The original podcast for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped startups, this show follow the stories of founders as they start, acquire, and grow SaaS companies. Hear when they fail, struggle, succeed, and take you with them through the tumultuous life of a SaaS founder. If you like Mixergy, This Week in Startups, or SaaStr, you’ll enjoy Startup for the Rest of Us.
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I'll say humble beginnings. I won't go into it too far, but between Sherry's family and my family, we have convicted felons. We have drug addicts. We have folks who have been on food stamps. Some folks who are still on food stamps. We've had people in and out of jail with alcoholics. We have a lot of stuff, and I'm not saying this to play the the politician role of, oh, look at the humble beginnings we came from. But in all honesty, where we are today is a far cry from where we started. And the number one reason for that is entrepreneurship. No. Obviously, you could say, well, Sharon and I would have been okay even without entrepreneurship. And maybe we would have. Right? We were working salary jobs before I started companies. And could we have built a great life? Just the 2 of us working hard as salaried employees? Of course, we could have. So I don't wanna sit here and act like entrepreneurship is the only reason that we're alive today and the only the only reason we own a home or anything like that because salary employment And investing in the stock market was the path that we were taking, and we were doing fine. We were certainly middle class and doing doing well. But as we look at this list of things that allowed us to build wealth, you'll notice that entrepreneurship is number 1, spoiler, but a bunch of the other ones came because entrepreneurship made enough money that then we could take several bets on different things that we wouldn't have been able to if we didn't have that money in the bank. I'm gonna be honest. I was actually a bit surprised as I ran through this list. I'd never really thought about it before, and to look at which activity contributed cash in what order was, pretty fascinating to me. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk through 7 wealth creators And this is not investment advice. Think of it more as a story. The story of of Sherry and I coming out of college with a $100, $200 in a bank account and building what I feel like is a pretty successful life that I'm very grateful for. And there
Have the time and the energy to to start working on that. You know, of course, read the literature, read the SAS playbook, read the mom test about talking to customers, read traction to learn about traction channels, and kinda get that that foundational knowledge in your head. But ultimately, that only gets you so far just just studying, you know, the how to's. You need to actually start start doing in order to build that kind of real world experience. So that's that's probably how I'd be thinking about it if I were him. Yeah. And you're saying doing to learn the kind of the marketing and or sales side. Right? The he was saying the business side versus the technical side. Yeah. And business can be vague. I remember folks being like, I am on a hire or not hire, but I'm on a cofound a company with a, you know, a business guy or a businesswoman. And it's like, what does that mean? Because if all they're gonna do is set up an LLC and set up a bank account and, like, do your books, like, this so you don't need the cofounder for that. Right? But if they marketing and sales are the thing that are marketing and or sales depending on, you know, if you're high touch or low touch are the things that I'd be trying to learn. And then even, you know, proceeding kinda coming before that, it's the it's the kind of the skill set for being able to determine if something is actually in demand in the market or not. Like like, have you hit on something that people actually wanna buy, or have you fabricated this in your own head? So even like that kind of jobs to be done type of, type of things, like, to at least align your hypothesis with, hopefully, as close to reality as possible. I think that's that's a mistake that a lot of us may I made made that mistake a ton of times early on when I just sort of was more attracted to problems based on how how the technical implementation would look or something I was excited about building, but didn't necessarily have a have, you know, demand in the market. So I think first kind of working on the skill set of being able to identify actual problems and not theoretical ones, and then, you know, how to how to get them out there and market it and sold. It feels like the harder thing is to be really good at marketing or really good at sales. I'm not saying being a really good developer.
It's another episode of Startups with the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling. In this episode of hot take Tuesday in our Volset, and Tracy Osborne joined me to talk about once.com to talk about how a company sold for half a $1,000,000,000 and the founders got nothing, at least according to this article. A developer who went from open source to a full time income, then we give some book recommendations and have a lightning round of reactions to controversial startup opinions. Before we dive into that, I wanna let you know it's your last chance to get tickets to MicroConf Atlanta. The event is April 21st through 23rd. Speakers include Rand Fishkin from SparkToro, Asia Arango from Demand Maven, Steven Steers, myself, and doctor Sherry Walling. It's gonna be hosted and emceed by me and Liana Patch of punchline copy. I'm also gonna be doing a fireside chat with Ben Chestnut, the co founder of Mailchimp. He does not do very many public appearances, and so I'm very excited to host him at microconf this year. Microconf.com/us you're interested in grabbing tickets, again, tickets are going to sell out soon. So if you're thinking about joining me and about 225 of your closest bootstrap founder friends, head to microconf.com/us. And with that, let's dive into hot take Tuesday. Tracy Makes back for another hot take Tuesday. I'm ready to fight with Einar. Yes. It's gonna be great. Einar Valsett, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We have some nice, fun, not at all spicy topics to jump into today. Kick us off. Once.com from 37 signals. They're basically saying it's not software as a service.
Welcome back to another episode of Startups with the Rest of Us. As always, I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in today's very special episode, I'm gonna be walking through some advice that I've been giving over the past 10 plus years on this show, in conference talks, even in some of my books that I've really started to rethink as new evidence has presented itself recently. The more conversations I get into on Hacker News and Twitter around these topics of being a founder, launching a startup, rules of thumb, and things that I've made recommendations on where look. I I'm not the person who says always never, but I will admit with many of these, I've said 90%, 95%, 98% of the time, I believe that this advice is sound. And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk about how I'm rethinking that on a few key points. The first point that I'm rethinking and want to maybe offer different advice than I have in the past is around pricing. And you've heard me say that pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and I still believe that. And I know that if your annual contract value is $500 a year, you have maybe 5 or 6 b to b marketing approaches that you can do, and there's a bunch you cannot because you just can't afford to do them. And if you're charging, I don't know, it's in the 5 to $75100 a year, then you probably have 10 or 12 that you can do. And if you're charging 30000, 40000 and up, then all 20 of the b to b SaaS marketing approaches that I talk about on the show and in my book, the SaaS playbook, are available to you. And all that's true, and I I stand by that. But what I've realized is I think myself and the rest of the microcom community have
Conf.com/us. And if you wanna meet up, again, with about 200 ish of your closest founder friends that you know from past microcomps, from MicroConf Remote, from MicroConf Connect, and, of course, the bootstrapped community on Twitter started around MicroConf. So many of those folks that you know are gonna be attending, so you don't wanna miss out. Microcomp.com/us. Hope to see you there.
