A few months ago I was catching up with a consultant friend who works with small and mid-sized companies. He told me about a client, a founder running a small services company, who had asked him, almost sheepishly, "Should we be doing something with AI?" The founder had seen the headlines, watched competitors mention it … Continue reading Every Small Company Is in One of Three Places with AI
Engineering Leadership
Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 2: The Product Architecture That Powered the Business
The multi-tenant database solved our scaling problem. Data updates that had previously taken weeks now flowed to subscribing clients automatically. Onboarding went from a technical project to a configuration exercise. The foundation was solid. But a database isn't a product. Our clients weren't paying for a well-designed schema; they were paying for access to healthcare … Continue reading Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 2: The Product Architecture That Powered the Business
Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 1: From a Dozen Databases to One
When I walked into The Ignition Group for the first time, the company had about a dozen paying clients and a proof of concept that had been duplicated for each of them. In one of our first conversations, the founder was straightforward with me: "We know this setup isn't going to work long-term. That's why … Continue reading Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 1: From a Dozen Databases to One
Your First Engineering Hire Shouldn’t Be a CTO
When I joined a healthcare data SaaS company as their first senior technical hire, nobody called me the CTO. The CEO needed someone who could build the product, and that's what I did. I reported directly to him, I wrote code, I designed the database, I directed a small, contracted engineering team, and I started … Continue reading Your First Engineering Hire Shouldn’t Be a CTO