I guess this applies to solo founders (like me) and micro teams but after making a decent livelyhood from SaaS too, my experience is that a lot of people confuse product and project.
I mean a project is something you do in your leisure time (like on a weekend) and it's meant more to show off your coding skills or scratching your own itch or maybe like gaining the pleasure a painter gains from drawing a picture.
A product otoh is a very different beast. It does need a project but that is like may 10-15% of it. The rest is a whole new world of selling, maintaining, growing which has things like content marketing, link building, SEO, optimizing Salescopy, sending out emails, building an affiliate program, recruiting affiliates, A/B testing, conversion optimization, reducing attrition, giving bonuses, doing discounts and coupons, cross-selling, upselling, funnels, analytics and a hundred different things.
The product makes you money, the project gives you pleasure of coding. For new founder and especially programmers trying to make a buck selling online services it can be a easy pitfall.
This makes some sense of it. The author has a project that happens to have some financial reward.
A startup SaaS is a product, and while a project can become a product, I think it is better to set out from the beginning as a product. And for projects to remain so and be treated that way as the author describes.
Projects are great, but revenue is the primary metric for most SaaS products, and and if you follow YC school of thought you should be chasing growth of that metric.
I mean a project is something you do in your leisure time (like on a weekend) and it's meant more to show off your coding skills or scratching your own itch or maybe like gaining the pleasure a painter gains from drawing a picture.
A product otoh is a very different beast. It does need a project but that is like may 10-15% of it. The rest is a whole new world of selling, maintaining, growing which has things like content marketing, link building, SEO, optimizing Salescopy, sending out emails, building an affiliate program, recruiting affiliates, A/B testing, conversion optimization, reducing attrition, giving bonuses, doing discounts and coupons, cross-selling, upselling, funnels, analytics and a hundred different things.
The product makes you money, the project gives you pleasure of coding. For new founder and especially programmers trying to make a buck selling online services it can be a easy pitfall.