The Bootstrapped Founder

We should all be a little bit more sincere and a little bit less serious about our work. It's a mindset shift that can transform not just your business, but your entire approach to entrepreneurship. I am Avid Kal and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder. Recently, I've been pondering the difference between being sincere and being serious, especially in the context of entrepreneurship. This reflection of mine was sparked by an article that I read about how the most successful people are sincere but not overly serious.

It was a fascinating concept I was introduced to that ties into the idea of playing the infinite game versus finite games. And that's a theme that I've explored in my book 0 TO Sold and the embedded entrepreneur before. Both entrepreneurship and audience building are very much infinite games. You can't truly win them, but you win by being able to keep playing. I highly recommend Simon Sinek's Infinite Game, that's a book, if you wanna dive more into this approach.

It's really interesting and it will impact much more than your business. You'll see things like purpose and health and love and family in completely new ways as well. You'll likely focus more on the infinite games because you can spot them more easily. Both finite and infinite games have their place. I need to say this too, it's not just about only looking for infinite games.

I'm saying this in the middle of a lot of soccer championships right now both in the Americas and in Europe. And I, as a German, I have to watch these. I think that's, in the contract that I signed when I was born. There are literally finite games happening there all the time. Right?

It's 90 minutes of a game. It's clear rules, there's static teams, and there's obvious winners and losers. It's all finite. And for competitive sports, I think that's great. You get the action, the suspense, hope, despair, and these snackable experiences that you can fit into your schedule.

Players are usually very serious throughout these games and you can quite literally see that when they just yell at the referee every 3 minutes when something happens. But there's a larger infinite game at play here too. The 1 where every nation participating keeps this ever improving set of soccer leagues in their country to find their best players. These leagues make long term decisions because they can't really win soccer. You can't win the sport.

You can only win the games that are played, right? These organizations just wanna keep participating in these amazing events. World championships, local championships, they just wanna keep playing and they are sincere about this. They talk to people around them, they offer all the information that they have, they put their goals and vision out there, and they seek participation, buy in, and the support of their governments and their peers. And in the world of entrepreneurship, those who play finite games like these soccer games, they are often very serious about short term wins often at the expense of their own long term vision.

On the other hand, those who approach their ventures with sincerity and almost radical honesty, well, well they are more likely to focus on the bigger picture, on the vision of it and they're willing to sidestep immediate gains if those gains might impede the ultimate realization of their vision. Right? They're not gonna go for quick money, they're gonna go for long term money, for wealth building kind of money. And this philosophy has been at the forefront of my mind as I've been building PodScan.fm in public over the last couple of months. And if you're not familiar, PodScan is a podcast marketing and brand analytics tool really that I've been developing.

Building in public, sharing all the steps has been an incredible way to demonstrate the sincerity that I have and make my entrepreneurial journey more accessible to others at the same time. And 1 of the most interesting aspects of this path has been challenging the conventional wisdom about how I should communicate with different kinds of customers. You get that a lot. People tell you how you should talk to others. And there's often this expectation that the larger the customer, say, an enterprise or big business prospect, the more serious informal we need to be in our communication.

Right? We need to write these convoluted emails and we need to present ourselves with a very fancy suit and a picture or something, I don't like this. And on the other side, conversely, I guess, when selling to individuals, to freelancers or indie hackers like ourselves, we are told we can be more quirky and personal and at least that's what I just keep seeing on social media channels around me. And it's like, is this actually true? Because as I've delved deeper into marketing and sales for PodScan, I've noticed something very intriguing.

There's a lot of seriousness in the world of podcast marketing and brand analytics. That's the field that I'm in. Right? Marketing. But not always a lot of sincerity.

And you know what? I'm not gonna play that game because it's a finite game. I don't wanna do this. I would much rather be open, honest, and approachable than to put on a facade that allows me to make a quick sale, but doesn't really reflect who I am. I don't think I can sustain this.

And this realization has been informed through a lot of interactions that I've been having over the last couple weeks with the people who are trialing PodScan. My prospects, my actual customers too. Because whether they work for big businesses and there are some in there that work for sizable brands and sizable influencers, all that kind of stuff. I I get a lot of interesting people. It's really cool.

It's a fun project. Or if they're solo founders that are just trying to get something started, at the end of the day, they're real people. And as real people, they can distinguish sincerity from seriousness. They can feel if I'm sincere or if I'm just acting like it. And they can spot when someone is genuinely engaged versus when they're just using this kind of formulaic approach or templated responses, people can sense this.

I can sense this and I bet you can sense this too, right? If somebody responds to us in a way that is just a little bit off and it sounds just a little bit like Caih Gipet, you know, it's probably that. And it's reminded me of a core principle that I've been reading about in so many serial entrepreneur success stories. Successful entrepreneurship isn't just about building a business to flip quickly or make some money online. That is part of it, but it's not the thing.

It's just a part of a fractional part. What it actually is about is adopting this mindset, this way of thinking that is geared towards playing the infinite game to stay entrepreneurial, To build a foundation from which you can then be more impactful. That's why serial entrepreneurship even exists. Right? People build their first little projects, they don't really work.

1 of them kinda works, they look into it, they take the small bet, make it bigger and then all of a sudden they build a business that they can keep running or they sell it and then they build the next thing. You find this journey so often where it's a foundation built upon a foundation foundation foundation. It's a kind of a very expansive mindset. And you need to think of this as an infinite game if you wanna keep playing it because otherwise you're just chasing money and that tends not to have long term benefits for you. In the context of PodScan for myself, playing the infinite game means focusing on building something that has really lasting value and that keeps people coming back.

Right? If you wanna fight churn, you need to increase retention. And if you wanna increase retention, people should want to stay and that is what long lasting value is to me. It's about having enough revenue in the business to close some deals and then pass on others if they don't align with my long term vision for the business. It's about building meaningful relationships with my users and continuously improving the product based on their immediate feedback.

I've been doing so much of that over the last couple of days even. I I got so much really really solid feedback from this avalanche of new users that came to PodScan through Peter Lovell's tweet And people have been reaching out to me with the issues that they've been experiencing, the little things that they might need, the things that they really do need, and I've been saying yes and no and building stuff and not building stuff. It has been a really interesting week just in the volume of feedback has been spectacular. And this approach of trying to play the infinite game while also taking all these little tactical decisions along the way, that requires absolute sincerity for myself, like to myself. Right?

I need to be sincere with myself about what I want for this business and I then need to also show this externally. I've been trying to embody this in all my communication channels. I strive to be very responsive and responsible to my users whether they're just chatting with me in our support system or sending emails back and forth. I'm always trying to be transparent about what PodScan can do and what it can't do. And I'm not afraid to say no and suggest alternatives if the product doesn't fit.

I'll say no because I want to overcome this deeply seated fear in myself that I bet we all know. The fear of what if they don't buy? What if they don't like it? Well, I was thinking about this and I was like, well, actually I would rather have a happy non customer than an unhappy customer. Right?

I would rather have somebody that saw my thing, thought it was 1 thing, and then it wasn't, and then I said, hey, that's not for you, but here's something you might actually use, and then they use that and they're super happy, that interaction between them and me is way more beneficial in the long term to me and to them than me trying to force them into the system that I have because I know that that interaction will stick with them as a positive thing And if somebody else comes their way that needs PodScan or that needs a relationship with me in some way, they wants to read my book, wants to learn from me, they will gladly send them my way. Right? An unhappy cast customer will never send anybody my way, and that's not a benefit for me, and it's not a benefit for them or the person that they're could have sent to me but didn't. So, you know, that's that's the idea. Saying no is fine because it allows you to get out of this whole thing with a positive perspective.

And when it comes to sharing the story of ProdScan, as I built it in public I made very conscious decisions about being completely honest too. I don't inflate my numbers, I don't make promises that I can't keep. Why? Well partly because I believe in the power of transparency and mostly the eventual reciprocity that it creates. If I'm honest and open today, I will attract people who are like that too right now.

And they will start interacting with me and the products that I'm building, the businesses that I'm interested in, and they will help me build a better business from that. But I also do this because, honestly, I'm too lazy to lie. It is hard work to keep these lies consistent. Everybody who's been a child has tried to kinda lie their way out of situations and it just the the the card house crumbles. Right?

It just doesn't work. Eventually, you trip up and I don't want this. I don't wanna have people, like, scour my Twitter messages for things that I said that didn't work out or whatever. I'm too lazy to want that attention and I don't wanna deal with this. So I'm just gonna be honest, it's hard work to keep these lies consistent and I would rather put that energy into building a better product, building a better business, and being more present among people that actually like me, right, that are not looking for ways to kinda point out my flaws, but are actually trying to support me in what I do.

And this commitment to sincerity is at the core of what I want in Potskin and frankly my entire entrepreneurial journey to represent. It's about being honest, user centric, very focused on people's problems and the solution that I can provide for them and voluntarily truthful. It's funny to have to say this, but I I wanna be honest. It's not the opposite. So but that I see so often in our community where people are like willingly untruthful for effect, right?

Shit posting with a twist. I'm not a fan of that. I wanna inspire others who might be on a similar path, who'm trying to build something meaningful in their lives to get them to financial security and stability And maybe I even wanna deter those who aren't ready for the challenges that come with building a business, right? If you if you just like don't don't wanna criticize anybody, but if you're like 16, 17 years old and you're you're just at the end of your your school life and you're ready to go to university or whatever and you wanna jump into entrepreneurship, that may not be the perfect time. And by exposing just by how complicated things are, I hope to get people kind of perspective so they can say, well, maybe I should do some work for a couple of years.

So maybe I should actually go and do some higher education and see if I can find some jobs on the side to build something or build something for others so I can understand what they need and how things work. I just wanted to be honest. I want to be honest about the complexity of doing things for yourself so that people don't jump into it, like, with this wide eyed optimism that you often find in people who don't yet have enough experience to see the potential problems later down the road. So that's kinda what I also try to do by just being truthful is giving people a way to say no. Just like I say no, people can say no to entrepreneurship.

That's also perfectly fine. And ultimately, my goal is to create a presence that is positive, uplifting, helpful, and trustworthy, Right? Because here's the thing, if you wanna play the infinite game, you can only keep playing if other people trust you to follow the rules that are set up in this game. I was kinda talking about rules earlier as the thing that is mostly a finite game component but, obviously, the infinite game has rules as well. They're just a bit more flexible and they change over time.

Soccer rules, I mean they do change in minute detail but in the end it's 90 minutes and you kinda try to kick a ball into a goal. That those are the rules. Right? And you have you have, like, 11 people on every team and all that. But in entrepreneurship, the rule is if I can trust you, I will do business with you.

And if I cannot trust you, you'll be on your own. And that is something where I want people to not even have to think about this whole situation. I want them to be able to innately trust me because I've been trustworthy for years. And this is especially crucial when you're starting out, when you don't have the track record of having been truthful for years. I mean, you could be.

You could have just been a good person on the Internet before you get started, which I highly recommend anyway. And if you try to build something from nothing, you have to present yourself in a way that makes it easier for people to kinda opt into trusting you. And I found this approach that I do with the honesty and sincerity, it attracts people and opens up conversations that have real impacts on the business that I'm building. Over the past couple of weeks, I've asked dozens of technical and business questions on Twitter in particular, always in a kind of a humble and engaging and kind of maybe self deprecating way because I don't wanna be, you know, overly self, advocating in all of this. And the responses I've received have provided incredibly valuable insights from advice and algorithms to suggestions for optimizations.

Like, on Twitter I'm at a point right now where people get to see my tweets or they people retweet my tweets because they're kind and helpful and and motivating. They they reach the the upper echelon of the tech community. I had people that are responsible for Google search reply to my measly question about implementing a little search engine, that kind of stuff. That happens because I'm putting myself out there as an honest person. I believe that at least.

And this is what entrepreneurship is to me, sincerity, not seriousness. I I wanna be sincere about what I'm doing but not like act like I'm super serious. And that attracts the right people. It's about being transparent, honest about what I'm doing and still having fun and engaging with the community in an enjoyable way. It's playing the infinite game.

And I try to focus on long term value creation here rather than short term gains. And as I continue to build and grow PodScan, I'm committed to maintaining this approach. I believe this is not just good for business, it's also good for my soul. I wanna keep enjoying the path because if I don't, I'm my own boss, right? Like nobody's gonna motivate me if it isn't me or the people that I put around me.

And who knows? Maybe I'll inspire a few more entrepreneurs to choose sincerity over seriousness in their own journeys. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to the Good Trip founder. You can find me on Twitter at avid kahl, ARBIDKAHL.

You have my books on my Twitter course there too. And 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 dot com slash founder. It makes a massive difference if you show up there because then PodScan and the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this will help the show. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day and bye bye.