Why an apartment is better than a house for most creators

I want you to think about when you first started your career. Maybe you’re there right now. What you need as far as living arrangements go isn’t a big house with a lot of maintenance. You’re just starting your career. Maybe you’re focused on work; you’re not spending a lot of time at your living place because you’re going out with coworkers and friends and partners. You need an apartment. This serves as a place for you to keep your stuff, make some meals, and rest your head.

A house is for when you have more people living with you — a family — and a home office. It’s when your career is in full swing and you have time to do those home maintenance projects, or at least the money to pay for somebody to replace that $10,000 HVAC (yes this happened to me recently).

The hosted versus self-hosted being renting an apartment vs. owning a home analogy has been done to death. But it’s the perfect framing for creators. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Most creators are at the proverbial beginning of their careers; they’re probably not making all of their money from being a creator. Maybe they don’t have the technical know-how to own a house. What they need is a simple place to sell their creations. This is why renting an apartment that is using some hosted SaaS tool is better than owning a house that is using a self-hosted solution like WordPress.

You Want to Get Up and Running Quickly

The first aspect is you want to get up and running quickly. You don’t want to spend time evaluating hosting, determining what WordPress plugins you need, and then how to connect everything.

You can sign up for Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, or ConvertKit, and be up and running in an hour.

OR you can go the WordPress route, and figure everything out yourself…and maybe be up and running in a couple of days.

…Assume you’ve tested everything and it worked on the first try.

This is one big reason the proverbial apartment is better. Besides some furniture, an apartment has everything you need. That’s not the case for a house.

You Don’t Know What Custom Features You Need Yet

The other common reason to go with a SaaS over your own solution is you don’t know what custom features you need yet.

Let’s look at ESPs. If all you need is a sign-up for and to reliably send emails, ConvertKit is incredibly good at that. And they have a bunch of other features for you to explore too.

Same with selling an only course. If all you need is a place to create lessons and host videos, Teachable is better.

This goes along with speed. SaaS companies understand the features that 99% of their customers need. So they build and optimize for those features. You’ll know they work, and if something breaks, they make sure to fix it.

Why would you spend time building a platform when these SaaS companies already exist? Because if it’s to save money, check how long it takes you, then look at your hourly rate.

…then think about how you could have been growing your business instead of building a platform to save $15/month.

You Don’t Have the Domain Knowledge of Running a Specific Platform

The last reason to go with a SaaS is that you have no idea how to run some specific platform or product. Let’s look at ESPs again.

This is all ConvertKit does. They know how to make sure their customers aren’t experiencing deliverability issues. They know how to optimize their servers so said servers aren’t crushed under the weight of sending hundreds of emails at once.

And they know how to make sure you’re complying with local email and privacy laws.

Do you know about any of that? Probably not.

Maybe you could learn it with experience. The same experience that comes with discovering what features you need custom built.

But until then, you should leave those crucial parts of your business to the professionals. Let ConvertKit, Teachable, and Shopify worry about how to implement email sending, online course delivery, and eCommerce. In the beginning, you’ll be so busy learning your own business that it will be nice not having to also wonder why your WordPress-sent email is going to spam and no one is seeing your promos.

After all…at 22 and fresh out of college, did you really want to spend your precious weekends repairing an HVAC (or worse, paying $10,000 to have one replaced), when a landlord could have been worrying about it?