SaaS 102 #6 Why Did I Start Writing This SaaS 102 Series?
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” – Albert Einstein
Before you do anything, it's important to ask a simple question: “why?”. This is a principle I strongly believe in. But I've found that most people don't think like this.
Once I’d written five SaaS 102 articles, I was finally asked why I wanted to write this series of articles. Why did I want to write about SaaS? What does the “102” in “SaaS 102” refer to? I was glad to get asked all these questions because it gave me a reason to write this article. 🤪
Why did I want to write this SaaS 102 article series?
As far as I'm aware, apart from the writing I was required to do as a student, I haven't really written more than about ten articles. 😅 I got the idea for starting the SaaS 102 series from a friend I really respect, Chen Hao. Chen Hao is the man behind CoolShell.cn, an informative website about coding and computer programming.
I consider Chen Hao to be both my friend and my teacher. I still remember when, back in 2018, I was trying to expand AfterShip to different locations in the Asia-Pacific region. As my goal was to build new teams in new locations, I was busy every day trying to recruit people.
When I talked to people about the job, I wanted to express to them what, in my heart, I wanted our company to do. To each candidate, I tried to express similar ideas, hoping to persuade them to join us. But in the last two years, I’ve interviewed more than a thousand people. Can you imagine saying the same thing a thousand times over?
All this made me think of a piece of advice Chen Hao had given me:
“Rather than going out to find people, you should let people find you. Writing is a great way to influence more people.”
So I decided to challenge myself. I decided to try to put all my thoughts and learnings over the months and years (I suddenly realized I feel quite old😂) about life, about careers, about the industry, and about our company and team into writing.
Why did I want to write about SaaS?
Another sudden realization I had was that I’d been in the B2B SaaS industry for eight years already. That time had passed in the blink of an eye.
I hope that these SaaS 102 articles can help to share some of my learnings and insights with others.
Of course, I welcome criticism and guidance from everyone who reads these articles. Getting feedback from readers can help me improve my knowledge and continue to learn and grow.
What does the “102” in “SaaS 102” refer to?
The “102” in the “SaaS 102” name refers to several things:
- I plan for there to be a total of 102 articles in the series.
- There are so many articles, series, and courses out there already that have “101” in their name. But not that many with “102” in the name. This makes it easier to get a high SEO ranking and come first in Google search!
- At AfterShip, one of our core values is to continually strive to reach beyond boundaries. So why wouldn’t we go the extra mile and create a “SaaS 102” series instead of a “SaaS 101” series. After all, “102” has got to be a step up from “101.”
What are my goals for writing the SaaS 102 series?
By writing this series of SaaS 102 articles, I hope I can achieve the following:
1. To help the people who join or have joined our company to rethink how they approach problems and challenges. To ask “why” before asking “how”. This can help our company become more competitive.
2. To attract people who agree with our company culture and values, to join us, work hard with us, and share the results of success together. 🤩
3. To reduce the gaps in my knowledge, to share my thoughts on different topics and receive guidance and feedback from readers. This can help me to refine and optimize my ideas and thinking.
Below are some key ideas that I would like to express in this series:
1. The first stage of thinking is defining the question
I think I can illustrate this idea to everyone with a story about the founding of AfterShip. When Andrew and myself started the company together in 2012, the question we heard our users ask the most was: “Where is my package?”.
So when we designed the company logo, we used the kind of location pointer often used on map software, and a picture of a package. A combination of the two became our AfterShip logo.
Back then, our website homepage and media reports about our business were all packed with package location imagery.
But what if I told you that our logo design was a mistake? And not a small mistake, but a mistake so big it could hardly be any bigger? Would you know what kind of mistake it was?
At the time our thinking was straightforward. Users kept on asking us:
“Where is my package?”
And our first instinct was to react very directly to being asked the same question repeatedly. We thought about different ways we could use our system to tell our users where their packages were. We used the image of a map location pointer as our logo because we were thinking along those lines.
But even once AfterShip was up and running, we found that even if we told users where the package was, they still continued to ask similar questions. That really got us thinking deeply about what problem it was that we were trying to solve for our users.
For the user, what they were really concerned about wasn’t where their package was. What they cared about was:
When would they receive their package?
As a result, we stopped focusing on package location, even to the point of no longer displaying the package location on maps. I often think, if from day one we had asked “why” and thought clearly about the answer, then our company logo would have ended up looking very different.
When we face a challenge, the key is not to hurriedly look for a solution, but to examine the problem layer by layer, until we get down to the root of the issue.
It's actually more effective to spend more time thinking about the problem, and to only act when you are clear on exactly what it is you are trying to solve.
This is because you can't see the actual nature of most problems just from looking at them on the surface level.
If you have an incorrect perception of what the problem really is, then it doesn't matter what method you use to try to solve it. That’s because whatever solution you come up with, you won’t be addressing the actual problem.
2. Birds of a feather flock together
Some headhunting companies cooperated with us for a short while. But they soon got scared off. Perhaps it was because we mentioned that in 2019, we received more than 20,000 resumes. But we only hired between 60 and 70 new employees.
A lot of people thought that we must be too picky?
You might think that we rejected 99% of applicants. But actually it was mostly us being rejected. 😭
I often joke with colleagues and team members. I spend more time with all of them than I spend with my own family. If they don't agree with my values and our company culture but we work together every day, then surely both sides will find it difficult.
Birds of a feather may flock together, but people with differing values and aspirations can find it hard to walk on the same path.
I hope that you, the reader, can gain an understanding of what kind of person I am through my writing.
I also hope that these articles express how our company does things and what kind of people we would like to hire. We would like to hire talented people who agree with our company direction and culture.
So, when we interview people we spend most of our time introducing our company culture and how we work.
Once we’ve introduced our company culture clearly, and if the introduction goes well, we’ll then continue to talk. In fact, it’s even a little bit like dating. In the end, 99% of the time, candidates reject us and not the other way around.
In every article in this series, apart from my thinking and analysis about the topic at hand, you can also see my requirements and hopes for the AfterShip company culture.
If it sounds like the kind of company culture and direction that you approve of, you are welcome to join us and work hard with us. Our company can also give you a platform to help you develop and grow, and show your skills to the world.
3. The more you know, the less you understand
The article content for this SaaS 102 series doesn't only come from my understanding of the industry. It also comes from my professional and career experience. It comes, too, from my personal experiences of entrepreneurship, group management, and other topics. I’ve thought through those experiences, and done some related reading, too. These articles are a collection of some of the thoughts and ideas that have emerged as a result of this process.
I’ve been asked before, why do I encourage people to contribute to and use open source projects? Why do I encourage people to submit pull requests if they can? (Submitting a pull request is a method of proposing changes to an open source project.)
We continuously say that we should avoid reinventing the wheel. If many people have already created open source versions of the tools we are trying to create, there’s not much sense in us starting our project from scratch.
Instead, we can submit pull requests to optimize the tools that already exist.
So when people ask me why I encourage the use of open source, I respond with my own question. What reasons are there to not encourage the use of open source?
Some people say they are afraid of contributing to open source projects, because they worry their code isn’t good enough. I say, don’t be afraid of imperfection.
At AfterShip, I was the first in the company to get involved in open source projects. After all, it’s no good to be all talk and no action. That’s why I wrote an open source project and shared it on GitHub. The project is called “phone” and you can see it here. (And if you like what you see, why not give the project an extra ⭐?)
My code is far from great. But once I’d made my project open source, I got people submitting pull requests, which helped me to really improve the code. And people submit these pull requests for free. Again, what reasons are there not to use open source?
I’m definitely not an expert on everything. So I hope that sharing these articles can become a way that I can communicate with more and more people. I hope that readers won’t keep their knowledge to themselves and instead will generously share their guidance. Each piece of constructive criticism or advice can lead to productive discussion and debate. And it is through opinion-sharing, discussion, and debate that all parties can gain an improved and more complete understanding of the topic at hand.
Summary
The main principles I hope readers can take away from this article are:
1. The first stage of thinking is defining the question. We should learn to ask “why” before taking any kind of action.
2. Please don’t keep your knowledge to yourself and don’t be afraid of imperfections in your contributions. Generously share your guidance and criticism. That way we can learn and improve together. The more we know, the less we understand. That being the case, receiving guidance, feedback, and criticism is the best way for us to quickly grow and develop.
About author:
I'm Teddy, Co-Founder & CEO of AfterShip, SaaS 102 is a series of articles where I share my experience in SaaS startups.
We are looking for great SaaS sales talent and welcome you to join us at careers.aftership.com.