Saent, Made With Saent
#29 Saent, Made With Saent
This series is about what we’re learning, observing and experiencing while building our startup Saent (pronounce “Saint”). The good, the bad and especially the ugly, each time in under 5 minutes reading time.
We recently past the one year mark, and our product is in production in the factory in Shenzhen — it’s a good moment to look back and ask, “What have been the essential ingredients for making Saent?”
*People* Without amazing human beings working towards a shared vision of solving an important problem, very little gets achieved. This is, hopefully, obvious, but it has to be included when talking about essentials.
*Tools* Without proper equipment to do the job, it’s hard to create anything of value. In modern (tech) startups this often constitutes of software and hardware devices, but in our case it also includes “real” tools, like machines in the factory where we produce our hardware.
An inside view of Saent.
Money* While in some cases a modern company or product can literally be created in one’s spare time from the bedroom, building a hardware device and desktop software (for Mac OS X and Windows) does not fit within that category. You need at least some money to allow everyone to eat, employ freelancers and vendors, as well as buy materials for testing and production.
** We are actually not that far off when it comes to* creating from home.
*Luck* Yes, that’s right, you need to be lucky to get to where we are now (and we will need a whole lot more to get where we are going!).
“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.” - Professor Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
Literally hundreds of things could have gone differently in the past year. If only a few of them had turned out for the worse, we might not be at this point right now.
*Patience* Patience is often underestimated; it’s not considered a virtue for nothing. While I’ve never been extremely impatient, being more patient is certainly something I’ve learned this past year.
Impatience in product development means you try to speed things up that can’t be sped up. Or you take shortcuts that eventually turn out to be detours. Impatience means losing quality, time, or both. This doesn’t mean you should be slow, or lazy, but you need to master the art of when to push, and when to wait and do the right thing.
*What else?* Those are the factors I consider the most important ingredients that have gone into Saent over the past 13 months. But there’s one missing: focus.
Fittingly, Saent has literally been built with Saent. Almost from the beginning, we’ve been working with crude prototypes. First of the software, then also the hardware. Using Saent has greatly contributed to me and the rest of the team being able to focus, as well as to take sufficient breaks to re-energize and, perhaps most importantly, think.
First Saent wireframe mockup.
The product you will soon get to see and use is therefore literally built with help from itself!
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