{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/articles/six-systems-that-save-you-months/","result":{"data":{"post":{"id":"5aa68f6e-f333-560c-8550-3371c518dca9","html":"

Everything, to me, is about systems.

\n

I said this even at the start of solidbook: the world is a patchwork of systems, and that's fundamentally how we deal with complexity. Software development, at its core, is us building systems of transformation. Little products, pieces of a larger workflow, systems where value moves through, where we take someone from A to B. That's what we're actually doing. Whatever you're building, whatever you're selling, fundamentally, is a system that takes someone from A to B.

\n

Years ago I decided I was going to study everything about business and systems to the same degree, same vigor, that I studied domain-driven design and everything else in software. I wrote down literally every term I didn't understand. Offers, brand, customer lifetime value, acquisition cost — there's something like 27 different numbers and keys you need to know to run a business properly. Different types of funnels you can run. I found some incredible mentors along the way to help me with that.

\n

So why am I telling you this as a developer? Because one of the first things I teach in The Software Essentialist is metaphysics, and part of that is helping you understand where you actually fit into the workflow.

\n

The Six Systems

\n

There are fundamentally six systems required for a business to work: mindset (or leadership), sales, product, marketing, operations, finance. All six are required. Every time.

\n

\"The

\n

Let's look at a few examples.

\n

QuickBooks vs. Kajabi. Take a business like QuickBooks. Basically you're building the product, that's what a developer there is working on. But zoom out, and QuickBooks isn't just a product, it's the entire finance domain for a huge number of companies. In DDD terms, QuickBooks is basically the Finance bounded context for whoever's using it. If you're building your own product or service and you need to integrate with it, you're integrating with that bounded context, respecting its boundaries, working within its model of what \"finance\" means. But if you're the one running the business, you don't think about it that way at all, you just think \"that's the tool that handles my finance system.\"

\n

Kajabi is a more interesting example, because it does so much. Product goes into it. I generate sales through the products that are in there. In terms of operations, a lot of the work I need to do each week happens inside Kajabi. I can pull and report on my finances through it. Even my email marketing runs through it and helps produce sales. So Kajabi does a lot, which is exactly why it's such a valuable tool for a business to run on. It's not one bounded context. It's stitched across several of the six pillars at once.

\n

Understanding these six systems empowers you to actually look at what you're building and ask yourself: how does what I'm building fit into these six pillars?

\n

B2B or B2C?

\n

You could build a consumer product, or you could build a B2B product. If you build B2B, something like Outrank or Tweet Hunter, those tools tend to sell for a higher price, have longer longevity, and people don't churn as much. Because money actually flows through a business. If you're saving a company time or making them money, you've slotted into a business somewhere, and that's a no-brainer sale.

\n

This is exactly why the six pillars work so well as a lens for B2B specifically. A business already has energy flowing through all six of these systems. When your product slots into one of them and saves time or money, you're not convincing anyone of anything, they already understand that spending on a tool that helps the business is just doing business. That's a much harder case to make with an individual consumer.

\n

Service Business vs. SaaS Business

\n

Here's the thing developers usually don't understand, and it's exactly why so many of us build in isolation for years, or throw a hundred different things onto the internet and hope one sticks.

\n

Developers don't come from a service-based business point of view. Actual business owners understand that for a business to work at all, you need a sale. So what they'll do, literally, is put it in a document. A Google doc. They'll write out an offer, an outcome. They'll go to a business, promise it, shake hands, charge payment, and then do the work. That's a service business.

\n

It's a completely different level of leverage than a SaaS business, and it's exactly why, if you're trying to get to $10k a month, it makes more sense to start with a service business than a SaaS business. Or, if you're going to build SaaS anyway, make sure you've very, very accurately validated that people actually want the thing before you build it.

\n

Levels of Leverage

\n

Labor and service sit at the bottom of this. SaaS sits at the top. Higher leverage.

\n

\"Levels

\n

But you don't get to skip to the top just because it's better leverage. You earn your way up by building systems — service first, proving the demand, then systematizing it, then productizing it. Skip straight to the top without the system underneath it, and you've built a product with nothing holding it up.

\n

Because energy needs to move through the system. Come back to the six pillars: skipping straight to product, without first validating that someone will actually put money in, is skipping the first few systems entirely. And I get it, as builders, that's attractive. We want to build. But that's the whole reason this is so hard for developers specifically.

\n

There's a lot of ways to get that first sale, or that first validation. Run $10, $50 in ads over a weekend, pointed at a simple book-a-call funnel, not to sell anything yet, just to get in front of that type of person and either pitch solving their problem or just have a conversation with them. Go to your network. Look at competitors. Start building an audience, that's another one, just putting yourself in front of the right people consistently. So many options. But fundamentally, whatever tool you pick, what you're actually trying to achieve is the same thing: get a real conversation with a real person. That's the whole target. Everything else is just a way of getting there.

\n

When I discovered this, I'd been doing things pretty backwards. It was a real paradigm flip for me, but once it clicked, a lot of things fell into order and finally made sense.

\n

The 15-Minute Landing Page

\n

Here's where AI changes the picture. What Claude can do is zoom out and handle operations across many of these six pillars at once.

\n

I taught a business owner last week, a friend of mine, and he told me it used to take him two weeks to build a landing page for a new client's site. I told him we could get that down to 15 minutes. He said no way. So we sat down at a coffee shop for about 30 minutes, and we built a Claude skill that systematized his entire workflow, cutting across all the different tools he uses across all these different systems. His workflow went from two weeks to 15 minutes flat. He bought me dinner that night and told me that one thing I'd just taught him was guaranteed to make him 15k a month.

\n

That's the value of actually understanding how these six pillars work, and the leverage you have as a developer once you see it. And even if you don't want to go build for business owners, if you're working on a tool that's vital to other companies internally, like QuickBooks, the work you're doing still matters enormously to those companies' success.

\n

Avatar. Problem. Solution.

\n

If you're someone who wants to build a product, the most important thing to understand is that people don't really care about products. They care about getting to outcomes. That's what a service business is, at the start: helping someone achieve an outcome. I'm going to help you get a girlfriend in 90 days. I'm going to help you reduce your customer churn. I'm going to help you increase your leads by 50% a month. I'm going to help you cut your ad spend, or get customers without spending on ads or content at all. These are incredible outcomes to the right avatar.

\n

The model is avatar, problem, solution. Put that together and you have a system.

\n

\"Avatar

\n

Once you have a system, you can productize it, and that product could be software, or these days, it could even just be a Claude skill.

\n

If the system you're building is genuinely complex, that's when it's worth turning into a real product. I'm actually building my own right now, based on a real system I built that solved a real, hard problem. You'll hear more about it in the weeks to come.

\n

So, practically: who? What avatar, what industry do you care about? Doesn't matter which one — hairstylists, small business owners, hospitality, there's even someone in our community doing this in the maternal care industry. Then ask what problems they have. Use your wizardry as a developer, as a problem solver, and focus there.

\n

This is the third of the Five Phases of Craftship we teach in The Software Essentialist, and notice it's not a code-first conversation, not even a best-practices-first conversation. It's pattern-first, problem-first. And this is where it gets genuinely lucrative — there's more money in focusing on problems than there is in focusing on code.

\n

\"The

\n

So: one, pick who, the industry you care about. Two, can you access them, and find what's actually painful — a painkiller, not a vitamin. Three, can you creatively design a solution and systematize it, even messily, maybe just through Claude to start. Every industry has problems. Problems exist. You just have to find them.

\n

Once you find a real problem and care enough about it, you can make an offer. That's what a service business really is — a clean offer to solve a problem. Solve it for $3-5k. Find someone else in the same industry with the same problem, make them the same offer, and you've already got a system built. Once you've validated it that way, that's when it's worth turning into software, because now you're scaling something already proven instead of guessing.

\n

Why This Matters Right Now

\n

Most developers don't build this way, because we're trained code-first, and most of the world still is. But AI is eating code-first fast, so code-first alone isn't going to take you very far anymore. Most developers also aren't aware of these six systems, or that energy needs to flow through all of them for a business to actually work.

\n

Which is also exactly why, if you're under $10k a month, the two things worth focusing on are mindset and getting a sale. Get one sale, and you've kicked off a business. And now you can focus on growing the flywheel.

\n

If you want to know more about how all of this works — service versus SaaS, validating before you build, the six pillars — it's all in the book I released, Sell First. It's $27 right now, back to $97 at the end of the week.

\n

Get Sell First — $27

\n

And if you're still code-first, I'd recommend at least getting to best-practices-first before any of this. The Software Essentialist will help you lock in on what actually matters, so you can transcend those first two phases and get here.

\n

— Khalil

","fields":{"slug":"/articles/six-systems-that-save-you-months/","readingTime":{"text":"10 min read"}},"headings":[{"depth":2,"id":"The-Six-Systems","value":"The Six Systems"},{"depth":2,"id":"B2B-or-B2C","value":"B2B or B2C?"},{"depth":2,"id":"Service-Business-vs-SaaS-Business","value":"Service Business vs. SaaS Business"},{"depth":3,"id":"Levels-of-Leverage","value":"Levels of Leverage"},{"depth":3,"id":"The-15-Minute-Landing-Page","value":"The 15-Minute Landing Page"},{"depth":2,"id":"Avatar-Problem-Solution","value":"Avatar. Problem. Solution."},{"depth":2,"id":"Why-This-Matters-Right-Now","value":"Why This Matters Right Now"}],"frontmatter":{"seriesId":null,"date":"2026-09-03T15:50:00-04:00","updated":"2026-09-03T15:50:00-04:00","title":"Six Systems That Save You Months","templateKey":"article","description":"Every business runs on the same six systems: mindset, sales, product, marketing, operations, finance. Understanding where what you're building actually fits saves you months of building in the wrong direction.","tags":["Systems Thinking","Business","Entrepreneurship","SaaS","Metaphysics"],"image":"/img/banner/blog-banner.png","category":"The Metaphysics","anchormessage":null,"withInlineTableOfContents":null}},"allTableOfContents":{"edges":[{"node":{"internal":{"content":"{\n \"seriesId\": \"client-side-architecture-basics\",\n \"tableOfContents\": [\n {\n \"pageId\": \"introduction\",\n \"name\": \"Welcome\",\n \"slug\": \"/articles/client-side-architecture/introduction\"\n },\n {\n \"pageId\": \"architecture\",\n \"name\": \"I. Architecture\",\n \"slug\": \"/articles/client-side-architecture/architecture\",\n \"description\": \"Understanding what we need from a client-side architecture.\",\n \"anchors\": [\n {\n \"id\": \"We-need-a-shared-language-to-talk-about-client-side-architecture\",\n \"name\": \"Shared language\"\n },\n {\n \"id\": \"Client-side-needs--testability-flexibility-and-maintainability\",\n \"name\": \"Client-side needs\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"pageId\": \"principles\",\n \"name\": \"II. Principles\",\n \"slug\": \"/articles/client-side-architecture/principles\",\n \"description\": \"Influential design principles that we'll use as the philosophy for our design.\"\n },\n {\n \"pageId\": \"layers\",\n \"name\": \"III. Layers\",\n \"slug\": \"/articles/client-side-architecture/layers\",\n \"description\": \"Understanding the layers/concerns and their responsibilities in a client-side application.\",\n \"anchors\": [\n { \n \"id\": \"Presentation-components\", \n \"name\": \"Presentation components\"\n },\n { \n \"id\": \"UI-logic\", \n \"name\": \"UI logic\"\n },\n { \n \"id\": \"Containercontroller\", \n \"name\": \"Container/controller components\"\n },\n { \n \"id\": \"Interaction-layer\", \n \"name\": \"Interaction layer\"\n },\n { \n \"id\": \"-Networking--data-fetching-infrastructure\", \n \"name\": \"Networking & data fetching\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"pageId\": \"conclusion\",\n \"name\": \"IV. Conclusion\",\n \"slug\": \"/articles/client-side-architecture/conclusion\",\n \"description\": \"Let's recap and discuss next steps.\"\n }\n ]\n}\n"}}},{"node":{"internal":{"content":"{\n \"seriesId\": \"solid-principles\",\n \"tableOfContents\": [\n {\n \"name\": null,\n \"pageId\": \"solid-typescript\",\n \"slug\": null,\n \"anchors\": [\n {\n \"id\": \"S-Single-Responsibilty-Principle\",\n \"name\": \"Single Responsibility Principle\"\n },\n {\n \"id\": \"Open-Closed-Principle\",\n \"name\": \"Open-Closed Principle\"\n },\n {\n \"id\": \"Liskov-Substition-Principle\",\n \"name\": \"Liskov Substitution Principle\"\n },\n {\n \"id\": \"Interface-Segregation-Principle\",\n \"name\": \"Interface Segregation Principle\"\n },\n {\n \"id\": \"Dependency-Inversion-Principle\",\n \"name\": \"Dependency Inversion Principle\"\n }\n ]\n }\n ]\n}"}}}]}},"pageContext":{"id":"5aa68f6e-f333-560c-8550-3371c518dca9","slug":"/articles/six-systems-that-save-you-months/"}}}