The Bootstrapped Founder

Welcome to the Bootstrap founder. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com, more on that later. I was inspired by a clip from an interview with Rick Rubin this week, and he discussed the notion that art should be created primarily for the artist's satisfaction, placing the audience second. I think he even said that you should place the audience last. I think the idea is that art truly resonates with others only when it authentically represents the creator's best effort.

Right? When you do your very best, that will be just good enough for other people to notice. I think that makes a lot of sense for artists. And Ruben contrasted this with commerce, with the idea of selling stuff, which often prioritizes the audience needs over the creator's vision. So it's the reversal of that.

And I think that resonated with me both as a creator and an entrepreneur. Because I have to navigate this balance between artistic expression, like as a writer, and commercial products, also as a writer, right? You wanna write stuff that people read that has impact, but you also want to express yourself. It's always a balance to strike, but quite frankly, I fall very much on the side of the commercial approach. So So instead of creating art, let's talk about a few rather non obvious ways of thinking about it and securing our businesses today.

Alright. Let's look at the audience and not just thinking about what they need, but also what could come of a relationship with them. The advent of AI in particular has led me to consider adversarial strategies in business, using tools and frameworks to challenge my ideas and sharpen my writing, by looking at it almost from the perspective of an opponent, of an enemy, of somebody out there who wants other things that I want, whose interests are in conflict, an aggressive conflict with my own. These people don't have to exist, but just by looking at my own stuff from their perspective, from their fake perspective, like these non existing people, I get to sharpen my tools and I will tell you what this looks like in my day to day. This process involves pretty much considering potential weaknesses in my arguments, and in my business strategies to eventually build more resilient systems.

I wanna understand the external challenges and prepare for things like competition, or for downturns, or when things don't work out. Right? And clearly, this is crucial for any entrepreneurial journey. It doesn't just have to do with writing or building a software business or anything like it. If you build an audience, a SaaS or a YouTube channel or whatever, it is really useful to look at your external factors or the the external factors that affect you in a way that describes how they could negatively impact you.

So now we need to expect business predators around every corner. Well, of course not. Right? I wouldn't go that far. Adversarial thinking, this kind of externalized negativity is valuable, but it's just as important to maintain the positive outlook and focus on creating meaningful contributions, like doing good stuff, right?

Not just fearing the bad stuff, but doing good stuff too. I think this approach, and I'll go into detail in a second, is a pretty sharp blade of a tool. And it can cut both ways quite literally. It can cut you too. You can harm yourself if you're not careful with this.

So let me share just how I apply it. Let's call it safely or reflectedly in my own businesses. I've been using adversarial thinking quite extensively, especially in product development to anticipate potential abuse and to secure very valuable data. Let me talk about what this is for me right now. I'm building an API for PodScan for the business that I'm running.

Right? So I have to take precautions against abuse because any anything that can be accessed by something technical by another computer is pretty much prone to be, you know, tested and try to see how much data and how effectively people can get it out no, out of that thing. I implemented things like rate limiting, and data obfuscation to prevent unauthorized data scraping, and to ensure that access is controlled and secure. And let's just be real here, like financially viable. I can't have people don't know just gigabytes or terabytes of data from my own computers there.

That has to be kinda limited. Right? So there are API rate limits and there are certain other limits in place that tell me if there's somebody trying to do something. And it's not that I think that all my customers want to overwhelm my server with their API requests. Don't think so.

But I have to assume that either through negligence or malice, someone might just do that eventually. Right? Unintentionally intentionally doesn't really matter. If it happens, it's gonna be a problem. So I put myself in their shoes.

I think of them as the potential adversary, and I think just about how they would access or could access data that they shouldn't see. And then I built those proper gateways and authorization checks into the most basic prototype functions that I put out there. Security has to come first when customer data is involved, so I always, whenever I build anything, always think about, well, what could somebody abuse this for? Right? That is an externalized perspective and adversarial perspective.

And I expect this respect that I have for this potential adversary to be 2 sided, they took for other people to respect me as the business owner as well, which is why I also limit who can sign up to my business. Put an email verification for example, like people get an email, they have to click it before they can use the product, which is great with Laravel, the PHP framework that I'm using that has it effectively built in. If you use Laravel's Jetstream, the plugin system that allows you to build authentication right out of the box. It's really fun, I activated it, I had to uncomment 2 lines of code, and verification emails would be automatically sent, and the platform wouldn't work until somebody would actually verify, click that link in the email, which is great. Right?

That that is already people who click that link are respectful towards me as the owner of this business. They're willing to jump through one hoop to make sure and show me that they're real people. And at the same level, I also put in checks against disposable email addresses because I need to maintain the integrity of my user accounts. I need to know who the people are that are signed into my platform for many reasons. Right?

Legal reasons obviously are some of them if there's ever any problem, but just really, if I wanna build a relational business with the people that are using my product, that starts with knowing who I'm serving. And if the user signing up does not allow me to do that, well, they can't use my platform. Right? This is a bidirectional thing. It goes both ways.

And this concept of externalizing and, adversarial thinking extends to content creation and personal branding too. It's not just about building software where it's pretty clear that there is, like, technical abuse, but it's just I don't just have a database to protect. Let's just say this. I have to manage my public persona and minimize potential backlash as well, because my personal platform, my presence on the web is probably the most valuable asset that I own. People resonate with my Merc, they enjoy my virtual company, they, that's just attracts opportunities.

It attracts collaboration, and let's be honest, it also attracts money into my life. And controversy, well that will attract the controversial. The people who thrive on fighting and thrive on arguments. And this has real impact on my relationships with friends, with peers, and with advertisers and sponsors. Right?

This is not about censorship. This is not about not saying what I what I want to say. I still say what I wanna say. I just ensure that I don't rush into saying things that might undermine my long term goals by providing an opening for people that I don't wanna have a conversation with. That I don't wanna pull into my vicinity because they would be destructive not just to me, I can block easily and mute, but other people get to see that and now their day is ruined because somebody is an idiot online.

And I don't want that. Beyond that, I'm gonna end with this, I guess. Here's a extremely practical tip. If you wanna use adversarial thinking, or use it, like, as a as a part of your process, or you just wanna try it out and to understand what it is. I've been learning to use AI as this fictional enemy to critique my writing.

It's been really helpful. Like telling Jadchi Piti to take a draft of what I was writing and then attack it as my worst enemy would, like somebody who really hates everything that I stand for and who really criticizes every little bit, and then put that in a prompt and tell Chat gbt to do it has been a transformative approach for me. Because the AI looks at my work through these fictitious eyes of some person out there who would want to attack me, which then in turn helps me identify weak arguments or logical fallacies, or where I just missed something, right, and that refines my content in a way that allows me to strengthen it. Now all of a sudden, without me doing anything, it's really just that externalized thing. I get to see where my argument has holes, and that is super helpful.

I even found that CechiPT can reliably suggest good counterarguments or even ways to prevent this criticism from coming up in the first place. We all knew that AI would end up being the enemy. I guess if we watch all the Terminator movies, you really know what that means, but take this literally at this point, and and maybe really just never ever take it figuratively, and it will help you strengthen your writing. That that means writing tweets, writing threads, writing articles, writing books, writing emails, anything, like particularly emails. That's something where this is super useful, probably way you might not expect it because emails are a very, like, human to human communication medium, but before you send that email, take it and tell an AI to just look at what where could I be misunderstood?

Where could somebody willingly construct this as something against me? And then you will find those little spots. And maybe it will tell you, not as pretty clear and it's fine, but you might find those spots that you can make better content. Make write better. Right?

Better emails, write better, whatever. It's really, really useful. So adversarial thinking or I guess rather externalized perspective setting, I think that makes more sense even though it's a bit of a, you know, stretch to even pronounce. This offers this bird's eye view of one's work. Either business, or an article, or a project, which then allows us to consider the motivations and the needs of our potential audiences, and the dynamics that might happen between them and us depending on what we do, and adjust accordingly.

And I think this perspective is crucial for navigating this competitive landscape of entrepreneurship that we're all in. Right? Where it is important to understand and then preemptively address the challenges posed by competitors and the market. This This will significantly impact how quickly you find success, because you have another set of eyes and ears. They might just be virtual, or they might just be fictitious, but it is something other, and that is usually very helpful.

So take this proactive and critical approach to entrepreneurship by going adversarial. I highly recommend it. It helps balancing your creative integrity, which you still wanna retain with the realities of commerce and competition. That stuff you cannot avoid. It's about preparing for and then mitigating potential challenges through looking at yourself from this externalized perspective.

I think adversarial thinking makes you a more resilient founder. And that's it for today. I wanna briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. There is an adversarial angle to acquisitions too. I was thinking a lot about this this week.

And strategic acquisitions, in particular, often happen because businesses would rather buy your business than fight with you over customers or over innovation or whatever. They might just buy you up and integrate you, acquihire, whatever it might be. There are a lot of strategic acquisitions and they tend to be, well, quite expensive for the acquirer because the person or the company being acquired understands that there is value in this. Right? And for us as indie hackers, this is not usually the case, but it could be, and that's the thing that I wanna talk about.

Right? Most indie hacker acquisitions are financial because people see MRR and they see an opportunity to grow it, but there are potentially strategic acquisitions somewhere out there as well. And there might be someone out there just waiting for an opportunity to buy your business or a business like it because they are in the same kind of industry and they're just looking to grow by this kind of acqui hire, But they might not know about you, or they might not know that you're willing to sell, which is more likely. And which is why I recommend to any founder who's willing to let go of their business to consider listing on acquire.com. They've helped thousands of founders like myself and many others sell their valuable businesses for a lot of money before.

And I know they will help you find the right buyer if you ever need or want one. So if you're pondering a sale at any size, check them out at try. Acquire.com/arvid. I think it's always good to keep your options open. Thank you for listening to the boots of founder today.

You can find me on Twitter at arbitkahl, arbiddkahl, and you'll find my books on my Twitter course at 2. If you wanna support me in the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get this podcast via podcast player of choice. Maybe go to podscan.fm, my latest project. Just check it out and see if this is for you, or if you know anybody that might be interested in finding, like, a podcast marketing, or podcast exploration tool, podcast discovery tool, just see if this is for you and leave a rating and a review for this podcast by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder. Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds and that's where I would like it to show up.

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