Building Services that Consider How Time is Money

I am not sure where I heard this…but I learned from another tech founder that as founders we should value our time at $150 an hour.

This is amazing insight…

Sadly I see entrepreneurs treating time like it is endless instead of being very limited.

Of course we will all die in the end — so your time is very limited.

Time Does Not Come Free…So Don’t Treat it that Way

When founders view time as free and endless — it leads to spending it on things that we would should pay others (or a service) to do for us.

With this in mind, I look for opportunities to offload tasks to save money based on that $150/hour formula.

Let’s go through a real world example to illustrate the power of this

Twitter is an important channel for me to get my voice out there, connect with new people, and help me realize new ideas.

I basically built my entire business using Twitter. But that is another story for another day.

Twitter can be an added touch point on the customer journey of discovery.

Who knows…maybe a new Twitter friend later becomes an employee, client, or partner. These have all happened to me before.

Along with building a Twitter following, it works best if your Twitter feed is interesting and active.

Easy to do if you have the time.

If you have ever been a founder of a startup or business — you know how easy time is to come by. Not very…

There are days where I am too deep in the weeds of work to remember to get lunch.

You know what I am talking about…

So things like Twitter can fall down the list of ever-growing priorities.

But we have to keep networking and working on prospects. New clients and connections do not grow on trees and Twitter is an important channel.

So I had an idea of building out a service that automatically tweets inspirational quotes.

• I knew quotes performed well on Twitter, but many don’t have nice artwork.
• Many of the quotes are the same ones you see over and over again.

I knew I could do better...

Being a huge geek of quotes and philosophy in general…this was in my wheelhouse. So I built it!

The service is called ThoughtFlame and is now available (sorry to self promote, but I am proud of it).

Business Math Fun

Let’s say that I have ThoughtFlame putting out three tweets per day for me.

Doing this the old-fashioned way:

• Research for a good quote
• Create a pretty custom graphic to go along with it
• Post on Twitter

This usually takes about 15 minutes total, but let’s say I am heavily caffeinated and do it in 10 minutes.

That comes to 30 minutes per day.

• 30 days in a month = 900 minutes = 15 hours per month.
• At my $150 an hour opportunity cost = $2250.

Funny how ten minutes here and there adds up to over $2000!

Actually that is not funny at all.

I think we can all agree that a CEO should not be spending time on this. So let’s consider another solution.

Let’s say we hire someone to do it for me.

$50/hour is average for a gifted graphic design freelancer. Imagine I’m lucky and find someone great for only $40 per hour.

15 hours per month would cost $600.

Don’t forget I have to manage this person, check their work, and give guidance as needed.

I don’t know exactly how long that would take. One minute per tweet feels fair.

That is 90 minutes at a cost of $225.

So my outsourced version costs $825.

That is a good savings of $1425. We are making progress.

But almost $1000 a month is still a hefty bill for a small business…especially a bootstrapped startup.

Consider that ThoughtFlame costs only $69 a month.

That is nearly a 10X savings over hiring someone — and without the headaches.

I don’t know how much of a success ThoughtFlame will be, but any business that creates 10X savings propositions has a great chance for success.

When you can create tools that save people time, you are on your way to a service that will be very attractive to your audience.

Especially if the service is as good as doing the task by hand — or even better.

So can automated tweets really be effective?

I know you are wondering how effective automated tweets from a SaaS service can be.

Looking at my own Twitter analytics for @kjstrasser I see that automated tweets from ThoughtFlame were my top tweets for:

• June 2017
• March 2017
• February 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• November 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• July 2016
• April 2016
• March 2016

That numbers speak pretty loudly and honestly that is way beyond my own expectations. I only wanted something to keep my feed interesting on those days when I was swamped.

Conclusions

1. Time is money. Never forget this as a small business owner or startup founder.
2. Any tool you can build that saves people a large amount of time has great value.
3. I love ThoughtFlame. It will save you time and it is now available.

About the Author

Kevin Strasser is the CEO of TribeBoost and co-founder of Podfudge. You can connect with him at Twitter and LinkedIn.