Tech is one part and you're right that having a manic focus on tech debt will alleviate maintenance. But from my experience the most time consuming stuff is really customer service. Depending on what your product is, it'll likely not be 100% self serve. If it's expensive and not a lot of customers then they'll expect a lot. If it's cheap and a lot of customers then there will be a lot of people to service.
You can outsource some of this stuff depending on how technical the product is. But realistically your time will be spent talking to customers and coding, about 50/50. Even if you get coding down to half it's still a lot of work. And managing customers is a lot more mentally draining.
That's all to say that a 9-5 is not that bad in terms of work life. You can always sign off and kick things up to senior people. You generally do things youre good at, so you won't be expected to do customer service, accounting, marketing, sales or a million other things you gotta take on as an independent business
Having run a bootstrapped-SaaS, I can say that it's 100% correct that customer service is the dominant term, time wise. More importantly, it's often the only commitment that has urgency (updating the site or the app can usually wait a day or a week).
That said, in my experience customer support was usually tied to new accounts. They need a bunch of support at the beginning. But once they get going, you essentially never get support tickets as long as the app continues to function. We literally had customers go 5+ years without ever filing a support ticket.
Once we realized customers do not really want to engage you & would rather self-serve, we invested more in documentation, simplifying UX, etc. Huge benefits to our time commitments for new accounts. I have seen others reduce time investment by having office hours where any customer can join and ask any question. The founder spends an hour or 3 a week and is able to help N customers, and customers are able to help each other as well.
Honestly we did not focus too much on tech debt because most of the things we considered tech debt ultimately did not impact the operation of the business.
You can outsource some of this stuff depending on how technical the product is. But realistically your time will be spent talking to customers and coding, about 50/50. Even if you get coding down to half it's still a lot of work. And managing customers is a lot more mentally draining.
That's all to say that a 9-5 is not that bad in terms of work life. You can always sign off and kick things up to senior people. You generally do things youre good at, so you won't be expected to do customer service, accounting, marketing, sales or a million other things you gotta take on as an independent business