Like many single founders out there, I have this perfect scenario mapped out in my head, and I think I’m on that road.
My perfect email parser journey encapsulating the internal workforce and customers really looks a bit like this.
Location Independence
I have this notion of being able to travel. Now, I have read about many of these single founder types who travel around working where they want. These digital nomads seem to be “living the dream” but I’m not sure I 100% believe it all.
Aside from the fact that a successful SAAS business takes time, the less time you spend on your business, the more time your competitors spend catching up to you. Your location may be irrelevant if you spend most of your hours locked to your laptop supporting, marketing or building. Being location independent has some financial implications too. And it also implies you don’t need to be in one place.
I have an amazing wife and twins who are 18 months old. One day they’ll be at a school that will be location-dependent. My location independence really just centers around one idea; that I don’t necessarily need to be at an office, at a location, with a boss I may not like.
Parserr’s ultimate success will fulfill my location independence desires.
Financial Independence
Financial independence for me centers around only one ideal at the moment: meeting my current salary at my current job. I work at an amazing company right now that rewards me satisfactorily. I pay a mortgage, and my needs are taken care of. I don’t live extravagantly.
However, working at a company affects points 1 and 3. It is location-dependent and time-dependent. My perfect scenario is to be independent of my current company to fulfill location, financial and time independence.
Parserr’s revenue matching my current salary will facilitate that independence.
Time Independence
I want to choose to have a guitar lesson at 3 pm on a Monday or work from 6:30 am to 3 pm any day I wish. By traveling to and from a location-dependent company, I am bound to 1.5 hours on a train and working hours stipulated by my colleagues (for meetings) and company. This doesn’t facilitate a time-independent scenario.
Employee Independence
Firstly without people, I don’t have a business. I need people to buy into Parserr; otherwise, it doesn’t exist. I love people, don’t get me wrong… but I’m talking about employees. I often find that work can bring out the worst in people. People also cost money and need a desk to work at.
I’m naturally an introvert and see that people will undoubtedly affect the location, time and financial independence. I am building Parserr so that most of it is automated. Unfortunately, the nature of parsing documents means that support is inevitable. However, until the load becomes overwhelming, I aim to do this myself until it becomes overwhelmingly time-dependent. Then I will most likely bring on a support engineer to handle the load.
Parserr, on the other hand, will most likely not need a sales team in the beginning. My somewhat unknown is that I will funnel potential customers from SEO efforts. Whether that is achievable or not remains to be seen. However, we are getting good traction so far, and I am trying to get as much quality traffic from quality websites as possible. To me, that means really appealing to the right customer audience, the websites where people go to find solutions to the email parsing problem. More on that in another post.
Final Thoughts
Setting these goals upfront for myself has somewhat narrowed the type of business I want to start. It’s not a unicorn. It’s a solid SAAS business. Overall, my ideal email parser journey is a package consisting of the three items mentioned above.
