The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid: 00:00

I am dealing with a pretty substantial question. Who is PodScan's ideal customer? Right? We're all looking for that ideal perfect customer, who I then would wanna sell and market to everything I do should be focused on that customer. And how can I find out who could even be ideal?

Arvid: 00:17

Then finally I guess what choices do I have to make when whittling down that list. And I'm gonna do that today with you right here. I'll dive into the ideal customer profile for my recently funded yet still very much owner operated software business PodScan. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later.

Arvid: 00:36

Let us start with where I am right now in terms of understanding my customers. Honestly, I don't think I'd be anywhere had I not talked to dozens of them over the last couple weeks. When I set up my transactional email system on ConvertKit, like all the emails that I send out when people sign up or a couple days into that trial, a couple days before the trial ends, and if it ends, all that kind of stuff. When I set that up initially, I had, I think, an epiphany is the best way to phrase this. I I found out the welcome email that I sent is the very first time I get to correspond to actually exchange with who are likely the very best people to talk to at this point.

Arvid: 01:15

My early adopters willing to give a new software tool that they don't yet know a shot. How could I not want to talk to them directly even more? So when I crafted these emails, I added a Calendly link with a wide open availability window. I added it to every single email that I would send to my trial users when they signed up, and then every following kind of email as well. And I even called the link something like early adopters are the best.

Arvid: 01:43

That was kind of the slug for this, to show that my users are extremely valued, that their input really matters to me. And from that, I received dozens of bookings, just 15 minute conversations. And in these calls, I met a wide variety of perspective viewers, it was pretty awesome. And I had a really great time just figuring out what people needed, where they came from, the ideas that they had, the jobs that they had, it was really, really exciting. And over these conversations, I found that my customers right now and the people using the platform fall into a few significant groups.

Arvid: 02:18

And the users with the clearest job to be done were virtual assistants and marketing people who were tasked with booking podcast appearances for their bosses or their colleagues. I got the most your tool saves me so much time and hassle kind of vibes from this very well defined group. They also had the most precise insights into what they needed to get their jobs done, which is not a big surprise if the job to be done is clearly defined, The tools and requirements are also pretty clearly defined. And when PodScan did not provide the right data or enough of it or in the right place, they would quickly tell me that. And they would tell me what they need and where they would usually source it.

Arvid: 02:57

It was incredibly valuable just to talk to them. Ultimately, this customer group reminded me of pretty much most of my customers back when we were running FeedbackPanda, which was an online teacher productivity SaaS. So we were selling to online teachers. And these teachers were people with a task clearly. Right?

Arvid: 03:15

They had to teach kids English online. They have very little time, and they had a drive to use good software for good purposes. They had a a purpose that they were willing to use software for, they had something that they already needed done that they were used to using software for, and they were good customer for that reason. And that last part was equally apparent in another group of prospects that I talked to. People working on software products, in the podcasting space.

Arvid: 03:43

That were interested in adding things like observability, and search, and transcript access to their own products for their own customers. In many ways, that was a completely distinct group of people. They were mostly technical or semi technical founders with a vested interest in accessing a massive database of podcast information, not for their own research needs, like the v a's would need it, but for the needs of their customers. They were kind of a transmission customer of mine, with their own customers, where virtual assistants were the end user, and they were using the browser centric alerting and search features of PodScan, all the stuff that I have built to be used in the web interface. These founder customers would only ever really need the API based features, which of course also include alerts and search, but they would all be just programmatic.

Arvid: 04:34

They would be on an API. They would leverage the whole pod scan system almost as a white label solution, not as a defined product to be used by going to website or something. So that was the second group. And the third group, which I would call marketers and salespeople sifting through historical data for prospects, that was also very interesting. And like the VAs, they would find a lot of good use in the browser part of the PodScan experience, because search is really nice, and you can really look deeply and research all the episodes of a podcast and that kind of stuff, but they were less intensely excited about the capacities of the product than the other 2 groups.

Arvid: 05:09

For this 3rd group, different data enrichment strategy will probably be needed. I can see a kind of feature that's, like, ask any question of a podcast and get tabular AI powered results, I'll get to that kind of stuff later, some kind of module, that would be something that would find more alluring than just what currently exists, alerting and full text search. These customers need something different, something else in the product, and the vibes that I got from them were more like, yeah. Let's see where this goes. I'm planning to build this eventually.

Arvid: 05:35

And again, I'll get to this, but this will take some work and some time. So I need to make a choice right now about my ICP, my ideal customer profile. Between virtual assistants, founders, marketers, what do I choose? Who should I focus on, and what should I ignore? Fortunately, I run the Calm business or at least I'm trying to.

Arvid: 05:55

It is occasionally chaotic, but it always finds its way back to the baseline of calmness and reflected approaches. And the calm business runs best when there's a framework for decision making in place from the start, and I will share that with you now. I have a rule for choosing an ideal customer profile, which is based on three assumptions. Assumption number 1 is that ICPs, these profiles, are temporary. Assumption 2 is that ICPs are incomplete by definition, and number 3 is that ICPs are binding.

Arvid: 06:28

And these fundamental choices, temporary, incomplete, but also binding, they are intentionally conflicting. Because how can something be binding, but kinda temporary? Like, how can something ideal even be incomplete? Doesn't make much sense, but it does because the reality of entrepreneurship is messy, and the framework to keep things calm has to account for this. In my case, I want my decision of an ICP to be something that I can commit to.

Arvid: 06:54

So let's dive into what this means for my ICP choice. When ICPs are temporary, I can set a begin and an end date for making them the focus of my business development efforts. When they are incomplete, I can update assumptions along the way. Right? Assumptions about the nature and the behavior of my best customers.

Arvid: 07:12

I will change them as I examine and explore them. So the incompleteness allows me to kinda shift a little bit. Not completely, but enough to make things actually work out with new knowledge as I gain it. And when I see piece are binding, I have to restrain my desire to serve another vertical or placate them into buying a subscription by creating features just for them that distract me from my actual ICP. So when ICPs are temporary, incomplete, and binding at the same time, I can make the ICP I choose a time limited yet to be fully explored target that gets my undivided attention.

Arvid: 07:51

And that's really what I need right now. Right? That's just what I need at the early stages of my business building efforts. Something that's clear enough to instruct my actions today without being too rigid to ultimately change next month, a couple months from now, next year. So that's my definition.

Arvid: 08:10

The idea is to give it a temporary sheen, and to slightly change it over time, but keep it as something that I am committed to, which is an indie hacker problem that we wanna build things all the time, and new customers come and they say, hey. I will so buy this if you built this, and then we're like, yes. We gotta get you as a customer. We built this thing, and then, ultimately, they don't sign up and we build something that confuses everybody else, hence, this definition. So with the recent bootstrapper compatible funding that I managed to get, PodScan will be able to operate financially soundly for at least a year, very likely much longer.

Arvid: 08:47

And it's already nearing 1 k MRR these days, so I'm it's everything is looking good. And once the massive backlog of podcasts is ingested, still a couple tens of 1,000,000,000 of podcasts for me to ingest, but once that is done, cost will drop significantly. So the runway is secured. That's why I'm saying this. Right?

Arvid: 09:03

There is a runway that exists. The question now is, how long should I focus on a single customer segment then, trying to build this business into something bigger? Well, when considering this, a few numbers float around in my head. Could it be a year, maybe a month, 3 months, maybe 6 months? What matters here to make this choice is the velocity of that particular market where the ICP actually lives.

Arvid: 09:28

Because if I were to make founders my ICP, I think 3 months would suffice as this temporary kinda interval to look into, because that's more than enough time to deal with people who, like me, live and breathe building products. Focusing on the needs of a group that is so accessible and willing to help, willing to collaborate is super easy and doesn't take much, you know, wiggle room. You know? Don't need to set up meetings, and then 2 weeks later, you need to exchange the meeting for something happens. You know, a founder, you could just send them a DM on Twitter or somewhere, and they will jump on a call if they're interested in you.

Arvid: 10:00

So easy. It's definitely easier than focusing on virtual assistants because honestly, I don't even quite know where they are, where to find them. Other than in my email inbox I guess, where 100 of them try to place their bosses or their, fellow employees on my podcast, which is the avenue that I've been using up until now to actually get customers. I've just been sifting through my own emails and kinda, taking those cold emails and just judoing them into kinda cold emails back, sending them information about PodScan. That's been really really funny.

Arvid: 10:31

So if I were to make these people my ICP, I would very likely give it at least half a year or more, maybe even 9 months, just to be able to find the right communities, forms, and marketing avenues, find a spot in there, understand the kind of jargon that they use, understand how they communicate, understand how they build trust, and then start involving the platform, the product, maybe even with a little elite generator product that is specifically built for them. Right? If I were to do this, I would take some more time than founders because I know how founders work with VA's different story. But no matter who makes it to ICP status for me, I am well aware that I don't know enough about them just yet, even founders. Right?

Arvid: 11:13

But founders, I I kinda get them because that is what I live too, but it's mostly projection. And maybe the founders working in that particular space in the podcasting world, well, they might think differently. So who knows? But particularly with assistance, I would have to intensify my call frequency just to really get them to understand their workflow, the inputs, the outputs, and the multilayered nature of their jobs to be done. Founders, well, they're often quite self refracted about this, so that information takes less digging to unearth.

Arvid: 11:40

Marketers, salespeople, the 3rd group that I didn't even mention in most of this, they might also present, discovery challenge here. But I know that I have to make a choice. And right now, I'm catering to everyone's needs because I have a very flexible kind of customer base right now, a lot a lot of variety. But I need to make a choice. Oh, do I?

Arvid: 12:01

Maybe. They that's an interesting question. Maybe I don't because the that might actually not be much more than a problem of perspective. And here's what I mean with this. After all that I've said, I all work I do on the data platform side of things eventually translates into more reliable and extensive features for the browser based customers.

Arvid: 12:22

Right? It's that makes perfect sense. If I build better and more reliable data, then on top of that data, I can build better and more reliable features that people can actually click and select and save. Right? If there is data extracted from a transcript, for example, and all the names are right, then I can list them and people can copy and paste them and just send an email to these people or something like this.

Arvid: 12:45

It makes more sense if the data is better, the features inside the actual product, the web product will also be better. And it's not the the same way the other way around. Right? If I work for a month on a feature for a specific end user, the background logic and the data implementation for that specific feature might be useful for someone using data platform, but they it just might. It probably won't because other people have different requirements.

Arvid: 13:12

But if I build a more generalized, but specifically implementable data platform extension, it will be used and useful to and by anyone using the platform, and allow me to build my own custom features. That is kind of the logic here. An example here would be the capacity, I kind of mentioned this earlier, to have a predefined AI based data extraction system for every podcast episode out there. Let's imagine I built this for my podcast guest booking customers, and I would end up building a very specific system that extracts things like who was on which show? What is their name?

Arvid: 13:47

What's the URL? What's their social profile? What were the main topics they talked about? And what URLs and products were plugged and things like this. That would all be part of the front end.

Arvid: 13:56

Right? People would see, okay, this is the person who what other podcasts were they on. They click on the person and the list of podcasts would appear that they were on. That's really cool feature and I wanna build this, but I also think, what if I can make this more flexible? If I were to build a more general module that could be configured with an arbitrary set of questions and data expectations like this, while the system could easily create this kind of bullet point list of who was on which show, but it also could create, like, a or return, a a JSON string that could be programmatically accessed, containing every single mention of, let's say, a certain industrial chemical on every podcast where it's mentioned, what time it was mentioned, what person mentioned it, and if they are likely a prospect to sell safety equipment to.

Arvid: 14:40

I guess an AI could figure this out from the context of the episode. And those are 2 completely different things, but the generalize system will allow for this specific one much more easily than the other way around. And that leaves me in a bit of a pickle, because on the one hand, I have a well defined customer with a clear job to be done, which is really cool. And on the other hand, I have a much more varied customer segment that, when prioritized, could then facilitate better features for their first customer segment, which then, of course, I would also have to build. Well it's a good thing I'm an indie hacker, because even with the comm company funding, that I really appreciate, I still get to make my own choices without any outside interference.

Arvid: 15:23

I can ask people, get their opinion, but ultimately, I make the choices. So let's make a choice. I got runway. I have this, if this works, then that will work too kind of situation with the data platform. And I know that the more podcast data and any additional information such as outside things, like podcast rankings, audience size, and inside things, like who is on the show, where else are they.

Arvid: 15:44

The more of that I have, the more valuable the platform will be to a vast host of prospects, not just one particular audience. So here's what I'll do. For the next 6 months or so, until the end of the year, let's just say that. I will focus on building data platform features, while also making sure that whenever I build something like this, I do a reference implementation of that feature that will benefit my podcast guest booking virtual assistant crowd. So it's kind of a let's bake the cake, have the cake, and nibble on it too situation, because I get to build a data platform for everybody, but I always test it with this particular sub ICP that I have as well.

Arvid: 16:20

So I kinda have 2 ICP's. The bigger ones are people building on top of the platform, and the test control group ICP is the VAs. Makes sense, I hope. So if you think that's crazy, let me know, because, you know, we're all sitting in our little echo chambers, and if you agree with the approach let me know too. I value the opinion of my fellow founders and creators and podcasters and anyone who trusts their guts to have an opinion.

Arvid: 16:45

Send an email to arvid@podscan.fm if you wanna just let me know what you think. Leave a DM on Twitter, I occasionally read these Or find me at microconfu s in Atlanta next week. I'll be there, and, probably hard to miss because I'll try to wear my Build In Public shirts all the time. Just let me know. I I really value any kind of input you have.

Arvid: 17:04

And I make these choices again on a temporary basis. So if there's new information, and your contribution might just as well be that, I can make a better choice. And I would really appreciate that. So that's it for today. Thank you so much.

Arvid: 17:17

I will now briefly thank my sponsor Acquire.com, a company that I hope to end up selling this business on eventually. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built this really solid SaaS product, you acquired all these customers and you're generating MRR that is the dream of other founders, right? The problem is, champagne problems exist, Like, we all have issues. It's crazy. Like, when I sold my first business, I thought all my problems were gonna go away, but they didn't.

Arvid: 17:43

I still I just got new problems. So on every stage along the way, like, when I had the idea for the business, oh, I had problems. When I started building the business, new problems, different problems, and then I made some money. Great. But now I have these problems, like, there's always issues.

Arvid: 17:56

And sometimes, you just hit the ceiling. Right? The the problem is you're not growing. You're you have a lack of focus, lack of skill, maybe you just don't care, and you feel stuck. What should you do?

Arvid: 18:08

Well, there's this ongoing narrative that you should just buckle down and keep working on and force it force it, but that's really not working. Right? That kinda destroys your spirit, and in the end, you start just caring less and less about the business, And well, the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation most of the time after a while, until this business becomes less and less valuable, and at its worst, completely worthless. And that's a problem because you've built so much equity, such a strong asset will be quite the ways to just let it fall apart. But there is another option here, and that option is selling your business on acquire.com to somebody who does not have that ceiling, or somebody who's really interested in picking up where you left off.

Arvid: 18:50

And capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. Acquire.com is free to list. They've helped 100 of founders already, and if you go to try.aquire.com/arbit, you can see for yourself if this is the right option for you right now or maybe in the near future or maybe never. You never know. Just give it a shot.

Arvid: 19:10

Just check it out. I think that's a it's a good idea for every founder. I mean, the whole episode was about planning ahead. Right? The whole thing with the ICP is about how can I get the right people to buy my product?

Arvid: 19:22

And maybe you should think the same way about an acquisition. How can I make sure that's that the value of this business is monetarily compensating me at some point? Acquire.com can do this for you. So thank you very much for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. You can find me on Twitter at avitkahl, airbiedi k h l, and you find my books on my Twitter course there too.

Arvid: 19:41

If you want to support me in the show, please do subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com slash founder. Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds, and any of this will really help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.