The Saddle Stitch Priority Manifesto

The success of a software company (or any company) is determined by the founder’s ability to make decisions that prioritize the right actions.

In this sense, prioritization and strategy are one in the same, but in my mind, prioritization is more connected to action, so I prefer to use that term.

I’m writing this manifesto and subsequent guide for myself and other founders to reference in the early stages of starting a software company or building a software for internal company use.

If you’re not yet familiar, my name is Christian Beatty, co-founder and lead developer here at Saddle Stitch Studio. We’re a software development studio based out of Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ll be drawing from my own experience ideating, developing, and selling a software company and developing and consulting on many software development projects for our clients.

I’ll also be pulling what I’ve learned through podcasts, videos, and articles from resources like YC, Practical Founders, Alex Hormozi, and a number of other brands and personalities that I can’t give enough credit to. The internet is a beautiful thing.

The goal for writing this is to help you think about how to prioritize action in the early stages of your software startup.

Education shapes priorities, and priorities are influenced by two different types of education.

Tactical education is reliable and repeatable instructions on how to accomplish something specific.

Examples might include:

It’ll generally work the same way every time, and the main factor in accomplishing the expected result is the

educator’s ability to explain how to do it

and the

student’s ability to understand and implement that explanation

.

There may be some minor contextual nuances, but generally speaking, the results are consistently repeatable with nearly 100% guarantee.

My experience is that tactical education provides confidence, and your confidence in being able to accomplish an activity will influence how you prioritize it.

Let’s say you have two tasks you need to accomplish:

If you have no idea how to do the technical setup, you’re going to write a blog post. But let’s say you’ve already written multiple blogs, and now the technical setup is more impactful for SEO. Without knowing how to do the technical setup, you’ll prioritize blog writing until it becomes a problem more painful than the perceived difficulty of learning technical SEO.

But if you find a YouTube video early on that clearly breaks down how to set up technical SEO for your site in 20 minutes, you’ll have confidence in your ability to do it in a short amount of time and it will be more appropriately prioritized.

Another type of education in this guide is

wisdom

.

Wisdom is a mixture of knowledge and experience, but it’s instructions are not guaranteed.

I like to think that some wisdom pertains to the order of what to do and other wisdom pertains to the decision of what not to do. Both are important.

For instance, some founders make the mistake of creating a software based off of a solution and not a problem.

There are many founders of AI software products today that solve a fake or low-priority problem rather than solving a real pain point. That’s because they see the potential value of AI (a solution) and search for a problem with that solution in mind.

Often times, these ideas sound great in theory, but in practice don’t resonate with people and have trouble gaining traction with any real paying customers.

So it’s wise to begin creating a software in order to solve a specific pain point rather than creating a software that begins as a solution. Yes, there are examples of people who had success despite using this approach, and people who were unsuccessful using it, which is why it’s wisdom.

I find that wisdom will influence how you prioritize the direction of all or a large group of actions more so than specific individual actions.

You’ll see a blend of tactical education and wisdom throughout this guide.

Don’t read this guide passively. Make judgements as you read and take notes on how you’ll re-order current priorities accordingly.

This guide will dive into 3 aspects of starting and building a software.

Let’s begin with guide number 1: Prioritizing Software Ideas.