The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid: 00:00

Hey. It's Arvid, and welcome to this year's final episode of the Bootstrap Founder. This episode is sponsored by pedal.com, my payment provider of choice. If you run a software business and you don't wanna deal with all this sales tax stuff and having to integrate every single money related thing yourself, I can really recommend it. And in fact, Paddle has been a major partner for me in 2024.

Arvid: 00:25

Big shout out goes to all the folks over at Paddle and particularly my dear friend, KP, who I got to meet this year in Atlanta and who kept cheering for me throughout this whole journey. The Peddle AI Launchpad Accelerator that I participated in, that was also him. Good times. Looking back at 2024, well, it's been a year of significant transitions for me. A lot of learning curves and unexpected opportunities.

Arvid: 00:50

The biggest professional shift was the launch of PodScan, this podcast learning and data platform that I've been building. And it has become my main focus and quite possibly the most ambitious project that I've ever tackled so far. You've likely followed the journey on this podcast for the last couple weeks months. And if not, I highly recommend going back to the episodes from, let's say, around June, July when I started it all out. It was really, really interesting just to explore this space in public.

Arvid: 01:19

It has been quite the joy to see it grow over time. And the genesis of PodScan is actually quite interesting. And I wanna share the story with you today in case you don't know. It started as a marketing play of all things. It wasn't a business idea.

Arvid: 01:33

It was just an idea for a marketing strategy for another project that I built last year. And that was Podline. The name of that project, Podline. Fm. It's still around.

Arvid: 01:43

And it's a podcast voicemail tool that I'd been working on throughout the winter of 2023. I felt I needed a way to reach podcast creators to market Podline because I built this tool for people like myself. It was an idea that I had that there are alternatives out there that already do voice mailing, and you can literally set up a phone line and get voice mails in. But I wanted to make it easy and give people transcribed data and give them the data when somebody would tell them something through this Podline website and they would get the full transcript plus the WAV file and the MP3 and could easily integrate it into their podcast production pipeline. So I wanted to build it because the other tools out there did not do this.

Arvid: 02:26

And in classic developer fashion, I just built my own solution. You know, you know how it is. You can cobble something together. You just built your SaaS for this. And little did I know that Podline itself wasn't gonna be the big thing because when I had it built, I needed to actually find podcast hosts out there who already used some kind of voicemailing system.

Arvid: 02:48

So I thought, Google doesn't help me here really. I need kind of my my finger on the pulse of the podcasting world. I need to figure out who is mentioning the word voicemail or a name of a competitor tool out there somewhere. So, yeah, This marketing tool that I built for that would very quickly eclipse the original project entirely. Podline itself ended up serving as a technological preview for PodScan, because it handled voice transcription for voicemail messages.

Arvid: 03:17

It made them searchable and visible on the website. And these core technologies would later become very crucial components of PodScan's infrastructure just at a much larger scale. And what makes PodScan fundamentally different from my previous ventures is that inherent scale. Because most SaaS businesses and most of the ones that I started in the past grow gradually. Like you onboard customers 1 by 1 and your infrastructure needs to scale with your user base.

Arvid: 03:45

It scales alongside it in almost a linear fashion. But PodScan, it very different. It turned this model on its head. From day 1, PodScan needed to be able to process every podcast out there. And that was a reality check for me which led to one of the biggest mindset shifts of the year.

Arvid: 04:16

Despite being a committed bootstrapper, I realized that some businesses simply require a different approach. And I always knew this, but I never thought that I would be involved with that. So the infrastructure costs would be substantial before revenue could catch up. Again, I have to deal with millions of shows. And fortunately, I found a bootstrapper compatible funding solution in the Com Company Fund in around March.

Arvid: 04:43

Now I've been an investor in the fund for a while and a mentor to people in the fund, so I know kinda how this happens. And got into conversations with Tyler, the CEO of the com company fund and a friend as well, like you are connected in this space. And it really helped me just look outside of bootstrapping, like fully completely bootstrapping for this particular business and see an alternative approach. And this funding that I then got in April has been instrumental in helping establish a steady operational baseline for this business as I work towards profitability. Because if you have expenses that need to deal with the cost of taking in 50,000 podcast episodes every day, that's kind of where it is roughly.

Arvid: 05:26

I mean, that is just the most important podcast as quickly as possible in the highest quality, and it's kinda where I'm at. Well, then you need to be able to pay for this and just having a couple customers won't cut it. Another significant change that kinda came from the same direction was my approach to building the business itself. Instead of trying to do everything myself all the time, I brought on Nick as my designer, business strategy consultant, and customer outreach specialist. His work on website design and email workflows and customer interviews has been invaluable to me and it allowed me to focus on the technical challenges of building the system that has to process 50,000 podcast episodes every day.

Arvid: 06:10

That alone is complicated. It's really nice to have somebody to help me with the other things. And this was a quite dramatic departure from my previous, I can do everything myself mentality. Where I would just often dismiss tasks that I couldn't find time for as unimportant. Nick has helped me realize that sometimes you need someone else thinking about different aspects of the business while you focus on your own core challenges.

Arvid: 06:33

And it's kinda divide and conquer. And Nick has previous to that helped me a lot with my YouTube and my podcast editing and all of this. So he kinda graduated himself into this role in the business by just being in my orbit all this time, which is also an interesting learning about how to find the right people to work with. They're already there. You just have to see them.

Arvid: 06:53

And the technical complexity of PodScan, and I've been mentioning just now, has been quite staggering, particularly around what I have understood is called data fidelity, a concept that I've never thought much about before I started this venture. The open podcast ecosystem is built on RSS feeds, which is kind of the basic technical layer, but these feeds come in countless variations of truthfulness and accuracy. And some include transcripts, others don't. Audio files might be m p threes or videos, some people even put JPEGs in there for some reason. Data is often incomplete, confusing, or duplicated.

Arvid: 07:28

Add this to the challenge of interfacing with closed ecosystems like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and you've got yourself quite the technical puzzle. The quality of this data is very important, and it's crucial for the customers of PodScan because podcast analytics and market research, that kind of data needs to be right. And automating quality control at scale has been one of the biggest challenges that I've been facing here, because you have to automate it. Again, 50,000 shows a day, you can't manually go through these transcripts. Often hours per transcript of podcasting just doesn't work.

Arvid: 08:03

So you need automated systems that are good enough, and fortunately, there's technology out there. Because I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have started this venture during the age of large language models and AI systems. Because PodScan simply would not have been possible as a solo founder 3 or 4 years ago. Maybe with a team of 20 and machine learning experts and that kind of stuff, but not as a solo founder. Not as a SaaS solo indie hacker.

Arvid: 08:27

Definitely not. 2 technological advances made this feasible. 1 is automated transcription. That's using OpenAI's whisper for speech to text, plus a couple other open source freely available things, and instruction based language models for data processing, for AI work, so we call it. I've integrated various AI models from these open source options like llama, Mistral to cloud services, from open AI, Anthropic, all of this kind of flows together.

Arvid: 08:55

And the experience has been mind blowing, especially when the AI's themselves help write code and then that code interacts with other AI systems. It's quite bizarre to write code in the age of AI where even the AI interface code is written by AI. It's almost self cannibalizing in a way. And this deep dive into AI has transformed my development workflow and led to a very interesting shift in my podcast interview strategy as well, because I've started specifically seeking out guests for my show who can help me understand the technologies and strategies that I need for PodScan. Back in the day when I started my podcast, I just wanted to talk to anybody in the in the hacking space.

Arvid: 09:38

Anybody interesting. And that is great. That was fun and still is fun. I often still choose people that I want to talk to because I just find them interesting. But I did a strategic move.

Arvid: 09:49

I made a strategic choice to talk to people who know things that I don't know yet that I need right now. So whether it's experts in prompt engineering or marketers with deep industry knowledge, specialists in feature flags, that kind of stuff, I've been strategically using my podcast to learn from experts while sharing those insights with you. And the learning curve with AI and all the tools and technologies around it has been quite steep. Each new model version requires different approaches to how to communicate with it and how to structure data, how context windows work, how big they are, and all the different ways of extracting reliable information at scale, and how to get unreliable information more reliable. I I could talk about this for hours just even dealing with data and I might.

Arvid: 10:34

This sounds like an interesting topic for a podcast in the future. But the results that I have so far gotten to, like slowly increase the quality of have been worth it. Because the system, podcast system, ingestion system, extraction system becomes more and more stable and reliable every single day. Just from using these technologies better and having these checks and balances to see, is it getting better, is it getting worse, should I change the prompt here, should I change this there. So there's a lot of complexity behind the scenes that obviously a customer will never see, but that just came from learning about this technology.

Arvid: 11:08

I highly recommend playing with this, particularly when you're using AI as a platform, as kind of this interface. Like, you push data in, you get data out. You might become complacent at some point with what you get. It might not be perfect, but it's good enough. But the models change, the prompts change, the awareness of these tools changes, and you can experiment with that.

Arvid: 11:29

And you should take time to do this. Just saying, like, from my own experience. And that is the technical side of things. But obviously, a business has way more than just the technical side of things. If you read the E Myth by Michael e Gerber, you will know that besides being a good technician, you also need to be a visionary for the business and a manager pulling all the operational strings.

Arvid: 11:52

So one other significant realization this year was about my limitations around personal branding for this b to b SaaS Cause that's what PodScan is. It's b to b. Right? I might have individual customers, but they're all businesses in some way. And while building in public and maintaining this personal brand that I've worked for for many years on Twitter and all these places, while that worked well for my books and my courses, the info product, it hasn't scaled the same way for PodScan.

Arvid: 12:19

It didn't work the same way. Because when you're selling to agencies and marketing departments rather than individuals, you just need a different approach. You just cannot reliably be a lead generator to be present online. You have to do more. And this insight has led to a very recent pivot towards more scalable outreach mechanisms, old school stuff like SEO and content marketing.

Arvid: 12:42

I thought I could get away with it not doing it, but I can't. So I have to deal with that. And it was a hard lesson to learn. Because the same strategies that work for selling books and courses, one at a time really, would not work for a b to b SaaS product that relies on retention and constant purchasing. Well, that is a learning.

Arvid: 13:01

And I mean, I wouldn't be surprised, and I shouldn't be surprised because people have been telling me this all this time, particularly in one occasion, the highlight of my professional networking this year really, and that was attending MicroConf in Atlanta. I got to meet so many of my fellow founder nerds, and I even ran into a few Potscan customers there who talked to me about their use of the product. It was really cool and was probably the most rewarding conference experience that I've had so far even compared to my previous speaking engagements at MicroConf. Like, it just gets better every year. The connections and relationships built within the community have been invaluable to me.

Arvid: 13:33

Just super useful. And I'm already booked for next year's event in New Orleans. Really looking forward to that. And I've realized I just need to expand my conference circuit. I it just needs to happen, not just with the founder conferences, but I have to include podcast industry events.

Arvid: 13:48

I am running a podcast analytics business now, and I have to admit that to the public. Be present and be present in the podcasting community, not just the founder community. I have to meet agencies and marketing departments, my customers, face to face, and it has become a clear priority for growing PodScan's presence and its seriousness because all the businesses that I I interact with are serious businesses. So I have to present that to, the outside world as well. Yeah.

Arvid: 14:14

That's that's the business side of things. On a personal level, turning 40 prompted me to take my physical health a bit more seriously too. And I was inspired majorly by Peter Leveld's tweets about fitness and lifting. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of meme stuff coming from this wonderful person, but it is very inspirational to see the impact that Peter had on a lot of people's health journeys. And I made the choice that it is now time to do that for myself.

Arvid: 14:43

I established a regular workout routine, and I made significant dietary changes. I'm trying to cut out sugar. I focus on hydration. I try to not drink anymore, and I'm staying active throughout the day. I try to walk as much as I can.

Arvid: 14:57

All these things together has had quite the impact. It's been remarkable, not just physically, but also in terms of the energy and endurance that I have for work and family, all the other things. This improved physical condition has, I think, been crucial for maintaining the energy levels that I need to tackle PodScan's challenges, because it is challenging to run this business mostly myself on the technical side of things. So doing something for the body at, the aging stage of my life is and has been very important, and I'm glad that I made the choice because it's also fun. It's fun to see results.

Arvid: 15:31

I've been more intentional about not just physical health, but also mental health. Like I've been reading more, although, I do this in bursts. I don't know if that's the same for most people out there, but sometimes I devour a book in half a day, 2 books a day, and then I'm not reading for weeks at a time. It's been part of my attempt to create this kind of life where different activities balance each other out. Not necessarily happening at the same time in the same levels, but maintaining this healthy equilibrium between the things that I wanna do and the things that I need to do.

Arvid: 16:03

And I think this approach has been kind of an approach of balance, and it's been very important as I juggle these demands of the business with my media business, the podcast, the newsletter, all of this, which I kinda scaled back a little bit from 2 guaranteed episodes a week to a more manageable schedule of couple of interviews a month, maybe 1, maybe 2, maybe 4, depending on how many people I talk to. So the media side of things is still very important to me because it is my way not just to share with you what I know and what I learned, but also to have traces of my own decisions that I can look back at. And it's that's why I always recommend to people to start a podcast. And if you need to do do one thing in 2025, it is very likely just documenting your own journey in a podcast format. Just talk into a microphone.

Arvid: 16:52

If nobody wants to listen, that's fine. At least you still have a kind of a journal. And if people listen, then all of a sudden you have the methods to reach people and to have people amplify your message to others. It's really useful. So, yeah, if you if you wanna make a commitment for 2025, start a podcast.

Arvid: 17:11

It's really not that hard. And for my own 2025, I'm just excited about PodScan's trajectory here. It's not just the biggest business I've ever built, which it is, but it's also the most complex and impactful judging just by the customer interactions that I have and the downstream effects that I see from them. The integration of AI tooling into my development workflows will become more and more crucial. Like I already code way differently than I did a year ago, and I'm ready to embrace that future.

Arvid: 17:40

I'm just way more productive and build more things for people that they actually need and can use. It's quite nice. So 2024 has been transformative to say the least From launching PodScan to embracing AI, personal health improvements, strategic business pivots was all in there. It's been a year of learning that some rules are made to be broken, whether they're about bootstrapping or doing everything yourself or just lounging on the couch all the time. Sometimes the best path forward is the one you least expect.

Arvid: 18:08

So to a wonderful 2025. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at abitkahl, arvidkahl, and you'll find my books and my Twitter card stat too. If you wanna support me in this show, please tell everyone you know who could benefit from using it about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder.

Arvid: 18:33

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 have to show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.