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Learn how SaaS founders can escape the founder trap and build a business that runs without them using lessons from The E-Myth Revisited.
Table of contents
- Why Most SaaS Founders Become Prisoners of Their Own Startup
- The Myth Every Founder Falls For
- The 3 Stages of Every SaaS Business
- The Bottom Line
Why Most SaaS Founders Become Prisoners of Their Own Startup
Ever felt like your SaaS — the one meant to give you freedom — has turned into a full-time cage?
The business you built to gain independence now can't survive a day without you. You've become the bottleneck — the CEO, product manager, marketer, and customer support all in one.
Here's the hard truth: The problem isn't your business. It's your mindset.
You're still working in the business, not on it.
This is exactly what Michael E. Gerber calls the Entrepreneurial Myth in his classic book The E-Myth Revisited — one of the most essential reads for SaaS builders and solo founders who want to scale beyond survival.
The Myth Every Founder Falls For
Most small businesses — including SaaS startups — aren't started by "true" entrepreneurs. They're started by technicians — developers, designers, or marketers who are great at their craft and think:
"I can just start my own thing and be my own boss."
But when you go solo, you don't just do the work you love — you do everything else too. And that's when burnout begins.
Gerber breaks this down perfectly. Every founder has three personalities fighting inside them:
The Entrepreneur — This is the part of you that gets excited about possibilities, dreams up features, imagines your SaaS being huge.
The Manager — This side wants order, creates processes, thinks about how things should run smoothly.
The Technician — This is you at 2 AM just wanting to code and build cool stuff.
If you're like most founders, you're probably 70% Technician, 20% Entrepreneur, and barely 10% Manager. That's the trap right there.
Your growth depends on balancing these three roles.
The 3 Stages of Every SaaS Business
Startups grow through phases just like humans do — and each demands a different version of you.
Infancy
You're doing everything yourself — coding, designing, selling, fixing bugs at midnight. The business literally stops if you take a day off.
Adolescence
You start hiring or automating, but control becomes a struggle. This is where many SaaS founders crash — they try to scale without actually building systems first.
Maturity
Look at companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Notion — they didn't wait until they had 100 employees to think about systems. They started acting like real companies from day one.
They built their businesses around processes and roles, not around the founders staying up all night.
The Bottom Line
Can your startup run for a week without you? If not, you don't own a business — you own a demanding job with no vacation days.
Here's what Gerber nailed:
You've got three people inside you — the Dreamer, the Organizer, and the Doer. Most founders are way too heavy on the Doer side.
You need all three working together to scale. Otherwise you're stuck being the technician forever instead of actually building something that grows.
So what do you actually do? Start treating your SaaS like it needs to survive without you:
Write down how things work. Automate stuff you're tired of doing manually. Hire when you can actually afford it, and let people own their part of the work.
Every time you fix the same bug, answer the same question, or manually do something you've done 10 times before — that's a sign you need a system, not more hustle.
That's how you go from being the bottleneck to actually having a business.
Work on your SaaS, not in it.