33 Minutes of No BS Tactics I Used to Build a $6.6M/Year SaaS

0:00So we all start as makers and so you know you build something that makes you a maker and then maybe what you made starts getting some traction. So then you're a successful maker right and this is where the trouble begins cuz you can't just stop there cuz you got something and it has some traction. You got to do something with it. Well at some point you got to incorporate and so now you're a founder. So many of you are at this stage now where you had to figure out how to create a company, talk to lawyers and accountants and all that,

0:32right? But being a founder is amazing. It's such a great job title, right? So many people aspire to be founders, right? Some people are like this for a long time. Then at some point, if you're still successful, you're going to need help. And then you have to make a big choice. you have to hire somebody and then turn into a manager is and then um this was very hard for me to do because I've never managed anybody before and so and I'm a great maker and so I had I was at a point where I had to uh switch my job and so the company was going to lose

1:08the best maker and gain a shitty manager at the same time and the and the company's just getting traction right and so it's very dangerous moment And it takes a lot of guts to to make this jump. So then at some point years later, you're not supposed to make anymore. I'm not allowed in the codebase anymore. And because there's many other people, the codebase has evolved, etc. And so you have to delegate all the making and now you're a CEO. Again, I didn't go to business school. I don't know what a CEO does, but you have to figure it out,

1:42right? Then if you're in business for many years, then you start thinking about legacy. And so that means you have to build a strong leadership team and you have to step away from the day-to-day of the operation and that makes you a business owner, right? As if you're at a restaurant. You don't work there. You have a manager that manages it and all

2:03that, but you own the business, right? Very different job altogether again. And then I I think you can't call yourself an entrepreneur until maybe you do this last step which is either selling the business or starting another business where really the business is a thing. It's like a separate thing from you, right? So many of us our identity is so closely tied to our baby, right? But if you reach step seven, that's not your baby anymore. That's just a thing that you made back in the day, right? So this is a tough journey. Not everybody will do the whole journey. Some companies might not go out of business a step

2:44three, you know, uh or get sold as step four or step five. Um or if you have a co-founder, one of you might do the whole journey, the other one will stop at some point, right? But, you know, I hope this uh this um slide scares you a little because this is what happens if you're successful. You know, like you have to you have to

3:08change all these jobs in your career. You're about to change all these jobs. So, you start as a maker. I want to build things. Probably you quit your job because you were tired of all this all this uh you know uh bureaucracy and and you just wanted to make. Well, guess what? But if you're successful, you're going to be the bureaucracy. So today, hopefully um I'll I'll make this a little bit easier and and u help you avoid some of the mistakes that I've made in in my uh journey. All right, so let's start with what is a business. So for many years, this was the quote that I lived by. Your

3:46business is your second product. Perfect. I know how to build a product. features, bugs, every new policy of the business is going to be a feature. Every problem to solve is going to be a bug. I've done this before. I can do this again for the business, right? Um it's very attractive. Um problem is it's it's

4:07terrible. It's very dangerous advice. Um, I spent so much time reinventing the wheel when it came to how to run a business because we had to do everything the balsamic way, right? And then inevitably over the years, these policies that we came up with, we had to evolve and evolve and evolve until they look like normal HR policies. Okay. Um, so your business is not a product. Your business is a humanpowered system,

4:37right? um like democracy, you're not going to build democracy feature by feature, right? It's a system of people that uh work that have to work together in in the right way. Um and so um your job is not to invent the rules of the game. Your job is not to innovate here. Your job is to innovate on the product. So there are some things you can choose here. Uh you can choose the company culture that you like. whether you're more of a synchronous guy or asynchronous introvert extrovert depending on your preference uh office versus remote uh more aggressive and faster and or versus more laid-back that

5:21that I feel like as the founder you get to set the the tone for that and that can stay uh throughout the throughout the life of the business. Uh, another thing that I always say is you choose the problem you want to solve. But depending on this choice, this dictates your company size and your company playbook. Quick example, I want to um feed the burgers to a neighborhood food truck, right? Okay. Well, then you're not going to get VC funding. You're not going to go public. You're not going to hire more than two people because they don't fit in the truck, right? Vice versa. I want to uh build the next

6:03eradicate malaria, right? You're not going to bootstrap that. Only Bill Gates can maybe try to fix that, right? It takes hundreds of people and so much money, right? So you choose the problem you want to solve and that problem comes with a expected uh company size and playbook and then you you choose the system of rules that you want to use to run the company and here there's this idea build versus buy. So, should I build everything from scratch like I used to or should I just adopt an existing system? And so, I'm this talk is to show you that maybe you should adopt the system and maybe tweak some

6:44configuration files. Basically, if you're enjoying this talk from MicroM Europe, you should consider joining us for our next one in Istanbul, Turkey at the end of September 2025. Our last two events have completely sold out and we expect that to be the same for this event. To get all the info and to get your ticket before they sell out, head to micro.com/ Europe. And so there's a lot of these systems around. Most of you

7:09have have heard of this lean startup. This is for this is a a system for companies that want to scale quickly, you know, uh Silicon Valley type thing. But the beauty of these system is that they always come with a book. They come, they're documented. They come with a consultants that you can hire to help you implement them. You know, there's another here's another here's another lacery. I think

7:37this is what Zapos and uh Spotify use. Uh if you don't want to buy a whole system, you can go one level down in granularity and buy some different use by these these things are, you know, mostly free, but use some different uh plays, right? Atlassian has this uh nice website with different things with how to run a retrospective, how to do recruiting, how, you know, different pieces, right? Um this one is called EOS. It's one that's very popular. It's based on not one but five books. Um, this is used by several companies uh of uh our my size, Balsamic size and so we're looking into implementing it

8:18ourselves now 16 years later. But uh what's great about these is that like the traction book is for the founder. Then there's how to be a great boss which is for managers of companies that are implementing EOS. There's what the heck is EOS for employees, individual contributors of companies that are implementing. And the thing about choosing an existing system that is so well documented is that not only there's books, there's also a ton of consultants that can you can hire. There's videos on YouTube. Chad GPT is fluent in these systems. We created one EOS expert and fed all the books and we can ask how do

8:56you do this in EOS? Right? So it's like choosing Tailwind over bare bones CSS. You know what I mean? It just makes things easier. It's proven. they uh you know they uh this is their whole job right the the attraction book is four or fifth edition right they always evolve it right so today I'm not going to give you a full system I'm just going to show you a bunch of uh tools and tactics uh that um you guys can use um that things that we are either implementing or we've implemented or we're looking into that uh maybe give you a little bit of an overview of um

9:36things that you can steal basically and I've noticed every presentation now has a chatgbt or a midjourney image in it. So check it then that all right structure. So you know this one if you're a programmer you know this saying absolutely right you don't want to overgineer things ahead of time. Well waiting too long hurts just as much. You know, Balsamic was a flat company for many, many years. Uh, which, uh, was not true because humans are pack animals and leaders emerge or followers emerge. And so, if you say you're flat, actually, you're not. And the managers you have, the leaders you have don't have the job

10:19title. So, they're not studying how to become a better manager. They can uh make big mistakes and they're not accountable for them because it's not their job really. And so structure an org chart uh the sooner the better. Uh EOS has this they call it accountability chart because it's an or chart with some roles as well like okay this is what this role is supposed to do. Five short bullets on what they are accountable for. Uh Rob has a whole chapter in the SAS playbook which I hope you all have uh about how to structure your team. So look at look at that. So I would say as

10:57soon as you hire two, three people, have somebody be a manager. You know, put this structure in place. This was probably my biggest mistake. It took us too long. This other thing I remember, oh, we don't have job titles. Those are very corporate, you know, we're we're totally startupy. That was another mistake. Why not? I mean, your employees, they go to conferences, they want to be able to have uh to to say what they do in a in a with a name that people understand. You know, they're looking for jobs. They want to know what their job is. So, now we have straight up job titles that we don't even come up

11:32with. We buy them. There's this company that have that has a salary data from around the world and they have a job a list of 6,000 jobs. These are all the jobs. zoologologist, uh, you know, assistant professor, and we just go through the list. We're like, "Okay, you're closest to this one. You're closest to this one." And so this is this is the copy paste description for product managers. We have a little translation because some of it might not

11:59map exactly. Uh, we have a multiplier. Uh, I'll talk about that later when we do a salary, but it's connected to this. And then we we go down and we say, "Okay, these are the hard skills for a product manager." And you have all that once and here's what it means to do at a level one, level two, level three. And this gives a level of clarity to employees. It makes uh coaching and performance review so much easier because you're like, "Oh, I do this at

12:26level one. I do this level two. Actually, I disagree." Blah, blah, blah. Soft skills, same thing. We have these long tables that we made. again. Now you can ask JPT to come up with these super super big pages. Um but anyways, your job as the CEO is to provide clarity. This took me so many years to

12:45understand. Um I thought I had to be the helper. I thought I had to take the trash out. I thought I had to do every be able to do every single thing. Yes. But those things eventually you delegate. You delegate. You delegate. This one providing clarity is the last thing. You can't really delegate it. What I'm learning, um, it's what people really require you to do as the boss, as the the CEO. So, you've seen these a million times. There's all these different ways to uh talk about values, v measure, mission. And again, I was talking to Rob last night at the beginning of this talk. You're like, "Ah, this is not for

13:25me. I, you know, there's just a couple of us. Why do we need all this?" Right? Trust me, do it now and start getting into the habit of doing these things now. Um, there's different uh if you if you search these, some people put value values first, some people put vision first. Some people call mission what the others call vision. It's it's messy, but just come up with your own your own uh hierarchy and and uh definition and uh

13:55and you'll be fine. This is what we do. I don't know if you want you know I I'll spend 30 seconds on it. You know the values is kind of our northstar. That's what that's what guides us. The vision is a snapshot in time. 10 years from now what does it look like it's not a it's not a path. It's a snapshot. You know close your eyes. Imagine yourself 10 years from now. What's the company look like? What's the product look like? What

14:20are the financials looking like? Right? Then the mission is how we're going to get all the way down there. we have to put some milestones in. And so those are goals, three-year goals. Then you have a strategy and the strategy is how we're going to get to the first goal specifically. And then from the strategy, you have road maps that are quarterly. Road maps are a collection of projects, right? So this is how we use it. By the way, I see people taking pictures. The slides are going to be

14:47available. So don't worry about that. Um, another one way to figure out your uh your vision is this is again stolen from EOS. Answer these two questions. Why does our organization exist? What's our passion? What's our cause? And what can we do better than everybody else? What's our niche? What's our secret sauce? These are they seem very simple question. It took me and my managers five meetings to come to agree on uh on

15:17what these should be right now. Okay. But now we're aligned. Now we have clarity. We know what the vision should be. Another way to come up with a good vision is to understand your client uh your your customers. This is a quote that something that I feel very deeply in my soul which is that the company that wins is the one that understands their customers better. Seems kind of silly but it takes a lot of work to be that company right. Um, right now we do it with a combination of qualitative and

15:51quantitative data. We This is Jessica. She's a user researcher at Balsamic. She's been there since we were 10 people at the company. So, pretty early on. Her job is to interview customers all day every day and gather insights and put them in Jira. Um, huge hugely important. Uh and then uh just this year after 16 years we started asking four questions during sign up what's your job and again do it right away you know uh now now it's expected before I was like no we don't want to bother them right now people expect it and uh and it's fine it takes on average it takes our customers eight

16:32seconds to go through the wizard so no big deal but be careful because um you don't want to only do the quantitative. I know it's very attractive. We're programmers. We don't want to talk to people, right? Let's just look at the data. Well, at the beginning, you're not going to have enough data to actually be statistically uh significant. And so, it's really dangerous to only look at the data. Uh this is a a framework that I just rediscovered after many years from Kemp Beck, the the uh extreme programming guy. um he liked the letter X. So he came up with this

17:13framework of explore, expand, extract. And so at the beginning when you're when you're just getting started, you're in the exploration phase, right? You don't have product market fit yet. In this in this phase, don't look at data. Data is not important to you. Just go more qualitative. Interview people, get feedback. One of the reasons I was successful is that at the beginning, very beginning, I gave Balsamic away to everybody in exchange for an honest review. That was gold for me. I needed to know what was the roughest corner of the app to work on next, right? So, just get reviews, interview people at the beginning. Then you you find product

17:52market fit and then you know things explode. But then at the end, it's going to flatten out. That's where we are now. And so now we're like, okay, let's look at the data. let's extract more value out of this thing that is 15 years old, right? Uh so data is important but use it carefully. Anyways, that's how you get to the vision. Then uh this is how we do strategy and I've never seen this chart in the online so I thought I'd

18:19share it. This works really well for us. It's a very simple chart. So it's strategy. So it's how we're going to get to the next goal, right? So it's three years, maybe a couple of years, not not that much further. And on the y- axis is focus or effort. What are we going to

18:34do? And and these are not projects. These are collections of projects. Each row is a collection of project. And so if it's high, we know that that's the focus. I'll show you another one. This is the uh the one of the teams. Every every group has their own focus. So this shows you that for Q4 they want to do a

18:54new design system and dark mode. Everything else is below. I like to leave a big gap between the top focus thing and the rest. And then there's some horizontal lines like uh the lighters. We always want to sprinkle in a lighter every quarter. Okay. But then there's chores that come and go, things that finish. One nice thing about these charts is that you can put some arrows in the future and that really helps to say instead of saying no, we're not doing AI is saying no, AI is planned for next year. And that really helps when when you have to say no, which is a lot

19:29a big part of your job, right? You can say, "Okay, yeah, we're doing it, but now we're not doing it until starting January." Okay, so we do these for our HR team does it too. Uh end of the year work starting now, it's going to end in in Q2, blah, blah, blah. I certification long initiative. It's going to take a long time and so we put it in. So again, this provides us with clarity on what the next few years are going to look like. Then you go to this quarterly road map. And so based on the strategy chart, we pick things that fit with that

20:07strategy. And one tip that I have here is to split the road map into kinds of jobs. So we have QA jobs, pivotal or or Jira batches, you know, little let's take this corner of the app that has a bunch of bugs on it. Let's fix all those, right? That's a batch. And then big features, small features, process improvements. This is useful because you you know your team and you can say, well, we can only do one or two big features a quarter and maybe three small features. So you put numbers on here and that helps everybody plan properly without overcommitting or undercommitting. Again, it's about being

20:46aligned quality and we staff them ahead of time uh the different different groups who's going to be responsible. Then this is another nice trick what we call pick pages. Uh the title of the page is pick what to work on in Q5 Q4. Right now we I just started one for Q1 for the next quarter. And what is this? This is a buffer. This is during the quarter everybody that's down on their projects, on the road map, but ideas come up from support, from the founders, from everybody. Ideas come up and the temptation is so strong to like, oh yeah, let's investigate that. Let's spend two hours talking about it, see

21:25what it will look like, blah blah blah. Right? That's a huge distraction. So instead, we say, put them on here. Great idea. Put it on the page. So that then at the at the end of the quarter when it's time to plan the next quarter, then there's a a moment where everybody's open to new ideas, the stuff is shipped. We're doing we're in planning mode. So let's all let's have all the discussions and then we pick for for the road map and then immediately we create another empty page so that people can uh can fill it up. Huge. This is huge for avoiding distraction. All right. All

22:01this stuff is uh also useful for coaching evaluating. This is company values. Again, you feel like why do I need company values? Well, that's the main thing that defines your culture. Okay? So, you really want to have those. You want to have them on the website. That's how you attract the right kind of people to your company. One thing about company value, they have an expiration date. Always put an expiration date. three years, maybe four years, but that's it. Always set the expectation that this is the company values right now. We're going to change them again in four years. Always tell everybody that because you have to the

22:39company evolves under your feet whether you like it or not. It's different people, different stage of the company. You have to update the company values to take a snapshot of what it actually is right now. So, this was our old one from 2019. we are redoing them now because they're not very actionable. They're too fluffy, uh too sort of high level and inspirational. Instead, um uh EOS has this thing called the people analyzer, which is a way to sort of uh do some performance review of your of your employees. And they put the values right at the top. And for each value, you have to be able to say for each person

23:22whether they're doing it most of the time, they live that value sometime or rarely. Okay? And and so you have to have values that are easy to say yes, they do that or not. Like be efficient, be accountable, right? These are things that you can tell immediately. If you say be a good teammate, that's too too vague, right? Um and this is what they use to do performance review. If somebody has a minus in any of the value, they have to go. They have to fix it quickly, it'll have to go. Okay? So,

23:53use values that you can use daytoday. Don't make don't make them too inspirational. Another tool is skills map. This is where you take all the skills that I showed you before from the job. This is again product manager management. And you self-rate yourself one to five on each of them. You say where you want to get in the future and then you can make a beautiful little chart that shows, hey, right now I'm in the green zone in the gray diagram, but I want to get to green. And the beauty of this especially is to put all of the ones from your team together where you

24:28see, do I have a well-rounded team or not? In this case, you know, we're pretty weak on user research. You can see it at a glance that we need to we need to improve our user research as a group. So maybe we hire somebody or we train somebody, right? because we want a well-rounded team. Or maybe not. Maybe it's a conscious choice that two is enough for us, you know. So, that's another tool. Then again, clarity um uh job descriptions, salary. I could do a whole talk about that uh about how to set up salaries. And so, we are remote, we are global, so we buy

25:07salary data because it's easy to find for the US, but it's much harder to find for Europe. And there's these companies that that's all they do. They do surveys and they update salary data for all those 6,000 jobs uh around the world. And so we take that data and turn them into ranges. So for for this one job, there's level one, two, and three. And that's the salary range that you're going to do if you're if you're at that level. The way we calculate this is with pretty much a formula. This is a person that has two jobs. They do 70% one job, 30% the other job. There are level three

25:43with 13 years of experience in the first one. There are level two with 80 years of experience of the second one. We give a balsamic premium on some jobs. If there's jobs that are historically done by women, those are paid less in the market. So, we add a 10% on that. If there are some jobs that are overpaid, we reduce 10% because we don't want too much of an over uh we don't want managers to be paid that much more than individual contributors because we want individual contributors to also feel like they don't have to go into management to make more money. So, we make a little few adjustments to the

26:18data, but it's mostly based on on the data that we buy and we update that every year so that inflation is uh taken into account. So, we're pretty proud of this system and it makes it so that each it's pretty uh fair. Every manager, we have six different groups now teams and every manager cannot really mess it up too much because they have to use the same

26:42system. Um some tools for collaborating. Sorry, I know I'm flooding you with information, but the slides are going to be available. Um this is something that we do uh hug human user guide. Um, some people call this a read me where you write a little page about yourself, what you're like, your history, uh, what my working hours are, where am I, um, when it's best to time to schedule me, uh, how to collaborate with me, um, how to give me feedback, yes or not, uh, you know, this different ways. And um so you know has a low patience for lying, scheming, gossiping. Um so so

27:28each person a balsamic has one of these. And so if you're working with someone that you don't normally work with, you can immediately go look at their hug so that you have a little bit of instructions on how to deal with them. Okay? So that takes 10 minutes to do and uh useful, very useful. At a team level, we do these team agreements and these are tiny contracts. Each bullet is a tiny contract that we say as a team we agree to take good notes during the meeting right so that we have notes we could do to do all retrospectives within two weeks we sit together and we say you

28:03know this is how we're going to collaborate and it's very uh short it's not this sort it's very actionable often these are results of tensions that have happened and we're like okay we did this wrong let's figure out how do we want to do Okay. Okay. We write it down. We commit to it. And we review these every quarter. We see if we live lived up to them or not. If we need to change them, add them, remove. Very easy, very useful. Uh want to spend a little time on uh the double diamond. You're all familiar with that, I hope. Uh but uh we recently started doing discovery much

28:38more deeply than before. Uh and uh it resulted in in uh better features, better projects altogether. uh how we do discovery. We uh we plan for it and uh we do some desk research and this is looking at everything we know about this problem from uh uh customer feedback bugs uh everything we have internally similar projects that we've done in the in the past. Excuse me. Uh so this is or uh u competitive research. How do they solve the same problem? Best practice research. Ask Judge GPT, how do you solve this problem, right? And we write it all down. Then we do stakeholder interviews. We talk to everybody in the

29:24group um inside the company or also customers and we say, "Okay, what do you know about this problem? What are you expecting about this project? What success for you? What timeline do you expect?" You know, basically get getting everybody heard. Then we do user research. We go and interview customers. Sometimes it depends on the project, but

29:46like okay, we're thinking of doing this. What do you think? Right? And here's where you can show them wireframes. Uh and then as you as you do all this research, you get insights and you write them down little bullets. Then from that you you can turn them into solution statements. You you then you then you go into design mode where you're like, "Okay, I understood these are the problems. What are possible solutions?" And some are not code. Some are like we need a video to illustrate this. We need a new tutorial. We need to change a process. Right? But if you do discovery right, you'll be able to have

30:20much better solutions. Then very important, split the development phase in two. Prototype quick and dirty as quickly as possible to be able to play with it even if it's not hooked up to the server. Okay? So that in real code that's what we do because uh because then you play with it, you make your little tweaks and then it's half implemented already. You don't have you

30:46throw away maybe 10% of the code, right? But the rest is already done. And so the the delivery phase, the iteration phase is much quicker that way. Anyways, I'm almost out of time. So um I'm not going to talk about this. This is how often you should meet with your people and your your group. But even for this, they have templates. The EOS has tells you what agenda to use for your weekly meetings. I mean, you don't really have to think about anything. It's all been proven and and chosen uh and you can use it over and over. Okay, last thoughts. This one took me a long time

31:23to figure out. I don't want to sell balsamic. this is my last, you know, my it's still my baby, but that's a problem. I that means I'm not an entrepreneur. I should see it as a business separate uh from me. And so it does create a healthy separation between you and your company and it forces you to make good financial choices. At any point your business should be run well enough that it's it could be sold. So good profitability, good policies and all that. It forces good delegation. You have to have a a good a good leadership team. That's something that acquires uh look for. And then, you know, there's a

32:04couple of books. Read Finish Big is a classic. And then Rob and Sherry, second plug to Rob Rob's book, Brook Ly. Um they're coming up with a fantastic book. I got to read it ahead of time for reviewing it and it's really good. So, buy these. Keep them on your bedside table. even if you don't think about

32:23you're not going to sell anytime soon. Uh so this is all the stuff that we talked about. So if you have questions, let me know. And uh thank you. I hope you enjoyed that talk from Pely. Again, if you want to see more talks like this, you should consider joining us in Istanbul. Tickets are now on sale at microcom.com/urope. At the end of his talk, Pely suggested you check out my new book, Exit Strategy, which is on sale now. You can get it at exitstrategybook.com or on Amazon or Audible. Exit strategy is the complete guide to not cracking up, not breaking into pieces as you think through your

33:00exit in advance, as you go through the exit. And then once you've sold your company and you start thinking about what's next, the subtitle is the entrepreneurs guide to selling your business without regret. And that's the promise that me and my co-author Dr. Sherry Walling intend to keep is to help you sell your business with no regrets. And if you're curious to learn more about what's inside the book, check out this next video where I break down the nine telltale signs it's time to sell your business straight from one of my favorite chapters. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next