The analyst
A builder reverse engineering everyone ahead of them.
[PLACEHOLDER — your bio goes here.] I'm an engineer and SaaS founder. I'm building my own product in public, and like every founder, I spend an unreasonable amount of time studying the companies a few steps ahead of me: how they launched, where their first hundred customers came from, why one growth channel compounded and the others didn't.
The SaaS Files is that research, made rigorous and public. Every teardown is assembled only from things that are publicly knowable — interviews the founders gave, changelogs, job posts, pricing pages, app store rankings, traffic estimates, tweets — and organized into one structured file. Where a number is confirmed, I mark it known. Where I'm reasoning from evidence, I mark it inferred. I never blur the two.
This isn't startup news and it isn't founder worship. It's a builder's notebook you're allowed to read. Every file answers one question: if I wanted to build this company from scratch today, what would I copy?
How every file gets built
The same method, every company, so the analysis holds up and the files stay comparable.
- 01
Collect the public record
I gather everything a company has said or shown in public: founder interviews and podcasts, changelogs, job posts, pricing history, app store ranks, traffic estimates, and the founders' own posts.
- 02
Separate known from inferred
Confirmed numbers are labeled known. Anything I reason toward from evidence is labeled inferred, with the reasoning shown, never hidden.
- 03
Fit it to one structure
Every teardown runs the same twelve sections, so you can compare companies instead of reading disconnected stories.
- 04
Extract the playbook
The point isn't the narrative. Each file ends with five copyable lessons and a "what I'd do next" — moves you could actually run.
- 05
Cite everything
Every file shows its source count and lists what it drew from. If it isn't in the public record, it isn't in the file.
What it is
— A builder's research notebook, made public
— Evidence-based, source-cited analysis
— Focused entirely on what you can copy
What it isn't
— Startup news or press release rewrites
— Founder worship or origin story fluff
— Speculation dressed up as fact
I write the file I wish existed before I started building, and publish the one I'll want to reread on the companies I'm chasing.