The Bootstrapped Founder

These last weeks have been a bit much. What do they say? Take a break before the break takes you? Well, I got quite close to that this week. I'm Albert Karl and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder.

I've been quite active working on PodScan in many different ways and it's been overwhelming at times this week. I found a way to cope with this and I found a way to still get done what I needed to get done. So I thought I would share the whole journey and the whole emotional state that I was in then and I'm in now because somebody out there might feel equally overwhelmed or somewhat incapacitated by the scale of things in their own business. And that's generally a problem in running a software business, that it is a lot. Not only do you have to fight for something that doesn't exist anywhere else because it's a new thing and nobody else has ever built the exact same business as you have.

And we have this kind of baseline level for needing to justify it and then there are so many things that you initially never even thought about that may or may not happen during the process of building such a business. Then they tend to swamp you when they occur in rapid succession or all at the same time it's a lot. And for me the last couple weeks of PodScan have been both very productive for the for the business for the tool and very taxing at the same time. The biggest thing that's been occupying my mind has been the Paddle AI Launchpad demo day that I was fortunate enough to be invited to. I joined the cohort, the AI Launchpad cohort a couple months ago when my friend, KP, asked me if I'm interested and I thought, yeah, even though I just received some kind of funding, it was time to spread the word a bit more and hang out with my founder peers that are working with the same technology that I use, AI stuff, machine learning stuff.

So I joined the Paddle Launchpad, and it's been a wonderful experience. But the big thing, after all the wonderful lectures and the founder huddles and the interaction with the community in Slack which was great, the big thing was the demo day where 10 out of a 130 plus companies were invited to pitch their business and product to a larger audience. The cohort, journalists, Peddle employees, and anyone who is willing to listen. And in the end, Peddle reported over 500 registrations for demo day, and that's a lot of attention. And that required a lot of work to prepare to participate even.

Besides running PodScan, dealing with my customers and building features for them, making sure their integrations work, and also thinking about what PodScan needs next, like prioritizing features on the roadmap, having customer discovery conversations, and dealing with improving the existing system. All of these things now were kind of overshadowed by the need to create a pitch tag and to rehearse a presentation and to record a showcase demo video. And if you know me, you know that I tend to talk a lot when people allow me to Because that is my process of thinking. I think a lot while I speak and things open up in my mind as I verbalize them. This is great if you have a podcast like this that can go on forever, but it's not that great if you only have 2 minutes to actually pitch your whole product and the business around it, plus a 1 minute video that you might wanna prerecord as well.

So all in all, the pitch was a 3 minute opportunity for me to talk about PodScan, and I kid you not, it took me days to get my thoughts under control. And only with the help of Danielle, my partner and cofounder of the previous business, I was able to create somewhat of a coherent pitch. She took over the design of the slides narrative within and research and all that and presented me with a pitch deck that I only needed to write a couple lines of story for then I had this baseline foundation of my talk and I could record the video for the showcase too. And then, I rehearsed a lot. And it was the first time I ever pitched anything of mine.

I've been participating in pitches for other businesses that I had cofounders for, but I've never pitched anything that is my brainchild. And that was kinda stressful. It was anxiety inducing, and it took me days to get my head wrapped around these 3 minutes. And I rehearsed for many days nights. But I wasn't alone.

Besides Danielle's heroic efforts, the people from Paddle were extremely accommodating too. They were quite helpful with going through the slides and going through the video and giving feedback and allowing the founders time to rehearse on the platform that the event would be on. It was really cool. It was a really nice experience. But still, on the day of the pitch, that was Tuesday, I was extremely anxious.

My heart was racing right up to the moment that I was called to go on stage, and then I felt serenely calm. It was quite surprising, but that's that's how it happened. When I started to pitch, I just fell into what I would call my camera presence, my stage presence, or my the recording light is on state of mind. Something that I've been doing for 100 of times over the last couple of years, like 300 plus podcast episodes, 100 plus videos, speaking confidently into a microphone or looking at a camera while doing it, that comes more natural to me now than it did in the past. And, of course, I'm technologically equipped to deal with this.

I had a teleprompter going. I had everything set up right, and I tested it multiple times with every single click and where I was gonna go. So rehearsal really worked. And when I started my pitch, it all went great. It went spectacularly well.

People were really happy to see this polished pitch and with a great pitch deck and a good video that had everything that captions baked in made it easy to follow along. I brought my stage presence to it and I explained PodScan to everybody what it can do and what it's for. Got good questions from the judges too that I had immediate answers to. All in all, pitch was great. And the cohort that I was part of was also spectacular, which is kind of a problem in a competition.

There were so many interesting projects, even 3 or 4 podcast related projects in an AI cohort to begin with, which was really cool, that there was some solid competition. And, ultimately, I didn't win the pitch. Another project, vana.ai, won the pitch. Highly recommend it. Check it out.

But I did win the people's choice award where the audience voted for the non winning project that they liked the most, which is really nice to get people's attention and then them sharing it with me in that way. It was really really sweet. Pedal then sent me some swag, which is on the way, I guess, and that was really kind. And, generally, all of this felt like the whole experience was a massive benefit for PodScan. Even though it cost me a lot of extra effort and a lot of mental anguish to get to the point where I felt confident in it, I have to say that just being able to pitch to somebody else, this kind of elevator pitch version of PodScan, made me much more confident in what it is, what the business means, what PodScan can do, and what I want it to be.

And that felt much easier after I had all these crisp slides and the words that went with them, and particularly the important numbers, like market size, total addressable market, reachable parts of the market, the reasonably reachable parts, the TAM, Samsung kinda slide, that was all very useful had to have looked into. But it came with a price. I noticed a couple days into working on the pitch that I was quite physically overwhelmed. I could feel it, like, physically in my heart, in my body. And at that point, PodScan had a couple of technical issues that I needed to iron out for it to run-in a stable fashion.

You know, it's a complicated system, and it has a couple of glitches. So there were things that kept me up at night quite literally because I didn't really know how to deal with this. And I had a couple of very intense days during that week. Usually, I start my day around 7:30 in the morning. That's when my dog wakes me up.

And then I walk the dog and come back and get started with work at 8:8:30. Then I tend to stop around 4 or 5 leaving room for an evening with the family and with other things. But there were several days that week where after dinner I would go back right to work and grind until 10 PM or so. And that would make it, like, a what, 7 to 10 kind of day which is 15 hours most of which is work and that's a bit much. Right?

I noticed particularly during those days that I needed a way to stop obsessing about all of these little challenges. Like I could feel discomfort in my physical body. And there was a lot of obsession about the stability of my product that I carried from room to room. Like even when I got a coffee, I was thinking about it. When I took a shower I was thinking about it.

I couldn't let go. And as I noticed that my mental energy was needed for the pitch and the work that would have to go into that, which is creative work and maintenance work, I needed a way to suppress this obsession with technical perfection. So I did 2 things. The first thing was I told myself I'm happy with things mostly working. It's kind of a mantra.

I just repeated to myself it's okay if things don't work all the time as long as they work most of the time. It's kind of the 80 20 the version of things are great. It's like things are 80% great. And I've been chasing this network error for a few days already which happened maybe once in a 1,000 requests. And that was so annoying but it wasn't critical and it derailed my focus.

And the moment I made the choice to suppress the error in my error reporting tools that I have and it wouldn't always flood my inbox anymore the moment it happened and I wouldn't see it immediately. It was like, oh, wow. This really doesn't matter. The product is still running. My back end services, they will retry a connection if it doesn't work.

And if the error comes up more than a 1000 times again in the next couple days, I will get an error again because my reporting tool kinda muted or silenced the error for a 1000 times. So if it comes up, you know, I'll see it again. But right now I don't need to see it every single time it happened. And dealing with things by taking them out of mind and taking them out of your alerting scheme, that is extremely useful. It's something that I recommend if you deal with lots of little issues that are not that crazy relevant, but appear louder than they actually are, just turn off notifications.

Look into these things when you find the time and the mental space for it, but allow notifications only for critical things or for things in critical quantities. And that's what I implemented for PodScan. On the other side, there's something that I returned to that I haven't done in months and probably has had the biggest most massive impact on my state of mind. I started literally stepping away from the computer and reading fiction again. I'm a big fantasy and sci fi kinda guy, and I've been reading several novels over the last couple days.

I think I got 3 or 4 novels done in, that week just because I took the time to read them. I read a lot of Brandon Sanderson's books, the ones he released ever since, he wrote his books during the COVID pandemic situation. And I read Ready Player 2, the sequel to Ready Player 1, which was turned into a pretty entertaining movie. It's a very nostalgia eighties, nineties, not culture driven book. It's a lot of fun.

So it was really enjoyable to read. And in a way, this sounds like escapism. Right? Which it kind of is. Intentionally escaped the tunnel vision that was looking at my metrics and looking at my logs all day long.

But it also allowed me something else that I noticed. I started feeling more empathy with myself and with the needs that I have. Not just as an entrepreneur, developer, marketer, but as a human being that needs variety and balance in my life. This kind of empathy towards myself allowed me to step away more easily. It allowed me to pull out of the perfectionist tunnel vision that I've been in for so long.

Because when you're working on a thing that isn't perfect yet, my mind at very least often goes to well, if I just spend a little bit more time on this, the chance for me to figure out how to get it right this time is gonna be higher than before. So I get into this loop of spending more and more time getting more and more into the weeds. And there's very little empathy for my sanity at this point. But reading fiction and putting myself into the shoes of others and seeing their ever changing struggles and the changing scenery around them pulls me into a different place. Quite literally.

It allowed me to leave my computer, get out of the software world that PodScan lives in, and just visit a different world for a couple hours and then get back. And that made a big difference. And it made a big difference for something that I didn't even expect to impact and that was the pitch. It made the pitch easier because I was also developing more empathy, not just for myself, but I felt more grateful for others, for other people that are part of my journey. I didn't just see them as customers or peers or prospects or developers that help me out on Twitter, which I already value quite a bit, but I saw them as directly accessible human beings that enrich my life just as much as I try to enrich theirs.

It's kind of hard to explain, but I I got an appreciation for people by just pulling myself out of this tech stuff. And that explains, I think, why I had such an easy time switching into hey, this is my pitch and my product is great. Let me share it with you kinda mode right when all the anxiety of the lead up was gone and I flipped on my my podcast personality I was like okay this is really just me sharing something great with great people. Let me lean into this. Let me enjoy it.

And I think having been able to step away from the debugging, the maintenance, the operational side of a business which often involves errors and things not working. Reading fiction and just taking time to myself allowed me to look at the things that are working and that are great and that are positive and that are fun. It's a perspective shift. It's an intentional reframe by doing an activity that pulls you out of this negativity cycle. And in a way, after the pitch, I'm still riding that wave right now.

You can probably tell. I'm pretty happy. This whole self empathy situation, the increase in that allowed me to more easily say yes to things that I wouldn't have liked to do before. Boring features. Like building stuff that maybe is not as challenging technically but it matters more to the customers to people that are actually using the product.

Yeah. I didn't wanna redesign my emails. Like, HTML for email is not fun. It's probably one of the most horrible ways of building software, It's incredibly hard to test, it's unreliable and then it's technology mixed from the mid nineties up until today. It's really bad.

But I felt like this is something that other people are going to see. So I might just as well make it nice for them. It's not a cool AI feature. It's not a fancy marvel of technology. It's just a boring old email, but it's something that connects me with people, that connects PodScan with people, that leaves an impression with them.

So in working on emails and onboarding things that don't feel like the meat and substance of the product I realized that this is how I connect with people through the product. The first couple of emails that I send they are extremely relevant. They are the first impressions that people get. Right? That's what they always will remember.

That's the first thing I saw when I interacted with this piece of software, with this business. And then every time I send a notification because somebody was mentioned in a podcast, well, why not make it look intentionally nice because that's an invitation to connect. Right? People connect with PodScan, people connect with that other podcast through PodScan. It's a really human interaction.

So focusing on that, that sounds like a good idea. Pulling myself out of the technical rut and getting more into the empathetic world of fiction really helped with this. It prevented me from dipping over into burnout this week. I think I was pretty close to just needing a break instead of wanting to take one, like I did, and it also made me focus more on things that ultimately made the business better, more approachable, and more enjoyable both for customers and for myself. So, yeah, this week has been a lot, but it also has been a week of stepping a little bit back into my own sanity and fighting the impulse to obsess over the business.

And I think in being more present outside of my office, outside of my computer screen, this has also benefited my presence in my relationship. And it's benefited my level of self awareness that as a founder who needs to do many different things, not all of them are product work. Many of them have much bigger impact than adding another feature. And sometimes, it's okay to step back. Sometimes, it's okay to stand still before you keep tipping over.

And then you read a novel. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Woodstep founder. You can find me on Twitter at abitkahlarvedkehl, and you'll find my books on my Twitter crossed tattoo. 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.

It 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.