My first programming job involved a lot of sleeping.
I was a night watch for a company that tracked valuable goods across Europe. My only task (at night) was to sleep—and wake up if an alarm went off. If something broke in the system, the monitoring team would call me, and I'd fix it.
Years later, as a founder, I found myself in the same role. Only this time, the alarms were a hacked server, a suspended Facebook ad account, or an angry customer text at 2:47 AM.
The difference was, I wasn't getting paid to sleep anymore. I was paying with my sleep.
The Always-On Trap
Nobody tells you this about building a SaaS company: the default setting is perpetual anxiety.
You celebrate landing your first customers. Then you realize you're now responsible for their success 24/7. You build features fast to compete. Then you're drowning in support tickets because nobody understands how to use them. You chase growth. One big customer churns and you're scrambling to make payroll.
The hustle culture answer? Work harder. Be more available. Sleep when you're dead.
I tried that. It nearly killed me.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking How do I do more? and started asking:
What would it take to build a business where turning off all notifications at 4pm feels safe?
That question led to the SWAN Stack: the Sleep Well At Night Stack.
What is the SWAN Stack?
The SWAN Stack is how you build a SaaS business where you can actually rest without guilt or fear.
It's not about working less. It's about designing your business—from pricing to product to technical architecture—so that a quiet evening isn't negligence. It's confirmation that the system works as designed.
Core principle: A healthy system is a quiet system. Constant alarms aren't a sign of importance. They're a sign of instability.
The SWAN Stack has three pillars. All three must align.
Pillar 1: Business Model Architecture
Your business model is your first line of defense against chaos.
The Pricing Decision
We started with a pilot customer at NOK 5000/month (about $450). I now realize we need to target around $700/month as our entry point. Maybe higher.
Not $99/month. Never $99/month.
Pricing isn't just about revenue. It's about filtering for the right customers.
At $99/month, you attract people who see your product as a commodity. They want cheap, and they expect support to be instant and unlimited. You become a cost center they'll dump the moment something cheaper appears.
At $700/month, you attract businesses making real money. They're not buying a tool—they're investing in a solution. They value proactive service. They become partners, not transactions.
This isn't elitism. It's alignment.
The right customer at the right price creates breathing room for excellence. You can afford to fix things properly. You can build features that matter. You can sleep at night knowing that losing one customer won't break you.
The Fastmail Principle
We're inspired by Fastmail, not Gmail.
Fastmail charges for email. Gmail is free. But Fastmail's customers ARE their customers. Gmail's customers are advertisers. The users are the product.
We proudly charge our customers because our goals align with theirs. If they succeed, we succeed. We're not optimizing for engagement metrics or ad revenue. We're optimizing for their actual outcomes.
That alignment lets you sleep well at night.
Pillar 2: Product Philosophy
Your product can be your best support agent—or your worst enemy.
Accessibility as a Business Moat
Most people see WCAG compliance as an ethical checkbox. It is ethical. But it's also strategic.
We build for WCAG (end-user accessibility) and ATAG (authoring tool accessibility). The platform itself—the part where customers create their content—is accessible.
The payoff:
- Fewer "How do I do this?" support tickets
- More intuitive interfaces for everyone, not just people with disabilities
- Access to larger markets (compliance-focused organizations)
- Happier customers who don't fight the tool
Ethics as a competitive moat. Less user friction means less stress for them, and dramatically less support load for us.
Good design doesn't just help customers. It helps you sleep at night.
Building for Success, Not Support
Every feature should answer: "Does this help customers succeed, or does it create more support burden?"
A feature that requires constant hand-holding is a support time bomb. A feature that reduces friction is an investment in your own sanity.
Happy customers don't just stay longer. They refer others. And they don't call you at 3am.
Pillar 3: Technical Architecture
Peace of mind is earned through technical excellence.
The Proactive Fix
A few weeks ago, our monitoring system caught a rare edge case. A customer hit a bug during normal business hours. Our Slack alert fired immediately.
We had a fix deployed in 15 minutes.
Then we called the customer.
"You may not have noticed, but you hit a small bug about 20 minutes ago on the course enrollment page. It's already fixed. Just wanted you to know."
The customer was stunned. "Wait—you're calling ME to tell me you already fixed a problem I didn't even report?"
That's the SWAN Stack in action.
The Monitoring Philosophy
Our rule: Log everything important. Alert on anomalies. But only during work hours.
Our Slack alerts are intentionally noisy between 9am and 5pm. We want to know the moment something looks wrong. We fix it fast. We confirm the fix.
After 5pm? Silence.
Not because we don't care. Because we've built systems that don't require 24/7 babysitting. The aggressive monitoring during work hours earns the peaceful evenings.
Simple Systems Over Clever Ones
We chose server-side rendering (using our own architecture) because it's simpler than complex SPAs. We chose Java. We chose MySQL. Simpler systems have fewer failure modes. Fewer failure modes mean fewer 3am wake-ups.
Boring technology that works beats clever technology that breaks.
Type-safe code. Observable systems. Architecture you can reason about. These aren't just technical preferences—they're lifestyle choices.
The Meta-Message
We're building Omumu as a customer education platform to help SaaS founders reduce their support burden and reclaim their time.
We're proving it's possible by living it.
The business itself is our first product. If we can't build Omumu sustainably, why would anyone trust us to help them build sustainably?
The promise of the SWAN Stack: Not that you work less, but that you design better. Not that you ignore problems, but that you prevent them. Not that you're unavailable to customers, but that you're proactively excellent during work hours.
The result? You earn the right to rest.
What's Keeping You Up at 3am?
I can't promise the SWAN Stack will solve every problem. Building a business is hard no matter what.
But I can promise this: the thing keeping you up at 3am right now is probably a design problem, not an inevitability.
Is it your business model? Are you trapped by low prices and high-volume support?
Is it your product? Are customers constantly confused and frustrated?
Is it your technical architecture? Are you the only person who can fix things when they break?
Start with the biggest source of your anxiety. Fix that pillar first.
Then move to the next.
You don't have to be an unpaid night watch for your own business.
Follow the Journey
We're building Omumu using the SWAN Stack principles. Some days we succeed. Some days we learn what doesn't work. But every day, we're documenting the process.
If you're a SaaS founder who's tired of being tired, follow along. Let's prove there's a better way to build.
Because business should fuel your life, not consume it.
Sten Morten Misund-Asphaug
Co-founder, Omumu
Former night watch, current believer in sustainable business
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