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Comment by jehb | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who's interested in answering, I'd be curious to hear your thinking on how you keep focused and avoid rabbit holes, particularly with build vs. buy decisions.

I've had an intentionally-small business that I've been working on for a few years now, but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering. I've done a very good job of replacing Shopify with WooCommerce, Google Analytics with Plausible, exploring about every static site generator as a replacement for my slow CMS, automating my social media content, etc. I've done an absolutely shitty job of growing the actual core business. Particularly for those of you coming from jobs in a corporate environment, how do you keep your focus on your core offering instead of spending all of your time "fixing" your tech stack?

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> but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering

The answer should be obvious. You are selling the end product, not your tech stack. For an early stage company there is zero benefit to wasting time on pointless engineering purism. You should use as much SaaS and other pre-built software as you possibly can and spend 100% of your effort on your core offering.

> You are selling the end product, not your tech stack.

I think the mentality is that by having a better tech stack the product will be better and also more "future-proof". Personally, I always spend (waste) time upgrading all the libraries to the latest versions and maintain the code up to the current standards. Maybe it doesn't really improve the product, but it gives me confidence that I am always ready to implement whatever features or most recent improvements in technology I could take advantage of.

It sounds like you’re either avoiding sales or just not interested in the product/space. Either way, the answer is force yourself to focus on sales. If it doesn’t invigorate your interest, let it coast while you work on something else entirely. View tinkering as an absolute waste of time. If you enjoy it, tinker on something else so you can perhaps point to net new growth for your efforts.

I have a comical lack of focus and love to go on coding expeditions. I don't want to be productive; I want to enjoy what I do.

The core business makes enough. Not a lot, but enough. I treat this as permission to do things that don't help the bottom line.

I've recently started thinking about new features in terms of: - Increasing revenue (by bringing in new customers or reducing churn) - Reducing my support load

That's basically all I care about now as a one-person business. Too much support load means I get burnt out and can't work on the stuff I enjoy (coding). Too little revenue means I can't continue operating the business.

By thinking about the features in these terms it has helped me be clear about which features are really important to me right now. So if my support load is too high, I work on features that will reduce it.

I think you already know the answer, but here it is: when running a SaaS, you should be either closing deals or shipping code that is being paid by these deals, especially in the early days...

Please note that you have to get an actual deal (i.e. contract/payment) before you start coding. I've fallen way too much in the trap where I didn't get a written commitment to "if you have this I will buy". This has never worked for me.

Edit: some additional clarification

That sounds like something I would do (and I have ADHD). It's a sign of boredom. If you're not interested in the actual "core offering" (regardless of how excited you are about it, or etc.) then distractions will be harder to ignore.

Only thing that worked for me was stimulants.

I suggest to perhaps change perspective. If you enjoy tinkering with stack maybe it's yours? And it's better to sell something you like instead of forcing yourself to do something you don't?

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