Entrepreneurship & SaaS
Overview
The most voluminous domain in the source vault (213 idea notes + 50 entrepreneur notes + marketing notes). Covers the full journey from ideation through product building, customer acquisition, and monetisation — with a focus on solo and small-team founders.
Core Areas
SaaS Business Models
- SaaS fundamentals — recurring revenue, churn, LTV/CAC, MRR/ARR
- Pricing models: per-seat, usage-based, freemium, tiered plans
- Marketplace vs tool vs platform distinctions
- API-as-a-product (monetising data access)
- Vertical SaaS vs horizontal SaaS trade-offs
Ideation & Validation
- Problem-first vs technology-first ideation
- The “remove 4 useless things” heuristic (see
remove 4 useless things.md) - Market validation: customer interviews, landing page tests, waitlists
- Idea scoring: problem severity × market size × founder fit
- Domain areas generating ideas: finance, AI tools, trading, developer tools
Side Projects & Bootstrapping
- Documented active projects: TradeInsight.info, Powerball, Alpaca Markets + AWS Lambda automation
- Privacy-first product design considerations
- Solo founder operating model: ruthless prioritisation, async-first
- Revenue milestones before quitting day job
Product Strategy
- Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework
- Feature vs workflow products
- Build vs buy decisions for core vs context
- Smile Curve Theory — value concentrates at design and after-sales ends of supply chain (see
Smile Curve Theory 微笑曲线.md) - Christian business values integration (see
Build a Successful Business on a Foundation of Christian Values.md)
Growth & Marketing
- Content-led growth: blog, YouTube, SEO
- Community building as distribution
- B2B outbound: cold email, LinkedIn, founder-led sales
- Referral mechanics and viral loops
AI-Enhanced Building
- LLM integration in SaaS products
- AI agents for automation (Claude Code, OpenAI API)
- Prompt engineering as a product layer
- Competitive moats in the AI era: data, distribution, trust
Relationships
- AI & Machine Learning — AI tools powering new SaaS categories
- Cloud & AWS Infrastructure — cloud as SaaS delivery platform
- Career Development — founder as career path
- Trading & Finance — TradeInsight.info product domain
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) — core business model concept
- SaaS Distribution — directory listings and low-cost acquisition channels