Business coach Caleb Jones suggests there are just five things you need to build a successful location independent business. They are:

1. Choose a narrow niche.
2. Find a burning problem or desire within that niche.
3. Develop a solution to that problem.
4. Sell only high margin products or services.
5. Devote the vast majority of your time on marketing.

That's the big picture.

Based on my observation of many successful businesses, it's an effective formula. Jones asserts that except for choosing a niche, which can be hard because the grass always seems greener on the other side, these are all easy.

It's the right perspective to have because we often overcomplicate things. Creating a logo becomes a multi-day design project costing hours and hundreds or thousands of dollars. At the end, we're no closer to completing the 5 steps above. (Ok, maybe 5 mm closer to completing the marketing step.)

Elements of Business that Take Your Eyes Off the Big Picture

Building a SaaS business seems hard because at every turn, there is a wide range of options. This exacerbates our fear of failure.

When choosing which product to build, you might have half a dozen ideas you've been entertaining over the past few weeks. It's hard to choose one because they all seem good at some level, but they also have some risk.

When choosing tools and frameworks for building your SaaS product, you might find dozens of options. There are always many ways to combine tools to achieve the same end, each with its pros and cons. There's always a tradeoff in time versus money.

If you choose a no-code tool, you can get a product out there faster, but there might be a limit to the speed and scalability of your app in the long run.

It might be easier and faster to learn a no-code tool than full stack web development, but what if you're already a developer? No-code tools have their own set of components, terminology, and ways of fitting together. Is it worth your while, given there's still a learning curve?

When choosing marketing platforms, you also have a dizzying array of options.

Should you start with YouTube because you can raise awareness about the problem you solve more quickly there? If you decide to do so, you’ll have to accept the fact that you won’t be getting as much traffic to your website as you could with a blog. You also have to keep in mind that you’re on rented land. If you unintentionally violate one of YouTube’s policies, they could suspend your account and you might have to start a new channel or leave the platform altogether.

If you start with a blog, it will take time to get organic traffic to your site, but if the blog is on your own website, you call the shots. You don’t have to worry about getting shut down by a platform. It’s also nice to be able to update your articles and expand them.

Pro Tip: Start with small articles—what Gwern calls perpetual drafts—on specific topics that you add to incrementally until each becomes a massive post serving gobs of insight to your audience.

"Never start. Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself."—Gwern

Or you might prefer social media, publishing quick posts on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, wherever you like to hang out and wherever your target audience likes to hang out. If you already know how the platform works, then it's just a matter of continuing what you do.

If you like to hang out on social media for leisure, you're just a step away from doing it to grow your business. Blur the lines between entertainment and marketing. You won't be able to post super long pieces of content, but you can entice people to the longer pieces through short, “shiny object” posts.

There's still the downside of being on someone else's platform, but you can reduce the risk by expanding to multiple platforms after you've built an audience on one.

Building a Business Need Not Involve Intense Exertion

What makes growing a SaaS company hard isn't that some aspect of it is inherently brain wracking or physically demanding. It's not like you're training for Olympic powerlifting or trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.

The mental gymnastics requirement is much lower than what you need to pass a coding interview.

The hard part comes from more basic struggles, like dealing with the fear that you might choose the wrong option at any stage of your business, or the fear of missing out on all the other options once you've chosen your path.

The hard part is dealing with distraction. How do you arrange your schedule so that the only option you have in front of you is the thing that will most positively impact company revenue and your future income?

On second thought, that might require some mental gymnastics. Unless you were born with the right set of business-scaling habits—which none of us are—you've got some habits you need to get rid of. You have to live life for a while to find out what your strengths and weaknesses are, and your preferences, so that later you can work with them to mold habits conducive to solving the problem you've chosen.

It's unlikely you'll land on the perfect set of habits, so you'll have to change some of them, which could be hard for deeply ingrained ones.

Planning a process for getting rid of bad habits and adopting new ones could require some mental gymnastics rivaling a FAANG coding interview. To pass a big tech coding interview, you need to learn data structures and algorithms, then practice dozens or hundreds of LeetCode problems to learn generic problem solving patterns you can apply to instances of each algorithmic puzzle category.

Is there an equivalent training regime for learning the problem solving patterns you need to recognize bad habits, choose better ones, and create a process for replacing the bad habits with good ones? Is there a training regime for dealing with emotional roadblocks like FOMO, analysis paralysis, fear of failure, distractibility, and outcome dependence?

Someone needs to invent a LeetCode for identifying habits that drain your bank account and replacing them with habits that increase the cash in your bank account. The person who develops that LeetCode analog would become a billionaire.

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