Not So Much About SaaS, More About Resilience

So I'm the creator of a SaaS business called YourPCM. I spun it out of the digital marketing platform that I developed over the past decade to offer blogging, social media and email marketing services to my clients ...

Over the Christmas 2022 holidays, I was working through my subscribers' feature request list as well as giving time to play with a few ideas I'd come up with to improve the user experience. The two weeks or so that my foot was 'off the gas' was great, with me being able to spend whole swathes of time coding and nothing in my diary as everyone else was taking a break.

"I achieved a massive amount!"

And I'm really pleased with the end results. I was able to add variable widths and font sizes to YourPCM, which my subscribers love, as well as build a search engine so that when someone reaches out to a subscriber, they can quickly find them rather than having to remember which section they put them in.

All was good coming into 2023. I did some final bug fixing, tested all the upgrades out with a few subscribers and signed them off, ready to renew my focus on sales and marketing as YourPCM is a founder-led SaaS product.

But no ... the Universe had other ideas. I have a sharing API I use to get blog posts, images and YouTube videos onto various social channels, and they told me they're stopping offering the API in the next couple of months. Darn it! I've been using it for 10 years and it was hard coded in various places around my digital marketing platform.

"Time to come up with an alternative solution!"

I'd normally send the raw shares via the API and list them all in associated channels in their publisher for sending later. This lets me check the links and messaging were right as well as ensure that any associated images were present.

I needed to replicate that facility behind the scenes on my own platform as a central repository of all the shares, then build a direct interface via Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin's own APIs rather than using the API of a third party.

So, I'm pleased to say I've done it. I have the ability to visualise what I want and then just start coding, creating what I see in my mind. I then fill in the gaps as I go along. It's all working now, but took a lot of time and effort to get right. Considering I thought I was finished with coding last week, having to do an extra solid week, as well as creating blog posts and all the other things I do during a working day ... well, I'm pretty tired now.

"Coding a major project does take time!"

Coding an entire platform takes longer. It also takes a lot of resilience because you know what you want to do (you can see it in your mind) and you just have to get on with it and make it work. It's one thing freewheeling ideas and seeing where it goes as I did over Christmas 2022, but having a project dumped on you just because someone else can't be bothered is a real pain.

I finished working on my new sharing processor yesterday afternoon and I was feeling cranky and tired after an extra week's work. I was a bit short with my best friend that afternoon because she caught me at the wrong time, but we're good now. I needed to just chill out for the evening, eat some scrummy food and watch a film. Forest Gump was my choice. I've seen it many times and it always brings me joy.

"It helped that my bestie cooked dinner for me!"

So, after a good night's sleep, I'm feeling must better now. I'm writing this blog post and drawing a line under my new sharing processor. It's working as it should, does what I want it to do, cuts the third party out of the loop, saves me some subscription fees, and barring a few visual tweaks, I can just leave it alone to get on with its job in the background.

It has been a long, hard slog, but totally worth it.

If anything I've mentioned here resonates with you, do call me on 0333 335 0420 and let's see how I can help.