The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. I'm Arvid, and welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder on the road. I'm recording this podcast episode from my hotel room at MicroConf in New Orleans with so many amazing software founders and people from the industry. I have so much to say and I guess so much to think about. It was a wonderful conference.

You know, I've been trying to go to MicroConf for the last, like, three or four years, and every single year, it gets better and better. I meet more people that are interesting and have interesting challenges to solve and have contributions to make. The talks are just spectacular. And the hallway track, as usual, in MicroConf where people just meet and chat and exchange information and exchange solutions to their problems or just commiserate with each other when there are issues. It's just so valuable.

I never regret coming here. And I have yet to go to any activity throughout and surrounding MicroConf that didn't leave me with some new thoughts or new connections or new ways to tackle the issues and challenges that I have in my own business. So it has been an amazing experience. Today, I wanna just go through my own experience of the conference a little bit and give shout outs where shout outs are due. There's lots of shout outs surrounding this conference.

And maybe dive into one or two talks that I found really, really interesting and helpful for the stage that I'm at. This episode is sponsored by Paddle, Paddle dot com, which is also one of the sponsors for MicroConf. They've been responsible for providing breakfasts, dinners, and the receptions, and all that kind of stuff. So they've been not only helpful to me and this podcast and me and my businesses because I run a lot of my software businesses on top of Pedal's payment solution, where they handle all my tech stuff and my different currencies that I charge and all these things they're really good at, which makes them quite the sponsor for this conference. Right?

Like, founder here needs to charge money in some way. And Peddle has been very reliable as part of my tech stack. So I'm glad they're here, and I'm glad they're sponsoring this show. So thank you, Paddle, not only for sponsoring the Bootstrap Founder, which is great, but also for sponsoring a conference that has hundreds of Bootstrap founders in it. Generally, the conference is always so well organized.

A big shout out to Rob Walling and his team, everybody around the Tiny Seat and MicroConf Universe. You've done another amazing job this year. You facilitated exchange and you facilitated conversation between people to a degree that I've never ever seen anywhere else, really. Like, no other conference has been doing this. And I'm just I'm just so happy at this point.

I'm just sitting here reminiscing even about something that happened, like, thirty minutes ago, a chat that I had with a couple of founders that was just very insightful. But it's a two day conference. I think it's, like, six ish or seven talks altogether, an excursion in the middle for people to just hang out and do stuff with each other and receptions every evening. So if you like to hang out and chat with founders, that's what the majority of this conference is. Plus a couple of amazing talks interspersed between all these conversations that you're guaranteed to have.

Like, some talks have a component where you just talk to somebody at your table. Sometimes there's something for you to just get to know the person through that is sitting right next to you. And sometimes you just listen and you take notes, and it's always quite valuable information. It all started with a talk by Rob Walling and doctor Sherry Walling, and it was really nice to see them together on stage. They were talking about the psychological approach to exits, like selling a software, getting acquired.

It's always really nice to see them speak and hear them tackle something that they have witnessed many, many times, both as founders and as people who've been helping founders get their own founder journeys on the way from beginning to end, where the exit kind of determines at least the later part of the journey. And it was really nice just to see how they approach the mental health aspect of all of this. Because so often when we think about acquisitions, when we think about getting your business sold, it's all about numbers. It's all about money. It's all about this tangible stuff that founders deal with day in and day out.

But the intangible, the emotional layer, the feelings, the the stress, the anxiety, and also the expectations that we have of ourselves, that doesn't really get mentioned too much. It's funny because I had so many conversations around the conference with people who either were just selling their business or had just sold their business, and every single one of them is like, oh, I fell into that void of purpose and got to that stage. And that was something that I didn't expect, but everybody kind of had the same story. We all know what's coming when we sell a business. We all know why we do it, right, to level up, to get to a new point of financial freedom.

But when it happens, the moment it happens, it is such an overwhelming feeling, such an overwhelming situation to be in that it still comes as a surprise. No matter how much you prepare and no matter how many people you actually talked about this, you will still feel kind of alone ish or at least uniquely stressed in that moment. I've had that conversation so many times over the last couple of days. It was both very validating for me because I felt the same way when we sold back in 2019. And I guess in just talking about this, it was quite validating for the other founders who were either going through it right now or had been going through it for a bit, just to see you're not alone in this.

You literally are not alone because every founder experiences something like it, but kind of uniquely colored to themselves. So it's just interesting to see because that's something that it's the happy moment that you want to have as a founder. But in that happiness is a level of stress and unexpected anxiety and just being overwhelmed that makes it something stressful that you have to deal with. It's a challenge. So that talk by Sherry and Rob was helpful to understand yourself a little bit better, know what work to do on yourself and in the life of your business and the people that you work with to then better deal with the situation.

So that was a great talk. It's always nice when Rob and Sherry talk, which I thought was already the highlight of the show when it started. But then came the ultimate highlight for me, probably the talk that I enjoyed the most because it was the best possible thing at my stage on the journey of getting Podscan to profitability. And that talk was about homepage positioning. Like it was such a specific thing, but it was by Anthony Pierry.

And I don't think I've ever been told what positioning is about and how to do it better than in this talk. It was spectacular. And the resonance from the founders that I then talked to after this talk was equally strong. They quite enjoyed it because it was so actionable. So Anthony Pierry was talking about how you should communicate what your business is about, who it's for, and why it's better than others.

That's really what positioning is. And he gave this amazing framework. It's like you wanna figure all of these things out before you start building a homepage. And in trying to figure these things out, you actually have to do a lot of reflection on the people that you want to serve, the people that you're already serving, if that's the right kind of crowd or if you want to shift your focus in your business to something else. And, you know, if you follow this podcast, I've been struggling with Podscan in particular with the many different audiences that I have, the many different kind of customers that I have for this product.

Podscan is scanning all these podcasts and creating all these transcripts, but what happens after that with that data that I have, that serves so many different purposes. I have individual people, like people who just wanna track their own name and where they're mentioned so they can kinda interact with the host. Then on the other end of the spectrum, I have businesses that are using the API to pull, like, massive amounts of data into their own system to do whatever kind of internal analysis they need to do. So I have individual customers. I have agencies in the middle, and then I have these bigger businesses, almost enterprise y, on the other end.

And I kind of want to serve them all, and I know I probably shouldn't want to, but, know, I'm a founder, I want to help people. And making that choice of who to serve and who to position this towards, That was something that I've been struggling with over the last couple of weeks and months. Then having Anthony actually give me a framework to figure out who this is and how I can then apply that framework best to talk to these people directly when they come to the landing page really helped me. What particularly was helpful in this approach of figuring out who this is for, what it is and why it's better and finding the underlying workflow that you're trying to help people with and the problem that you are then overcoming with your solution was that I looked at my homepage and I was like, I'm all over the place. I'm trying to say all of these things for everybody at the same time.

Whereas what I should be doing is find the one ICP, the one ideal customer profile that I truly want to serve out of the many that I have. Right? Do I want to serve individual contributors? Do I want to serve the agencies in the middle or those larger tech enabled businesses at the end? Pick one.

That's kind of the advice here. Pick one, make that your main thing. You can still serve others. You can still have something down on your homepage, a little bit down, where you talk about their use cases and then kind of invite them to come into the product. But the big thing on top, the hero, the header, and this is probably not going to surprise anybody, but it helped me just understanding what my problem was right now.

The big thing on top should be for your ICP and nobody else. Right? You can help so many different people in so many different ways, but if there's one person that is best suited for your business, that's the person you're helping and that's the person you talk to by telling them it is for them, telling them what problem you're solving in a way that's better than others, and telling them how you're solving it, what you are. And it was really cool. There were so many good examples in those slides.

I hope he makes them available. Or if you can find HimSpeak on YouTube or somewhere, please check it out. I will add links to the show notes if I can find some. But it was really helping me to just understand I really need to make this cut. I cannot have a landing page that caters to every single person out there because then nobody will find themselves being recognizably represented in that header, in that website.

Just doesn't work. So I need to make a choice. I think I know where I'm going, but I'll explore it a little bit over the next couple of days, let it sink in and think about it a bit more. But man, what's that at all? Can you imagine the sake?

You go to a conference and you listen to somebody for thirty minutes and all of a sudden everything you've done leading up to the conference was like 20% of what you should have done. And you know, okay, the other 80% I have a framework for. That's how I feel this year coming out of MicroConf. I felt very similarly to last year coming out of MicroConf. That was around pricing at that time.

Now my novel understanding is around positioning. And I am so glad because I feel I was so undereducated in that field that right now I feel like I read like several books, which I didn't, but I was taught just the same. I'm really, really grateful for Anthony to have presented such an amazing talk. It's really, really cool. And that was that was talk number two.

That was, like, the first half of the first day wasn't even over, and I had already got my money's worth from the conference. It was amazing. Then we had lunch. New Orleans, man. What can I say?

Food here is spectacular. And at the hotel that the conference was at, food was really, really good as well. And after lunch, we went on micro excursions, which is always something that MicroConf offers because people talk best when they do something, just either going for a walk or going through a tour through the city or like in my case, we took a swamp tour and got on a boat and floated around looking at alligators, feeding alligators, taking pictures of alligators, seeing an owl. It was really cool. It was just like a little nature trip outside of New Orleans.

And everybody on that boat, it's like, it must have been like 60 plus founders or so, was just chatting away, looking at animals, looking at this beautiful swampy area, and just having a chat about their businesses, like introducing themselves to each other, sharing stories, sharing experiences, sharing insights that they gleaned either from this conference or from many other things. And that is the secret to MicroConf. People are excited about each other's work. And no matter where they are and when they are, right, in the morning at breakfast or throughout the conference, in the hallways, or even on a boat, people will be animatedly chatting about the things that they're doing and try to help each other, maybe forge new collaborations. I had several people just understanding that there's an actual solution to the problem that they had and then got in touch with the founder that solved it, which I have to point out, there's no selling happening here.

Like, people don't sell their stuff to each other. They just mention things and then people find each other if they actually can use each other's work for their own business purposes. It's really nice. So this conference is very non salesy. So I didn't sell POTScan.

I just mentioned it a couple of times. And every time I did, the founder that I was talking to was like, okay, you can kind of see the thinking starting in their minds like, oh, I could use this for that and and all of that. It was just really spectacular. It was a fun thing. We came back at a reception the next day, today, a couple more talks about pricing and LinkedIn outreach.

It was just so much good stuff going on. But I think I have to kind of let it settle a little bit. One thing I can tell you, like when you go to a conference like MicroConf, you will walk away with actionable insights. You will walk away with something that is meaningfully impactful to your business journey because A) either you find it in a talk, which are always good, or B) you will find somebody who had that problem before and solved it or has this problem right now, and you can kind of bounce back and forth between your approaches or know somebody who can help you. MicroConf is perfect for bootstrap founders or almost bootstrap founders with a little bit of funding.

Indie hackers, anybody who is in this kind of vicinity will benefit from this conference. I'm not being paid for this, obviously, right? I pay for a ticket full price and all that. But I would highly suggest going to this. I think the next one is in September in Europe, in Istanbul, in Turkey.

So if you're interested in meeting the MicroConf team and all the founders that make it there, I highly, highly recommend it. And now I have to go to the after party. There's a closing reception. We are just on the other side of the World War II Museum here in the hotel. So we're all just going to jump into the museum and have a good time.

So it was a spectacular event. I probably will think a little bit more about all the other talks I didn't mention just now. But for now, I'm going away from this with very specific tactical and strategic insight on how to position, and I'm really, really glad that I went. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstr Founder.

You can find me on Twitter at avid kahl, a r v I d k a h l. And if you wanna support me in this show, please share Podscan.fm with your professional peers and all those who you think will benefit from being able to track mentions of the brands or businesses or names on all the podcasts out there. We scan 50,000 podcast episodes a day and transcribe them in near real time. So if you have any purpose for this kind of data and want to use the API that we provide, please share the word or check it out at Podscan.fm. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day and bye bye.