304: Tyler Tringas — Investing in Bootstrapped SaaS
Download MP3Today I'm talking to Tyler Tringas, a good friend of mine. He runs the Calm Company Fund. A Calm Company is really just a revenue focused sustainable, slow, but intentional growth company. And he runs a fund that funds, obviously, a lot of them, almost 80 companies. And I think just 4 companies over the lifetime now 5 years of this fund have folded.
Arvid:In the world where they tell you only 1 in a 100 companies succeed, I see 77 companies here and Ford that didn't make it. That's 73 that are making it, and that is amazing. I'll be talking to Tyler about what it means to approach building a business in a calm way, what it feels like to run a fund like this, how it's different from all these VC funds that we see all over the place, and how he runs it with a really really skeleton minimal team. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later.
Arvid:Now here's my friend, Tyler. Tyler, when I sold my SaaS business back in 2019, you were the first person that I called to make sure that our acquisition was gonna be a good idea. And now 5 years later, you run the Calm Company Fund and you're helping, what is it, like, 77 bootstrap sustainable profitable companies making their way towards building a life changing business, I guess. You must have started to fund just around that time, 2019 ish. Right?
Arvid:So how were those last 5 years for you? Were they relaxed and calm and chill?
Tyler:You know, I think the the thing that I like to say is that, calm is something that we all aspire to. It's not actually it's a sort of equilibrium worth striving for. It's not necessarily a description of the day to day of running a calm company, and and that's definitely been pretty accurate. You know, it's been a pretty wild ride. I feel like, you know, I just did a big summary of of of kind of looking back on those 5 years, and it's it's actually nuts how much happened.
Arvid:But it's
Tyler:been fun. It's been rewarding.
Arvid:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Let's let's dive into the last 5 years because I I read that summary that that you are talking about. And thing I put it in the show notes because it's just such an interesting just historical document at this point, right?
Arvid:Because you're you're looking back at 5 years and I think in 5 years time you're going to be looking back at this document and you're gonna see things that have changed and progress that has been made. So maybe let's dive into 5 years ago when you started the fund. I think, I I'm invested in the fund because I really believe that something like this needs to exist. And I guess you are the person that that didn't just believe that it needed to exist, but also did something about it. So how did that happen?
Arvid:How did you start with this? How did you figure out that somebody needs to build a fund for sustainably profitable bootstrap businesses?
Tyler:Yeah. I mean, well, I think I figured out that it needed to exist the same way everybody did. Right? In the sense that, you know, at least for me, I had, a very direct experience of this when I, you know, I quit my first job and decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I think I was always really only fit to be an entrepreneur. I didn't last very long.
Tyler:I actually never really applied for a job ever in my life. I, I got an internship in college and they offered me a job and, and it was, like, really fun for about 3 years. And then we got acquired by a big company and that was the last time I ever worked for somebody, you know. I was like, yeah, I have to be an entrepreneur. And when I first started doing that, I I had an idea, you know, like like, you would think of just like a a great opportunity for entrepreneurship.
Tyler:I understood this kind of niche market better than most people. I taught myself to code, so I was able to build a product that I thought met a need that other people weren't seeing. You know, like, the the classic ingredients of just, like, I should go build this business. Right? And the thing that I ran into is that it was a software company.
Tyler:Right? There was software involved. It was it was billing, it was a product to help, folks switch to solar on their homes more easily. This is a time when it was very, like, manual process and would would come to your home to give you a quote to, you know, just to say, like, oh, this is gonna cost, like, 5 times more than you think and, like, waste your time. So I built some software to let you get a kinda instant quote for solar and was gonna build a business on top of this.
Tyler:And at the time, this was, like, 2010, 11, and starting a business was just way less capital efficient back then. Know what I mean? Just even incorporation, like, was go to a lawyer and pay, like, 5 to $10,000 to start your business. Right? It was just, like, not, like, you know, go to Stripe Atlas or Firstbase and pay $300 and you're done.
Tyler:And so we we were like, okay. We need some money to get this business off the ground. I didn't have any money. I I couldn't raise a friends and family round or anything like that. And so my cofounder and I basically spent 2 years discovering that there were no investors out there who would invest in these kinds of software companies unless you were trying to build this, like, unicorn, this multibillion dollar company.
Tyler:And it was a really hard lesson for me. I basically wasted, like, 2 years of my life. I spent, you know, all of my savings and then, like, ran up about $60,000 in credit card debt. And finally, I, like, gave up, you know, and I had to, like, leave New York and fly to Thailand to live on, like, $500 a month to sort of rebuild my life. And that was a really hard lesson.
Tyler:And then I bootstrapped a b to b SaaS business and, you know, ran it for about 5 years and sold it. And I was like, well, I still could have used some early capital to get that thing off the ground. And if someone had invested in me, they would have done well. You know, it would have been like a all in all win win. Why doesn't this exist?
Tyler:And so that was the question. And then, you know, the magic of Twitter and writing on the Internet, as I was building that business, I met a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs like you, like, you know, dozens of other folks, a lot of whom eventually became successful and sold their companies and had money to invest. And they all had the same idea. Like, why can't we invest in these kinds of They're great. We built 1.
Tyler:I would have loved to have invested in me. Why isn't that an option? You know? And so that was the origin of the fund was basically me just kind of like firing up a spreadsheet. You know, I just happened to be the 1 weirdo bootstrap SaaS founder who also had a prior career in finance, you know, working with venture funds and pension funds and stuff like that.
Tyler:So I was like, I think we can make a fund work here, guys. What do you say? You know? And now people said, alright. Let's try it.
Tyler:And that's the origin of it.
Arvid:That was really cool. I'm glad you had that background because just seeing it being real for others makes things more, you know, easily accomplished or at least dreamt of by yourself. Right? Somebody did something like this. I can try building something.
Arvid:Let's see where it goes. Love that. And, honestly, back in the day, probably 2012, 2013, I was trying to bootstrap something in Berlin back in Germany with my friends as well, and we were looking for money. We were going to banks, and they were like, you're not building a factory, or we're not gonna give you money. That was literally what they said.
Arvid:It was really bad. And then the the only other option we had other than government kind of funds in Europe, there is a lot of money that just trickles down into technology because they're European Union. They wanna when there are other things that they're building to be used by other people, so they give you money to implement it. That was horrible. But other than that, all you have were or you had were accelerators.
Arvid:And accelerators are great, but they still operate under the the other paradigm. Right? They still operate under this kind of VC hypergrowth paradigm. Let's maybe establish a little bit what comm businesses aren't. Like, let let's maybe look into what the default is or has been for how to raise money or how to raise money.
Arvid:That's already kind of implication of this, but how to fund your business. Right? Obviously, comm businesses have a different money requirement, and comm the comm fund is not a hypergrowth VC fund. Let's talk about what it's not.
Tyler:Yeah. It's funny because, you know, in many ways, when you try to describe describe a calm company, you basically end up describing like a good business. And then people who are not really in the industry are just sort of like, what are you talking about? Why is this a thing? You know?
Tyler:But the reality is that the kind of venture model of building companies has just come to over dominate the conversation where every business seems to you know, everybody seems to think they need to build some sort of venture scale business. And venture capital and this whole mindset of building venture scale businesses is really actually like a niche subset of the ways to do entrepreneurship. And the basic premise of it is you take on really high risk opportunities. So if you're a venture investor and you make 20 investments, you expect a lot of them to fail because these are like moonshots. Right?
Tyler:You're gonna do space factories and you're gonna do a cure for cancer and you're gonna do your next competitor to Facebook, etcetera. And most of them are gonna fail. So the the way that you make the whole math work is you need to have some massive outlier winners in that portfolio to make up for all of the other failures. Right? And that's how you make that work as a venture investor.
Tyler:And that mindset then trickles down to how you are encouraged to build companies in a portfolio like that. And the general approach is you need to take on you need to maximize your chances of building a huge company. Right? So, like, even if that means taking on more risk, growing really fast, raising as much capital as you can, every lever you can pull to increase the chance that you build a $10,000,000,000 company is worth doing even if that decreases the chance that you build a really successful $100,000,000,000 company. Right?
Tyler:Or $10,000,000 company. Right? And so that's the kind of mindset that flows through into this type of entrepreneurship. And calm companies are really just sort of the opposite of that. You sort of unwind a bunch of that where you say, you know, we're not gonna raise as much capital as we possibly Right?
Tyler:We're not gonna keep raising and then assume we're also gonna keep raising raising raising raising raising. We're gonna try to get back to being a real business that's profitable, and then maybe we'll raise a little more money later down the road, that sort of thing. Same thing with growth. Right? You say, what's a sustainable growth rate?
Tyler:Something we can actually keep up. Right? Something we can repetitively do and let it compound for decades over time, not let's try to create this hockey stick growth no matter what. Right? And it's a couple of things like that, but it's mostly just a process of looking at this, like, sort of specific way of building companies and unwinding some of them back to a sort of normal way of thinking about building companies, which really aligns with how most entrepreneurs wanna build a company anyway.
Tyler:Well, they wanna succeed. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Arvid:Yeah. Sorry. I I didn't wanna cut you off there.
Tyler:No. I think it's right. It's like, you know, I think if you talk to most entrepreneurs, they would like, what are you really shooting for? And the answer for most of them is I want a a high percentage chance of building a fantastic company. Right?
Tyler:And if you say, would you trade that for, you know, a low percentage chance of building a $100,000,000,000 company? Like, most entrepreneurs will say no. You know? Like, I want a really good shot at building a great company is the answer to most of it. And and that's actually the wrong answer for, like, 99.999 percent of investors out there.
Arvid:Yeah. Isn't that bizarre? Like, in in a way, it it feels like it it feels like a very hazardous way of dealing with money. Like an investor has money some somebody's money. It might be a pension fund, might be a a private equity or whatever it is, somebody else's money, and they wanna play this extremely risky gamble situation, like, all the time with everything they do.
Arvid:It feels very misaligned to me. It's very interesting. Right? From from your perspective, like from a fund that doesn't subscribe to this perspective, How have you implemented processes within the fund or even just aligned the goals of the fund to not just look for moonshots. Do you still do you still have moonshots?
Arvid:Do you still have these exits happening? And how how do you orient the funds if that's not your active goal?
Tyler:Yeah. There's a couple I mean, there's there's some things that are similar. Right? So you're always looking you know, you're at the end of the day, you're investing in the early days in an entrepreneur. So you do wanna look for things like, does this founder have a unique insight into the market?
Tyler:Do they have, like, an unfair advantage? Do, you know, do they bring an audience and trust that they've built over decades or not? Those sorts of things. Those, I think, are common to all kinds of early stage investing. Then there's ways that are divergent.
Tyler:And so one of them is the idea of going after a huge market or a niche market. I think that's, like, the most important one where, you know, when you go after a huge market, if you wanna build a $100,000,000,000 company, you have to go after a huge market. It's like a definitional thing. You cannot build a company that big in a smaller market. But there's other attributes to that.
Tyler:Very, very big markets also attract a ton of competition. They also attract a ton of other competing venture investors. So now all of a sudden, you know, like, Uber and Lyft is a classic example. Right? They got into this, like, war where they were, like, raising as much capital as they could.
Tyler:They were losing money as fast as they could just to sort of do battle with each other. That dynamic is not going to happen in, like, a much smaller niche market. It can only happen in a market that's so big that you can attract, you know, a SoftBank to give you, you know, $10,000,000,000 to go after it. And so we kind of unwind that again. Right?
Tyler:And so we're, like, very comfortable backing entrepreneurs that are going after niche markets where, you know, if they really hit a home run and they capture, you know, 30, 40% market share, they're still not gonna necessarily build a $1,000,000,000 company in that, but they can build a fantastic, very profitable, very healthy company as long as they don't raise way too much money along the way. Right? So that's, like, one example. And we kind of try to take, like, a similar approach to thinking through an investment thesis and then, you know, choose intentionally which ones we feel are the same and which ones we're gonna take a sort of divergent perspective on.
Arvid:Well, the the one thing that really stands out to me in in your just how how you value companies, how you look at the the the value of a company that the fund might invest in, you you don't go for these kind of unicorn weird virtual fake valuations. Like, all this stuff that happened over the last couple of years where it was just massively inflated in one round, and the next round, it was worth nothing. Like, that stuff just doesn't doesn't catch you at all. Like, it doesn't doesn't make any sense for you to even look at these things. Right?
Tyler:Yeah. I mean, valuations is a really tricky topic. Right? Because I think, you know, first of all, just like what are the current valuations is a very difficult question to answer because you only will hear, like, a dataset of this is pretty hard to come by because these are private deals being done. And so, you know, every fund like, when I go and do, an investment and I set evaluation on a company, like, eventually, my investors in my fund might hear what that number was, but they're not obliged to share it with anybody.
Tyler:And there's nobody aggregating that data to figure that out. So what you end up with as an entrepreneur sort of thinking, like, what are valuations is you kind of read, like, more of the outliers because the outliers will get reported. Oh, this company had a $100,000,000 valuation with, like, almost no revenue that will show up in the news. Right? And so, like, what is a normal valuation is even difficult to even start with?
Tyler:And then the question is, like, what valuation do you want as an entrepreneur is also tough because you would think this is a obvious kind of zero sum game. Right? Like, a better valuation means I can raise more money while giving up a lower percentage of my company. So, obviously, like, as better of evaluation as high evaluation as I can get, that's, like, objectively good. The problem is that you have to think about how the game plays out afterwards because raising the money is just the starting line.
Tyler:Right? And so one dynamic that we saw a bunch, especially over the last couple of years where money was really widely available, evaluations were crazy, is entrepreneurs would go and they would raise, like, you know, in my opinion, like, way too much money. Then you raise this money. It's not like you raise, let's say, like, $3,000,000 or $5,000,000 or $6,000,000. It's not like you can then, like, just build a nice small team of 5 people and say, great.
Tyler:We have 4 years of runway. We can just, like, chill out and spend time figuring it out. There's so much pressure to spend it. You know, the investors are like, dude, we gave you this money to spend it. You know, like, we we have this fund.
Tyler:Like, we don't want we want you to take it and turn it into growth. You know? And so what happens is now you go and you hire 25 people, and now your monthly burn is, you know, $400,000 a month. And you maybe you start building this business and your revenue starts going up and going up and going up, but you start to burn through that money and you tend to burn through, like, the money in 12 to 18 months no matter how much you raise. So now, like, 12 months have gone by.
Tyler:You've got good revenue, but you're nowhere near breakeven. Right? Because you raised so much money and you hired so much people. And so now you're staring down the end of this runway, and now you have to go back to the market to raise money because there's no way you can get your revenue to break even in time. Well, now the last valuation that you just raised at is your new low watermark.
Tyler:You almost it's technically possible to raise a lower valuation, but there's immense pressure to raise at the same or higher. And now you haven't really got much progress. You know, you've, like, grown your revenue when you raised at a 20,000,000, $30,000,000 valuation here. Now Now you're gonna go to the market and say, oh, we're doing 500 k of ARR. We wanna raise a 50,000,000 air, valuation.
Tyler:And everyone's like, no. You're not worth anywhere near that. If you had scaled that whole thing down and you had raised, you know, $400,000 at 3 or $4,000,000 And then you had 500 k ARR. You said, we need another $500,000 at 6,000,000. Everyone's like, yeah.
Tyler:That totally works. So it's a really tricky dynamic where you can actually kind of, like, run yourself off a cliff with an otherwise good business simply by overshooting on valuation. I know it sounds like it's kind of like I sound like I'm, like, talking my book because I'm on the other side of the equation, but I really do think that, like, setting fair, reasonable valuations and and reasonable investment amounts is on average, like, a win win for for founders. And, yeah, it's just tricky, though. It's been a very it's been a very interesting ride for the last couple of years to have this conversation over and over again with founders because, again, it's been, like, in this context where all of those numbers were, like, going crazy and now they're kind of settling back to earth.
Tyler:But, again, you don't get that in the news. There's no news report that says, like, valuations, much more reasonable these days. Right? Like, that's not a headline, but it really gets any traction, you know. So, yeah, it's an interesting topic, but it's it's, yeah, it's tricky.
Arvid:It it is, I think, also the case that most of the the media outlets in our space that report on these things, like Tech Crunch and stuff, they only look at Silicon Valley. They only look at these massively funded companies. So, like, you you were right. The outliers get reported, and they are already like, even the the the base foundation of the the people that they look at, they are already outliers compared to the rest of us. Right?
Arvid:So you have the outliers within an outlier group, man. Yeah. Of course, this is gonna distort the the perception of this. I I I really like your very reasonable approach to to raising. Right?
Arvid:Like, raising money. And one thing that I read in the article that you wrote is that you changed your perspective on follow on investments. And I think, like, raising rounds is effectively getting investment once and then having a follow on. How and why has this changed for you?
Tyler:Yeah. So to, so follow ons is basically a term where you invest in a company and then maybe you invest again. Oftentimes the, the way that would normally work is you'd you'd maybe be the 1st or the only or the lead investor in the first time. And then they wanna go raise a bit more money maybe from a bigger fund. And there's an opportunity for you to invest more alongside in the 2nd round.
Tyler:And in general, we just we we had to sort of stake out a position on this because in the venture world, this is like standard operating procedure is you actually reserve part of your fund. So if I go and raise a fund, I won't invest as a venture fund, I won't invest every single dollar out of that fund in first checks. What I'll actually do is I'll keep a big pile of that aside. I'll do all my first checks, and then as those companies mature, I will take some of my reserves and I will use that to invest in the follow on. So it's like standard operating procedure.
Tyler:And then there's this extra dynamic called signaling risk, which is basically if your existing investors have an opportunity to follow on into your company, but they're not doing that, they're choosing not to do that, the new investors will say, well, what do they know that I don't? Okay. You know? And this is called signaling risk, which says, like, if people are not following on into you, this might be seen as bad because they're set up to do follow ons and they're choosing not to out of their reserves. Right?
Tyler:So we took this opposite approach. We said, most of the companies we invest in are, like, not gonna raise any more capital. So there's no point in reserving. And if there's no point in reserving, then we're just gonna say we don't do follow ons. And we just say we write our first check and that's it, and we're done.
Tyler:Over the last couple of years, a couple of things have changed. Basically, we got more and more comfortable investing larger checks. So we initially were writing checks around, like, a 150 to 200 k, and we kinda realized that more like 2.50 to 500 k was the right number to be investing for a bunch of different reasons. And then also we got more comfortable investing in more mature companies. We found companies coming to us that were, you know, almost maybe doing a million of ARR who still were not finding the right investors to invest in our company, which I didn't predict when we first started the fund.
Tyler:I thought we were only gonna be investing smaller checks earlier, and that was it. So we found those opportunities. So what we're now finding is we have companies kind of transitioning within that phase where we get 2 kind of bites at the apple. So maybe we'll invest a smaller amount very early on. They then grow, but they're still within that rage.
Tyler:They wanna raise a little more capital. And we've said, okay, well, we gotta change our rules now because these are good opportunities. We would invest in them if they had just come to us as a new opportunity, whether we had invested them or not, they're a good fit. So now we're gonna invest again. So we've kinda changed that approach where we still kind of treat it as a brand new opportunity.
Tyler:We're not, like, reserving money to do follow ons, but we will do that now because we're seeing enough opportunities where we're like, it's actually a good fit to go ahead and invest more in the same companies in our portfolio as they, like, grow and hit milestones and mature.
Arvid:I mean, that also is, I I think, almost in the sense of the word, a sustainable approach because it sustains, you know, like the momentum that you see in in your relationship with this company as well. I kinda like this. It's kinda you you you feed back into something that you obviously see as working. Right? That that's kinda nice.
Tyler:Yeah. And I think what I will look for there is like, I wanna see, and I think founders should also think this way is like a kind of seeing breakeven as like this equilibrium that you're comfortable kind of like diverging from, but then you know you're gonna rotate back to versus like when it becomes a capital dependency, right? When you become a money pit and you're like, we need more money so that we can burn even more money so that we could burn even more money and raise even more money versus like, you know, we're growing. We see how we could take more money and invest and create a slightly better growth trajectory, which will get us back to break even just off of the money that we raised. And we're basically seeing companies kinda still have that that kind of, like wave almost where they raise a little bit from us.
Tyler:They invest that they hire a few more people than they could. Otherwise you see an inflection point in like their revenue growth and they say, okay, well, we could get back to break even, but we wanna do even more of what we just did. So let's raise a bit more money, you know, but as long as it feels like it's going to have a pathway back to good business that makes more money than it spends, then we're excited to keep doing it, basically.
Arvid:That's pretty cool. I I love this. I I would like to to talk a bit about the spread, like, both in terms of, like, how many companies you have, how many of them are profitable, how many have quit along the way. All all those kind of numbers are interesting to me. And also the size of them, like the the recurring revenue that you have on a on an MRR level.
Arvid:Because you just said something about a 1,000,000 ARR, and I would assume there are probably very small, very early stage, just having reached profitability businesses in there as well. So what what's the spread in in terms of success and in terms of monthly revenue?
Tyler:Yeah. In terms of like within the portfolio right now, if
Arvid:you can talk about it.
Tyler:Yeah. I think like the the the upper end of companies would be starting to push, like, starting to, like like, top end of 7 figure ARR, basically. So a couple companies in that range. So, like, you know, 8 figure ARR is, like, on the horizon. Yeah.
Tyler:And then all the way down to, you know, especially with recent investments, you know, we we're pretty comfortable investing in, you know, companies that are post launch, post revenue, but quite early, even within that. Right? So even just like a few 1,000 or one to 2 k MRR, is something that we can sink our teeth into and and invest in. So it's it is a pretty big spread, which is kind of funny because, like, we something that I'm honestly still not sure what the right answer is because like a lot of if you look at like the traditional accelerators, right, which we were talking about, they have figured out this cool kind of, like, cohort based approach to things where, you know, you get comments at the very early days. You get them from like pre seed to seed, and then you like send them on their way.
Tyler:And so you're always dealing with companies that have like similar ish challenges. We kind of just have this, like, ever expanding portfolio. And because, like, they not that many of them die, you know, only, like, 4 companies have shut down out of, 77 of them. Wow. And but also, like, not that many of them will, you know, exit or like, a lot of them are just like still growing.
Tyler:You know? They're just still doing their thing. So they're still kind of in the portfolio and they're still and so we have this, like, real diverse set of, like, needs, experiences, etcetera, within the portfolio that is an opportunity because it's a lot of different things. You actually can have, like, founders within the portfolio mentoring newer founders and stuff like that. But also, like, what does our portfolio need from us is, like, very hard to pin down because it's, like, this now, like, big growing blob of of companies at all stages and and inflection points.
Arvid:Is is that a challenge for you? Is that something that you you wanna fix?
Tyler:It's a challenge. It makes it very hard to know what to do. So if you think about for example like a lot of accelerators and stuff will do programming, right? So they'll like cap people on to give talks and we've done experiments like this. And one of the things we found is like, it, you know, like not everybody needs the same thing at the same time.
Tyler:So it's very hard to know like what to sort of sequence. So where we've sort of settled is to kind of take, like, a community based approach that's very, like, choose your own adventure. It's like, here's a bunch of resources, here's a bunch of mentors, here's, Slack, a directory, a way to ask for introductions, a way to talk to us to get you to connect, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you just kinda, like, tell us what we need and we kinda, like, route you to stuff. And we actually just launched, like, an AI concierge inside our Slack now, which has the same basic ideas.
Tyler:You can just ask it. You can be, like, who do I know who can help me, you know, hire a CFO? Who do I know that's in the travel industry that could make introductions for us? And so we kind of just, like, try to make it like that, but it does make it like a difficult group to build to build product for. Right?
Tyler:Which is I don't know. It's a challenge. Yeah.
Arvid:But it it it sounds like you wanna keep it that way. Right? It's not that you wanna move upmarket and just say anybody, like, below 20, 50 k MR, go do your own thing. We only take these people with the the higher numbers. That's not what you're gonna do.
Arvid:Right?
Tyler:No. I don't think so. I think that is a thing that happens a lot with people running a fund business like I do is they realize that, life is a lot easier when you move up market. It's a bit like the same dynamic of, you know, you'll see like recurring meme and in, in kind of bootstrap or Twitter of like the difference between like the $100 a year customer and the $10,000 a year customer. And, like, I get it and there are attributes of that, but, like, I don't I just wanna help early stage entrepreneurs, to be honest.
Tyler:That's just, like, what makes me happiest. And so I think that we will always do that. But at the same time, we have to be opportunistic and look for, like, the best investments we can make. So I think for now, we will just, like, continue doing stuff that's a little bit like a wider spread than, than might be, like, optimal, but that's just because that's what I love doing. Yeah.
Arvid:There are other ways to to help people outside of just giving them money. Right? Like, the the fund is I would that's what I love about the fund and being part of it is that it's effectively a mentor network. And you kind of mentioned this, like founders that are in the funds that are in the businesses that the fund funds help other founders in the fund or the the sub funds that exist in it. That is really cool.
Arvid:You're effectively building a community. And I think even outside this kind of closed community that is kind of, you know, in in this money relationship, you could do a lot of work. And, you know, we used to have a podcast. We used to have used to have a an idea on how to do this. Right?
Arvid:So there are ways to do this outside. Do do you have any any plans that are, you know, like, educational outside of the fund?
Tyler:I don't have any firm plans, to be honest, and we should probably just pick that conversation back up, because, you know, I mean, I don't know if folks followed this a while, but, you know, last year, you and I had this podcast. We were talking about creating like a calm MBA, Right? So, an educational sort of course, kind of counter programming a little bit like we were talking about how, like, the sort of, like, Silicon Valley venture mindset is kind of over dominated. You know, how can we kind of create a an alternate path? And I think it's worth picking back up, you know, to be honest, like, I I mean, I wrote about it a bit in this this essay that I shared with you, but, you know, it was a pretty challenging year for for me personally and for the fund last year in terms of, like, restructuring the fund.
Tyler:We had to reduce the team size quite a bit. We were also dealing with, you know, pretty challenging legal issue that I don't wanna go into too much detail on, but it consumed a lot of, a lot of my time. And so I basically just didn't have the extra bandwidth to really participate in it. But I do feel like it is something that really weighed on me a lot. And I I guess, like, if we if someone had asked me the question about this, I guess I would have seen it, but it just sort of blindsided me a little bit that, like, running a fund like this is, like, you know, 99% say no.
Tyler:Right? Like, you know, a founder you meet a founder who, like, really wants to build a company and your main tool in the toolkit is saying, like, no. I'm not gonna invest in you, for, like, all kinds of different reasons. Right? And a lot of them are not the founder's fault.
Tyler:A lot of times, my answer is I think this is a great business to bootstrap, but not one that I can invest in. Right? You know, which is, like, not helpful to the founder, really. And that kinda sucks actually to do that for like 5 years and to end up spending most of your time saying no to founders who are looking to you for help. So I've been thinking a lot about how to, how to layer in more work that is helpful to all entrepreneurs.
Tyler:So we should we should keep talking about that.
Arvid:Yeah. For sure. Did that impact you? Like the just having to deflect and say no to people? Like, did that challenge you on, like, a mental health level?
Arvid:It kinda it's it sounds like it's quite stressful to to tell people who had a dream to, nah, not today.
Tyler:Yeah. It does. And I mean, it really sucks because you go in at least I go into every conversation wanting to say yes. You know what I mean? Like, I, you know, every time that we have this like open application process where people can go to our website and they can, you know, basically fill out their hopes and dreams.
Tyler:Right. They like tell us their strategy for, for building this company and why we should invest in it. And I, every time I open it and start reviewing applications, I like, you know, am crossing my fingers that there's going to be some stuff in there that we can like totally invest in. And, you know, especially if it's like, you know, I review 30, 40 applications and not a single one is like something that we can actually invest in. Like, that is a real bummer.
Tyler:Like, there's no real equivalent to that when you sell a product to customers. Right? Because, like, everybody who wants your product, you can kind of maybe there's like a similar thing in consulting maybe, but like, you know, it's not cool. It's not the same ratio, you know, you're, you're not often doing 95 to 1 or something like that. And it is.
Tyler:Like, it's it weighs on you for sure, man. Like, I did not anticipate that.
Arvid:I mean, the the open process is I I I don't wanna blame anything or anyone here, but it I mean, you you you switch the script or you flip the script on how people get into funds as well. Right? You used to be you need to know that guy. That guy is gonna introduce you to them, and they introduce you to you. And then you you you you come over and you have this weird coffee meeting because you you need to look the other person in the eye and and really see if they can live the dream, if they can be that you're your golden goose or whatever.
Arvid:Right? That is different. You you have a completely remote company. The open the process is open. Everybody can apply.
Arvid:So I guess there is also a lot of misaligned submission there happening, I would assume. Is that right? Like, do you do you get a lot of things that like, do people come to you too early? Maybe that's an interesting question. Or do they come to you with the wrong ideas, or why do you say no?
Arvid:Maybe that's a good question here.
Tyler:Oh, I mean, every every possible permutation is is on there. You know? I mean, we try to we try to aggressively pre filter it with, like, the way, like, the language that we write around it. You know, it's not just like investment application form, you know, fields. Like, there's a lot of stuff, which is like, here's what we like to invest in.
Tyler:Here's the stages we invest in. Here's what we don't invest in. Like, a lot of that wrapped around it. And even kind of it's like an app now. So it's like, got like inline feedback and stuff like that.
Tyler:So we try to filter it, but even still, we get people who are like, I'm launching a new soybean farm in Indonesia and I'm looking for investors. It's like, okay, great. You know, that is the, that's the downside of the open application process is you get some like totally random stuff. But I would say like, by and large, the, the largest reasons that I say no to stuff that maybe looks like it kind of fits the parameters. So one is that like, it can be like really too niche, even though like I am interested in investing in niche markets.
Tyler:Like sometimes it's like, I think this is too niche to even support like a solopreneur business. You know, like this is just a niche within a niche, within a niche You've got, you know, 400 MRR. And I think you're gonna like struggle to break 1 k here, you know? And there is an element where as an investor, like, you know, what we've tried to do, you have this misalignment, right, between like how big of an outcome is a success for the founder versus how big of an outcome is a success for the investors. And like in a lot of venture funding, you might end up in a world where that gap is huge, where, like, the founders, like, $10,000,000 would be life changing, but the investors have invested so much money that the business has to be worth 500,000,000 for it to even, like, register or a billion or whatever.
Tyler:And so you have a huge gap. You still do sometimes have that gap, right. Where like, you know, somebody is at a point in their life where building a business and selling it for, you know, 6 figures would be life changing for them. I can't invest 6 figures and then get a return on that, you know, that outcome. So they say like, like that's like pretty common too early is definitely common, right?
Tyler:So no revenue yet, no traction or kind of like what we often see is kind of like, Kind of like fake traction in the sense that it's like, we have 20 ks of MRR, but actually those are like consulting contracts and you've kind of like spun out a product, but that product doesn't really have the same amount of traction. And you're kind of like. Like, you have people who signed LOIs, but they haven't actually paid you, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Arvid:So yeah. So so you just you just get a lot of different dreams that that people have in whatever shapes they might be. I find it very interesting because, like, the fund itself, as it's not chasing the big unicorn exit, No. You have to make money somehow. And the the more I looked into it, obviously, when when I started, I was amazed by the the shared earnings agreement.
Arvid:The idea that you you do you don't really do revenue sharing even. You do earnings sharing. And I think that is an interesting difference. That is the ultimate alignment. Like, for me, and you can explore this in a in a second.
Arvid:I just wanna tell you why I love this so much for a second here. I love that you make people pay themselves and only then does the fund make money. That I love. I I love the alignment here. You want founders to make money and then do you make money.
Arvid:You don't make money in spite of founders. You make money because of founders, and I love that.
Tyler:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, it's again, like, it's funny.
Tyler:Right? Because, like, I think if you drop somebody in who had, like, no context on all this market, they would be like
Arvid:Yeah. Sure. What are
Tyler:you talking about? Like, you invested for a piece of the business. Like you should make money as a proportion of the founders making money. Right. That's often not how it works.
Tyler:Right. You know, so for example, like a lot of, a lot of early stage funding structures really are only optimized to get paid back through an exit. Right. So if the business has an opportunity, if there's a moment in time where the business could basically take their foot off the gas and, you know, start to become very profitable and start to throw off several $1,000,000 a year in profits. A lot of times investors don't want that, right.
Tyler:Because they either the funding structure doesn't even really entitle them to a percentage of profits or just the way they've structured their fund and, and all that sort of stuff is they don't want like a dividend stream coming back. That's not what they told their investors they were going to get. So they'll tell you like, no, reinvest all that money, try and like grow as much as possible. And, you know, sometimes like you can reinvest that money and you don't get growth, you know, or you reinvest that money, but the market valuations for your company come down. So you grow your top line, but then when you sell, you make the same amount as if you'd sold 3 years ago and taken 1,000,000 of dollars in dividends out of it.
Tyler:Right? So there's all kinds of times where investors and founders are misaligned. And one of the things like from day 1 was we wanted to be aligned with founders who made that decision to say, I think the sensible thing for us to do is to take a healthy amount of profits out of the business right now. We wanna say, like, great, you know, we'll also just take our share of those. So it's basically 1 there's a threshold.
Tyler:So, you know, they can kind of pay themselves a a, you know, modest amount of money. But once that, you know, either dividends, profits, or founder compensation goes over a certain level, then they are obligated to pay a portion of that, you know, back to to us. And and right now, I think we have we have, like, 12 companies, who are paying quarterly, shared earnings. Basically, a profit share payment, of of some kind, which is, which is pretty cool. I think that's, like it's pretty far ahead of schedule.
Tyler:You know, when we originally kind of modeled this out, we didn't expect any companies to be profitable until about 5 years in. And so, you know, it's been about 5 years since the first investment. Right? So the the and and also those profit share payments have been happening for several years now for for some of them. I think we got the first one, like 2 years in, or maybe even less.
Tyler:So that's been kind of cool to see companies like succeeding and it's pretty cool. Like, I don't know if you saw, I did a conversation with, with Riley, Chase from Postify, who was the first investment that we did and he shared there and on Twitter that like he'd paid us $300,000 in shared earnings, but that was as a function of paying himself a $1,000,000 in profits over several years. And it's like, yeah, that's the exact kind of, like, high five that that we wanted to create. You know?
Arvid:Yeah. That's the ultimate win win right there. Right? And even even that that you were talking about signaling earlier, that is the signal That is the signal that this works to me. That somebody gets to make money and you make money, and then this is it's just such an encouraging motivational thing.
Arvid:I I love seeing this. That was one of my favorite Twitter conversations of the last couple months. Just seeing the joy of somebody building something that's so valuable and you having helped make this happen along the way and everybody benefits. That is really, really, really cool.
Tyler:One thing I do want to say actually, since we're here, and I think the people listening to your show will care about this a lot. So, we did get quite a lot of feedback, you know, so we crafted the shared earnings agreement as this like relatively new structure. And, I think it did 2 things. It was kind of a trade off between alignment and complexity. Right?
Tyler:And so, like, the agreement is like a little bit more complicated. In my thinking, it created quite a bit more alignment. The main dynamic here is this concept that you can sort of invest. And then as you make shared earnings payments back to us, you're actually also sort of like repurchasing some of your equity. And to me, this created a lot of alignment.
Tyler:5 years in, I think where we've landed is that on average, it's too complicated for most situations, mainly because it makes our because of the repurchasing and all that sort of stuff, it's like how much does do the investors own? Is this, like, dynamic target?
Arvid:Changes over time. Yeah. That's interesting.
Tyler:People don't like that. They some people don't like that at the beginning, not knowing, like, what does what it's gonna be in the outcome and then not knowing quarter over quarter how that's gonna be. So where we have landed is, like, I would say the majority of our deals now have the same components where, you know, we're an investor. We have a slice of if you sell the company or if you're very profitable, we get a percentage of it, but we've just kept it as more of a flat number. So if it's, you know, 6%, then it's 6% of a sale and 6% of shared earnings.
Tyler:And there isn't any sort of dynamism to the to the dynamic there. We actually use a a standard safe, which is like a very well known convertible equity instrument, and then a side letter that describes all the shared earning stuff. We still do both, but, you know, I think that's an important update because I think some people have gotten a little churned off, from working with us just by the oh, I don't even know what this is. I don't wanna do due diligence on it, etcetera, etcetera. And look, you know, we listen.
Tyler:So, we use both tools for the the right, you know, occasion. But that's, like, definitely one of the, I would say, lessons learned, in 5 years in is, like, overcomplicating things has a cost.
Arvid:Yeah. You're building in public. Right? Like, you build things that may change, that will change, and you you get the feedback complexity is and how people I I honestly, I this now and and look at what the complexity is and how people I I honestly, I love the idea that this is so aligned, and personally, I would not have a problem with this, but I know that other people may have different perspectives and it's nice that you see or that I get to see you like moving into a a more compatible way of doing this. That's really really interesting.
Tyler:Yeah. I always honestly thought, like, all of these are just, like, tools for the job. Right? The thing that's unique about us is the thesis that we're trying to execute, and everything else is just I have no, like, identification with it or attachment to it. Like, if it's not serving the thesis or if adding other things to it serves the thesis better, then we're gonna do that.
Arvid:You know? Tools of the job, now that you mentioned it, you you've been heavily you already mentioned it, having using AI tools inside of the fund. And also you I think you have an in house no code team. I I find this very interesting. Can you can, like, explain how that came to be?
Arvid:Because I don't think it's normal. You you said it. Most funds of that size are like a guy somewhere doing something, and you have you have a team building no code tools for your internal communication stuff. That's really cool. How did that come to be?
Tyler:Well, it came to be because, I don't know how many people know this these days, but Ben Tassil who built Makerpad and sold it to Zapier and now runs Ben's bytes, which is a super popular AI newsletter. He was the 1st employee at the fund. And you know, he kinda, I, I wasn't even really hiring basically because again, you know, we had no budget to hire anybody. And Ben approached me and, you know, Makerpad was this sort of side hustle project where he was teaching people kind of no code, but it wasn't really making, very much money at the time. And so he came and worked for us and immediately I saw all this incredible stuff he was building with these no code tools and I was like, this is the future.
Tyler:Like, I don't wanna have to have a, you know, 3 person engineering team, you know, writing code for us. We're gonna build everything and go all in on no code. So he kinda got us started down that road. And then basically, Makerpad started taking off and I said, like, look, you gotta go full time. And by the way, we're gonna invest in your in Makerpad.
Tyler:And and it all worked out because he he sold us happier, like like, 12 months later, which was awesome. But he got us started down that path. And then later, Michael Revere, who joined the team and and, some other folks kind of we we really went all in on no code tools and so we have, like, a back end tool for analyzing deal flow, and HQ tool for connecting the community. We also have, like, a bunch of internal things that we use to wire up to our Slack. At any given time, we have, like, you know, hundreds of different Zaps running, like, thousands of times.
Tyler:And so that was a really cool base. And then when LLM started to really come along, it's been really cool because they're so easily integrated with these no code forwarding this thing, why don't we also take it and summarize it and forward it with a summary attached to it? And so we've been really, like, for the last year, experimenting a ton with all kinds of different ways to layer in LLMs into our workflows, and it's been it's been really fascinating project because I don't know if we wanna go off on too much of a tangent here. But one of the things we've been finding is that, like, it's really hard. There's it's very there's a lot of sort of shiny objects in the sense that you try something with LOMs and and then, like, once or twice, it works amazing.
Tyler:And you're like, oh my god. This is incredible. So I'll give you an example, which was, we try to use LLMs to basically do competitor analysis on the inbound applications. So somebody would send us an application. One of the things I do is I go and research the competitors.
Tyler:And so we said, let's try and have an AI do a first pass at this. Figure out what kind of product this is and then go find the competitors to it and give me, like, a rough draft of it. The first couple of times we tried it, it was, like, amazing. I was like, oh my god. This is incredible.
Tyler:It's, like, actually doing a very good job of this. The problem is over time, there's just enough, like, hallucinations and things that were wrong and all that sort of stuff that I ended up not being able to trust it. So we basically had to go and recheck the work every single time, which more or less reduced the value of it back to 0. Like, if there's no way you know? And and there's been a bunch of things that we found where it goes like that, where it's like, this is so cool.
Tyler:Oh my god. Wait. It doesn't work just oh, now I can't rely on this at all. It's worthless. Right?
Tyler:But there's a few things that make it through that filter. Right? Where it's like, oh, no. This actually works. Works reliably enough that I can sort of lean on this often enough that now it's a part of our workflow.
Tyler:And so that's been like a really cool process of finding those those few things that make it through there and then integrating those in to create a bunch of leverage. So
Arvid:That's really cool. I've been noticing the same thing. Like, I'm building PodScan. Right? Yeah.
Arvid:There's, there's a lot of LLMs that I use in the background both for, you know, for transcription of audio, which has its own hallucinations and is kinda hard because, you know, accents and words that don't exist in the English language, all that kind of stuff. But on the other side, I I use a lot of inference too to you check for keywords and check for themes and that stuff. And it took me a long while to get a local AI because I run it locally. I don't wanna run any API because of platform risk. I'm a boot shepherd.
Arvid:I'm not gonna trust the success of my business on OpenAI's, like Microsoft's weird platform or whatever. So I'm I run this locally, and it took a a long while to find anything that reliably produces true results. Right? I'm really just checking. Is there something like this in this piece of text or not?
Arvid:It's not too complicated, but even that is hard to get to a to a point where it works reliably, like, 95% of the time. So I know that I mean, we are at a stage where LLMs, like the idea that we even talk about this is, like, what, 6 months old? Sure. This this is the nascent stage of all these tools. And every week, just a couple days ago, I guess, Google released a new thing, and now we're looking at the next Mistral or whatever.
Arvid:Like, all these things come out in such rapid succession that we just have to, you know, check if the new thing works every single time every week. So, you know, that's just working with these tools at this point. Right?
Tyler:Totally. Yeah. But this has been cool because we just started we spent about a year really playing with this stuff, iterating. And and now I think we're at a phase now where we have a good enough sense of, like, how to wire together some of the NoCo tools, what stuff is likely to work versus not likely to work that we're starting to basically do like internal consulting for our portfolio companies for free, but like basically just like coming to them and saying like, let's see how we can, you know, find something in your workflow that's gonna improve you. So, like, one example would be, like, using, looking through their inbound, like, either free trials or their CRM as, like, new leads come in.
Tyler:If you know, hey. Real estate companies are really valuable leads for us. Okay. Like, let's set up a no code automation that runs off of every new thing that comes in through HubSpot, strips out the domain of the email, goes and looks at the site, does an inference of, like, is this a real estate company or not? And if so, like, notifies, you know, your head of sales in Slack.
Tyler:We've been able to sort of figure out how to, like, create that for portfolio companies and set that up for them, whereas they might not really even know where to start if they don't have anybody looking at this sort of thing.
Arvid:That was awesome. That was that was incredible. Like that and that just shows how valuable it is to have some kind of central fund for this. Like, the the fact that you are effectively and and I I'm using this term almost ironically, an accelerator for for these people because you get to actually accelerate internal processes. That is spectacular.
Arvid:Really cool. That is that is really interesting. And it kinda just shows that you don't need to build everything yourself. You could just kinda take the tools that exist and connect them with each other. I think Zapier is you you probably have a lot of platform risk around Zapier at this time thinking about that.
Arvid:Right? That that connection, have you ever thought about this? Like, what that means for the fund?
Tyler:Yeah. We have platform risk for sure, but it's been a trade off. Right? This was like a conscious choice, because of the stuff that we've built, you know, again, like, I mean, I talked about this a little bit in, in the essay again, but like, like it's really hard to build a fund business. And I I really underestimated.
Tyler:I know this sounds like whatever. Like, I'm, you know, I'm not asking for sympathy here. I'm just, like, stating some some some things that I've learned, which is, your top line revenue for the company that you're building is management fees from the fund. And that's basically like getting handed a budget, like, as if you were inside a big corporation and it's like, here's your budget for the year. And there's none of that stuff where you're an entrepreneur where you can make these bets.
Tyler:You can say, We're going to hire this person and we can't really afford them right now, but we know that they're going to be able to generate enough revenue that they'll pay for themselves eventually. There's, like, no version of that. So, the situation where I could have, like, an actual team that could be developing real software products, it's like I had to have a massive fund to be able to have the excess budget to hire, you know, whatever it would take, 5 people to run all these products for us. So, we were able to build it with a much smaller team using no code tools. So, we have way more automation and leverage than we possibly could have on the budget that we had.
Tyler:But you're right, we have a ton of platform risk. Maybe the next phase is gonna be, you know, sort of, like, having folks take some of these things that we've kind of proven worked and then rebuilding them, you know, as more robust, stand alone software products. I don't know.
Arvid:So I was gonna say, is is that another business that I hear right here? Because that is tooling that other people I mean, you you probably not gonna be the only calm company fund in this space forever. Right? Like, obviously, this idea is getting much more validated over time, and other people might wanna build similar things because there are way more business. I think you say this in the article For every company that you know about, there are, like, 50 that went the VC route and kind of failed that you didn't know about but could have helped.
Arvid:Right? At that point, what would you have known about them? And I guess there's the the cake is big enough for the the pie, I guess. I mean, I do love cake, but, you know, the pie is big enough for a lot more. So building tooling for these funds would also be an interesting business, man.
Arvid:Yeah. Ever the maker.
Tyler:I think well, look. I think you're right. Like, one of the things I'm most excited about is that I think we're at a a crazy sort of turning point for this idea of building comp companies. I think, like, we went through what I think might have been one of the toughest times to make that choice because, you know, honestly, like, it is short term much like, building a business is scary, you know, and, like, not knowing if you're gonna have enough MRR to make payroll is a really scary position to be in. It's very comforting to have a big slice of capital and to know you have 12 to 18 months runway.
Tyler:You know? Like, that is helpful. And if that's available, you really can't blame founders for for taking it, you know, left and right if it's on offer. And so but I think we're we're going through a phase now where folks are gonna see that, hey, this actually if my goal is to build a sort of, like, amazing long term company that I wanna run for 20 years or to build generational wealth for myself, this was actually not a really good plan, you know. And we're seeing that, like, that's starting to happen.
Tyler:And I think, you know, at the same time, you have all these folks who are going to basically have been a part of these, like, things where they're unicorns and they thought they had $10,000,000 in employee stock and that's going to 0. So you're about to have this, like, tidal wave of people who are like, you know, I think I wanna build whether they know it or not, they like or whether they know the name or not, they wanna build a comm company next. So I definitely think we're about to see, like, a big upswing in those kinds of companies and founders trying to build those kinds of companies. I don't know that I wanna build products for other funds. I'm I'm happy to be helpful, but I I for the same reason that building a company off of management fees is hard, selling to businesses that operate off management fees is also very hard.
Arvid:Yeah. Good point. Yeah. But I don't
Tyler:think they're very good customers. But I would like to be as helpful as possible to anybody who wants to start a, like, calm fund type of fund, without selling you stuff.
Arvid:Look at look at maybe. Right? Look at them, like, pivoting into open source. Like, I I had Josh on the podcast a couple weeks ago. Yeah.
Arvid:That was
Tyler:a cool conversation.
Arvid:Yeah. Thank you. And and and it is it is not just a cool conversation. It's a cool move to make this happen. Right?
Arvid:And I think that could also be an option for you. I mean, you're already teaching a lot of things to these companies. Why not teach other people how to build these operations as well? Right? You could easily do this as just, you know, just speculating.
Arvid:I've just that's that's the founder of why I said I'm just trying to to see where this could go. I I honestly thank thank you for sharing all of this. This is extremely interesting and exciting. And you're right. It's a pivotal time with a lot of disillusionment, you know, towards the traditional ways of funding, and still a lot of very positive motivational direction that I see these businesses going into.
Arvid:People wanna be calm and lifestyle business, what used to be an insult, and you write about this in the article too. Like, that's what people VC funds kinda looked at your business like or looked at people's like yours businesses and see, like, no. This is not a that'll be a business. This is a lifestyle business. They're just doing this, you know, to make some money.
Arvid:That's is turning. It's turning into a positive direction, and I think calm business and lifestyle business are very positive forces and and worse descriptions of things that we do. It's really, really interesting.
Tyler:And I'm really excited.
Arvid:I'm I'm excited too, and I bet and I hope that people listening to this conversation are equally excited if they wanna follow you, if they wanna follow the Calm Company Fund, if they wanna apply with their hopes and dreams to the Calm Company Fund, where should they go?
Tyler:So calmfund.comcalmfund.com is, you know, where you can find a ton of information about the fund and where you can apply for funding. Still the best place to keep track of stuff is probably my Twitter, or my x. Do we say x now?
Arvid:Let let's just call it Twitter. Come on. Yeah. On
Tyler:my Twitter. So just at tyler tringus. Yeah. And say hey.
Arvid:I certainly say hey. I've I've been really enjoying the the way you write about things. It's always really interesting. You're very reflective, and you're you're non combative. I like that about you.
Arvid:You're on Twitter. You're you're you're not fighting for with your opinion. You're just sharing your opinion, and you're giving really, really interesting, observations about the world that I know often very little about. And you you elucidate. Is that a word?
Arvid:Lucinate. That's you. You enlighten me in that way. It's really, really cool. I really appreciate this.
Tyler:Thanks, man.
Arvid:Highly recommended follow. Thank you so much for being on the show explaining Calm Companies, called the Calm Fund, the inner workings, and your amazing automation and AI usage. That is really cool. Unexpected, but really, really cool. Thanks for being on the show.
Arvid:Love talking to you, and you're right. We should maybe take up that other podcast we used to have. Yeah. Right? Let's talk about this in the future.
Arvid:I think we both are currently busy doing stuff, but I I would love to to re, rekindle that fire because it's it's an important thing that we've been doing, and I think we probably should rethink it. But thank you so much for being on the show today. That was amazing.
Tyler:Yeah. Thanks, Arvid. It was great catching up with you.
Arvid:And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product. You acquired all those customers, and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder.
Arvid:Right? Problem is, you're not growing. For whatever reason. Maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or lack of interest. You don't know.
Arvid:You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road, 6 months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue, and you have this hyper successful business.
Arvid:That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who is facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation.
Arvid:Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point, or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option, and that is selling a business on inquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list.
Arvid:They've helped hundreds of founders already. Just go check it out at try. Acquire.com/arved. It's me. And see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time.
Arvid:You might just wanna wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. I really appreciate that.
Arvid:You can find me on Twitter at avidkar, a r v e r I k a h l. You find my books and my Twitter course tattoo. If you wanna support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It would be interesting to see.
Arvid:And leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder. It really makes a big difference if you show up there. Because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds. And that's I think where we all would like it to be. Just helping other people learn and see and understand new things.
Arvid:Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.
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