The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today, I have the incredible privilege of talking to Rob Walling, a pioneer in the SaaS universe. We're diving into the ins and outs of scaling SaaS businesses, the shifting landscape of software businesses in general and how to run one of them, and the role of AI in SaaS projects in the present and the future. You will gain firsthand insights into Rob's famous Stair Stepping Approach and so many challenges owners' face. We'll talk about competition, customer service requests, white labeling, and the essential role of networking and support systems for entrepreneurs. We even talk hiring, oh, and we do talk about exits as well, which is great because this episode is sponsored by acquire.com. And that's a place where SaaS founders can eventually sell their businesses for life changing amounts of money. I will be talking more about that later. Now, get ready to harness the magical power of someone who not only listens to podcasts at 2x speed, but also seems to think and speak that fast. Here's my friend, Rob Walling.

One of the most impactful things that you teach is the Stair Step Approach. And it starts with small bets on someone else's platform, then you establish reliable revenue stream from all these offers. And then in step three, you build a standalone SaaS business. Now is your podcast or conference organizer, writer and investor life, the secret step four of the Stair Step Approach?

Rob Walling 1:29
You know it's my step four. I find that to each their own. Some people, their step four is launching another SaaS app. You know, you look at David Cancel. He's had, I believe, five exits. So I think his step four is just rinse and repeat. Other folks become investors. And for me, it's the whole ecosystem you just mentioned.

Arvid Kahl 1:49
Yeah, you seem to diversify a little bit. That's what that is. So you're saying diversification is not the next step? Because I always feel like when I look at successful founders in the space, a lot of them, significant amount of them and maybe that's just confirmation bias. They put themselves out there and they talk about stuff. They bring people together. But as you set this just now, I'm like, yeah, okay, obviously, these are the only people I get to see in this space because everybody else is just doing their own thing. But let's talk about diversification a little bit, right? Like, it feels like something that too many people is the reason they exit because they need to financially diversify. And for some people after an exit, they just want to do multiple things. So how long should you stay laser focused as a SaaS founder?

Rob Walling 2:34
I mean, who? That's an interesting question. For me, I wanted to be as focused as possible until I had enough money in the bank that I never had to work again, till I had a few money in the bank. I don't know that I would say everyone should do that. But kind of, if that's your life goal, like the moment you become not focused like I am, for example, I do think you're less effective at each individual thing. And if you're driving SaaS is so draining, right? You and I both know this, like the amount of focus and time and energy it takes to grow, it is a grind, like even the best founders I know. Even if they raise funding and even if they're on their second, third, fourth, they still. I talked to them and they're like, I forgot how hard this is. I forgot, it is so much harder. It is harder than podcasting. It is harder than for me running MicroConf. It's harder than writing a book. It's harder than running accelerator, period.

Arvid Kahl 3:22
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've experienced the same thing with my little SaaS experiments that I do on the side, just to even stay in the developer space. Because it's so easy not to do this, right? It's so easy to talk and go in shows and communicate, which is still fun and has impact just not the same thing. So it sounds like, yeah, it's the harder choice, but it's probably also a very rewarding choice still, right?

Rob Walling 3:42
Yeah

Arvid Kahl 3:42
Running SaaS

Rob Walling 3:43
Yeah, it's harder and it can be, it can get boring, it can become a grind, where it's like, oh, I need to do this for five years in order to sell for 10 million. You know, I'm kind of making stuff up. But like, if that is your goal, it's like you get two years in and you're like, boy, it really would be fun to start a new thing because that's fun. Isn't launching on Product Hunt, on Hacker News really fun? It is. It's the dopamine. It'll be way more fun than slogging day to day, but the slogging day to day seemingly making progress actually can get you to that, you know, the goal. Again, I'm assuming your goal is multimillion dollar SaaS company with a multimillion dollar exit.

Arvid Kahl 4:15
Yeah, and maybe it is not, maybe it's just like being a reputable person in your community to get all kinds of opportunities beyond that, you know, the SaaS exit. We'll get to that, we'll get to audience building because I've read your book and I know you're not the biggest fan of that or not necessarily the of the opinion that it needs to be a thing but I still want to stick with stair stepping for a while because we looked into this just a couple of weeks ago as of this recording, I think and we looked into the history of your blog post around this. Right? And this has been around for now 10 years like you wrote this in 2013. The article that is very famous, I guess in our community explaining the steps towards building a SaaS. Is it still the same? Is it still a way to build a SaaS or has the environment changed?

Rob Walling 5:02
Oh, that's a good question. So I will admit, the original incarnation of the article and the original talk that I gave at the Dynamite Circle at DCBKK event was not SaaS focused, per se. I had to generalize it to like step one was like, launch a small product. Maybe if it's software, then you do it, you know, with a single marketing approach usually in an ecosystem. But I also included like, a small ecommerce store, an info product, a course. And I think those are totally viable. Like, if you're not a software person, maybe don't try to build software in the early days, you know. So I did go back maybe five, six years ago. And I actually changed. I updated the blog posts. And that's the beauty of it being a blog post was that I realized I wanted it really to be more focused on SaaS. But given your question, which is have things changed, they've changed but not in a way that I believe makes the Stair Step not work. Meaning I still see people doing it today. We have TinySeed founders, who are in the process of doing that. And then I talked to folks all the time, I'm going to be honest, who are on that step one. I mean, someone just wrote into the podcast. The rest of us and I was reading their question and they basically said, I have stairstepped over the last like, two, three years. He now has two products. One is doing like, 5200 a month and one's doing 3000 a month. And he's like, I'm just like, he's on step two. He's just about to buy out his own time. And so do I still see it working? Yes.

Arvid Kahl 6:30
Yeah, good to know. It's also good. It must be so much fun for you to be like the end of the funnel, where people's journeys all leads where people tell you about this, still work.

Rob Walling 6:32
It's what keeps me going, man, honestly. I have a label in Gmail, it's called thanks. And it's all the thanks that I get. And it means so much. I'm you know what this feels like when people say you impacted their life. I mean, my mission, like the mission of my life and of MicroConf and TinySeed is to multiply the number of independent self sustaining startups in the world. And you could replace SaaS or whatever, you know, you can focus on SaaS because that's really what I'm doing. But I'm just, I just want people to find their freedom, their purpose in there, you know, and have healthy relationships.

Arvid Kahl 7:11
I love that. Independent self sustaining, I like this phrase because it kind of brings me to my next point, platform risk, you know, the opposite of independence and probably not very sustainable.

Rob Walling 7:12
Yup

Arvid Kahl 7:12
The idea of stair stepping is still a thing that's around. A lot of people start with building like a Shopify app or plugins for like WordPress or you know, something. You build on somebody else's platform, which is extremely beneficial in terms of, you know, how the marketing and distribution works, but you are inviting a lot of risk into your business. Is that something that is harder now than it used to be? Like, there's also this kind of predatory thing that platforms occasionally do, where it's something that works really well, all of a sudden ends up as a platform feature and there's not a plug in anymore that kind of cannibalize their developer base. Is that risk that is still something that people should just take?

Rob Walling 8:01
Yeah, I think so. And that's why well there's a couple things. Number one some platforms are really bad at you know, at cannibalizing their own apps so Shopify is terrible and Twitter is terrible and Meta really doesn't give a crap. They're not as bad as Twitter, but so know that going in if you're gonna build on any of those. Most of the other ones are better at it, right? Salesforce, HubSpot, you know, what? Zoho, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom like, it's pretty rare you hear about someone one of those ecosystems smoking someone you know who's on them. And the other thing is, I view the steps of the Stair Step as temporary stages. Right? I was in step one and two for like, a few years. That's it. And so am I willing, its risk tolerance, right? Am I willing to have some modicum of risk for those few years? Yes. Because by the time I get to standalone SaaS, I've, you know then I'm starting to diversify. Now, we then get into the conversation isn't every app or platform is to some extent, yes. But to me the risk of being uneasy to or the risk of sending through SendGrid or Twilio, of course, you have some platforms, but it's a lot less than if you're building an actual app in a Heroku or Shopify app store.

Arvid Kahl 9:09
Yeah, if it's infrastructure, there are these other platforms. It's this kind of Lindy effect. They've been around for a while, they probably will be around for a long time. And their business model is depending on retaining you as a customer, so that's fine. But that's also a platform risk that I personally see a lot of people ignoring. Like they jump at new technologies, new frameworks, new whatever, right? Implemented into their business and all of a sudden that purchase falls away implodes and poof, they're standing there with a business that is just not sustainable because an integral part of dismissing. Open AI like that was, I was just reading on Twitter. Josh Pigford was talking about like his experience with Baremetrics when Stripe implemented their own analytics back in the day and how it hits Baremetrics, even though people came back and figured out oh, yeah, actually Baremetrics is the much more in depth analytics tool. And Open AI has done this with PDF introspection at this point, right? Lots of PDF startups are now in the balance and it feels this stuff just happens much more quickly now. Like you're around for like a month and all of a sudden, all your feature set is copied by the platform. Is that just a perception thing? Or is it just a reality of building SaaS?

Rob Walling 10:13
I think it's the edge cases that we hear about because we're on Twitter. And because open AI specifically is moving very, very fast like AI. When was the big reveal? Was it less than a year ago? Like it's

Arvid Kahl 10:26
Like a couple of months ago

Rob Walling 10:27
It's moving way fast. So AI I could I mean, I've been saying like ChatGPT wrappers for the last nine months. You're gonna get mowed over get the money while you can because anything you do is going to be steamrolled by a bigger player. That's been pretty obvious, versus, you know, again, if we start running through Heroku, Atlassian, Cloud Flare, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, you know, these all have app stores, like, are they steam rolling their apps that's fast? No, they're not. And the Josh, I mean, Josh Pigford with Baremetrics. I mean, that was something that he knew that was coming, like I had talked to him within six months of him building Baremetrics. And when was it 2012, maybe 2013. And we were at a MicroConf. And I was like, dude, you know, Stripe is gonna build this eventually. You know, it took Stripe a lot longer to build it than I thought. I figured they'd build it the next year or two and it took ages, you know, but yeah, it's a risk we all have for sure. I think the more the further I got along in my entrepreneurial journey, the more I wanted to have fewer of those risks. And that's what Stair Stepping attempts to do. And at a certain point, my de risking was much like yours. I was running drip, I was not diversified. I had millions upon millions of dollars tied up in this asset and my de risking was to turn it into cash. And now that's derisk

Arvid Kahl 10:45
Right

Rob Walling 11:17
But then I have some stocks and some metals and some cryptos to theirs, you know, that's its own platform risk in a way.

Arvid Kahl 11:51
Yeah. And the Beatles record, don't forget that

Rob Walling 11:53
And the gold record. Abbey Road, baby.

Arvid Kahl 11:56
Yeah, I get that. And I think derisking is genuinely the thing that most people want, like in economic times such as this in particular, right? Like, you want to make sure that there's a fallback or like an alternative and I think AI is the topic where this is extremely hard, building business on top of AI. Right? I would like to hear like how nuanced you think about building on top of AI like building on top of open AI as a platform and using AI as a feature in your existing non AI based startup? Like, what's the difference there in terms of risk and reward, I guess?

Rob Walling 12:30
Yeah, I like that. And there's a third actually, right? It's to use open AI or chat GPT to just to make your internal processes better. Like I'm doing cold outreach. I'm gonna personalize. So there's actually three different things. The third one that I just mentioned, is pretty low risk, I think, because let's say I'm doing cold outreach and I'm using Chat GPT. I mean, what's the worst? They've raised the price, they kicked me off. And now I have to go back to the, I mean, the risk, it's not existential, it's just like, well, that kind of sucks. Obviously, building a Chat GPT wrapper or building on Chat GPT yes, there's platform risk. The big thing that I think a lot of people, I think misunderstand, is if you build a wrapper and you do the obvious things, which is like chat with a PDF chat with a CSV, you know, import a CSV and have clean up the data or whatever, these are obvious and they are going to get built by Chat GPT or by just a bigger player, like by a Salesforce or buy a Google, you know, Google Docs or something is going to build a CSV importer. Any of these things is gonna get done. And so don't be shocked when that happens. If you can make a bunch of money in the meantime, it's opportunistic. And if you can make 20 grand a month for 50 grand a month for a year until they build it, just be like, hey, don't count on that being valuable, count on a cash in hand, right? That's what I think about building on top. Now, there are some exceptions. I think, in general, people who build on top of open AI, you're either gonna have a tiny little niche product that no one notices and you're away in a corner, much like the Start Small, Stay Small approach, where you just don't get noticed. Or it's going to be the big funded competitors that are going to come in and just stomp on you, you know, like the again, like a Google Sheets or just some big player that does it. I feel so that's, I guess what I'm saying is, yes, there is risk there building on top of AI because it is changing so quickly. Think about remember when Facebook apps and games were all the rage? And there was Farmville and I forget what the company was, but they had a bunch. And man, the valuations and everything went up and it was obvious this was not going to last. But they went in and you know, and they made a I think they made a ton of money. They raised a bunch of money, but it wasn't going to last. This is the same thing with these AI kind of AI wrappers. Look, let's just let's be honest, it's not gonna last. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Just know that this is not a tenure business.

Arvid Kahl 14:46
Yeah. That's a funny one like the farm wall situation. I think it was Zynga. There's a company, I remember back in like 2012 I was in San Francisco. And the Zynga building was this massive building, like towering over the Adobe building right next to it. And then a couple of years later, right? Everything just imploded, tells you to not over index.

Rob Walling 15:07
Same thing happened three years, four years earlier with iOS apps. And where the App Store started, same exact thing happened. There's huge gold rush. Yeah. So Facebook apps, there was a time when it was Twitter apps, although it was never that big a bunch of Twitter clients. A crypto web3 was one of those, AI is another. And so look, these are all waves. And if you catch them and you hit them at the right time and you exit or you make a bunch of cash on it, great. But if it is, again, this is not a five or 10 year business in the way we're talking about it, you need to be a different. The durable competitive advantages of just having a SaaS still apply, AI can augment that, but AI is not itself an advantage because any of us can use it.

Arvid Kahl 15:43
That's a good point. And if you have an AI based business where you know that like your days are numbered, right? Does it make that less or more sellable? Because I could imagine that somebody a bigger player that wants to integrate that functionality into a much bigger suite of products would find that interesting, like as a strategic acquisition, kind of not a financial one. So what do you think about like the solubility of these short term, intentionally short term businesses?

Rob Walling 16:09
I think that revenue buyers, whether it's micro PE or just people buying through Quiet Light and acquire.com, they will discount it heavily. They know the risk involved. So if you're truly selling on a multiple of net profit or whatever, you're not going to get great multiples because the risk is huge. If you get lucky, extremely lucky and you find a strategic or strategic finds you. Yes, you're right. You could probably get aqua hired. I mean, I'm thinking of someone doing 20 grand, 50 grand a month, you know, this is not a $10 million exit, but will someone give you, you know, half a million or a million bucks and then some stock and this and that? I totally think that's feasible. I just think it's going to be the one in 100 or you know, one in 500.

Arvid Kahl 16:49
Funny, it's kind of VC odds for bootstrap businesses once again.

Rob Walling 16:53
It feels a bit like it, yeah.

Arvid Kahl 16:55
Oh, that's funny. Yeah, I guess. I've seen a trend in these AI centric startups. A lot of them, they kind of stop using the subscription revenue model. And they go a lot of, they front load a lot of their payments, like one time payments or like yearly things, knowing that there will be around for less than a year. Maybe it's a bit creepier that way. But that's how it works. Is there is that just because these things are time limited? Or is there also this overall subscription fatigue that exists? Or purportedly exist somewhere in the world?

Rob Walling 17:26
Yeah, huh. I think that there are certain tools and tasks that really shouldn't be subscription. You know, just because SaaS is the best business model ever doesn't mean everything should be SaaS? And, you know, I don't know if you saw, was it BMW? Yeah, they have the hardware in your car, but you had to pay a subscription in order for them to enable it. And people were so mad that they just stopped because it shouldn't be that. It feels like you're ripping them off. And same thing like to chat with a PDF, for example, I know I can come back to that. But like, that's an example. Or let's say I want to convert dirty data to clean data, right? Or I want to convert an mp3 to a wave or I want to, these are like one time things unless I'm an editor and I'm doing this on a weekly basis. Like, it really should just be a one time charge, right. And so when you try to force one time into subscription, that's when you see this really high churn. And so I don't know, I think people say subscription fatigue. And when I look at, you know, the Tiny Seed dashboard with almost 150 companies in it now, I'm not seeing subscription fatigue in those areas because

Arvid Kahl 18:31
That's interesting.

Rob Walling 18:32
You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, I'm just up into the right as a general rule, it's not everybody but I mean, SaaS is still very much alive.

Arvid Kahl 18:39
Is that like B2B SaaS that you're looking at almost exclusively? Okay.

Rob Walling 18:42
Pretty much. Yeah. B2C, there's fatigue. Dude, I cannot believe. I think it's like Hulu Plus, with no ads is like $18. I'm like, No, I mean, I'm not like one of the least price sensitive people you'll meet with because I just want stuff to just go. And when I was like 18, I don't watch enough on Hulu. So I actually cancelled that subscription. So yes, on the B2C side, which is something I don't like to plan for exactly this reason. I definitely think there's subscription fatigue. I hear people talking about it all the time.

Arvid Kahl 18:42
This has nothing to do with SaaS, but do you think that's going to be a consolidation alongside the streaming stuff? Like we had it in the beginning then it kind of split up now? Will it be consolidated?

Rob Walling 19:18
Yeah, I think because now so yeah, in the beginning it was land grab as many subscribers as possible and then we saw in the last six months, price increases. Everybody's doing increases and all this coz I'm on Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and HBO and Disney Plus and I'm on Peacock right now because I like Poker Face, you know, there's like two shows that I like. And yeah, then the next phase will be consolidation. This happened with TV networks. You know there were like three in the US, you known as ABC, NBC, CBS, but at one point, there were a kajillion of them and they consolidated. Same thing with radio networks. Same thing with car makers, like how many American car manufacturers are there now? Let's put Tesla aside but it's basically Ford and GM has been for years. Now Chrysler at one point and then Tesla came up. But there were like 100 or 200 in the 1920s and 30s. And then they consolidated. So they will do the same thing with streaming.

Arvid Kahl 20:10
Hopefully, because I cannot handle more. I mean, I can handle the subscription. I just think there's still logistical overhead of even understanding where I show is because that also changes over time. Right? The one that I dive too much into TV, but I'm a Star Trek nerd. I want to watch Star Trek, where is it now? Paramount plus, is it on Netflix? Like where do I go?

Rob Walling 20:28
I have this app on my phone, I this app on my iPad, it's just watch.com. You ever gone there? Just watch, type in a series, it'll tell you where it is. And it'll tell you, you can stream it for free. Or you can buy it or rent it. I'm in that twice a day or not twice a day, twice a week trying to find shows

Arvid Kahl 20:45
Is that a bootstrap business? That sounds like

Rob Walling 20:47
I have no idea. I don't know. It was one of those B2C things that kind of where it would be fun to own that. But I bet it's a nightmare keeping up with all the changing stuff.

Arvid Kahl 20:56
Yeah, you need a lot of people like really at the pulse of what's going to happen in these broadcasting services and stuff. That's fun. Yeah, but let's maybe get back to SaaS, let's get back to product market fit, which is one of the most central things that you talk about in your book. And I like that this is the first thing you talk about, like in terms of chapters, there's teams later and there's pricing later and all that stuff. But product market fit is one of the biggest things. And as I read the book, I agreed with a lot of stuff obviously from my own experience. But I found one thing that I really want you to dive in a little bit more. You talked about competing on three different potential levels. You say competing on price is a thing you can do, competing on sales model and competing on product. Now, price and product, I understand. I can be cheaper. I can build a better different more diversified product. But sales model was something that I found really interesting. And we already kind of touched upon it just now. So which is why I want to bring it back in. How can you compete on sales model with bigger, different, richer, more capitalized players in the market?

Rob Walling 21:55
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So what you have to find is a company or companies where the standard sales model is a pain in the ass for customers and they don't like it. But they've been forced to do it because there's a monopoly or an oligopoly, right? So Salesforce, have you ever tried to buy a Salesforce subscription? It is terrible. Never, never do that. And because you have to you just they will not even talk to you unless you jump on a call with them. And they do this demo. I remember, I was just like, how much is it? How much is it? And they wouldn't tell me. How much is it? They just wouldn't tell me. They were gonna force me to do a frickin zoom call. That sucks, man. So isn't there opportunity to disrupt that? Anytime there is friction or there is something that customers don't like, sometimes it's like price, oh my gosh, there's way to expect. The cheapest version of this thing. Marketing automation is the one that comes to mind. Of course, because I compete in that space. The cheapest version of marketing automation was like $400 a month when we started drip. And it was obvious, it didn't need to be $400 a month. It was that much because the margins were huge. And their sales model was very time intensive. And we were like if we build self serve, I know we can charge less. And make it self serve. No one else was self serve. Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop, like they all wanted you to do a demo and do the big sales grind. And look, that's great. You can make a lot of money doing that. I'm not disparaging that. But I am saying where there is dissatisfaction where you're making folks jump through hoops and there is friction, there is opportunity to compete. And that's really what I mean by sales model.

Arvid Kahl 23:27
Okay, would you say this kind of switching up the sales model is a moat for you at that point?

Rob Walling 23:33
I don't think so. I think moats are durable. You know, like moat is like once you have a brand where you are one of the two or three in a conversation where it's like oh, what are the like the really good marketing automation providers? Oh, it's like the most popular ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft and Drip like at certain point that became the conversation. Once we have that, that's kind of a moat unless we screw it up by having the founder leave and then raising your prices so much that you piss everybody off. But you know, that's just a hypothetical.

Arvid Kahl 23:54
Yeah, of course!

Rob Walling 24:03
But you know, so sales model someone else can just do the same thing and it's kind of like competing on features that it's like false moat you know, it's a temporary moat. False may not be the right word but like a temporary moat because they can just build the features or they can just change the sales model.

Arvid Kahl 24:19
Yeah. That's something that I really liked when you said about translating the interface, that kind of stuff. That's also something that doesn't really, it's not durable. I like the phrase of durable moats. I think white labeling was the thing that surprised me because I mentor a couple software businesses and one of them has been thinking about white labeling their product. So they are in the SEO space and you know, they think of how I'm using their product, giving it to other agencies and having them use it or offer it to even their customers and clients. And you say that's not a good idea. Why is that not a good idea?

Rob Walling 24:52
Yeah, just for listeners. We've switched for moats, two common mistakes that I see people make, right? Like translating your app too early. I'm at five camera, I've typed up my market. Now I'm going to translate to Spanish, German, French. And it's like don't do that. It's a waste of time. So to your point, white labeling, here's the thing, it's white labeling too early. Oftentimes, you will launch and you'll get to 5 to 10K MRR and you're just starting to build a good business. And this happened to us where I got five requests in the first few months of people saying, I really want to like, take drip and white label it and then sell it to realtors or I want to sell it to mortgage brokers or I want to sell it to, you know, insert another vertical here. And it's super appealing to be like, well, this person will do the sales and like we'll get customers without even try, you know, it's all that stuff. But the problem is most people, they're wasting your time, like unless it's a big company and you know that they are bringing the thunder, meaning they have a lot of customers that they can sell it to. You're going to spend too much time hashing out legalese, signing docs for someone who's going to sell two copies of it. You know, it's like that's usually the issue. Now, if I was doing seven figures ARR and I saw it as an actual channel to where it was using agencies could, you know, could reuse it and white label it. I've seen some folks do that. I don't think it's the end of the world. But it's not, it wouldn't be my first choice of marketing approaches. It's one of many. And I think the siren song of it is dangerous, especially when you're early because you just don't have. The amount of code you have to write any amount of legal contracts, you have to go through and sign, it is significant to enable white labeling. So make sure that if someone is going to do it, they pony up upfront, like I want a minimum commit of, you know, 50 grand upfront or 100 grand a year. There's some numbers. If they can't or won't do that, then they aren't committed to it. Why would you commit all this time and money to it?

Arvid Kahl 26:50
That makes sense. Somebody should build this white labeling as a service. Wouldn't it be cool, another little meta layer on top of that, but yeah, I think like sharing development cost, great idea. And I think generally a good idea for sizeable customer feature requests, right?

Rob Walling 27:04
Yup, it's pretty common. Yeah, I see folks do it more common than folks might think.

Arvid Kahl 27:09
So let's keep in this wheelhouse here with the customer feature request because that's also something that you have very strong opinions on, right? Like when to say no pretty much to them. So how do we deal with all these things that constantly flood us? A lot of small SaaS businesses have this, I don't know if it's a user voice or some widget where people can put up their ideas and they are just inundated with all these requests that people want. Why should we listen? What should we listen to? And when should we just say no?

Rob Walling 27:37
Yeah, I mean, you know this. It's hard. And it's harder in the early days because the more mature your product gets and the more revenue you have, the more kind of your vision of what your product is solidifies. And eventually, you're kind of like making tweaks, you know. By the time your software is a teenager, meaning let's say, 50k, 100k a month, you know, it's like, oh, I kind of know what this is. Now, we might make a strategic decision to add an entirely new aspect to it. But unless we do that, we kind of know that if we're an email service provider, I'm not going to add affiliate management. That's a whole other categories. You know what I mean? You just gotta get there. But in the early days, man, it is so hard, especially if you're still trying to build something people want. You know, you haven't done that yet. And so every feature request that comes in, you think to yourself, oh, if I build this, will this get me closer to product market fit? Like, that's the real kind of crux of it. And so I feel like there's some feature requests that come in that are just obvious knows. And then there's some that are obvious yes. It's like hell yes. Why didn't I think of that? Or it's already on the roadmap, right? Unfortunately, yeses and noes are maybe, I don't know, what do you say? 20, 30%? It's the minority 40%. You know, some number, that's not the majority. The majority are ones that you kind of have to agonize over. And usually what I would do is ask myself, alright, what's my vision for the product today? And do I feel good about that vision? Or do I need to alter that vision? Because if I implement this, it means it's a different thing, right? So I've kind of run it through my founder gut. I would also, I know some people, I never did this, but they have like customer advisory boards, where you have depends on how far along you are. But it's like, who are my best customers? Who are the customers who stick around for a long time, give us a lot of good feedback, whatever. And I used to just kind of email. I would email like Brennan Dunn, right? Or Ruben Gamez or Jeff Epstein, founder of Ambassador, you know. There were a handful of people who were like, my friends and I was like, what do you think about building this? What do you, you know, would you use this? And have you seen this another tool, you know, kind of get a sanity check on it. But the bottom line is, you have to say no to the vast majority, right? But by the time I left Drip in 2018, I believe we were getting 175 feature requests a month. And that 150, 175, that was from sales support success and directly from customers. And you have to say no to 90 plus percent of those. And so figuring out a way to filter those is kind of what I tried to talk through in the book. It's hard, right? There's no direct to say I can't tell you yes or no but it's like, here's the mental framework of how would I think through it.

Arvid Kahl 30:03
And that's also kind of like an identity thing for a lot of founders, right? They want everything to appeal to their customers. They want the prospects that are out there that don't yet use the product to every single one of them to feel like this is for them, which is obviously folly in so many ways. But on another level, there's also a problem, like, once you have this advisory board of customers that you talk to, how do you avoid this typical, you know, Rob Fitzpatrick Mom Test problem of people just wanting to encourage you because they really like you. They really liked that you're building this for them? And they say yes to everything. How do you get out of that?

Rob Walling 30:40
I never had that. I don't know because I never, usually I would say, here's our current roadmap, here then it is, again, a private conversation. So like, here's the next five things we're building. We got a request for this. Do you think I should bump into these? Because then there is it's not just yes. They can't just say yes, they have to bump something else, right? So they have some loss. Now, you can also I mean, there's dangers to this. You can get in an echo chamber. If you only have three in your customer advisory board. And they're all the same use case and you have other use cases you need to support, you know, you need to get some more diverse thought in your advisory board. But you get the idea. It's helpful. I mean, to me, the Advisory Board or any of these are all just signals. I have my founder gut. I have the category that we're currently in that I define a SaaS. I have my vision for the product. I have an advisory board. These are all just signals. None of them makes the decision. You have to put it in a stew. And being founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. This is a great example of that. You will never at best, you'll be like 50% certain you need to build something, you know.

Arvid Kahl 31:37
Yup, sure sounds like the regular founder life, quite anxiety inducing. Maybe that's also one thing from my own personal experience having like a couple of mental health issues along the way. Do you think just being a founder just has to be stressful?

Rob Walling 31:53
You know? Yes and no. So it depends. So these days, I'm a founder of MicroConf and Tiny Seed. I'm not a SaaS founder these days, but I do run companies. They are startups with teams of people. And we are doing big stakes, high stakes, things that impacts a lot of people and you know, all that stuff. And I'm not stressed. And I used to be stressed all the time. And so I think that's where I say yes and no. I think in the early days, most of us are not equipped to deal with the uncertainty. And that's a huge part of being a founder, as you know, hard decisions, incomplete information. Everything is uncertain, especially in the early days. I think certain people are either naturally or perhaps there's nature or nurture, like did their parents teach them better coping skills? Because I didn't have any. I'm like a high anxiety person. And I have no coping skills to deal with uncertainly. So for folks like us, it's just stress, stress, stress, stress, burnout. I do know some folks who are better equipped at dealing with it and who actually take a grain of salt, like I'm launching the startup. And realistically, this is not that bad. Like, I'm not digging a ditch somewhere. And if it goes under, I can go get a job. You know, for me, I was like if it fails, the end of the world as we know it, so I'm a catastrophizer, right? So I think so much of it is mindset, like the actual risk to us as founders pretty is not a lot. The actual risk is usually minimal unless you make dumb decisions, like putting money on credit cards and such, which is something I never did.

Arvid Kahl 33:17
Do you ever do fear setting as like a conscious exercise with where could this go wrong? And would I still be fine?

Rob Walling 33:24
Yeah. What's the worst that could happen, is the phrase that I use. What is the worst that could happen? When we were starting Tiny Seed, we were struggling to figure out what the terms should be right? Because it's like, well, we're not VC but we don't want to do the revenue based financing. How do we be in your, you know, in your court for the long term and have terms that are both investors agree to invest in and that will give a return such that the fund can continue and not implode. And the founders will agree to it and that was a very, very difficult. It's kind of like setting pricing. It's just hard, right? Because you don't know what the answer is. And there were some major setbacks where we were screwed, right? We had like six different versions of our terms. And I was running them by founders. And someone told me yeah, I just wouldn't take that money. And here's why. And it was devastating to me. And I remember I was like, oh, this is never gonna work. We just can't do this. You know, I got super catastrophizing. And Einar was like, dude, we're smart. We'll figure this out, you know. That's my co founder and that helped me level set of like and then he said, what is the worst can happen if we don't figure this out? We just don't do it. And so you go back to being retired, right? I came out of retirement to do this. So I go back to playing my guitar. I guess that is the worst case, that's not a bad worst case. You know?

Arvid Kahl 34:35
Yeah, that's why I said like step four of the Stair Stepping approach because you already had all these other things figured out, right? You were in this kind of post economic situation already. You didn't have to think about where the next like mortgage check is gonna come from.

Rob Walling 34:48
It helps. It helps a lot.

Arvid Kahl 34:50
For sure. Well, most founders are unfortunately not in that position. Right? And a lot of founders too. You said we a lot, which is something I really notice here because my experience in many things before I co-founded Feedback Panda with Danielle was, it was just I. It was just me all the time. And I kind of in retrospect, I was almost in a constant solo founder of funk kind of felt like it, like a lot of looping thoughts, a lot of just spiraling all the time. And I was talking to a Dickie Bush on this podcast a couple of weeks ago, about how writers have the exact same problem, right? There's a surprising similarity between writers whose product is good writing to appeal to people and impact their lives and SaaS founders, solo developers whose product also is writing just, you know, code for machines, not for people. And they also don't know is it going to work? Is this whole thing going to work? How do you get out of this kind of solo founder funk? Do you have any ideas?

Rob Walling 35:41
Yeah, I do. So there's a few opportunities or a few options. One is obviously to get a co founder. But that's a big decision. Masterminds, mastermind groups were hugely impactful for me and have been. I mean, I've been talking, I started this mastermind in 2010, I believe and it's gone through a bunch of iterations. And it was four of us then three then now, it's just two of us. And it's been two of us once a month since 2010 now, 13 years. I mean, it's just with this one other guy. And we talk once a month. Now we do it in VR fishing. We don't even get into. We literally get in VR, we fish. And we talk about you know, startup stuff. Masterminds are huge. I used to be in two masterminds because I wanted, you know, and they were every other week. So I pretty much every weekend, someone to talk to. That was such a big deal. I think that's the best way. The other thing, of course, is to join a community, get little less than that. But you know, a MicroConf Connect or if you wind up getting into Tiny Seed or whatever, the Dynamite Circle, you know, there's all these indie hackers. Right? There's online communities. It's less interpersonal, I think, you know, than masterminds. That's probably my number one, to be honest. And then of course, I mean, the other one, too, is going to in person events, like I wound up going to a lot of MicroConf, of course, because I host many of them. And I'm fired up when I come back, you know, and I think that that can be motivational for folks as well.

Arvid Kahl 37:00
Yeah, that was a big learning for me as well, like the in person events in particular. That was something oh, okay. I'm doing all right. Everybody else is constantly just knowing the nails over their own businesses and that kind of stuff, it's perfectly fine. And in commiseration, there's a lot of elation, right? You find a way through masterminds. That's the thing that for most of my life, I had no idea about. So it is very important to understand that this is a feasible way to connect with people on your level, on your journey too, right? And you facilitate them, right? In the community?

Rob Walling 37:31
Yeah, we do matching with MicroConf. That was something I resisted for a long time because we would get people say, how do I join a mastermind? And I'm like, go to MicroConf and find somebody you know and it's just like, eventually producers Anders was like, I think we just start matching people. And I'm like, but what if we get it wrong? But what if, but what do you know that was and it's like, let's just try it. Let's try it with get 50 people to apply, match them up and see how it goes. It's been one of our most aside from in person events, it is the most successful offering we've ever offered at MicroConf. And so we match, it depends. There's like $250 up to 2000. It's a one time fee right now, although we're talking about going subscription and actually facilitating. Right now, it's just a one time match and depends on your revenue level. And then I think we guarantee it for a year, like if it just falls apart, you know, you can get rematch but wildly successful. We've matched to close to 1000. I think that's the number 800 or 1000, you know, founders with one another collective MRR or ARR of you know, 150 million or something huge number across 30 or 40 countries. So, that's a big deal. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl 38:32
What's the churn and retention metrics on that stuff?

Rob Walling 38:36
It's not subscription. Right? It's one time.

Arvid Kahl 38:38
So I mean, like, on the community or like the little groups of people themselves, like, do they?

Rob Walling 38:43
Stick around? Yeah, surprisingly high number. I don't know that I know the exact numbers, but it's like the vast majority. I'd say that at a minimum, the majority, which is only 51%. I think, like the super majority wind up, I guess, depends on what timeframe we're looking at. Right? Exactly six months or six years. You know, there's only a handful, it's going to be kind of a, I think a bell curve or, you know, kind of degrading curve over time if people stop.

Arvid Kahl 39:11
Yeah, because people probably also graduate from certain groups of people into new ones, right? As their business improves, as well. Well, I certainly love the fact that you're facilitating like actual relationships between people. And that kind of brings me to the point that I said I want to get back to ,which is audience building and you know, the building in public, doing stuff like in front of people. In your book, you say and I think you're right, that for many foreigners, it's not a necessity for many SaaS businesses building in public or building an audience. It's a nice to have, but you don't need that necessarily to build a business that serves people and solves that problem. But it could and I think where you mentioned that building an audience is actually useful isn't hiring. I found that really interesting too. So are you still like pro or are you like against building an audience? What's the nuance there? I want to know.

Rob Walling 40:03
So I'm glad you asked because there is nuance. I'm not pro or against. I am opinionated about it because almost every week, I see a tweet of like, steps to build a business, build an audience, then ask them what they want, and then build the product. And it's like, great and I always chime in. Great for info products, not for SaaS

Arvid Kahl 40:24
Yeah

Rob Walling 40:24
Not for B2B SaaS, specifically, right? If you are marketing, if your audience, if you are marketing to other indie hackers, guess where indie hackers are? They're on Twitter. So yeah, go hashtag build in public and sell them your chat with PDF thing or whatever it is. That's great. But the vast, vast, vast majority of companies, in fact, Tiny Seed we funded 131 companies actually, almost 150. A couple weeks from now, it'll be over 150. But like I did, I ran the numbers and it was like 4% or 4 and a half percent had any kind of audience, I mean, any type of social podcast, YouTube, anything before they built their businesses and similar numbers even now. Like where we have a lot of companies doing seven figures and we've had exits and they just don't need it, right? Because SEO, content, cold outreach, integrations, in person events, affiliate programs, you know, all this other stuff can be done without an audience. So my thing is, you and I both built audiences. I've been building audience since 2005 when I started blogging, 2010 when I started the podcast, you know, 20 whatever, when we started the YouTube channel. It's a fuck ton of work. It's way more work, way more work for the reward than SEO or called average or you know, these other like, staple B2B marketing. That's what I see. If you're gifted at it or if it's what you need to do. Arvid people like you and I, I had to do that. I was blogging to no one for like a year. I was podcasting to no one for like a year. Right? You and I do it because we have to. It's part of like Stephen King. At one point, he said, he told the reporter. He said, yeah, I'm gonna retire from publishing. And this was years ago. And he said, oh, you're gonna stop writing? And he said, no, I'm retiring from public, like the dude has to write.

Arvid Kahl 42:06
Yeah

Rob Walling 42:06
I have to, like, I have this curse that I need to talk in front of, I need people to hear my every thought, right? And so most people aren't that way, though. And so I'm doing a disservice to entrepreneurs, if I'm telling people where it's not their natural gifting nor their desire to go do something where pound for pound, hour for hour, it is not as effective as the 20 B2B SaaS marketing purchases, you know, that I put in this book. That's where I fall down. It's the common narrative and same reason I strike out against. There is no always, you should always bootstrap, you should never bootstrap, you should always raise funding, you should never there is, none of that. So I get annoyed with that. You should always build an audience like no, you shouldn't. You should really know what you're getting into. An audience is a tool, know what it takes when you should use it.

Arvid Kahl 42:47
Yeah. And there is also a pretty notable difference between like building a massive audience and just having a presence as a founder.

Rob Walling 42:54
Yes.

Arvid Kahl 42:55
Right? Because that is something that I would recommend to everybody just having a presence for people to know there's a person.

Rob Walling 43:00
I don't disagree with that. Yep, and

Arvid Kahl 43:01
Good

Rob Walling 43:02
So look at people who are tweeting. I mean, I didn't, let's say Twitter, for example. I didn't build a Twitter audience until the last five years, maybe like before that I had people who followed me, but I never pushed them there. I wasn't tweeting anything that interesting. And I see a lot of folks on Twitter who are not like Ruben Gamez or earthling works. You see him on Twitter. He's not building an audience. Yeah, but he is on Twitter and being around and he's learning and interjecting. So I like that distinction that you're saying just being being in public or you know, building in public can be even like these days. Derek Rhymer is a good example of this. He used to. He was building an audience when he had to order product podcast. And he was building in public to the point where he was publishing screencasts and publishing stuff to get people on YouTube and on Twitter. And then he hit a point where it just didn't move the needle for him anymore. And it was more time than it was worth. And he's not, I would say, as far as I know, from the outside, he's not building an audience anymore, you know.

Arvid Kahl 43:55
But it's certainly, it can be an intentional thing. Or it could just be a consequence of you just being yourself, which is I think, the most authentic thing, right? Like you, you mentioned, Derek, I think like Jason Cohen, also an example here. And he's just blogging, talking about stuff he's interested in, that is building an audience without being like, here are the 10 browser extensions for whatever, right? You don't need that kind of stuff just to attract people that are genuinely attracted to what you have to offer, what you do because you have insights into something. That's the best kind of building in public is the one that is not forced.

Rob Walling 44:26
That's right. And to your point earlier, you mentioned in the book that I say building an audience just to find customers for SaaS is just really an uphill battle. But when you go to hire or when you need to build when you need to find people who can promote you, like let's say, sorry an affiliate program and I need affiliates who are influencers in this space. Or I need investors like that's when an audience suddenly comes in. Like when we started Tiny Seed, the fact that I had an audience was a huge advantage.

Arvid Kahl 44:56
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It really depends on what you want to do. Right? And there might be a point in the future where it just becomes a necessity because you're adding some new component to your business that requires that. But it's not a starting point for everybody. I know a lot of founders and a lot of SAS developers really like just coders who really don't want to do this. They just want to go. They're technical people and they end up being solo founders. That's one thing I wanted to ask you too, like, do you fund solo founders? Or do you focus on teams? Like, what's your position with that?

Rob Walling 45:29
The majority of companies that we have funded are solo founders. And I think, so state of independent SaaS survey is and report is a MicroConf thing we put out every other year right now. And I believe the numbers are one person. Teams are like, what is it 60 or 70% of our kind of ecosystem. It's somewhere in there. And then one and two person teams combined, I think is like 90. So whatever the you know, if it's like 70 and 20, you know, one and two, something like that. It's like 65, 25, 70 and 20. That's about how the Tiny Seed founders work done.

Arvid Kahl 46:05
Wow

Rob Walling 46:05
You can, yeah, it's very similar and just a sliver of three person and four person teams. I find that there's, it's actually a little bit of an anti pattern for me to be bootstrapping up for founder company like that's, yeah, yeah, it's a little weird. So yeah, that's where venture capital says no, you know, Paul Graham came out and said, I want two person, three person teams. We have found, I mean, how many examples do you and I know of single founders who've built incredible multimillion dollar?

Arvid Kahl 46:31
Thousands at this point?

Rob Walling 46:32
Tons and tons

Arvid Kahl 46:33
Yeah

Rob Walling 46:33
So we have no bias. If anything, I have no bias. I think one and I'm biased towards one and two person teams, to be honest.

Arvid Kahl 46:41
Yeah, I guess for like a laser focused business that is solving one particular problem really well, like it's the whole thing about cooks, you know, too many cooks. And that makes perfect sense. So can you hire too early then? Is that something that exists?

Rob Walling 46:55
Hire too early?

Arvid Kahl 46:57
As a sort of founder

Rob Walling 46:59
If, yeah, it depends on, yeah, you can. I mean, let's say you have $20,000 in the bank and I hire my first out and I go through all my 20 grand. You hired too early, right? To be honest, when you're building, finding, I say finding product market fit like it's some destination, it's not. You and I both know, it's a continuum. It's not a binary. So, you know, as you're finding, as you're strengthening product market fit. If you're too early and you hire a salesperson to go sell it and you don't have a product market fit, you just churn everybody. Either no one signs up or you just churn everybody out. So yeah, you can hire that too early. But I don't think, I think if you have budget, these days, like I would hire for almost from day one. But it depends on which role you hire, right? It's like, oh, well, I hired enough. I will hire another developer to accelerate or usually need more features to get to product market fit in the early days. And then at a certain point, you kind of hit it and or you know, get enough of it that then you need more marketing and sales. And so that's kind of it kind of switches over time. I actually have a matrix of this of like the most common first, second and third hires of depending on your founding teams make up.

Arvid Kahl 48:06
That, among all the other wonderful things in the book, is probably one of the most impactful things you could have put in there. Because that is something that I as a solo ish founder, never really understood. Who's going to be the next person or the first person to hire. Right? Should they replace me? Or should they augment what I do? It's really nice that you looked into this. And I think you draw this data. Well, you drew this data from like real companies and their hires as well. Right?

Rob Walling 48:30
That's right. Yep. And I asked, again, this is where Tiny Seed is an asset for me because I have access to these 130 to 150 companies. And I was able to do my mental model, you know, you're like an archaeologist where you're like, alright, here's been the experience I've had and the experience of memory from all these founders. And then I went into Slack and actually posted I said, this is a matrix. Who here followed this? Who here didn't? And do you disagree with, you know, it wasn't good or bad for you? And do you disagree with any of these? And it was like, so if you're a single founder and you're a developer and you're in low touch sales, usually your first hire is support because it's low touch and there's high but you know, it's that kind of stuff, right? So people were saying, yes, I did it. And in general, I call it like, maybe 90% accurate, it's not 100%. But it's at least something because before you have this matrix, you're like, I don't know who you know, I don't know what I should do, to your point. Just guidance, you know.

Arvid Kahl 49:22
And if you don't have a mastermind or like a group of people like Tiny Seed that have this knowledge that just have the experiential insights, then you just kind of struggling. You're doing random experiments that can cost you and can, you know, derail you quite substantially, too.

Rob Walling 49:36
Yeah, hiring is a big one, right? It's so expensive and time consuming.

Arvid Kahl 49:39
Hiring is also something personally that nobody taught me. I get a lot of technical skills, you know, people teach you how to code and all that stuff. But hiring is like, yeah, okay, just hire people. But what does it mean?

Rob Walling 49:49
It is hard. This is actually where I've talked about this on my podcast before working a day job and being like being a developer on a team where you're involved in a hiring process or if you become manager a team lead and you're actually making hiring decisions, invaluable. Like I did that for many years, as much as I hated every single one of my day jobs. You can learn skills that your day jobs that will help you as a founder.

Arvid Kahl 50:11
Yeah. And that's the thing, if you know that you will need it eventually, you probably will look out for these kinds of insights. And you will ask people questions. Something I didn't do because when I was a dev, I was like, I'm just gonna be a developer forever, right? Not for me. I'll learn that later. Well, I should ask questions back in the day.

Rob Walling 50:28
Absolutely. And, you know, I used to go talk to our marketing. I worked at, it was a credit card company and I would go talk to the marketing people and just be like, how do we? Do we add for? Like, I don't know what marketing was, almost 20 years ago. Do we add for time? They're like, yeah, we do. And well tell me about that. And I was just trying to learn something like at every company, you can learn there's hiring, there is managing, there is getting better at, you know, at technical side, there's business just operations like what is it like to run payroll and do your books and marketing and sales and all this stuff is you have to, you know, you have to do it all when you're the founder.

Arvid Kahl 51:02
The earlier you understand as a founder that you're an active generalist and you cannot just be a specialist in the thing that you already do. The earlier you will build this into your routine, right?

Rob Walling 51:12
Yeah, yeah, you really, if you want to be a specialist, there are rare exceptions. You just have to, you have to limit your growth of your company to do that. And it's possible and that maybe it's bootstrapping. You're a lifestyle bootstrapper. You can do what you want. But if I'm a developer and I want to keep developing, great, but I am going to hamper the growth of my company, you know? That's just a decision you get to and have to make at a certain point.

Arvid Kahl 51:37
We all got to learn these things. And we got to learn from amazing people like you. So, let me pivot. If people want to follow you on social media and want to see what you're doing, the conferences you run, the podcast you host, the books you write and I could list more stuff for a couple hours. Always super impressive. Where do you want people to go?

Rob Walling 51:56
I think @robwalling on Twitter, might be the number one, podcast The Startups for the Rest of Us and if they're listening to this podcast, they may want to hop over and subscribe to that in any podcatcher that exists.

Arvid Kahl 52:09
You're gonna hit 700 episodes with that in a couple of weeks

Rob Walling 52:12
I know. What should I do? I've already done all this, you know, at 100 we like had people send in audio clips and at 200, we reflected on at three like we've already done it. What at 600, I did almost nothing. I didn't even say it until the end of the episode. I was like, hey, by the way that was 600. Here, it just happens to have two zeros at the end. I'll see in 601. You know, is there anything I could do at 700?

Arvid Kahl 52:33
Oh, man, you could do a live show like with a live audience somewhere. Like

Rob Walling 52:36
Done that a couple times.

Arvid Kahl 52:38
Yeah

Rob Walling 52:38
It's fine. Those shows don't turn out as good. Like, have you listened to podcasts where you listen to the live one? And you're like, the show sucks? It's not as good. So I think we've done two or three. We did them at Microconf's and we recorded them with a live audience. So I'm going to ixnay that idea.

Arvid Kahl 52:55
Well, I guess that's up to the listeners of this episode to send you, to follow you on Twitter, give you some kind of idea. I think that would be nice because that's kind of where your podcast impacts. It's the community, right? It's the people in the community that learn from it. And I bet they want to give back. So hey, cool idea. Send it to Rob. Thanks so much for being on the show and sharing these 1000s of insights and nuggets today. That was really, really nice. Thank you so much.

Rob Walling 53:23
Amazing, man. Thank you for having me.

Arvid Kahl 53:24
Absolute pleasure.

And that's it for today. I want to briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. Now, Rob sold Drip and a few other SaaS businesses which massively impacted his life. First of, few people ever sell a business. I mean, few people ever build a business to begin with. So if you're starting one or are already running a profitable SaaS, I think it's important to think about the next step to use Rob's Stair Stepping terminology here. Selling my own SaaS certainly changed my life. I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't even be talking to amazing founders and teachers like Rob if I hadn't built a sellable business and then sold it at some point. No matter where you are on your founder journey, I recommend always thinking at least about your eventual sale of the business. You don't have to sell it, obviously. But you can. And acquire.com is the platform to do that on. They've helped hundreds of founders list, negotiate and sell their businesses from 1000s to millions of dollars in sales prices. They've seen it all and they can help you sell your SaaS business. Go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see if selling your business is the right thing for you right now. It doesn't hurt to be prepared. It doesn't hurt to dream either because a well run business is always a more sellable business. So setting it up, getting it right, that is what you want to do and acquire.com will help you get to the point where selling is a great choice.

Thank you for listening to The Boostrapped Founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. You'll find my books and my twitter course there too. And if you want to support me and this show, which I would really appreciate, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). That will make a massive difference because if you show up there, then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. That's where I would like it to be. That's how we can help each other learn from people like Rob. Any of this will help the show so thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.