Some expensive mistakes I've made

I started building my SaaS boilerplate (getparthenon.com) two years ago. And over those two years, I've spent thousands of euros on various things trying to get thing going and made mistakes that cost me time and energy. Here are some of the expensive mistakes I've made along the way.

Long build time before going to market

So one of the first major mistakes was just spending a lot of time building Parthenon before releasing it. I built Parthenon to be flexible after spending multiple years at various startups and seeing the exact same tasks being worked on with the exact same issues. Most companies were spending a large amount of time working on generic tasks. One of the main issues was that they weren't flexible enough. So I build Parthenon to be super flexible. This meant I built three applications on it before I released it. Using different databases and different stacks.

Overall, most of the flexibility isn't really used right now, and I've got enough experience in designing flexible applications that I didn't really need to prove the flexibility so much, and I could have added flexibility later.

I should have released it earlier. This cost me time and energy.

Use paid ads for a purpose

While I was building Parthenon, I realised I should at least try and sell some of the apps I built. So I built a CRM that could be used as a kanban board, basically a Trello but with invoice generation purposes.

I thought, just put ads on, and people will sign up. I spent a bunch on ads and only got a few sign-ups. Overall, I got more signups while I was ignoring this project than I did while I was spending money on ads.

I learned if I'm going to use paid ads, it should not be to get signups as most people don't sign up the first time they hear about you. Using paid ads to get people to on to a newsletter and then mature them.

I am not sure how much I spent on paid ads overall. This probably cost me $1,000.

Build for a reason other than building

So part of the Parthenon development was to build 3 apps on it. These apps now just sit in my GitHub repository list, only being used for backward compatibility tests. I don't use them, nor does anyone else.

For one of the apps I built, I built integrations with other systems. It was an order anomaly detection system for e-commerce systems. So I build Magento, Shopware, and WooCommerce integrations.

Now I only build things that I want to use. Worse case, I end up with something I can use.

These cost me time and energy. Overall, a lot of it.

Don't need an amazing landing page design

When I first started out, I used a template I got for $30. People commented that it was a poor landing page design, and I ended up buying custom designs. For Parthenon, I'm on the 3rd or 4th professional design. The site was only launched a year ago.

Starting with a simple design that conveys the message and uses stock images works well for the majority of indie projects. The copy is far more important than the design. Just don't have a terrible design a so-so bland design will work.

This cost me overall in the range of $4-5k.

Write the copy yourself

One of the things I learned was the copy on the landing page was important. So I tried to outsource this. The main issue I had was that multiple copywriters literally didn't understand the value Parthenon brings nor the pain it solves. This resulted in landing pages that people just didn't really understand.

Writing your own copy helps you to explain to the world the value it brings and the pain it solves. You can go over your landing page copy many times. That is ok.

Also, it hurts a lot less when someone says the copy you wrote sucks than the copy you bought for $500 sucks (and that was still cheap).

This cost overall in the range of $1,000

You don't need scaling power straight away

When you start out, you use the development experience you gained from your day job. And that was that you needed to be able to scale, handle traffic growth, traffic spikes, etc. So if you're like me, that means you overpowered the hell out of your setup and were able to handle hundreds of requests per second. When you get three visitors per day, one of them being you.

The lesson is to start really small and really cheap and don't scale out to separate servers and a professional scale setup until you have lots of traffic. If you have 4 users, you're probably going to be ok if your site goes down for 2-hours while you fix it. It's embarrassing, but hardly anyone will notice if they notice it at all.

This cost me more than $500 in excess server power that wasn't used.

Conclusion

There are still more mistakes that cost me more money, but this post is rather long, so I'll end it here.

I'm currently building https://blether.chat, which is a privacy-focused Live Chat that allows you to not need an annoying cookie banner. So if you've made it this far, check it out.

If you want to find out about the future expensive mistakes, I'll make you can follow me on here as I'll be continuing to post as I go on.