On Acceleration

2026.09.27

CLXXI

[Take the Flight; And Then There Were None; Changing A Big Decision; Self Documenting; The Snowflake Effect; Tail Bets; No Permanent Plateaus]

Thesis: Being patient now so you don’t have to be patient later

[Take the Flight]

I took the most spontaneous flight I ever have this weekend - booked around 00:30am Friday, taken around 01:00pm that same day.

I don't regret it at all - in fact, it may be one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I still don't have fuck you money, but I'm also fortunate that both my cofounder & I agree that there's no sense in waiting til we're 'done' to occasionally exercise the freedom we're building for ourselves.

Still, I have been thinking about the notion of being patient now to be impatient later.

A few months ago, I said this was happening in my business. Now, it's accelerating.

This post will still be about B2B SaaS today, in a bit of a more non sequential way than usual. Don’t expect a grand revelation or through line; rather, it’s many meditations

But, first, I must say that even outside of business, I was being quite patient in a respect that I didn't even recognize as patience, because I didn't know what I was waiting for anything.

I don't know anything about you, dear reader, so I’m uncertain if you need to hear this, or if you should, but… when the timing is right, and you know it, you should take the flight without hesitation. You'll be glad you did.

[And Then There Were None]

Two more of WhiteWhale's competitors disappeared in the last 2 weeks.

The first one was interesting, because it was a company run by a non technical person who was deeply AI pilled vibe coding software, who all of a sudden just threw in the towel. I know the guy, and I know that he's pretty good at sales and distribution.

I think his venture lasted 3 months - an interesting counter point against the narrative of "You can vibe code anything and sell it as long as you know how to sell." I still think that it is possible to vibe code and sell a SaaS, I know people doing it, but I think the notion that building useful products and successful businesses is only dependent on 'distribution' misses a lot of nuance.

The second competitor had their team was hired by HubSpot. I'm not calling it an acquihire, as the press releases strangely did not call it an acquisiion, although some money likely changed hands, because an early investor is claiming they got ROI on the deal.

HubSpot has been very acquisitive lately, and is very aggressively building new products & features out. I think in another 2 years, it will be very interesting to see how much this translates into retained and expanded revenue.

I don't really know what's going to happen in the space, and I don't even feel comfortable making much of a strong prediction. That said, perhaps I'm naive or arrogant or both, but based on what I've seen so far, I'm not shaking in my boots about big companies all of a sudden being able to make way better software 'because AI', nor do I think that acquisitions & the like become less value destructive 'because AI.'

I think the structural advantages of a startup still exist, and if anything are more amplified by AI than the advantages of large companies are.

Eg, the binding constraint on a big company's code base is NOT the speed code can get written, it's the speed at which PR's can be merged, systems integrated, and committees convened. Maybe if you just yeet all of that to AI the speed does increase, but so does bloat.

Then, in terms of competitors my size... well, it's really hard to make a profitable, sustainable business in our space, and we are seriously starting to wonder if we are the only pure play 'signal company' that is profitable.

All of this is to say that it renews our vigor and energy to push the advantage while we have it.

It's the sort of thing that helps you stay in the mindset of "How do I achieve this goal for the customers as quickly & best as possible without breaking anything" rather than "I don't know if we should do this what if we break something or they don't like it."

You start to trust in your ability to predict that more and more, while accepting you can still be wrong.

[Changing A Big Decision]

We're writing a feature for WhiteWhale that we've explicitly said we'd never ever do. Crazy, right?

I still think it was right for us to not do it when we didn't do it, and I think it's right for us to do it, or at least try it, now.

I have a pretty mid version of it done, but it might take a week to make a really impressive version that gets us a lot closer to not only the thing our customers say they want, but the thing we see them doing even without our product (the latter is so much more important than the former).

It's a big risk, and it's basically impossible to get it 'perfect', but wanting to get it perfect is one of my toxic traits that slows down great.

This feature will be an attempt at completing the next 2 or 3 steps in our client's workflow. Even if it only succeeds 50% of the time for them, that is actually an insane improvement over what we have now, and very likely good enough that we'll see an uptick in usage, and more importantly, ROI.

[Self Documenting]

You would be surprised at how many things are not as self explanatory as you'd think. Even if you really think you're spelling something out for users, it's likely that it's not clear enough.

Take the below water faucet. Undoubtedly, entire committees argued about what icons they should use for the 4 buttons on the thing.

Inevitably, it still confused a high enough percentage of the users that Delta felt the need to print out a little explainer sheet, defining what each icon meant.

God, wouldn't it be so much easier if there was a design that even 99.99% of people just intuitively got?

During my time writing software with only hundreds of users (I suppose the total number is over a thousand now), I am shocked again and again by how much simplification is needed.

Changing copy here, removing a button there, has a real impact on getting people to take action. As an example, we just overhauled the copy & formatting of the Slack alerts we sent out and we're already having more users tell us about wins they're getting by following the alert to take action.

[The Snowflake Effect]

I once heard an argument that half the reason CTO's buy Snowflake is because they get to be the smart CTO who bought Snowflake and tell all the other CTO's about it at conferences. It becomes part of their identity in an additive way.

We want WhiteWhale to have this effect. One of our partners actually just posted about us on LinkedIn in a very natural way that makes me think in that direction. You can check it out, but basically it is "Signals are really important for outbound. You can either build your own tools or buy WhiteWhale, there isn't a comparable option on the market."

This is great for both the Partner and us: We get a partner bragging about using us, and he gets to be associated with the sexy new cool up and coming thing.

It translates to revenue for both of us, because it helps him get customers, and when he does a customer, there's a decent chance he grabs another WhiteWhale license from us. And better yet, because we know he's really good at using the software, we know that we won't have to do much Customer Support and the client is more likely to stay for longer.

This isn't our first partner like this, and we really don't want it to be our last.

[Tail Bets]

We took an interesting assymetric bet many months ago with another company that wanted to resell our data in their platform. It required quite a bit of engineering on our end, and I doubted if it would work.

For a while, it didn't. But, we changed the pricing model with them to be entirely consumption based. There had been so little usage that we weren't even charging them for it, but this month, all of a sudden, usage ticked up to what I think will be 4% of our revenue for September. This is really cool, and is a nice win.

I think I'm sharing this because it's a cool win and there are a lot of variables that go into getting something right. Changing something as simple as pricing can have a massive impact.

And, at this rate, anything can happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it became considerably more than 4% of our revenue over time and out stripped our other growth.

If you enjoyed this post, I’m here each week talking about bootstrapping SaaS and living life and, when I’m really in a mood, preventing the fall of the west.

[No Permanent Plateaus]

I love the idea of always having 'another level' to break through.

At first, when you have no customers, or get stuck for a bit, you might lose hope and feel that these levels are insurmountable.

It's counter intuitive, but I really do think it's important for you to try and 'master' the level before you spam through to the next one.

I talked about plateaus briefly before; here, I reaffirm that I think explosive growth happens because it's very hard to know what the real binding constraint is, but it's not so hard to know what the 10 most likely binding constraints are.

So, as you aggressively solve all of them one by one, everytime you're wrong about the problem you solved being THE binding constraint, but are right about it being one of the next 10, you're simply clearing the way for a growth spurt.

Because, once you solve the real constraint, if you've already accidentally solved the next 5 in an attempt to solve the main one, well, now you have a clear path to grow grow grow like gang busters.

I think there’s a similar pattern with a lot of things in life, which is maybe why it sometimes feels like so much good can happen all at once.

Live Deeply,

Noah Jacobs

(Signature image absent today as finishing post on cellphone, will be back)