The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid: 00:00

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. This episode is sponsored by Paddle.com, my favorite payment provider. If you wanna make any kind of money with your projects, you need a payment provider, and I personally use Paddle on many of my software projects, almost all of them, and on the ones that I don't, it's mostly out of legacy reasons. I've been very happy with them over the last couple years, and they're merchant of record. That means they really helped me be confident in charging for my businesses all over the place, Different currencies, different places, different people, different expectations, different banking systems are all done by them so I can do one thing, and that is focus on my business.

Arvid: 00:41

So go to paddle.com to check it out, see if it's something for you. I think it's one of these really really important choices that you should get right in the beginning, so why not give Paddle a shot because they've been super reliable for me. Since I talked to Anne Lollukunft this week, the neuroscientist and author, and we talked about her book and all kinds of things on my Wednesday episode, in that conversation about goal setting and running experiments and trying to deal with uncertainty, I realized one thing. I have actually been running experiments over the last couple months and weeks and want to talk about these things and take some time to really dive into the experiments that I have recently run-in my life both in PodScan, inside my media business, on Twitter, off Twitter, and just report on my progress here. So I wanna give you some insight into how I do my things, how my operations work, what things I'm trying to do, and what I want to get to, what my goals are, so to say.

Arvid: 01:40

And looking back at all of these experiments now and I get to each one in a second I realized that there's a fascinating theme here. All of them are in some way about removing constraints so maybe you're gonna pick up on this. These are not necessarily super creative experiments that build something completely new, but they are things that experiments that build something completely new but they are things that remove old assumptions. The assumption that things need to be this way. Well, do they?

Arvid: 02:05

This is not necessarily true, right? That's unrealistic and often really not what is expected from an entrepreneurial journey. So constraint removal has been a big theme across all the experiments that I've been running over the last couple months. So maybe this is going to be inspirational to you to also take out a couple constraints out of your life that don't belong there. One of the biggest experiments that I've done over the last two months involves the podcast data that I have inside of PodScan.

Arvid: 02:30

That's my treasure trove. That's the stuff that nobody else has. It's now over 3,000,000 podcasts with over 25,000,000 episodes of transcribed data and analyzed data between them. It's a lot of data. And this data has always been in my database and available for my paying customers, but I've started to make it available to the public to a certain degree by building public podcast pages.

Arvid: 02:55

It started, I think, mid December when I thought about this, and it was on this podcast too, so you can literally go back in time and see when I started thinking about this new paradigm shift. Chartable was closing down. And Chartable was the software that allowed people to see where podcasts chart on the Apple charts, on the Spotify charts, just to see where your show ranks, where good shows are, and what the good shows are that you might wanna listen to from the customer's perspective or from, like, a, somebody who just wants to look at it. But from a businesses, from a podcast agencies, podcast producers perspective, it was really useful to see how you were trending. And Spotify bought this company and then they were shutting down.

Arvid: 03:34

I mean, they probably still do all of their stuff internally for Spotify, but nobody can actually see that charts anymore. So I quickly built a way to offer that podcast charting information from Apple Podcasts and from Spotify to my own customers internally. I thought at some point, why would this just be on my dashboard? This might be interesting for non customers too, so I made it available publicly on PodScan for non logged in users. It was almost a threatening thing to me because I was so good at guarding my data, But then I realized I could show more information about these podcasts to attract people to the platform, who the podcast is by, what the last couple episodes were about, maybe a summary, maybe description, a thumbnail, maybe a fragment of the transcript for people to see what PodScan can do for them, just a landing page for people to see some demographics, things that would be interesting.

Arvid: 04:27

So I kinda bit the bullet of not keeping all my secrets to myself anymore, and I made this available, all of it, through the website. And those pages from early January have started ranking on Google. There are over 20,000 pages now on podscan.fm that have started to rank for both the niche podcasts with the really specific keywords and for the bigger podcasts that exist on many platforms out there. And that is really cool because now my domain rating is going up and my emails aren't delivered in a better way. It's really interesting what kind of consequences putting stuff out there had that I didn't think about.

Arvid: 05:05

And I believe this to be a really successful experiment now that I look at it in retrospect, but I had to overcome my inhibition to give my data away so much. It was so hard to build that even thinking about, oh, now people might wanna scrape my platform. It's gonna be a problem. I felt that one of the most valuable things about PodScan is precisely all of this data. Maybe the only valuable thing.

Arvid: 05:28

If you have this data, you can build all the other things on top of it. So that's kind of the core value of the platform. All my transcripts and all the additional information that I've kinda clobbered together from all those different places, the chart history that I have tracked, that stuff. And all that data only ever exists in my database. No other company has exactly that, the transcription data charting all of these episodes.

Arvid: 05:49

So it was hard to put this out for free because I felt I'm kinda giving it away. Nobody's gonna pay for it anymore. And, obviously, I'm not giving all of it away for free. Like, people still have to sign up to see the full data. I blur it out for people who just visit but they see some data and after a while people can't access it anymore without subscribing.

Arvid: 06:08

So there is that but it was still hard for me to overcome my protective instinct with all this information. The experiment was to open it up and that has led to a significant increase in sign ups and conversions. So it's been really, really successful as an experiment. And in the wake of this, with all these public pages existing, it also allowed me to add yet another feature that I always wanted to have in the product, but kinda didn't feel like it was the right time, and that was claim your podcast. I've always been interested in adding this, allowing people to say, hey, this is my podcast.

Arvid: 06:41

Can I manage its information? Can I update the description? Or my co host quit. Can I just put my name in there? These are all customer service messages that I got over the last couple months.

Arvid: 06:51

So now I built it. I built Claim Your Podcast mostly because competing products have it, and it's a great opportunity for me to actually have other people improve my data quality and data hygiene in the product itself. Again, hesitancy. Right? I was super hesitant to add this feature because it would increase complexity.

Arvid: 07:09

I need to make sure that the information that people put onto their pages is verified and valid. There are a lot of things that can go wrong if you allow people to deal with their own data in your database, but on the other side, it also exposed me to this completely new kind of potential customer, some of which are now paying customers on the platform, and that's podcast hosts and agencies, podcast producers. They have found that having control over their own shows, if they are the hosts and producers, is quite significant. Then it allows me for upsells that can happen because if somebody keeps their podcast data up to date and they go onto the platform and they see search for podcasts, set up an alert, or I can actually track my mentions. My podcast has been mentioned so many times over the last couple weeks.

Arvid: 07:52

Okay. They're already in the product that offers this capability. They can do it in the trial period anyway when they set it up for the first time. I kinda push all these features then. So they're one subscription away from having full access to all of this data.

Arvid: 08:07

So another experiment that went pretty well. I was fearful of the technical complexity of validating podcast ownership because every platform out there does it somewhat differently, but I thought it was more complicated than it actually turned out to be. It was just really checking for a token that I created and then somebody had to put into their podcast feed somewhere that was very easily added. I already have a podcast fee checking infrastructure anyway because that's part of my product. Right?

Arvid: 08:34

I need to know when new episodes are released, so I could just use that. It turned out to be a nonissue. But it was something that I purposely had not built in the ten months that the product has been on the market because I felt it wouldn't align with the core features. Well, it turned out I needed to build something else before that, and I was opening up to search for people to come in that would actually benefit from this. It's really interesting.

Arvid: 08:57

So looking at it now, in retrospect, it's definitely a win win feature because it improves the quality of the underlying data in my system, all of the data that people can claim, and there's hundreds of claims now already for shows, while at the same time inviting these new people who are already in the professional field of broadcasting into my product and then have the features that they didn't even know they needed right there for them. Not all my experiments worked so well in PodScan. I released a couple features that just fizzled out or didn't get much adoption. One of them is topics. That's a feature I released a couple weeks ago.

Arvid: 09:31

Hasn't been adopted much. It's only used by certain people who are interested in something super specific. It tracks the overall themes of every podcast episode out there. So if there's, like, a news podcast that's, like, half an hour, it would get the five biggest news items and just the phrase of it, like tariffs or war in x y z, that kind of stuff. It was meant to surface data that was kinda already in there anyway in the the summaries, but it really didn't do much.

Arvid: 10:00

It was not really much of a thing. It is still part of the data layer of PodScan, but as a feature, it may not be the most important that people wanna use. I built this within a couple days. The data was already there. I just visualized it a bit more.

Arvid: 10:15

It definitely does not find as much adoption as charts have or as transcripts have or lists for that matter, but that's just what it is. I'm trying not to overcomplicate the interface of the platform with too many of these because a lot of my users are not technical at all, and they don't see data through the same lens that I do. I kinda wanna see it compartmentalized and categorized and all that. Some people just wanna see the most important stuff and that's it. But on the other hand, I'm trying to surface as much of that information as I possibly can because you never really know what the most important thing is for somebody and that's kinda why PodScan is used and what it's used for, to highlight information that was not easily available before.

Arvid: 10:55

So it's been a hit and miss when it comes to feature deployments like this, but the big feature things that I released over the last couple months that people really liked, list, claim your podcast, that kind of stuff that I released recently, they work. So experiments need to run. You need to see the thing in real life to see if people take it or if they don't, and that's just what it is. And that's the technical, the product side of PodScan. Here's the other side of the business, sales and marketing.

Arvid: 11:22

It's important. Something else here that I had to experiment with, kind of forced myself to because I'm really uncomfortable doing it, was sales calls. And I was on what can only be described as sales calls even though they were never meant to be for several days recently, like one or two a day and this not only landed me a few actual customers who are using the platform as a business data collection integration to get podcast data into their own business systems, but it also allowed me to finally offer and sign metered billing on the API. That is something that I always wanted to do because right now the system is not even meant to do this. It's highly experimental, which is, I guess, the theme of this episode.

Arvid: 12:04

It is something that I don't even have as part of my billing system because it's so new and so different from what I usually bill for. Billing for PodScan is very simple. Three tiers of a plan, and each plan has limits. So for the API to get podcast data, there is a limit, like, a thousand a day, two thousand calls a day, or 5,000 calls a day. And that's how many API calls you can make.

Arvid: 12:25

And depending of the tier of subscription, that's how much you get. And maybe I can set the limit to a higher value if I wanted to, but I've never really had to do this. Well, this customer asked me because they needed way more than I was offering at this point. And if they could get a metered plan, that would solve their issue. They could pay by the thousand.

Arvid: 12:45

So I had to go deep into my wishful thinking documents that I have for the business, do some math, and I came up with a price per 1,000 requests that I could give them and then we negotiate it in a call, in a document, which was also quite nerve wracking for me and very new because I don't really do much of this, particularly not with a low touch business like this, but apparently, it has a high touch component. Haven't done much of this before. And from that call, we agreed to do monthly billing on a plan plus additional billing for anything over 5,000 requests on this metered plan. So, technically, it was a sales call. Just, I didn't expect to be in one.

Arvid: 13:23

So now PodScan has a tiered per 1,000 request price in addition to the existing subscription tiers, which allows me now to do very precise billing for the use of the platform on the API side and gives me the opportunity to supply API calls and data to customers who are really willing to pay for it or who have this intense need for high spikes of calls. The price is based on a negotiation, of course, but I would definitely offer it to other customers at a similar rate, which depending on the overall expected load, maybe higher or lower for others that I'm gonna negotiate this with in the future. But that's kind of what we're talking about here. So I really like this as an experience because it kind of forced me to act on the side of the business that I'm not too comfortable with. Product, sure, I can build whatever.

Arvid: 14:13

But when it comes to pricing, when it comes to negotiating contracts, that kind of stuff, it's just not where I'm from. But they needed the data quickly and reliably. I asked them, well, can I give you the numbers next week? They were like, nope. Need them now.

Arvid: 14:26

Okay. I guess you're gonna get them in five minutes, and And then it happened. So they had just turned on their system. They were hitting their limit. They needed this.

Arvid: 14:33

So knowing how important that conversation was for the relationship with my customer and how important that customer would be for the potential future of the business, just in terms of what else I could offer, I not only agreed to set up this billing system for them, which is gonna happen manually for a while, I would guess, but I also implemented several other things on the data layer for that particular customer that would allow them to use my APIs more efficiently. It tries to give them my full attention. That's what happened. And, obviously, that kind of behavior, building whatever one specific customer needs, is not smart to do forever. Kinda whale customers are wonderful, but they also are a problem because they can dictate the product road map, and you don't want that if you wanna build a low touch SaaS business.

Arvid: 15:16

Because if only a couple customers determine what your business is gonna do, all the other customers are not getting their needs met. But if it's a customer that is kind of this catalyst customer, if it's customer that can supply one of the most needed and most useful use cases, like intense integration of the API into another business, something that's very critical, and they're willing to pay several thousand bucks a month for it, why would I not engage with that? So I did, and it was great. Like, it was a great experience. We had wonderful call.

Arvid: 15:49

It's just a nice back and forth in customer service chat. It is a great experience, and I'm starting to do this with more and more customers because I see for them, that integration is a core relationship, and the attention that I put on that and going on calls, having conversations, something that I don't really like, but now I'm starting to enjoy more and more is absolutely worth it. So, yeah, those are my PodScan experiments that I ran. Personally, outside of PodScan, I've been trying to make some time for something completely different, which is hobbies. Believe it or not, I try to have a life outside of entrepreneurship.

Arvid: 16:26

Something that I've really missed over the last months, years maybe, was taking time away from the computer, mostly because it's so exciting to build a business, but also because there's always something. Right? There's always a fire burning somewhere or you had to do a little thing because you always wanted to find the time to do it. I mean, I had a phase a couple months ago where I would read a lot, a lot of fiction. I would just sit down and read books for, like, four hours a day on my couch when all the important fires were doused in the morning, and after that, I had some time.

Arvid: 16:54

But that phase was really nice, but it ended at some point. I went through the series that I wanted to read, and then it was back to business. What I have done now is get back into a different hobby, one that I had since I was a kid, which is miniature painting and more recent addition to that, which is three d printing. It's a couple of things that I really enjoy. And those are nice things that you can actually do between coding sessions, which at this point more than ever is just me instructing an AI to deal with a certain problem and then let it do its work and then come back couple minutes later to see if it's solved correctly.

Arvid: 17:24

So, well, five minutes later, that is a coat of paint. That's a little space gun painted or a little layer of cloak color added to the model. So I'm just going back and forth between building my little spaceman, like, my Warhammer 40,000 hobby if you need to know what it is. And when you're working on the same thing day in and day out for many months, burnout comes knocking, and you can feel how you're more stressed and more anxious. And I felt this enough in the past to know that the only way out of this situation is by embracing other things to allow you to find clarity and find some kind of diversion from the things that bother you all day.

Arvid: 18:01

And not having touched the critical parts of the software for a while and seeing that things just keep running well also really helps here. So it's about balance. That's really what it is. I know that I need to take care of myself and my mental health and 42 to be able to keep running the business, and I owe that both to my customers, myself, and my family to be present and understand my own limitations and make sure I juggle these things correctly. And that's important.

Arvid: 18:28

And it's important for me to know that I'm limited in ways that I can overextend and I shouldn't, that I can choose to act to make my experience an enjoyable one, which makes me just be in it and be with it better. And trying to step away from work when there's always work to be done is extremely hard. And it's not that as a founder, I'm on this kind of grind set mentality, but my founder identity says if you use your time productively, it's a smart use of time. Not saying you should work every hour of the day, but focus on things and get them to a point where they work for themselves. Right?

Arvid: 19:02

That's the narrative in the background. Painting little robots or space aliens does not feel like productive use of my time. Hence, I have a problem finding time for that in my day. But allowing myself to understand it as a necessary part of my health regimen Makes it a productive use of my time. By phrasing it as a mental health activity, a therapy if you want to call it that, which is obviously not, but we could jokingly call it a therapeutic activity, it allows me to feel like I'm still an active founder and I'm taking time for myself.

Arvid: 19:33

Because if not, I would just be a nervous wreck and very anxious. So that's one of those little internal changes that I made in my own self perspective, I guess, that has been very helpful. I found that I'm much more reflective on business challenges or technical challenges. And a lot of my problems in the software part of the business have kind of solved themselves as I filled with plastic glue and my X ACTO knife. By using my hands and my eyes, I'm doing some actual crafting.

Arvid: 19:59

I found that my mind was at peace because the action that I was doing and it was focused on was so simple that my mind could just go exploring instead of being fully focused on building this complex thought and keeping all of these things in mind. So, when I'm cutting a piece of plastic or trying to shave off some excess resin here or there, this task is usually so simple that my mind gets to relax a little bit. And that is usually the moment when revelations happen. So I've been seeing very good results from making that little change in my life personally, privately, just doing more hobby stuff. And finally, on the media, the media business side of things, there hasn't really been a lot of change.

Arvid: 20:37

One of the experiments that I did, it's a long term one, I guess, over the last half year, has been very productive and helpful, but that's very specific to my business. I'm still gonna talk about it, and that's been dropping the requirement to put out an interview episode every week and only interviewing people that are important for me to talk to right now. As you probably have noticed, the interviews on this show have been sporadic in nature and almost kind of randomly placed, but I prefer to have sporadically happening interviews over being forced to find people to talk to. The last couple of guests that I've been talking to have almost exclusively been people that I really, really wanted to chat with in this moment or that have written something that I really liked or that are talking about certain topics that I really enjoy and need to know more about. Just kind of vibe interviews with people who I enjoy and wanna hang out with.

Arvid: 21:21

And that has been super helpful for me to both keep the quality up and to feel that it's not a chore, but an opportunity. Even though I have minimums with throughout my sponsor agreements here, it still allows me to be selective and then kinda talk to the people when I feel like it and deploy the episodes when best benefits them. Just like I did this week with Ann Lore because she launched her book this week as well. And we talked about the book and all the things in it. It just works here.

Arvid: 21:45

On the day the episode comes out, the book comes out. So this has been an experiment in allowing myself not to feel too constrained. And like I said, all of these things are like this if you really think about it. Allowing my data to be more public, that's removing this internal constraint, like I need to protect my treasure. Allowing myself to only interview people that I like, well that's removing an external constraint like the pressure of a calendar and allowing my customers to administer their own data, that's removing the constraint that I put on them.

Arvid: 22:15

Allowing myself to spend more time with hobbies, that's very different from my work and that is removing the constraint of an internal mindset that I needed to shift around a little bit. Constraint removal is the underlying theme of these experiments, and they've been largely successful so far. I think there's something to be learned here. Like, sometimes the most effective changes are not about adding new things, but it's about taking away the limitations that we have placed on ourselves or our businesses. So I hope you experiment a little bit more in your own life.

Arvid: 22:44

Go read Elinor's book. It's really, really nice in terms of how to set goals that you can actually hit that are kinda short term and tracked, measured, where you have metrics and things you can analyze. And you will find your experiments actually be much more fruitful than randomly trying out new things. Hope you get to do this. And that's it for today.

Arvid: 23:03

Thank you so much for listening to the Boots of Founder. You can find me on Twitter at AvidKahl. If you wanna support me and this show, please share PodScan with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, businesses, names on podcasts out there. PodScan is this near real time podcast database with a really, really good API, many kinds of APIs that can now be purchased by the thousands. So please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem.

Arvid: 23:32

This episode was edited and mixed by my wonderful sound engineer, Danielle Simpson. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.