The Bootstrapped Founder

What happens when the small bet strategy leads to a big win and you're not prepared for it? Well, I'm Avid Khan. You're listening to the Bootstrap founder and I'm gonna share that with you today. I'm at an interesting stage of my entrepreneurial journey. Seeing several of my worlds colliding at the moment, the frameworks that I've been using to get where I am are both working really well and they're starting to show their limitations.

And that's kinda strange, but it's happening to me right now. For years, I operated under the paradigm of having many small bets which is a framework popularized by Daniel Vasalo in the indie hacker community. I've been part of his Small Bets community and even held workshops there occasionally. It's a really interesting and working approach. The idea here is to treat your ideas like cattle, just try many different things and see what sticks and stop the things that don't.

This approach led me to build a diverse portfolio. I have a media business with a newsletter, this podcast, and a YouTube channel. I've been doing consulting and mentoring and workshops, and I run several software as a service businesses. All of these projects are effectively running side by side, each a small bet in its own right. And this stage for me was all about exploration and variety and experimentation.

I was looking for signals in the noise trying different formats and approaches to see what worked. And recently something changed. Something worked. My latest software project PodScan has been showing signs of product market fit like I've never seen before. This success is kind of forcing me to restructure my focus which has become a challenge for me.

I'm so used to having all these parallel entrepreneurial efforts that pulling my focus away from them and maximizing the time and effort I put into PodScan is surprisingly difficult. The challenge for me is overcoming my inhibition to change. It's making a decision to prioritize one thing and deprioritize others that have been big parts of my life for years that I kinda cling to in some way. It's not just about personal expectations here, but also managing the expectations of the people who've been part of my journey. That's very present for me right now.

When you build a media business, you build it with and in front of people and the podcast is nothing without its listeners and the newsletter is nothing without its readers. So the question isn't really whether I should keep running my media business or not, that's a clear yes, I'm gonna keep running, but the question is how much of it do I want to run while spending most of my time on PodScan on the thing that works really really well more than anything else. I could do less of it, I could give it to somebody else or invite someone to work for me and there are so many options and they're all different from what I'm used to and that is really really hard to deal with. What I've noticed though just in how I approach this business all by myself is that I've been subconsciously moving towards less media and more software as a service for a while now. My income in the past had been mostly dictated by sponsorships for the last couple of years which provided both motivation and structure, particularly if you have to keep doing this for weeks months years.

So if somebody is paying you for 8 podcast episodes a month, you have to create 2 episodes a week. That's just what you have to do. And if they place newsletter sponsorships 2 months in advance, you know you have to create newsletters for a couple of months. And that really works well for me because I need this level of accountability and having these things in place made me do the work and make me prioritize the work. But I think my subconscious mind understood that this accountability and the work that came with it was actually getting in my way.

Over the last couple months, I've been saying no to sponsorships more and more. Not consciously really. Not like, ah, this is a bad idea. But more like, this doesn't feel right. I don't want this.

And I've pulled out of long term agreements and I tried to deprioritize this mental load of having to create content every week so that I could focus on the software business. But I've been doing it subconsciously, and I just realized this a couple days ago that all of these things were kinda leading to me pulling away a little bit from this very heavily dictated frequency of content more into a more flexible thing, more flexible approach of doing it. And the potential outcomes that come between sponsorship and the and the SaaS business are also becoming very clear to me. Getting another 20,000 newsletter subscribers, well, that is a wonderful thing and it's a good reason to keep going with your newsletter to grow your audience and all of that. But having a couple hundred more recurring customers in a software business, that is creating a business worth 1,000,000 that other people want to run.

And it's a completely different ballgame. It's something more sellable, it's something more profitable in the end. And I know this sounds very selfish, but as an entrepreneur I kinda have to look at my bottom line here and PodScan is such a tool. It's a marketing amplifier, a tool that helps people make money and get their job done. My media business also helps people.

I certainly hope so. But it does not have the upside necessarily that building another software business has. So for where I'm at right now, what I'm looking at in the choices that I have, yeah, focusing on PodScan could have and likely will have a much stronger impact on wealth building and the impact that I have in the field that I want to work in, which is podcasting. So I've been feeling the shift more strongly, I guess, since getting funding for the business back in April and receiving so much positive feedback from customers and big shout outs like the one last week for Peter Levels on Twitter. And now that I've realized that I really want to do this and I wanna do as much as I can of this, I'm making a more conscious effort to adapt to this new situation.

I've decided to make the interview part of my podcast way more flexible. Mine used to be 1 interview every week which was a lot of fun to do, I had new conversations every week, I got to talk to people, but it also comes with a lot of logistics, a lot of planning, a lot of pre booking because a lot of people also are extremely busy entrepreneurs and they only have time, you know, 2 months from now so you need to preschedule this. And I don't want to do that anymore and I don't want to have to find the time for this anymore. So I will interview people when I want to. Not on a weekly basis but whenever I feel like it, and I will focus more on the core values of independence and progressive business entrepreneurship ideas and soda preneurship.

The stuff that this podcast was all about in the beginning and still is, I wanna contextualize my own business efforts with these things and then have people to talk to about these issues. I wanna keep the interviews relevant to what PodScan is currently struggling with, and I wanna bring my real world problems that are probably also your real world problems or will eventually be your real world problems. I wanna bring them to experts in their fields and hear about their own experiences and frameworks that they will use, would use, and did use to tackle these kind of issues. I wanna make it more pragmatic. That's maybe the idea.

Right? Less talking about all kinds of things and more talking about solutions to actual problems. And those are problems that I have. They are real and they happen in the time that I spent on PodScan. So my weekly episodes, they will remain as my accountability regimen just to myself and to everybody who wants to see me succeed on this PodScan journey.

And as I spend more time building PodScan there will be more for me to talk about on the podcast as well. So that's the added benefit of me having more time to actually do the work is for me to talk about what I did,

which is great.

You gotta what is it? What do people always say you have to do something interesting for people to be interested in you while I'm doing this? And it's hard to change something that's been working well for almost 4 years for me right now, but I have to remind myself that change is constant in entrepreneurship. 5 years ago, this podcast did not exist. 3 years ago, it was just me talking about things that were interesting to me.

2 years ago, I was gonna sheepishly getting into interviews, and a year ago it was my main source of income. Why wouldn't change keep happening? Why why wouldn't this look different today and a year from now and 2 and 4 and 5? Right? So things change.

And my strategy now is to focus on PodScan as my main dish and keep everything else as side projects. They were moving, I guess, from side by side projects, parallel things, into true side projects. And I need to be adaptable to my changing circumstances, because if I'm not then circumstances will keep changing without me. And maybe PodScan really takes off and I have to pause my other efforts that could happen Or maybe it finds an equilibrium where I can hire someone to help me with it, coder or a marketer or something like this and I can then spend more time on my other efforts. I don't know and I don't need to know now.

I just need to be able to make the choice when the time is right. And if you're struggling with priorities and focusing on things, consider that nothing is ever truly lost if you keep a channel open. It's fine to pause things to see if they impact your productivity overall. And it's okay to dial them down and dial them back a little bit if that helps you significantly to do the thing you really need to do in this moment. Think this is just a common problem for solopreneurs and founders who have to juggle many different things at the same time.

It's not just that we can be great at what we're technically capable of, we also have to manage ourselves and have a vision and express it and talk about it. We only have a dozen or so hours in the day to truly distribute amongst the many things we could be doing. So if one of your small bets turns out to be the proverbial golden goose or looks like a goose that is turning slightly golden, you owe it to yourself and your future self to question if your current priorities are serving you. And that's why I'm changing mine. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter at abitkahl, a r v I d k a h l. You find my books on my Twitter course there too. If you wanna support me in this show, please tell everyone you know about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder. All of this makes a massive difference if you show up there, because then the podcast and the product will show up where other people are, and any of this will help me and the show.

Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.