How This 10X SaaS Developer Decides What NOT To Build

0:00as you build your SAS it's easy to get lost in a mountain of feature requests not knowing which ones you should focus on deciding what to build next and which ideas you should not build is actually really hard so in this video I sat down with Derek ryr one of the best product people I've ever worked with to chat about how he decides which features to build next we talk about real examples from the business he's building right now called Savvy Cal it's the best calendar scheduling app I've ever used later in the video we talk about specific features he decided not to build even though on the surface it

0:31seemed like a good opportunity and if you stick around to the end Derrick and I chat about why building everything your customers ask for might be a recipe for disaster let's dive in what recent feature did you ship that you you know feel like was the right decision and what was the logic behind deciding to do that whether it was tons of customer re crests or whether you just knew in your founder gut or whether it was a compe you know there's a bunch of reasons why you would do it and then let's touch on like one feature or more frankly that you haven't built probably aren't going

1:01to build and why one of my favorite ones that we shipped this summer I think it was about a month ago um is this feature it's it's kind of a simple one but it had been on my radar for a little while and it's sort of just in in reviewing my backlog and I like to keep a backlog of things just ideas anytime someone requests something I usually log it in there and then sort of store up you know anytime someone mentions it in a help Scout conversation I drop a link to it just as kind of a a knowledge Repository and this one had been floating around

1:31and resurfacing for a while um it's basically a little feature that allows you to toggle on a a setting to require approval for new bookings before they make it onto your calendar so um you know think like if you're if you're really busy and say you've um you're just a busy person in general and you have one reusable link that is just out in the wild people use it all the time we often have kind of our one multi-use link that maybe we store in our text expansion or whatever and it's just the one that gets shared around usually like SL chat after your name right and so a

2:05lot of times people who are who are in really high demand uh we'll just see people using their link and grabbing time on their calendar and so there's something very um visceral with people who feel this pain it's like this is really a major problem and so they either resort to like not having a multi-use link or using an unguessable URL or just other solutions that just don't don't quite feel right and feel like we could be doing something on the product side to to alleviate this this also happened to be like one of the favorite features from uh scheduling tool called x. that was acquired and

2:39then shut down uh last year um so I hear you know anyone who comes over from x. a is likely to request this one right so it's been it's been coming up over and over but again it's just one of those decisions like even though it's just a toggle in the UI and just a just a slight modification to the booking flow it's still not a foregone conclusion that we're going to build it um but the things that really tipped me over the edge on it were were one just strong strong visceral demand from a group of people who are really passionate and like I would say scheduling power users

3:10you know and we have gradually become a tool that I think a lot of people in their minds think of it as sort of a a scheduling power tool like um you know obviously when you're when you're young you're you're behind the competition in a lot of different ways so it's hard to it's hard to Foster that perception early on but we've been at it for a few years now and have mostly caught up on feature parody and now people actually see us once they get in the product they realize that a lot of our ux is is um an improvement over the status quo and they

3:39can they can do more things to guard their time they can use like a ranked availability feature and some of these things that we have that help people who care a lot about shielding their time um protect it basically so so this one felt like it was philosophically aligned with where our product's going um it doesn't over complicate the product in in confusing ways like most of the complexity actually lives under the surface and for the user it's just like do you want to enable this or not um and so yeah it was like Bas combination of strong demand differentiation alignment with kind of the philosophy of what we

4:15want Savvy Cal to be and and like I always think about too is this attracting the right kind of user the kind of user that we feel like we're able to serve well and I think those who care about toggling this is an ideal you know user of Savvy Cal because of the things we care about yeah I really like that I think that's something that more founder that I don't think that's intuitive for a lot of people and the fact that you've just called it out I think is a huge a huge deal it's like how many people we use it and what kind of customer will we use it

4:50yeah there's a certain I think there's a certain magnetism that features have and they can draw in more of the people that early in the sweet spot for we have built some things um I'm trying to think if I have a specific example I might think of one in a minute but feel like there are some features that we build that suddenly start attracting people who aren't a super good fit and that's that's always just uh it can be a frustrating process for the user because they're all excited and they think they think savy is going to be the tool for them and then realize that we're missing the mark on a number

5:20of things but they were attracted by this one thing so you just I just want to be mindful and careful about um you know just thinking about that giving some thought to that when when marketing features and building them how about on the flip side a feature or features that for the foreseeable future you know it is not going to build or every recent thing you decided we're not building and and what was the thought process there yeah so one of the big ones is um SMS notifications um so this one does come up uh it's certainly requested from time to time and it's a feature that a lot of

5:53other scheduling tools have built into them uh think of like classic examples in my mind are ones that are like your you know going to get a haircut or a dentist deployment or something like they're often sending text messages um to remind you and this is one where I've struggled a lot with it trying to understand you know why people want it because I personally never want to receive a text message from a scheduling tool and I think I do have even though I'm not like a perfect representation of my customers I think you know a lot of my customers are similar to me and that

6:28um you know we're using this for kind of businessto business meeting scheduling and we're near our calendars a lot and we probably have Google Calendar installed on our phone and we'll get like a you know a little notification through there so like I don't know just the the the need for it kind of eludes me a little bit and um and then I've spoken to a number of um folks who have endeavored to do this actually I've was speaking to some former colleagues at drip um who and they added SMS support into the product and I got to hear some War stories about just how much of a

7:02bear that is to uh to maintain and you know things like you know you think you think dealing with uh email spam is bad wait until you deal with all the regulations and constraints around sending text messages on behalf of people even though there's tools like twilio which are amazing and give you a nice API on top of the lower level SMS stuff it's still um it doesn't certainly doesn't solve all of the complexity that you have to deal with when doing this and so it's just kind of one of those giant Iceberg features like you know a certain percentage of people would just toggle it on like sure send a text

7:35message yeah why not and maybe not even give much thought to it but under the covers there's so much complexity to maintain um and there are honestly other ways around it too people can accomplish this with zapier you know there's there's different Integrations that you can connect to your zapier account so if you really need this you can do it today and I would kind of much rather push that complexity off to zappier for for the foreseeable future yeah and and with an N of two one being you and me being the second one I would never use that feature and so I wonder if and and you know we uh Tiny Seed

8:08microcom are obviously a saval customer yeah and so does it you know would it attract the right kind of customers going back to the feature you know that you said earlier and obviously you know if you listen to this podcast it's like two people does not a focus group make but it but it is I can imagine you know my uncle who's a realtor wanting to turn that on right and it's like is that where Sav wants to be right now because I think more perhaps sophisticated like Founders entrepreneurs Executives Tech entrepreneur tech tech se you know uh senior leaders whatever you know it is that you're focused on a saval those

8:43folks are probably more in our line where they you know in our uh situation where I I'm also in front of my calendar all day and my phone buzzes with a little reminder and that's all I need and you know y another one that kind of comes to mind um is so some people use Savvy Cal a very small percentage of our customers use Savvy Cal for a lot of internal scheduling which you know theoretically is a pretty powerful way to use it right like you share a booking link to someone inside internal to your company and they can use that as sort of a curated window into your availability

9:16um even though most most companies of of a certain size these days are either using the built-in Google Calendar um sharing technology Microsoft Outlook has it also so there's like a lot of sophisticated tooling built up in those ecosystems around you know sharing calendars with your colleagues and adding colleagues and finding times that work for everybody and doing Collective scheduling like so a lot of these problems are sort of already solved which is why I've been hesitant to try to Bild saval as an ideal solution for doing internal scheduling you know it's like you can use it for that but it's probably not going to be better than the

9:53built-in bundled um Solutions into into the ecosystem and like I had some reest the other day from a customer that he was asking for the ability for events created by saval to be editable by anybody added on the calendar invite which struck me as curious so I I dug into it a little bit and asked him some more questions and discovered that he was basically using this as a way to to put time to use round robin and put time on one of their internal team members calendars and and then from that point that person would sort of take ownership of the calendar event and you know

10:31literally take ownership of the event like it would get transferred so that would sever our connection to the event cuz it would get a new owner in the calendar system and then they would add external people onto the calendar event and reschedule it if needed this was just causing all kinds of problems with our ability to stay in sync with that calendar event and I thought for a second like we need to solve some of these problems and maybe add a setting to allow it to be editable but then realize like for anyone who's doing the traditional path of like sending a link scheduling something with an

11:03external party you would never want it to be fully editable by all parties and a lot of these other problems just simply don't surface for that for that happy path right and when that comes up you know you have to say oh is this a new market that we should build for like is this a use case that no one has been paying attention to and this can open up a bunch of new customers and are these a customers we want to work with can this help alter my vision right you have a pretty strong vision your product I'm the same way and sometimes you get a

11:32feature request and you're like that's not in my vision but should it be is this such an opportunity like building workflows like building automations you know it's like that this could this changes the whole Direction but it it could be amazing or is this one of those things I'm going to add that I'm going to regret because one person wanted it or the people who do want it are just not good fits for us or they're using it in a way that really that's not where we're headed you know we can grow faster we can get more customers through other you know other easier wins mhm and

12:02that's where like yeah it's it's important not to get too myopic sometimes you do you do want to keep an open mind right um and especially I think as a pretty horizontally positioned product there's all the more I guess it's it's more difficult to to know whether you're making the right decisions in general because you have a lot of different you have a variety of people using the product most savic Cal users care about creating an optimal booking experience but they are horizontal across a lot of different Industries use cases so like making sure you're staying in line with what your Market needs is extra difficult when

12:35you're positioned in this way um which is why I'm a big fan of of logging most things U this is runs counter to that traditional like 37 signals wisdom of like never write down a feature request and just expect it to resurface if it's important uh I used to I used to think that way but more and more I don't trust my own brain to remember when when certain Trends start to emerge because there's so much noise all the time so I like to log these in in a place I use our backlog for it some people are viscerally opposed to that but you know even just a spreadsheet could be a good

13:07place to just kind of keep track like how many times has this come up has this come up more recently should I be thinking strategically about like potentially building this thing and that's just helpful and I review it periodically and just uh kind of keep it fresh in my mind yeah I can imagine much like I will take notes on anything whether when I used to think of business ideas or now I'll think of like oh this interesting marketing approach or maybe I should write a book chapter about this record a podcast episode about this crazy topic and I just write all that stuff down in notebooks and periodically

13:37just like it's a backlog it's a backlog of ideas and periodically I revisit them and usually it's like that's not a good idea and here's why but any year it might be a good idea because you might change direction you know strategy changes over time and the direction of your product and your vision it can change so I can see that being valuable in a minute Dereck and I talk about using what I call the founder filter to find product Market fit but first if you've enjoyed this video you're going to love startups for the rest of us it's the podcast that we pulled this video

14:04segment from and I've been recording and shipping it every week for over 13 years on the podcast I go deep into a wide range of SAS topics and often answer listener questions which you can submit on our website at startups forther restof us.com check out the podcast on Spotify Apple podcast or wherever you tune in to your favorite shows all right let's get back to the conversation with Derek it's the the specifics of those examples and hearing that both the features you mentioned are completely reasonable and then you said why right that as I remember being a like a brand new baby founder and just feature request and was like I just

14:40build I'm going to just build everything people want and that's that's all thing that's where I struggle with like the customer development or leaning too much into just build what your customers want and then you'll hit product Market fit because I that's not I don't think that's actually true you have to have that filter that founder filter to to keep that Vision in line you know and to keep the product going in a direction that doesn't just duplicate all your competitors which is often what like less technical users want so more technical users often want you to just build that's just way too complicated you know and your power users can push

15:13you in a direction where it's like you built an build an unusable product or a product that then no one else wants to you know there's all these dangers with listening to every request uh a customer makes there's a reason you're the founder and your customers are not of of your particular company you know it's like you have to like much like guarding the quality of your code base we have to guard the quality of our product right the the ux and the Clutter and the the overwhelm that can happen by just putting a bunch of settings everywhere yeah I mean it's pretty it's a pretty

15:44common Trope but learning when to say no is just extremely valuable because you can't be everything for everyone and it's hard to resist that Temptation especially early on when you're just clamoring to get any customers to pay you and try to get some kind of traction like it's it's very difficult um to stick to your vision and know when to say no to certain things but um especially as and I think that part in one sense gets a little easier as you go and you have more traction you have a better sense of who your Market is um so it's it's not for the faint of heart in

16:14the early days to to try to solve that equation um but uh yeah that's just an important skill to to develop and as you said it does get easier it's really hard in the early days and then you're a year two three in I think the filtering process is much easier Tim Cook apple he says there will always be more great ideas than we can implement we are going to have to say no to some great ideas and I I think that's being an entrepreneur as well I hope you enjoyed this video check out this next one if you want to learn more about how Derrick

16:44and I built drip an email automation platform that we sold to lead Pages for a lifechanging amount of money and make sure you subscribe to this channel so you get more content like this every week see you next time