Notes on running a software company

I’ve been running a software company for a while now. Nobody trained me for it. These are the notes I wish had been handed to me on day one — not strategy, just the things that turned out to be true.

The product is the easy part

This sounds arrogant until you live it. Building software is a skill, and if you’re reading this it’s probably one you have. What nobody tells you is that the software is maybe 20% of the company. The other 80% is pricing, positioning, saying no to bad-fit customers, and figuring out that “it works” and “anyone wants it” are different sentences.

Revenue is the only scoreboard that isn’t lying

We tracked everything at the start: signups, sessions, stars, press. Most of it was vanity wearing a metrics costume. Revenue is slower, less fun, and impossible to fake. When we finally started looking at it weekly instead of monthly, our decisions got noticeably better.

Hire slowly, especially early

Every hiring mistake I’ve made came from urgency. The empty seat feels like the emergency, but the wrong person in the seat is the emergency — it just takes six months to show up. A small team of people you trust beats a big team you manage. By a lot.

Say the uncomfortable thing early

The misalignment that kills companies never announces itself. It’s the co-founder who won’t say they want out. The customer who won’t say the product isn’t working. The team that won’t say the deadline is fiction. I’ve learned to treat “I’m probably wrong, but” as a professional skill, not a weakness.

Boring is a feature

Every “boring” decision we made — plain pricing, slow deliberate hiring, a simple product that does one thing — aged well. Every “exciting” one — pivots, big logos we weren’t ready for, growth hacks — aged like milk.

You will not feel ready

Not for the first hire, not for the price increase, not for firing your first person, not for any of it. The feeling never arrives. You do it anyway, and afterwards you understand why nobody could have prepared you.