solo bubble SaaS. the day my house felt like a small office and i didnt know what to do with that.

building a small bubble SaaS for 18 months. $7,400 mrr. my house in the suburbs is also my office. has been since day 1.

a thing happened in q1 that i want to write down so i remember it.

i was on a customer call at 9:15 on a tuesday. zoom. the customer was talking. i was nodding. my eyes drifted to the bookshelf behind me.

i realized i didnt own a single book that wasnt about software. or business. or productivity. every single book on the shelf was a work book.

i looked at the wall. there were 2 frames. one was a whiteboard. the other was a small print of the san francisco bay that i bought 6 years ago and never replaced.

i looked at the standing desk converted from the kitchen counter. it was clean. the laptop was open. the second monitor was on. the chair was ergonomic. the lighting was good for video calls.

the room was a small office. my house was a small office. i had been working from home for 18 months and i had slowly turned my home into a workplace without noticing.

after the call ended i sat there for a while. the customer was happy. the call had gone well. that wasnt the problem. the problem was that my house had no parts that werent for working.

i went out that weekend and bought 4 books that were not about business. i moved the san francisco print to the bedroom and put up a print of a forest. i bought a small kitchen rug that was decorative. i took the second monitor down for one day to see how it felt.

it was fine. the customer call was fine. the company is fine.

the small office is gone now. the kitchen counter is a kitchen counter on monday wednesday friday. the laptop comes out tuesday and thursday and weekends are mostly off. the standing desk is still there but it doesn’t dominate the room anymore.

i didnt expect to have to actively un-work my house. i thought “working from home” was a binary thing. it isnt. it’s a slow accretion that you have to push back on or your house just becomes the office.

i have never felt dumber in my life than the moment i realized i had turned my bookshelf into a work bookshelf without noticing.

if you’re solo and remote, look at your bookshelf. look at your walls. look at what your kitchen counter is doing right now. it’s worth noticing.