell you, in most of those instances, people are thinking about it in those terms for relatively obvious reasons, because we are natural innovators, right? We want to provide and add as much value as possible.

The problem is you've probably yet to validate even the key feature. As such, you need to focus on keeping your experiment really.  because if you're adding to that, it's gonna make it more difficult to validate. It's gonna convolute the user experience. It's gonna, again, you're getting in the direction of the cruise ship again, and that's not where we compete, right?

We compete on a much smaller level because we're faster, more flexible, more agile. So don't give away your competitive advantage. Leverage the Micros design pattern in order to succeed in B2B SaaS.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

The biggest mistake I see often is building BEFORE you try to sell your B2B SaaS concept.  

Let's talk about why this is a huge mistake and I'll share an example with you from the consumers perspective to prove to you that YOU are already doing this so you know that it works.

Free product-market fit course - 

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is if you want to be successful building a B2B SaaS business, you have to get comfortable with something that most people are uncomfortable with, and that's selling, in particular, selling before you build, which adds potentially another layer of insecurity for folks who are afraid to find out that their baby is ugly.

Now, I understand that that sounds harsh, but this is really important information for you to know. It can create this unstoppable snowball effect if you wind up building something that ends up being a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And that's what I see a lot with people who want to get involved in SaaS.

They build a product based on idea. They have not a validated concept or a problem worth solving. Before you know it, you are continually chasing your tail. Find someone to give this software away to, and that's not what you're trying to do. So you need to get comfortable with this concept of selling, in particular, selling very early on, which is one of the first most important tests you can run to measure the relative strength of your proposed value proposition.

Right now, a lot of that. Should lead you to understand that this is very early days, so that's why we're doing the testing. If we're doing that testing early on, then we'll have an idea whether or not you're onto something, because I don't want you enter those later stages, which suck up so much time, energy, resources, and putting you on a path that's hard to get off if you begin building.

Before you do any of that or make any of those investments, I want you to have a better understanding in the direction that you're thinking of heading into potential that it has. So, What is an example of doing something like that? Well, I'm gonna skip over entirely what it looks like doing for an actual assessed business, and I'm gonna share something that's probably more relatable for you.

Think about it in terms of going to a restaurant with friends or family, right? One of the pushbacks that I get whenever I am telling people that they need to do this is I can't sell my product unless I have my product. How's anyone gonna believe me or someone needs to experience it in order to really understand.

And I wanna tell you that's a hundred percent wrong. And trust me, I've been there. But having done this time and time again, I know that that's wrong. And let me explain it to you. I'm gonna explain it to you in a way that will help you understand that it's wrong as well, because you don't do it either.

In fact, from the other side, right? As the consumer is someone who's making purchasing decisions, you don't need to see access to the product either. So here's the concept that I've come up with most recently, and it's in a restaurant setting. . So if you're with your friends, family, a date, whatever, and you're getting ready to order, right?

What do you have in order to make that purchasing decision? When you're talking to the waiter or the waitress and you're getting ready to order whatever, lasagna, spaghetti, sometime, some type of food, right? A burger. It doesn't matter what it is, right? You're getting ready to order. What do you have available at your disposal to make that purchasing?

Do you ask the waiter or waitress to wheel out for you the completed meal so that you can see it and then decide whether or not you wanna buy it? No. Right. That sound, that concept almost sounds ridiculous. That's just not how it works. You look at a menu, you interpret the description for what it is that you want to.

Potentially purchase what you want to have for dinner. You optionally see a price there as well too, right? More commonly. So we, we know that as well, so that we understand like what's within our budget, right? What do we wanna spend? What are we gonna buy? What do we wanna spend? And based on the description, does that sound like something that we want to have?

And that is all the information that you need in order to make a purchase decision. And you might have a question or two, right? How does that get handled? Well, a waiter or waitress is right there to answer your questions for you, right? And the equivalent of that can be. . Basically customer service for your SaaS application or an FAQ on a landing page, right?

Regardless if you have more questions before you need to make a decision, most of them are not, let me see the food before I buy it. , right? So you are more than capable and you do this all the time. That isn't the only example. Everyone does this all the time, making purchasing decisions based on something that they want to or need without actually experiencing or seeing the product for themselves.

as such. I want you to think about that in terms of how you can leverage that strategy to potentially sell your SaaS product idea and do some early stage testing, which will help you validate the respective strength of that early stage value proposition to know whether or not you should ultimately move forward with potentially building it.

If you can't sell it, then you shouldn't build it.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

I'm borderline obsessed with the Micro-SaaS strategy for B2B.  Allow me to explain why that includes a story about how I struggled to use my refrigerators water dispenser.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is this new topic or strategy that I'm borderline obsessed with, that I've been referring to as micro SaaS. Now, if you haven't heard this terminology before, how I describe it is not thinking of your B2B SaaS product as a fully featured application.

That can get complicated or heavy at times. It's thinking of the most important feature in your B2B SaaS application and then turning that into the application itself. Let me explain a little bit more. So, in my opinion and in what I've observed out in the wild. Software just gets way too complicated, usually way too fast before you know it.

I see a lot of software out there turn into basically Salesforce, if you've ever used Salesforce before or experienced it, you know what I mean? They have so much going on. It's hard to tell anymore what Salesforce does or doesn't do because it seems to me that they have something for everything, in my opinion.

If you have, if trying to beat all things to all people, you're nothing to. And what I mean by that is it becomes so overwhelming for people to figure out what it is your software does that they get frustrated or quit, they become overwhelmed and they really just don't have the they, they don't have the ability to kind of continually figure that out, so they give up.

So that's why, I mean, it ends up becoming nothing for anyone because a lot of people quit. So that. Has become ever more present in the B2B SaaS world as well, too. As products evolve, software becomes more mature, features become more intense and overwhelming, and I think that is a risk to the success of B2B SaaS companies at scale.

So what I've dove deep into in recent weeks and months, and in fact at the moment, I'm actually building multiple micro SaaS products, which has. Really exciting and I wanna share those details with you moving forward as I continue to record these episodes so that you can learn from what it is I've been doing, what is working, what isn't working.

I could share those strategies with you and you can incorporate them into whatever process you may be investing in at the moment. Perhaps it's a product of your own that you'd like to build or are currently building, or maybe you're even working at a company with a more complicated piece of software.

Regardless of which of those buckets you may fall. This is a strategy I feel like has benefit for everyone cuz I've been in all those positions myself. Right now I'm building Micros applications, but I've worked on heavy, complicated, big software product teams. In fact, I consult to them still now and the strategies that I'm learning and I'm deploying.

Using this concept of micros would help even the most complicated software products. Because the, the universal philosophy that I've adopted and I continue to pursue and push the boundaries of is software can never be too simple. You can't make software too simple if you continuously work to make your software simpler, but effective.

I often experience some of the, some of the best experiences that I have with software are the simplest but most effective pieces.  because again, I feel like too many people are trying to do too many things with their software, and before you know it, you lose people. , there's an interesting story I'll share with you,

So my wife and I just moved into a new apartment, essentially in Philly and in it we, a new refrigerator came with the unit. Great, right? So w. Simultaneously, we're both trying to figure out how the water dispenser on the refrigerator works , and you'd think because of how many years I've spent in usability that things like this would just be intuitive for me at this point, but you'd be wrong  trying to use this thing.

We both got it wrong and she's much brighter than I am. She is a PhD, so it's the obvious when you approach the fridge, what's obvious is that there's one lever and if you put the a glass against that, It dispenses ice. So if you're not expecting ice and you're expecting water, it's sprays ice everywhere,

So I think we've all had kind of that experience, but the, the trick that came into play was like there's a touch screen on the fridge, for example, and I am on there and I'm looking for like, how do I switch this to water? Because that's the ingrained experience. That's what I'm used to with these products.

But there isn't an option for that. Why? Because there's a second dispenser. Or second lever that dispenses water. They've separated the water dispenser and the ice dispenser  levers in terms of where you press the glass against. And the water one is like almost camouflaged, like it's like built in to the extent where you almost don't notice it, but what you can notice is the ice dispenser lever

So I simultaneously made the mistake myself and then witnessed her do the same and then had to explain it for her. So anyway, my point is like something simple like. , it causes tons of usability issues if it's not intuitive or you've made it overly complicated, and I see this with software all the time.

So anyway, I encourage you to do a little bit of digging on micro SaaS. I'm gonna be creating a lot more content around it, and I'm hoping it's gonna help you be more successful in B2B SaaS.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

If you really want to bootstrap your way to success then you're going to have to understand unit economics.  

Let's talk about measuring growth for B2B SaaS and the various traps to avoid.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is growth for B2B SaaS companies and how to measure it. Now, I'm sure you're familiar ish with the concept of measuring growth at a B2B SaaS company.  relative to your LTV and your CAC or your lifetime value, your customer and your customer acquisition cost.

If you take your LTV and you divide it by your CAC, you should get a number around three, or at least greater than three, but not too much greater because that can spell trouble, and if it's significantly under three, you have a problem as well. Now, that is a fundamental concept for B2B SaaS companies to understand because it's valuable, however, Something I think is arguably more important is really having a fundamental understanding of unit economics in general, because it's easy to get obsessed with measuring quantitative things when you're trying to run a successful B2B SaaS company, and I don't want you to fall into that trap.

Unit economics, on the other hand, speaks more to solid fundamental business principles because at the end of the day, my opinion, what you're trying to do is run a profitable business, and that doesn't get talked about enough when it comes to building and growing a healthy B2B SaaS company.  I think I know why, but I want to try to do whatever I can to try to change that because there are a lot of successful B2B SaaS companies out there that don't get a ton of credit or press not talked about as much because they're not in the so-called kind of VC or investment ecosystem, because they haven't really needed to do that.

So I'm sure you're familiar with bootstrapping, which is really where you're funding your own growth. I'm a huge fan of this concept, at least until you're in a position to be able to negotiate from power. But the way to get you there, first and foremost, is understand that what you're doing is setting yourself up for running a healthy business.

And in particular, with regard to growth, I wanna talk about unit economics, which is. , the concepts here, and again, people can get lost and it can get really detailed really quickly. I don't want you to fall into that trap. I really want you to try your best to keep things relatively simple, especially in the beginning.

And if you understand solid business economics at a fundamental level, unit economics is about as foundational as it. . Basically, you need to take in more money than you spend. And if that's the case, then ultimately you should have a really solid shot at being profitable, which does any number of things.

It provides a lot of benefits. Number one, it gives you that financial freedom and flexibility, gives you control, enables you to keep most of what you're building, so on and so forth. So if you don't, if you're not forced to go down the investment route, running a healthy business is advantage. For any number of different reasons, but from a unit economics perspective, I want you to focus on making sure that your numbers make sense very, very early on.

Why is that? Because if you don't, you will fall victim to the age old saying, which is you're going to lose a little bit on every sale, make it up in volume, , which obviously doesn't work, right. That makes it pretty straightforward in terms of can't see that working, but. I see this pattern all the time, and especially with venture backed or investment backed B2B SaaS businesses because there's this obsession with growth for growth sake, and I think that is a really dangerous trap if you're going for a unicorn status, if you're reinvesting every single dollar you have back into growth to try to someday in the future, however many months or years from now, exit for a ridiculous.

I think that's a trap. If you take a closer look at the statistics on that, it's around 1% ever actually achieved something like that. So people, people talk about that part, but they never positioned it the other way. , which is 99% approximate failure rate. So I don't like those odds for you. That's why I don't take that approach myself.

I'd rather see you build your B2B SaaS business with solid fundamental economics, and that starts with understanding these concepts at a unit economic level.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

In this episode, Founder of GrowthMentor Foti Panagio talks about the importance of having a mentor, the difference between a mentor and a consultant, and how to grow a business without any additional funding.

Foti Panagio is a full-stack growth marketer with over a decade of experience in growth with a unique overlap into the world of InfraOps.

Foti is the Founder of GrowthMentor where he provides Founders and Marketers one on one advice from vetted startup mentors. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

• How GrowthMentor helps Founders and Marketers.
• Why having a mentor is so important.
• The difference between a mentor and a consultant.
• How the amount of content you consume affects your productivity.
• The value of verbalizing your thought process.
• The difference between passively consuming media and personalized coaching.
• How to tackle imposter syndrome.
• The dangers of following vanity metrics.
• How to grow a business without raising funds.

Resources:

• GrowthMentor
• The Lean Startup
• DigitalOcean
• Acquire
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connecting with Foti Panagio:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables:

• 04:05 - “There’s certain mistakes and failures you need to make to grow my favorite analogy here is you go to the gym and how do you grow muscle you break it first and it rebuilds but go with the wrong form into the squat rack you put way too much weight and you’re going to be out of action indefinitely and it’s these sort of mistakes that are really unnecessary and that’s where mentorship can come into play just learning from other peoples fuckups.”
• 09:01 - “As awesome as it is to ingest content via podcast at the end of the day everybody's situation is completely unique, so I have my industry I have my specific situation going on it’s so nuanced so the advice I’m going to give to you is completely different to somebody else based on the context and that’s lost when you’re just consuming content.”
• 10:54 - “The way I describe mentorship is it helps you connect the dots that you didn’t even know existed so many times I’ll talk to somebody hey I need some help with my Facebook ads or SEO or whatever and zoom back and there’s another channel potentially they want to look at or another approach or a slight little tweak it’s like a chiropractor in a sense you go that little snap and you see things differently or the neurons transmit in a more efficient way.”
• 14:59 - “A lot of people shy away from that what do you mean a lifestyle business don’t you want to get rich? And I’m like well it’s nothing to be ashamed of you want to life your life and style it the way you want so it’s a lifestyle business.”
• 20:34 - “If you want the most efficient honest-to-God truth of how to avoid funding just learn how to do more jobs yourself and then you don’t have to hire other people, it’s pretty simple.”

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

If you don't know what type of return you are receiving then how do you know if it's a good investment?

This is the million dollar question I ask my B2B SaaS clients to which I usually either don't get a response or they tell me that it's a good question that should be answered.

Do you know what your return is on product development investment?

Related Article - https://nxtstep.io/daily/product-development-return/

Find Product-Market Fit Faster - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is the return that you're getting on your investment into product development. Now, when I first start working with my B2B SaaS clients, they almost never have any context for this, which is always surprising to me. The reason why this is so surprising to me is because this is consistently their largest expense as.

Time, effort, resources, capital, largest number of all of those categories is can typically be found in a B2B SaaS organization as investment into product development. So the question when I ask it of the clients that I work with, when I simply propose, you know, what type of return are you getting from all of this investment and all of this activity, I usually get either crickets as a no response or a response along the lines of something.

that's a great question, but no one has asked it before, so that is always surprising to me for obvious reasons. But the, one of the other reasons why this is, I say, kind of alarming to me is because if you don't know what type of return you're receiving, then how do you know whether or not it's a good investment?

If you're not sure whether or. , the dollars that you're placing into something significant like that is producing a return, then you don't know whether or not it's a good investment. So we end up having a lot of dialogue around this, and that is really the catalyst for figuring out how to fix this in dialogue with my B2B SaaS clients.

So, we'll, that will open up the possibility of taking a closer look and as we. Closer into where that money is going and what type of return it's producing the, you kind of, you start to like peel back the onion and the information that you find can be pretty surprising for those that I work with, as in just how much of those resources are going into something that isn't producing a return.

I've shared this in a couple of recent pieces of content that I produced, but there's a feature adoption report out there from a company called Pendo. That they did a few years back where they found that nearly 80% of the investment into product development is essentially wasted because, and the way that they measured that was that 80% of that investment goes towards features that are either never or rarely used, indicating that all of the effort that led to that feature winding up in the.

essentially was wasted because no one ever used it. So now I find this as to be a systemic problem throughout product development organizations for B2B SaaS companies. So if you haven't looked inwardly at your process, I would encourage you to do so sooner rather than later. This is usually where I start, and there is a ton of opportunity to make improvements if you look closer and you find problems elsewhere.

there's a lot of time, effort, resources that is not producing a return, so that's why I'd encourage you to kind of look first.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Back in the mid 2000s we were panicked that data centers would run out of capacity to run applications.  

Then technology called virtualization was invented that changed everything (including the teams that managed it).

Let's talk about how this story may help us predict how technical teams may change due to the advancement of AI in product development.

Related Article - https://nxtstep.io/daily/data-center-capacity-problem/

Find Product-Market Fit Faster - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to tell you about is the story of how a technology called virtual.  eliminated a entire crisis that we were expecting back in the mid two thousands. So back then I was working in data centers, and if you're unfamiliar with the concept, data centers are where all the server infrastructure lives.

It manages and runs the applications we use every day. So back then technology was a little bit more static and required a lot more management. Now what we were worried about was that we were running outta capacity in that we didn't have enough servers. We didn't have enough air conditioning to cool those servers.

We also didn't have enough space to physically put those servers. We had all these capacity constraints and we were really concerned that we weren't gonna solve this problem. Didn't seem to have a very straightforward or easy solution, so we were a little panicked there. We couldn't rack mount servers fast enough in order to keep up with the demand for infrastructure to run the applications that we needed to run for our customers.

So ultimately, what happened? Well, along the way, technology was invented around that timeframe, referred to as virtualization, which enabled us to go from. , the physical construct that was each server to creating this concept of a virtual server, which you may or may not be familiar with, which is basically like you can pull together the resources from the infrastructure, and then you can create virtual instances of the server.

So from one physical server you can make. Theoretically an unlimited number of virtual servers. It really just depends on the amount of resources the server itself has, which enabled us to then consolidate the hardware and the infrastructure. And ultimately what this led to was a reversal of this trend of just consuming more resources and requiring expansion and.

All this crazy investment and new building and construction and all that kind of stuff. It don't, it didn't just slow down. It actually reversed itself and data centers started to shrink. So what was wild was where we thought we were gonna be needing new buildings and stuff like that. We ended up having empty rows where servers used to be

We were able to literally take them out because we didn't need them anymore. The software was that efficient. It was an exponential improvement and an evolution technologically. So why am I telling you this story? . The point of this story was really about how teams change that were expected to manage all of this operation.

The skills that were in demand previously, which was managing all of the hardware, ultimately became commoditized and fell out of favor, and in became a significantly higher demand for folks to better understand how to manage the software so we could figure out how to leverage these new tools and resources to the best of their capabilities.

As such, the demand really shifted there in terms.  what we needed skills-wise and how those teams changed. Now, the reason why that's relevant is because I believe.  should. It provides a good example of something we're on the precipice of, again, which is the invention of new technology and a new wave that's about to change technical teams, that being AI with the invention of tools like chat, G p T from open ai now.

Because of what these tools are capable of, it's going to eliminate significant bottlenecks in product development, in my opinion, and significantly speed up our ability to build features, create applications, even spin up entire companies. It's gonna be a real game changer, and that's gonna change how technical teams evolve.

So whether your team is ready for it or not, these changes are coming and they're gonna make big changes to how product development is managed and what those teams look like. So you need to be ready.

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ChatGPT has passed the Google level 3 software engineering interview.

What does this mean?

Well it means BIG changes are coming to your product development team (at least they should).

So let's talk about what you should be doing to prepare.

Related Article - https://nxtstep.io/daily/chatgpt-could-work-at-google/

Find Product-Market Fit Faster - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Okay folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about are the AI tools that are coming for software engineering jobs. Now, I know this is a hot topic recently, especially with ChatGPT and Codex component and all the things that it's capable of. I've been producing a lot of content talking about this because I'm excited for.

The evolution in product development software engineering for a while now has been one of the bigger bottlenecks to the process of producing software features applications more efficiently. As such, that has cannibalized a lot of the resources that have invested into product development and prevented investment elsewhere.

in particular with discovery and research, which are typically underutilized in a lot of product organizations, especially the B2B SaaS ones that I consult for. So that's often a huge area of opportunity for additional investment to make a greater impact. However, not withstanding still the limitation being the bottleneck and software engineering often prevents set investment.

So what I wanna talk about today,  what I would consider to be rather exciting development in chat GB T's capability of being able to pass technical interviews for some companies like Google. Now, there's been quite a bit written about this one, but chat G P T was evaluated by the Google team and was able to pass.

A level three technical interview for our software engineering role. And while that may be relatively entry level at Google, it comes with an impressive salary of about $183,000 a year. So now we could talk for a while about the tools capabilities and using an actual human engineer versus the AI tool and go back and forth there, but I don't think that's the.

Interesting element here, and really the one that's likely to be the most impactful for your team and your B2B SaaS company. I think instead, what we need to consider is the fact. This technology is here and it's already doing that work. Companies are already replacing software engineers, especially on the junior side, with tools like ChatGPT because of what they can do and how much faster they can do it.

As such, that cat is out of the bag. So for anyone thinking. Well, this tool doesn't have certain capabilities or it can't do creative problem solving. Like I get that right. And I'm not saying you're wrong about that, at least for now, but chances are that's gonna change as well too. What you do know is that the tool has considerable capabilities right now, and it's on its infancy, so as that continues to develop, it's only gonna get better at being able to perform in this area.

For those of us thinking of becoming anywhere near territorial about these positions or these roles, I think that's a mistake. And historically, as technology has evolved, we've seen that taking a stance like that which is almost adverse to the evolving technology doesn't put you in a best position to be successful.

Instead, what I would encourage you to do is think about how these new capabilities are likely to enable your team to be able to evolve with it and do more. Particularly giving you time back, and I want you to think about why are you're going to invest that time that you're going to get back. I'm gonna encourage you to try to do so with discovery and research because I feel that's a great area to create a greater impact for now what you're working on and why that's important.

But in terms of the actual how of getting it done and moving faster, I think you really need to be prepared for enabling your product development teams, especially in the software engineering side to. By using these tools. I think that's one of the biggest opportunities that's coming a long time.

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Software engineering is the biggest bottleneck to progress in product development for B2B SaaS companies.

This is all going to change QUICKLY.  ChatGPT can now write code for us and provide building blocks which will make it MUCH faster to build software.

Related Article - https://nxtstep.io/daily/building-software-much-faster/

Video Demonstration - https://youtube.com/shorts/SOmN0AbTD5w

Find Product-Market Fit Faster for Your B2B SaaS - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is not just why technology evolves, but how it evolves. I think we're all relatively familiar and probably very comfortable with the fact that technology appears to be evolving all around us at all times at this point, which can be anywhere from exciting to frustrating, depending on what role you play in whatever it is that you do.

But there is a distinct pattern if you look closely enough in terms.  when we might expect technology to evolve and in particular wear, and that is around, what I'm often referring to is the bottleneck, which is, you can think of it as the slowest step in the process, whatever the process is, but along that critical path, whatever step is the slowest, that's where the vast majority of the resources are being invested in order to figure out how to eliminate that step as the bottleneck.

As such, you can expect. Innovation to come in or around that area eventually, because that investment is eventually gonna lead to leap forward in progress, meaning that that bottleneck is going to be eliminated. Now, couple things to note here. When the bottleneck is ultimately eliminated, that doesn't mean that it disappears.

A bottleneck never disappears. A bottleneck seemingly just moves as in whatever was the slowest step in the process that isn't any longer. Somewhere along that critical path, there's another step that is now the slowest. And as such, if you follow along there, you can look backwards historically to see seemingly a pro relatively predictable path of ultimately what has become an evolution in technology.

Now, the one that is of particular concern right now where I'm doing most of the research, most of my research is focused on, I should say, is what these AI tools are capable of and how they're gonna impact product development teams. In particular at B2B SaaS companies, which is where I do the majority of my consulting.

in looking at where the bottlenecks are there. The biggest ones at the moment are related to product development, and as such, how long it takes software engineering to build features and applications. So with the innovation around these AI tools like Chat G P T for example, what they're ultimately planning to do is eliminate software engineering as the bottleneck in the process.

I even created a video to demonstrate the capabilities of ChatGPT to write the code for you, which like I said, has been the biggest bottleneck on these product development teams in creating a sub-routine for me and node js to swap variables around, which is a relatively straightforward request, but you can ask it whatever you would like and in mere seconds it's able to produce the code that is

production ready, like you can copy and paste it, drop it right into your application and start using it immediately. That is dramatically faster than how that process has been being completed up until now. So my question for you is, is your team exploring this and are you ready for these changes?

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