The entrepreneurial space on Twitter is packed with posts praising “doing” instead of “thinking.” That’s understandable. People tend to confuse “overthinking” with “thinking” and “doing” with “getting results.”
Let’s take these concepts one by one:
→ Overthinking: Spending most of your time thinking uncontrollably or overanalyzing a subject. For example, this can be the architecture of your website, your business model, or the pricing plans. Overthinking may lead to:
→ Thinking: Using your mind to produce thoughts and reason about something. There are two ways of thinking:
→ Doing: Executing or engaging in a series of actions. By separating thinking from doing, we’re simply in motion, which involves:
→ Getting results: Engaging in a series of actions that stem from a clear purpose with a specific end goal. It’s worth mentioning that combining purposeful thinking with doing will result in diligent actions, subsequently leading to results.
You can dedicate a part of your time to thinking and developing a strong, well-defined growth strategy for your SaaS. Yet, you won’t move the needle without deploying this strategy and the action plan that derives from it.
Without thinking, though, you won’t be able to articulate your actions and align them with your growth strategy, ensuring their overall impact on your business.
In my experience, I’ve seen teams jumping into doing without thinking. Someone comes up with the idea that sounds good, and everyone agrees to execute it without evaluating things such as:
For example, someone may throw the idea of transforming users into creators and nudge them into building templates based on your software. Everybody likes the idea and decides to go with it. However, without going through the thinking process first, the team may miss several crucial details, such as:
You can deploy multiple actions. However, if there’s no thinking behind it, they’ll have little to zero impact on your overall growth.
We can’t separate thinking from doing, especially when growing a SaaS. Thinking is as critical as doing.
In some cases, SaaS teams will come up with specific actions and try to integrate them into the overall strategy resulting from a detailed and purposeful thinking process. That’s a wrong approach, however. Here’s how it looks:
→ Example:
Why is this approach wrong?
Just think about it: Building multiple feature pages won’t necessarily help you increase conversion. The team came up with an idea and justified its implementation by making a wrong assumption: more landing pages will lead to more traffic, which will ensure a higher number of signups.
Better conversion practices will help you ensure higher conversion—not a higher number of landing pages. They did that to integrate the idea into the overall growth strategy that aims to increase conversion.
What should they do instead?
Example:
Thinking is crucial to define a strong “doing” framework.
You can’t separate those two. Moreover, be deliberate and purposeful with your thinking time for better results. Your approach to thinking will make or break your SaaS.