422: The Things Your Customers Don't Care About

Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. When you build a software business as a founder, you have this dream. Right? The dream is to build something that people actually need, something that they want and something that will make you money and that you can keep building and make better and make more money as you build it and make it better. And maybe there's an extension to that dream where you sell it for millions or where you build a company that allows you to retire. But the core of the dream, the interesting part, I mean, everything is interesting, but what is interesting right now is that you have a thing that you think needs to be built and then you build it and then people come and give you money for it because they actually need it. Now that is a dream. Quick word from our sponsor here, paddle.com. I use them as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of my taxes currencies. They track decline transactions and they update credit cards in the background so that I can focus on dealing with my product and my competitors and my customers and not have to deal with banks and financial regulators. I don't really like interacting with them at all. So it's nice that Paddle takes care of this for me. So if you think you would rather just build your product at work on that dream, and we will see how realistic that is, the dream not working on it, check out paddle.com as your payment provider. People paying for your product. It's not just a dream, right? That's the general concept of entrepreneurship. But along the way, you will realize that this starting point isn't actually the whole story. Along the way, there are a lot of things that you care about personally that other people simply don't. So today I want to demystify the stream. I think we should be diving into a couple of things that might be contentious, polarizing in their ways, but are definitely things that you as a founder are over indexing on that other people just don't care about. It's It's kind of a a warning to not do certain things even though they feel like the right thing, but they're not. This is obviously gonna be different for every project and every founder. But what I have learned from my own experience building PodScan and the other SaaS businesses in my life. Let's start with the visible parts, the user interface of a software product. I thought if I don't spend hours or days or weeks tweaking this interface, people are not going to be using my product because they have high expectations. That's what I thought. And lo and behold, people still use it. Even though a lot of the things that I want to change, things that I feel deserve weeks of refactoring have been sitting in …