The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid: 00:00

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. This episode is sponsored by Paddle.com, the merchant of record that has been responsible for allowing me to reach the revenue goal that I will share with you in a minute here. Paddle truly is more, that's MOR, merchant of record, because their product has allowed me to focus on building a business that people actually wanna pay money for as a customer. And not only that, but Paddle just yesterday sent me an email that they recovered a payment from a customer whose credit card had expired.

Arvid: 00:34

And that's why Paddle does more for you. They deal with taxes. They reach out to customers with failed payments, and they bring the money back in. They charge in people's local currency to make it easy. It's quite amazing.

Arvid: 00:45

So check out paddle.com to learn more. Before we get to the big thing today, a quick update on what I tasked myself to get done this week, pivoting the positioning of Podscan from this all over the place kind of website to clearly focusing on the kinds of customers that really drive revenue. Took me a couple days, but I finally pivoted the homepage to be much more upfront about the data platform nature of Podscan. And I created two sub landing pages, one for data customers and one for those who need alerts. So now instead of this weird Chimera landing page that does everything and nothing, I give people the option to choose their own adventure and show them distinctly tailored landing pages depending on what they came to Podscan for.

Arvid: 01:26

So this is a first step in my repositioning efforts, not the last one. Obviously, this is gonna change over time, but I'm glad I got it done within the deadline that I set to myself. And I'm telling you, having a podcast does wonders for accountability. I have to commit to stuff because I promise it to you. So I kinda have to keep it.

Arvid: 01:43

So I promise to share something else with you today. Now it's the April 2025. It's been almost a year to the day that Potscan got its Bootstrapper compatible funding and it has taken me this long, one year, to reach the very first goal that I set for myself that day back in April 2024: becoming profitable before the funds run out. And that goal has been reached. The profitability part.

Arvid: 02:11

And over the last several months I have slowly but surely ramped up revenue, generated customers, found the right customers that wanted to pay the right amounts of money for the quality of the data that I offer, had them stick around and made Podscan profitable. And I think this is quite the accomplishment and it's something that I thought would happen much faster than it did which is my own problem, my own internal expectation, but it has happened. It's taken a year to get to this point, but it is profitable. And even though I'm very happy to now be in this phase where runway is not shrinking anymore, but very slowly but significantly increasing every single week, I am faced with now having to find the next goal for myself and making a couple of choices about what Podscan is going to be, what it should be in the near future, and what the ultimate strategy for the business is gonna be looking like. Now every single software business, be it an indie hacker business, solopreneur business, a small team of founders, bootstrapped, having some kind of bootstrapper funding, or aimed at getting you to reach profitability, every single one of these businesses has profitability as its very first goal.

Arvid: 03:21

It's always the same. It's the critical target. Be self sustaining. Because only once that part of the business journey is reached can you then comfortably or even reasonably make choices about the future because everything leading up to this is just survival. Trying to figure things out, product market fit, getting to the point where you create traction with the right customers, reduce churn with those customers to a manageable rate, and then figuring out how to find more of them through positioning, marketing, all the things that I've been doing over the last couple months and I've been trying to share publicly, all of these experiments, all of those small bets that I made and some paid off, some didn't, all of those worked in tandem to get me to profitability within a year.

Arvid: 04:02

So now the question becomes, where do we go from here? So I'll just talk about my personal relationship with the business, the industry, the customers that I have. I think I'll just come up with what options I have, the plans that I might follow, and what I'm leaning towards. All of those things change over time, obviously. Right?

Arvid: 04:20

Like, if I think about this in a couple months, in a couple of years, I'm probably gonna think differently. New situations come up, offers start coming in, collaborations start to happen, things shift. But at this point in time, and maybe also as a little time capsule for Potscan for a year from now or two years from now or five years from now looking back at it today, I'm taking inventory of the options that I see and the strategies that I'm interested in pursuing. And there's one big one, clearly. If you listen to prior episodes of this podcast, you will know that I've built and sold SaaS businesses in the past, so I'm not new to the idea of building something for it to be acquired.

Arvid: 04:58

That's definitely one of the three major options that I have. Even talking to the people at the MicroConf conference a couple weeks ago in New Orleans, I found that everybody has this as an option and wants this as an option. Everybody there either is aiming to eventually be acquired or is talking to potential acquirers or even has an acquisition offer on the table. So it's always a potential way to set a goal for your own business, make it acquirable and then make it acquired and have a trajectory towards acquisition because the founder gets rich, business finds a new home and keeps running, either gets integrated into something else or gets run by other people, that's interesting as an option for where the business could go. It could be a financial acquisition where people keep it running, they buy it, and they make more money of it over time.

Arvid: 05:45

Or it could be a strategic acquisition where people get access to your customers, the relationships that you have, your data, or even your employees, maybe even you as a founder for a couple months or a couple years. It's a very legitimate option for looking into strategic outlooks for your business, and it's very present with me because the first meaningful acquisition that happened to me back in 2019 was so substantial that it freed me from having to work for anybody else. And that acquisition allowed me to do whatever I want and build the things that I want. And you are experiencing the consequence of this right now. Right?

Arvid: 06:18

If you ever read my newsletter or if you're listening to this on my podcast, you're watching my YouTube channel, you'll find me on Twitter. Like, all of these are consequences of me not having to do anything else for anybody else. I could focus on this. I could build this. And POTScan, the whole theme of this episode, is another consequence of this.

Arvid: 06:36

It's something that I got to build as a new business completely on my own, completely as I wanted it to be in the market that I care about, which is podcasting, which funny enough is a consequence of me selling the other business too because then I started talking about how to build businesses. Right? There's a lot of freedom that I have developed throughout the last five years now in being able to do whatever I wanna do. And many of the things that happened to me and for me gave me this opportunity step by step to build PodScan into a profitable business. And the connections that I made allowed me to find funding to get it going for a year, finance it so I could then find profitability in this very expensive market where I pay a lot of money for AI and GPU capable servers to run AI systems on.

Arvid: 07:17

And that made it hard to get to profitability because it's quite expensive. So for me to make Potscan incredibly sellable, which is one of the reasons for why things are acquired, they're sellable, right, they can easily be bought, it needs to not just be valuable, but it also needs to be transferable. And this is why most agencies or founder specific brands don't really get acquired. They at best get collaborated with or invested into but never really acquired if the founder is the product, like MrBeast, for example. Right?

Arvid: 07:48

They won't be bought and renamed. Nobody's gonna buy MrBeast and rename it to mister something else. You invest in MrBeast or you work with MrBeast or you make money through a collaboration with MrBeast, but you're not gonna own that business. But a software company is different. You can sell a software company.

Arvid: 08:06

They get sold every single day all over the world. If you wanna sell a software business completely, get a couple million dollars and hand everything over to somebody else just like we did back in 2019 when we sold FeedbackPanda, you have to make it completely transferable and completely decoupled from the founders. In Podscan's case, that also needs to happen, obviously, but I think it's already there. And other than the fact that I manage customer service chat or handle sales through email, but none of this is completely bound to me. All of it could be done by somebody else.

Arvid: 08:39

And that's also one of the big benefits of going to MicroConf was really just figuring out that every founder secretly wants to sell. A lot of the founders there were looking for or already had interesting acquisition deals on the table, and we're just thinking, should we? Should we not? Should we keep it running? Should we sell right now?

Arvid: 08:55

It's a very interesting state to be in. And I wanna get to that point with POTScan, where people want to acquire it for a significant amount of money. I think it's already there in terms of stability. When I spent the week in New Orleans, I didn't do anything for the business. I didn't have to do anything for the business.

Arvid: 09:12

I think I answered two or three customer service conversations. None of them were critical, just people asking for stuff. The software just kept running. It was useful to people. People were using it all the time.

Arvid: 09:23

It created thousands of dollars of revenue throughout the week that I was away. And that's pretty amazing. It's very stable. It's reliable and didn't need any hand holding from me anymore. Now that's a sellable business already.

Arvid: 09:35

Of course, there's more. There's some infrastructure work that needs to be done, maybe streamlining some optimizations, but it's now a profitable business that runs on well documented systems because that's something I learned over the last decade is to start documenting early. Have standard operating procedures for everything you do. Have documentation for every error that you ever encountered so that if it comes up again, you know how to do it. Have links to systems.

Arvid: 09:58

Tell yourself how to solve problems that you can routinely solve. It's important to have well documented systems. Podscan itself doesn't have catastrophic failures right now. And even if there are problems, I've tried to document everything from the beginning to be able to deal with issues as they arise. So that is kinda dealt with.

Arvid: 10:18

And since all the technology that I use, with a couple of exceptions, mostly related to AI platforms for data extraction that I sometimes use, everything is self contained. And if nothing changes, it'll just keep working all by itself. So it's already pretty sellable in that regard, definitely more sellable than other businesses. The question then becomes how valuable is the product. Right?

Arvid: 10:39

How valuable is the whole business and who would be interested in buying it? For being acquired, everything's set up, all my accounts are decoupled, nothing personal is in there, and there's a full business entity around it. Podscan is acquirable. So all I now need to do to make an acquisition more interesting is to make the product and the business itself more valuable, adding more revenue, creating business opportunities, and increasing the overall value of the business, not just of the customer base that I have, but also the data in my database. Right?

Arvid: 11:07

At this point, I think it's 27,000,000 transcribed podcast episodes and 3,700,000 podcasts that are constantly tracked. And, wow, I recently integrated topic, theme tracking, entity tracking, people's brands, institutions, companies, organizations, that kind of stuff. Those database items are growing every day. So even the interconnected structure of the data in Podscan is expanding, making the data itself more valuable. That would make for a massive strategic acquisition target.

Arvid: 11:36

Somebody could just buy the Podscan database and even get rid of the business if they wanted to because the data that we've tracked and cleaned and connected is itself massively valuable or obviously, could buy the business. The API platform, the monitoring system, all of these could be interesting targets, but I digress. Let's talk about the other options that I have. Another one is just keeping running the business and just growing it slowly over time, turning it into a company of multiple people at a certain size. And that also is appealing to me, particularly because it's all just running by itself without requiring much intervention anyway.

Arvid: 12:13

The last time I was at this stage where the business was sellable, I was really burnt out back in 2019 just before we sold. And I was constantly trying to keep up with some kind of external provider that we integrated with dealing with their unpredictable schedule of changes that we really couldn't preempt but always had to react to and fix was very stressful. But I'm not in a situation like that at all right now. All the services I use that are potentially shaky where APIs might change, while I now use AI systems to extract data from them. That's different.

Arvid: 12:44

Back in the day, had to write my personal specific integrations, but now I don't have to understand the specifics of the responses. They can change, and AI will still find the right data for me. And this is really new and novel. It's Postel's Law. I talked about this a couple weeks ago.

Arvid: 12:59

The robustness principle. Like, send restricted, highly formatted data, but be capable of receiving all kinds of data in all kinds of formats and turn it into something usable. I mean, not exactly what it says, but it's kinda be restricted on what you sent and be liberal on what you receive. And I think that's what AI systems really facilitate in terms of interoperability between systems, and that's great for Solo Founders. There's always some room for error because the interpretation layer.

Arvid: 13:24

But for Solo Founder, I would rather have 1% of my data be slightly weird than having a % of the data be correct at all times. But if any tiny thing changes, 0% of the data works until I fix it. I think I'll take the 1%. And that feels like a fair exchange. So I could just keep building the business in terms of the data that I ingest.

Arvid: 13:45

There's not much more to do. I already fetch almost everything I can from every podcast, like all the chart rankings and all the review counts and all that. And they don't make more podcasts all of a sudden. It's very linear growth in that field. And customer expectations change and with the size of the data infrastructure requirements change over time, but I could hire for that.

Arvid: 14:06

I could just find somebody to deal with the complexity of this database and then build systems that are still snappy and reliable for bigger customers and more usage. I could easily do that, build a business with other people where everything could be completely remote. I wouldn't need anybody in office because it's all work on and with data, which is very technical, doesn't require much person to person interaction, just needs a lot of specific thinking and work. So I could keep building Potscan as a business, keep running it myself, keep owning it, and start at some point to derive some kind of, you know, salary dividends and just keep reinvesting this into hiring people to development and adjustment of more reliable technologies. I could see doing this for a couple more years, that's for sure.

Arvid: 14:50

And I think that's the hiring angle. But the third option, is get POTScan to, I don't know, maybe $50,000 MRR, maybe a hundred thousand dollars MRR, just make it a million in ARR, and just keep it there. Relatively independent, relatively solo. Just hire people for the odd jobs on and off here and there and have it as a constant income stream, but not aspire to grow it into anything bigger. And I feel this is kind of the boring version, right, the uninspirational one, because either acquisition or a bigger team also means bigger business, bigger numbers, bigger valuations, and serving more people with more things.

Arvid: 15:26

But it could well just be a small business, very specifically focused on providing one particular product, which is a data product at this point. I'm not sure if that is my option. It doesn't really interest me as much. I'm at a point where the solo work on Podscan feels a bit exhausting. I still derive a lot of joy and curiosity from doing the work, but I kind of wanna share this with more people and see what other people can come up with.

Arvid: 15:49

Built really cool things that are useful to the people who use PodScan, who are interested in data from podcasts and all other things around it. Keeping it solo, keeping it all on my shoulders, I don't think it's really conducive to this exploratory and fun product work that I want. I want different perspectives, a diversity of thought kind of situation. So out of the three options I see before myself, keeping it as a solo business is the least interesting one. It's also the one where I need to change the least, so I guess it's the default one until one of the other two happens.

Arvid: 16:20

But I have this feeling that Podscan can be a nice midsized company, maybe smallish with a couple dozen employees dealing with a relatively limited amount of incoming data because that's just how many people create and publish podcasts every single day, And a manageable, if complicated, but still manageable data production pipeline. And as it grows, a more sophisticated data distribution pipeline. That's the interesting part. That's what I'm noticing with the customers that are skyrocketing my MRR at this point. They have high needs for quality data, for reliable data, for comprehensive data that includes everything that they might be interested in.

Arvid: 16:55

And for that to be scaled for sending out hundreds of gigabytes of data a day, there needs to be some smart architecture that exceeds the capacities of the current system in terms of automation. I've set it up in a way that will work for now for the next hundred customers still. But to make this truly scalable, I think we need somebody who understands data at scale better than I do. I think I could get there, but somebody else is already there, and I can pay them to bring the expertise to the business. So that's kind of what I'm looking at.

Arvid: 17:23

So acquisition, always on the horizon. And, hey, if you have a serious 7 figure offer for Podscan, send me an email, arvit@Podscan.fm. But until then, I'll keep it solo for maybe the next couple months to just stabilize and deal with the customer pivot that has increased my revenue this much, like turning it into a process that is more reliable, repeatable, and then slowly but necessarily grow the team through part time work and freelance work at first and then actually turn this into a multi person business. So I guess that's the strategic outlook for PodScan in early twenty twenty five just after having reached profitability and getting into a state where the product is stable. It's used twenty four seven.

Arvid: 18:00

The API is constantly working. It's amazing to watch. And there are opportunities for growth and scale that I still need to discover. I think it's looking pretty good. Half a year ago, this would have been a dream state to be in.

Arvid: 18:12

Now that I'm here, though, it's like, okay. We reached this goal. Let's set the next one. So with all these options, keeping it to myself, growing a team, and selling the business, there needs to be a next goal for me. I think that goal has to be both a monetary goal, like an MRR goal, and also a hiring goal.

Arvid: 18:28

Because either way, acquired or not, I need to start offloading development, particularly infrastructure work, and have somebody help me build a system that can serve bigger customers with more data requirements. So my next MRR goal would be being able to pay a qualified data engineer developer with infrastructure background that can help me build scalable data pipelines and systems to export massive terabytes of podcast data to customers reliably on time, in real time, and with massive data lake deployments, that stuff. For that, I probably wanna get to, like, $15,000 MRR at a minimum to pay for all the infrastructure business expenses plus a well paid full time or part time engineer. Let's say 15 to 20 k MRR, but I have to hit fifteen first. So that's the goal.

Arvid: 19:10

I'm so happy to be able to think about this. Oh, yeah. We we reached, like, $8.10 k ARR. Let's go to 15 next. That's just so nice to be at that point.

Arvid: 19:19

I'm joyful, and I'm glad that Podscan is panning out to be profitable and a tool that people actually like to use. I've been talking to several customers over the last couple days, several different kinds too, and the conversations have been overwhelmingly positive, like both verifying and validating that people need insight into the podcasting world and that Podscan is a solution that they like. The other things they talk to me about, the other solutions out there, too expensive, mostly because they come with all kinds of bells and whistles as part of a complicated software suite, and that doesn't appeal to the people who wanna build something on top of them. And other customers are agencies that just don't want complicated software. They want easy and highly automatable software.

Arvid: 19:58

So having this data platform that is very data and automation centric has been a big, big benefit for PodScan, and I wanna keep it that way. Me being present in those conversations, sharing my interest, my joy of podcasting, and my delight in building tools to help people in this field, well, that has also been very helpful to build these initial relationships with customers. I've yet to be yelled at for anything. And even if somebody comes to Podscan who's not an ideal customer and is kind of frustrated with why it's not for them, the conversation usually turns them into somebody who's like, okay. This is not for me, but the founder is nice and the company is great.

Arvid: 20:32

I might recommend this to somebody who this might actually be for. So conversations have all been very positive and useful, and that's where I'm going. The next goal is set. Let's see how quickly I can accomplish this. And that's it for today.

Arvid: 20:46

Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at arvid kahl, a r v I d k a h l. If you wanna support me on this show, please share Podscan.fm with your professional peers and the people who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, names on podcasts out there. Podscan is a near real time podcast database with a really good API, so please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem. Thank you so much for listening.

Arvid: 21:12

Have a wonderful day and bye bye.