What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both through their companies and in their personal lives,
and what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
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Today, I'm talking to Rob Walling.
Rob came on the show about a year ago to discuss his almost two decades long journey, building
and selling profitable online businesses, and culminating in the sale of Drip, his latest
company, to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Rob is also the founder of MicroConf, the world's largest conference for bootstrappers,
and more recently, is the founder of TinySeed, the only startup accelerator for bootstrappers.
The way TinySeed works is Rob invests in a bunch of companies who all join together as
a single cohort.
And then over the course of a year, they work together to build their companies and grow
them into something bigger.
I think it's a super cool model, and Rob is particularly interesting to talk to you because
as an investor, he gets to see what works and what doesn't work across a wide array
of companies.
Whereas most people I have on the podcast can only really extrapolate from a sample
size of one.
They're only one person and they can only tell you about their experiences.
So I hope that you enjoy the episode.
I think there's a lot to learn from the perspective of an investor.
Last week, you told me that you have over 700 audiobooks in your Audible account.
What does that say about you, Rob?
And also how many of those books have you actually listened to?
It's a little embarrassing.
It says that I'm a learnaholic.
I have listened.
What's interesting is I bet there's about 150 to 200 kids books, and then my wife probably
has about 100.
So I have a portion of that number.
But I have listened.
If they're in my account and I bought them, I have listened to them.
So I keep them on a wish list.
And then when I am ready to add it into my list of three or four books, then I buy it.
And here's what I did discover, too, a little secret right off the bat, is you can return
Audible books.
And I'll get 10, 25% in, and I'm like, this is not good.
And you go in and you exchange it.
And so if you pay the credit, you get a credit back.
If you pay cash, you get the cash back.
So I've been doing that ruthlessly now for about a year and a half to two years because
I used to.
There are probably some in there from five years ago before I knew this that I got halfway
through and bailed on, but I didn't get the refund for.
And again, Audible has never had an issue because I have 700 books that I've kept.
It says that I like to learn, man.
And that's a huge part of being a successful founder.
There's got to be a little bit of ambition.
There's got to be a little bit of willingness to take some risks.
But I also think you need to learn stuff really fast.
Yeah.
That book returning tip is pretty good because I also start a lot of books that don't finish
them.
I drop them.
And sometimes they're not even bad.
They're like, oh, I've gotten enough out of this book.
And I can tell it's not going to say that much more.
And then I just drop it and move on to something else.
But I haven't yet figured out that you could return the book and get a refund.
I'm going to start doing that.
And I only do that with books that I don't.
If I get them, if I listen halfway in, I'm like, man, I got some great stuff out of this,
but I'm not going to finish it.
I don't return it.
You know, my personal thing is like, yeah, I mean, because I feel like the author, you
know, the author should get the royalties because I got some value out of it.
But it's only if I didn't, you know, Patrick Collison's website is a link to this passage
from a book by Umberto Echo.
He's this Italian philosopher and novelist.
And he had like a couple of apartments with just huge libraries and people would walk
in and always ask him, you know, if you read all these books, just kind of same question
I asked you about your audiobook library.
And he liked to troll people and talk about how he hadn't read any of them.
Otherwise why would he keep them there?
But I think what's cool about it is he had this idea that essentially your library can
also serve as a reminder for all the stuff that you don't know.
And I thought that was really inspiring.
I heard that.
I actually bought a bunch of books that all my friends had recommended.
I've got maybe like 100 sitting on my shelf and I've read less than half of them.
And it's very humbling because every book I look at can be like, oh, that's a book my
buddy Dave recommended.
And I know there's a bunch of stuff that Dave knows that I don't know because he read that
book and I have it, which is great, but also it hasn't really motivated me to read any
more than I ever have.
I'm still like a book or two a month.
So it's good for humility, but not necessarily for motivation to read more.
Right, right.
You know, I gotta be honest, man, we're obviously in quarantine right now.
The thing I miss most about it is going to bookstores and I don't actually buy that many
physical books, but for the exact same reason, you just said, I love being around books because
it reminds, I love the knowledge and the idea that there's all this knowledge out there.
And I have since I was a kid, my mom used to, you know, when I was 10 years old, we'd go
to the mall and she'd, I'd go into like Walden books, which still had a business hour, beat
all the booksellers and I would, she could leave me for two or three hours.
And while that sounds irresponsible in today's parenting environment, I would just sit and
read and read.
And then I'd have a big stack.
I'm like, how many can we buy?
Totally get it.
Yeah.
Books are kind of the ultimate ambient decoration that just kind of have around.
Yeah.
Is there any book you've read in the last year or two that you just can't stop thinking
about?
You can't shut up about, you're telling everybody about some idea that you learn from that book?
You know, there's a book that impacted me a lot and I have, I've referred to a few people,
but it's, it's called, uh, it was actually referred to me by, uh, Stephen Kellen.
He's a micro-confident.
It's called why we sleep and it's just the science of sleep.
And it talks about how sleeping in a room that is not really dark, relatively cold and
really quiet is even though you won't, you kind of don't notice it in your physiology.
It's not ideal from an evolutionary perspective and that there's basically a, an epidemic
of people who don't get enough sleep, teenagers, all the angst that comes with that is scientists
are starting to think it's that, wow, when you're 15 and going through puberty, you need
10, 12 hours of sleep at night.
Whereas high school students get, you know, much less than that.
And it just sleep is like, well, I often say like pricing is the, is the biggest lever in
a SAS business or really in most businesses sleep, I think is perhaps one of the biggest
levers in our lives, sleep and exercise probably.
So why we sleep super, super fascinating.
One of the books I have on my shelf as well completely agree.
I'm one of these like, I'll go without sleep and be like, I feel perfectly fine.
But then there are certain things where I can tell like, oh, this lack of sleep is affecting
me.
Like I'm coding, for example, and I find myself really just wanting to like take a bunch of
shortcuts and just get things done as quickly as possible and not like write the right code.
And I'm like, Oh, it's because I'm tired.
Or if I'm playing poker or something and just like not really thinking about every hand,
I can tell like, like a really subtle difference in how I'm playing if I'm like, not caught
up on sleep or not.
And so I think all the tips in that book are super great.
And any founder wants to operate, you know, the peak levels are probably getting a lot
more sleep, a lot more exercise than they think.
Yeah.
Even though it seems probably, you know, on its face, more immediately productive to just
stay up an extra hour and get like answer those emails, etc.
Yeah, for most of my adult life, until I I don't know when I discovered this isn't in
the last 10 years, I discovered the same thing, my sensitivity to sleep and how it impacts
me.
And for me, it's not just productivity, it is literally my outlook.
It's like my opinions on matters would change, I'd wake up and I'd almost feel depressed
or very pessimistic, to the point of I'm running drip, and I would get up and just be like,
this business, I mean, you know, we're doing whatever we're doing seven figures in ARR.
And I'd be like, this business isn't gonna work.
Like there are too many competitors, and we're just gonna get crushed.
And I would have this feeling of impending doom, I wouldn't tell anyone, but I would
feel this crushing weight all day.
And then I would get a good night's sleep and wake up and be like, what was I thinking
like it literally would change my psychology.
So I started tying it to sleep.
And it was three things for me, it was sleep, lack of exercise, and like drinking alcohol
the night before, which would make sure it really degrades your sleep quality.
And so as I tweaked those things, I really don't have many days.
It's very rare that I have a day like that now.
It's funny, you hear like all this, all this basic advice that we've probably been hearing
since we were kids, you know, sleep and exercise and like for startups, it's kind of the same
thing, like talk to your customers, charge more.
And it's one thing to hear that stuff and be like, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it.
But it's nothing to actually do it.
And there's like a very long list of things that like I get and I'm tired of hearing,
but that I don't actually do.
And I think, you know, a lot of it is just the fundamentals.
You know, if you're playing basketball, you're on a sports team, the coaches are just like
do the fundamentals, that'll get you 90% of the way there.
And most people just don't do the fundamentals.
They're focused on like all these like fancy tricks and extra stuff, and they're not really
doing the basics.
Right.
I'm gonna implement, I'm gonna buy the next book and implement the next productivity thing
and the next growth hack and the next body hack, because I'm going to take this and newest
thing protein that I pour in my coffee with this, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, but are you, are you doing the basics?
Because the base, you know what, the basics are boring.
The basics are tend to be hard work or at least require discipline.
And I think it's a perfect analogy for starting a startup or or just living life and being
healthy.
It's like, we want to read about the next growth hack, you know, but really, it's about
we know it.
What is it?
What are your customers?
It's fine to paint it stuff, all of it and it really, it is it is interesting.
So you're trying to do something that I don't know if there is a list of basics out there
that I don't know if it's something that's really been done before you're trying to basically
take the Y Combinator accelerator model and apply it to bootstrappers.
And you talked about this a bit on the podcast a year ago when you first launched tiny seed.
Remind us all about the concept and how it works.
Yeah.
So tiny seed is the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers, we really focused
on SAS.
So I tend to say now it's like the first startup accelerator to design for SAS bootstrappers.
In essence, we saw I say we it's in our goal set is my co founder and I and just through
my podcast and and the conference microconf and all the stuff I do online and just conversations
with founders.
I've done advising, I've done a little bit of angel investing on my own.
I did about 12 or 13 angel investments privately.
So I have a lot of insight into I have a lot of conversations.
And then I have exposure to quite a few founders and companies and all that.
And I kept seeing this, this bifurcation where it was like, all right, you can raise venture
capital, which really most of us don't want to do because it comes with a bunch of strings
attached and not always it's getting better.
But really, I don't want to move to Silicon Valley, I don't want to work 90 hour weeks,
etc, etc, all the tropes there.
And then there were folks that were that were self funding or bootstrapping.
And which is what I've done.
But it's hard.
I mean, you know, this that like bootstrapping a company is hard.
And so I remember at an early stage of drip, I was like, man, if I had literally like a
couple hundred thousand dollars, my life would be it not in my personal account, but in the
business account, I like would be noticeably different.
And I started seeing companies do this.
So like customer dot IO raised a couple hundred grand back in 2012.
And then Jordan Galvick cart hook raised money I invested in them and they're not raising
it to go on a venture track.
They're raising it to, in essence, get to profitability to reach escape velocity to
get product market fit to start marketing and then to become profitable at some point.
And they can raise venture later if they want, or they could sell the company, or they could
just take dividends out.
And it's this whole different model.
And so I started seeing a lot of founders interested in that sort of kind of talking
about it, thinking about, you know, who's doing this, where's the money coming from?
And I kept getting eventually I kind of was over diversified with startups, you know,
I had too much money in angel investments.
And so people were asking like, where, who's investing like this?
And where can I find investors that aren't trying to shoot for unicorns?
They aren't only funding the Ubers and the, you know, the Instacarts, but they'll fund
just a SaaS idea that can do 5 million a year.
And so that was the original idea as I got together with Aynar and we raised about just
sort of four and a half million dollars as a fund and then, but we didn't just want to
write checks.
I mean, my whole adult life since I started, you know, blogging in 2005 has been helped,
like trying to educate, but just trying to help founders because when I, if I was, if
I'm a year ahead of you, like, I feel like I can offer some advice at least on what you're
doing.
So it's a year long remote accelerator.
And we decided to do a year long because SaaS takes a really long time.
And we felt like the 90 day dash to a demo day is helpful.
But we think there's more value in, you know, in a longer program.
And then we wanted to do a batch because man, just the network and the, the motivation of
your, you know, working together with other founders is huge and it's remote because really
where else could you pull together that many bootstrappers because we are so distributed,
you know, we're in hundreds of country, I'm sorry, hundreds of cities across the world.
So that's a long and short event.
And we just launched this second batch.
I saw it.
It's a lot of great companies.
I am a mentor and tiny seed and you've got kind of an all star list of mentors as well.
Eden Shaw, Jason and DHH from Basecamp, Rand Fishkin, Paddy11, your wife Sherry Walling
and Laura Roter, April Dunn, it's like a who's who of ND hackers podcast guests, basically
helping all these startups.
Let's talk about this cohort model, which I think is fascinating.
So I went through Y Combinator in 2011.
And the way any accelerator works is everybody joins at the same time, the latest batch of
tiny seed, all these companies join at the same time.
And they kind of go through this process of building their companies while talking to
other people.
I think that's kind of the secret to why Y Combinator is so successful and why a lot
of the companies are so successful.
It's kind of an X factor that companies going through YC have, the companies who are just
sort of on their own, don't have a bunch of peers who are working alongside them.
What is your take on the cohort model and how's it working for tiny seed?
Yeah, it was something.
So Anar went through YC back in 2009.
And he knew the value of experiencing it like you knew the value and then for me having
started a couple of different online communities and then microconf and seeing the value of
getting people together and realizing that there's so much more value in the hallway
track, the conversations in the hallway versus watching a speaker speak.
It was kind of a no brainer from the start.
And in our very first really crappy hack together landing page for tiny seed that I put up overnight,
we had kind of some basic tenants like it was a little bit manifesto ish, right?
This is what we believe.
We believe it should be remote.
We believe we should not shoot after unicorns.
And we believe in the batch model, the cohort model, the support between batch members,
the willingness to help the shared expertise of, hey, two batch members are amazing in
enterprise sales and three of these folks really know SEO well, it's just this.
It's amazing.
And then even to be able to do a friendly competition against one another of like, hey,
you're doing pretty well.
Let's we're not in the same vertical.
Maybe we can borrow a trick like what's working for you right now, you know, as well as well
as the network, you know, it's like just everyone has their own network and we're able to tap
into that.
So I have no desire to not do that.
I mean, I think that is a I've actually seen there is a fund that did batch models and
then didn't and then went back to doing batch models because of how much value they saw
on it.
Yeah, there's just so much motivation and having other people working on the same time
as you.
And I feel like, you know, I talked to a lot of founders who just have trouble with motivation,
they wake up every day, and like they're living in like, you know, some city where there's
not that many other indie hackers, they don't have a lot of friends who are doing this.
And it's just that.
And you know, maybe they're not getting a lot of sleep.
So they wake up and they have like this existential crisis, like, man, is my company gonna work?
Is this stupid, etc.
But when you have other people motivating you and doing the same thing, if you have
some of this friendly competition, you have some of the support, it sounds like, you know,
a little airy fairy, just like, oh, everyone worked together.
But like the reality is, we're such social creatures, we're so programmed inherently
to care like what other people think to care about status to care about not letting down
our colleagues to care about impressing people and all these like sort of, like emotional
levers that pull us along, I think it's incredibly powerful just to have a ton of people you're
working with.
And people who genuinely care about your success, because you're like a, I don't know, you're
like a college class or a sorority or fraternity where you really are, you have a pretty deep
connection to one another.
And especially, you know, we do three in person retreats during the year, just to get everybody
together because in person really, you know, does Trump, does Trump zoom and video chat.
And man, those those bonds start to start to go pretty deep friendships form, you know,
that aren't just talking about work and yeah, it's pretty special.
So let's talk about how this works.
I had Tyler Tringis on the podcast last year, he runs earnest capital, which has kind of
a similar goal funding for bootstrappers.
And he said, quote, you can't just take the YC model and copy it over to bootstrappers.
And of course, what he meant by that was you can't just copy and paste, you have to adapt
it to account for the differences between bootstrappers you're investing in.
And you know, what makes them different than like the kind of high growth startup trajectory
that YC companies take.
And it's a huge question mark, obviously around whether or not this model can actually work.
So tiny seed is a year in, is it working?
I mean, I would say yeah, you know, the companies are growing, the feedback we're getting is
overwhelmingly positive in terms of kind of like we're talking about, like people said,
man, I didn't almost didn't realize the value of being in a batch, the quality of the companies
we get, you know, who apply is high, we get there's obviously a lot of demand on the company
side between the first two application periods we got, I believe it's almost 1600 applicants,
batch one and two combined.
Yeah, it's a lot.
And then the quality of them, meaning that traction or just the experience level is high.
So we are obviously tweaking things as we go along, like the first batch, the whole
year was going to be kind of the same where it's like, Oh, we'll do some, we'll do mentor
calls will, will definitely, you know, interact a lot with batch members.
And we will do a lot of kind of mastermind calls where the batches, the batches talk
to each other.
But we realized there was a lot of there was some education that was needed early on.
And then there was like less of that needed as you went along.
So we've, we're tweaking things to where the kind of the curriculum or the, you know, the
week to week how it looks is different in batch two.
But at this point, it's really tweaks, you know, it's things that were just kind of kind
of mixing it up.
How does a kind of your funding model work as an investor, I want to talk about the business
of being an investor.
For example, how do you get paid as sort of partner of tiny seed?
You know, it's so funny, every time you say as an investor, I'm like, Wait, who?
Because I don't I still identify as a founder.
That's like, and I, I'm not just saying like, I truly, I've been doing this work without
writing checks in companies for 15 years, you know, because it's something I enjoy it
so much being around ambitious people trying to do interesting things and make and create
companies.
And again, I was doing it not writing checks.
And that's why I started a conference.
And that's why I've been blogging and podcasting about this topic, because it's just so interesting
to me.
So while I do, obviously, technically, I am an investor, there is no I write checks into
companies.
I don't identify as that.
I really do identify it as someone I almost look at them, the money to be able to write
a check to a founder is an excuse to be able to help them over an extended period of time
and to justify that like I have to justify it to myself, I can't do that for free, right?
It really is a side effect of all the other stuff, all the mentorship and the teaching
and the helping and the trying to do it, I would say, all right, so you're a preamble.
But you were saying, how do we get paid?
Like, do you mean me personally?
Yeah, you personally, because I think I think, you know, there's like VC firms.
There's private equity firms, there's hedge funds.
From what I understand, there's like kind of this two plus 20 model.
Yeah, that's very common.
Does that work with tiny seed?
Is that what you're using?
And I think it's an interesting model for people to learn about because a lot of people
don't know.
Yeah, cool.
So how does it work at tiny seed?
Yeah, it's it is based on a two and 20 model.
But I'll give you an example.
So like we raised our first fund, normally, a venture capital firm would raise a fund
and then they deploy it over, I think it's three to three to five years and then it plays
out over another five to X amount of years.
We deployed our entire fund in two years.
And we run an accelerator program.
So we have a full time program manager, we have in person retreats, we have like way
more expenses than if we were just writing checks, we would have almost no expenses like
I take that literally a stipend.
So it is not buckets of money coming out to me.
So we front load that to the 2% typically the two and 20 model is, if you raise a fund
and you take 2% of the fund value per year as management fees.
So imagine if you raise a million dollar fund, then 2% for 10 years, you're going to take
out 20 grand a year for 10 years to 200,000.
And then the 20% is called carry and it really is just you get after the fund is paid back.
So after a million would be paid back in that case, then the fund that you get 20% of the
profit of any of any gains that you make, two and 20.
We have to front load that to we can't do 2% a year again, our fund was $450,000.
And 2% of that would have been 90 grand and that would not be enough to keep the lights
on given that we're running this, you know, we meet multiple times a week with founders
for 52 weeks.
So it's not something we can just write and kind of be advisor.
So we front load some of that and we essentially run it effectively run it at break event,
which is what most venture funds do.
And most venture funds don't make any money unless the carry that profit unless they make
a profit.
And that's the return to investors.
I know a lot of people in SF where it's become trendy for a lot of these like higher growth
tech startups, founders to like raise a fund after their company exits and there's all
sorts of smaller funds.
But because of that model, a lot of people just raise huge funds because they're going
to get that 2% management fee, they'll try to raise $100 million from wherever they can.
And that means they can justify paying themselves $2 million a year, but then unlike tiny seed,
they don't necessarily have a lot of expenses.
So that just goes in their pockets for being an investor.
And I think in a lot of ways, it misaligns their incentives is yeah, they can make more
money from the 20% carry if they actually make good investments, but they're still rich
just from the fees.
And so they don't actually have to have good returns for their investors.
I would agree with you there.
It would feel weird to me to take personal money out of the management fee that to me,
that's not what it's for.
It's for running the business.
I don't know.
I am new to this though.
I mean, I wrote my first angel check maybe 10 years ago, but really this type of stuff
I'm about two years in and I've seen some weird stuff like that that doesn't make a
ton of sense.
What would you say given your new perspective that your average bootstrapper doesn't understand
about fundraising?
What are some common misconceptions?
I think some bootstrappers can have the black and white mindset of all funding is bad.
And it's like, well, there may be some venture, there are of course these horror stories of
raising venture capital and having strings attached and having, oh, I can't sell my company
because it was blocked.
I was fired from my own company because the board fired me.
There's all these things, liquidity preferences, oh, if I sell, they get paid back to X before
I get any.
And those things do happen and have happened.
I think it's less so these days, but then there's this whole other thread of to say
all funding is bad.
It's like tiny seed is, I just wouldn't call it venture capital.
It's much more growth capital for early stage SaaS companies.
You have to know who are your investors because all investors are not alike.
If you go to Sand Hill Road in the Bay Area, there are venture capitalists and they want
a billion dollar companies or $10 billion companies, whereas tiny seed is me and Anar.
And we just have a different view on it.
And we believe that a seven-figure, eight-figure SaaS company is a huge win for the founders.
Life-changing amounts of money can come out of that.
And if we can help more founders get there, that's the goal.
And again, we have to justify it.
I can't personally do it for free.
And so the model that we've set up, I think people wouldn't have dreamed of it 10 years.
If you went to a venture capitalist and said, can you make money investing in companies
that won't be unicorns?
Most of them will tell you no, because the common wisdom in the VC space is you make
money on your Airbnb's and your Ubers and you lose money on most of the other ones.
But the way we've modeled it out, that doesn't appear to be the case.
So explain your model to me.
How do you make it so that this model works?
Does it have to be the case that everyone you invest in succeeds?
How are you actually trying to profit if you're not expecting these companies to become billion
dollar unicorns?
Yeah, there's two things really.
One is fewer companies will fail.
These are just more like when you go for a base hit, meaning let's say seven or eight
figure SaaS app, so many more make it there than implode.
Because when you pour an inordinate amount of money, let's say you put 10, 20, $30 million
into a company and you say, all right, become a billion dollar company.
It instantly, your risk shoots through the roof that you're going to fail because you
hire 50, 100 people.
There's way more chaos, you're moving way faster, and it just makes it more likely that
you are going to fail.
I've seen it many times actually.
I'm here.
Yeah, I think living in San Francisco, you probably see it all the time where you're
like, hey, that company would have been a great five or $2 million business.
But they raised funding, and then they trucked the company, they destroyed it.
And again, I'm not saying all VC does have it, I'm saying it just increases the likelihood.
A big chunk of venture capital, if you raise 10, 20, $30 million, it really increases your
likelihood of failing or of being a unicorn, a billion dollar company.
They want it to be binary because that's just the way it is, whereas we say, you know what,
what if 40, 50, 60% of the companies could be successful and be these nice base hits
and none of them become unicorns?
And then the other thing is, as opposed to Y Combinator, they're able to give slightly
higher valuations than we are because they will have the drop boxes and the Airbnb's.
Those are the two factors that allow us to exist.
I have probably five or six conversations a year with founders where they're either super
excited that they just raise a ton of money from VCs and they're going down that sort
of very polarized path of unicorn or bust.
And they're just super confident they're going to become a unicorn.
And then next year, I follow up and they're like, I should have just bootstrapped.
Yeah.
The company could be doing pretty well, it could be making money and growing.
But if it's not growing at this ridiculously crazy rate, with those kind of investors,
you're just the walking dead, you can't raise another round, no one wants to touch you,
but you also owe your investors a bunch of money and you feel like crap, even if your
company is doing well.
There are so many more companies that can be successful seven and eight figure businesses
that there are can be billion dollar companies.
And yeah, they've just been neglected by this.
They've been neglected by people who can give them a little bit of funding to help them
help them get along with few strings.
So that's really been the goal.
So let's talk about how you start one of those companies, because I know we're making it
seem a little bit easy here, like it's a base head, it's way easier, it's still hard.
And I think there's a lot of things that you've learned as an investor and also as a very
storied founder who spent a lot of time starting pretty successful companies.
First of all, do you think your perspective as an investor has changed how you think about
starting one of these basic companies?
I do, because I'm seeing even more, even though I've for 10, 15 years been immersed in the
space and thinking about it and talking to founders, I'm now getting more and more deep,
deep dive data points.
So I have 30, I believe across TinySeed and then the stuff like Angel Investments I did
before TinySeed, I have 36 companies I've invested in.
And for most of them, I am either, if they're in TinySeed, I'm talking to them every week.
And if Angel Investments, I typically get like monthly updates, so I'm seeing financials,
I'm seeing how they operate, I'm seeing how different founders approach things, just a
lot of a broader insight, I think, than I've had in the past.
And so it has made me definitely seeing patterns in company, example is like, this is from
a little bit personal experience, but also from looking across companies, it's like,
I don't plan to ever start a SaaS again, but if I did, I would start from the assumption
of I want one with expansion, like expansion revenue is built in, and net negative churn
is possible.
I don't think I would build a business without that because it's just such an immense growth
lever.
Explain that to people who don't know what expansion revenue is or net negative churn
because I agree, it's like immense, but it's not an obvious thing if you're a first-time
founder, that this is the thing you can even think about or plan ahead for.
Yep.
And I didn't plan for it.
So I started a company called Drip, which was an email service provider and later became
marketing automation, and we had expansion revenue and we hit net negative churn.
We did it by accident.
But once I saw it, I was like, this is incredible.
So expansion revenue is basically where, let's say you're a SaaS company and you have three
or four pricing tiers, or maybe you have 50 pricing tiers, but you have a metric, a value
metric it's called, which is like an email service providers, it's a number of subscribers.
Or in CRM, it's a number of seats, number of sales people you're paying for.
And that that number, organically, like over time, it ticks up.
It goes up for the majority of your customers, and your revenue expands even when you could
literally not add any new customers and enough customers are expanding.
And so you think about email subscribers, most lists, if people are working on them,
their goal is to build them.
And the more subscribers you get, the more you wind up paying MailChimp or AWeber or
Drip.
It's an expansion piece, that negative churn is where your churn, not counting, you don't
count new customers, but where literally your existing customer base is growing.
And it's expanding your revenue base.
If you literally added zero new customers, your revenue would increase month to month.
And in many of these businesses, like a Zoom or a Slack where it's seat based, or Sales
Course where it's seat based or MailChimp, which I believe did 700-minute bootstrap to
$700 million in ARR, they did that in 2019.
Expansion revenue is a substantial portion of that.
And so it's just an immense, I like to think of, if recurring pricing, if SaaS is the golden
ticket of building and selling software, I think net negative churn expansion revenue
is the golden ticket of SaaS.
It's the thing that you, the pinnacle, it's the thing you aspire to do.
And it's not possible in every space.
Every app can't do it.
Every vertical can't do it, but there are some ways to engineer it.
Yeah, I think it's one of those things when you're a first time founder, you're very focused
on acquisition.
You don't have any customers, you don't have any users.
And so you kind of think the only lever that you can pull is, how do I get more users in
the door?
Right.
And like maybe, in the very beginning, that's true.
You don't have anyone, there is no expansion revenue to be gained.
But as you go on and you get customers, that becomes huge, because it's easier to sell
to people who've already given you their credit card, they're already paying you, they already
know you and trust you and like you.
And if you don't unlock additional revenue from them, you're just spending all your time
trying to get new people who don't know you, you have to be, you have to persuade just
way harder.
And it feels like an endless grind.
What are some of these businesses and some industries where it's easier to get expansion
revenue?
And how can a brand new founder, you're trying to come up with an idea, think about this
in advance?
There's kind of three ways to structure pricing, right?
One is based on a value metric, which is like subscribers or seats, like I said, second
is to do feature gating.
So to get off features, so it's not based on usage of your product at all, it's based
on which features do you need, and you have to pay more for these types of features.
And then the third one is to do both, right?
So you'll see there is value metric and feature getting going on at the same time.
So feature gating doesn't tend to be expansion, it really tends to be hey, the value, it's
based on the value metric as that number goes up.
So A, I would focus on that, and then B, it's to think in any space, will this number actually
go up over time?
And will it go up enough?
And it's hard, you just have to guess, right?
And one way is to look around and be like, wow, all the CRMs I know charge per seat,
I'm guessing that's a pretty good way to do it.
So if I have something that I can charge per seat, and of course, the rule of thumb is,
if user A and user B log into your app, they're in the same company, and they see something
different, then you should charge per seat.
And if they see the same thing, then you shouldn't.
But if seats is a great value metric, assuming that these teams grow over time, or that your
app will infiltrate the company more over time, because sometimes they only need three
seats and then it's permanent, you know, you just kind of got to think through it, they're
not going to expand.
Subscribers, of course, is another one, and all these, you know, contacts in like ESPs
and those kinds of things.
And that's probably a pretty good way to do it, because you know, they do it.
But like I had an app that was an SEO keyword tool, right?
It was a SaaS app, you connected it to like your Google Analytics, and it sucked in keywords
and then it recommended keywords that you should attack based on your actual incoming
traffic, right?
So there was an algorithm it used.
And I was like, expansion revenue, because it's based on number of keywords processed
or number of visits per month or something like that.
But you know what, a lot of websites really weren't, they just weren't growing, especially
some reason the people that were coming to me, they weren't busting through the tiers
to the next thing, and I thought it might, but really, it wasn't as successful as I thought
it would be.
So and the other thing to keep in mind is, typically, it is your larger customers.
Your larger customers got there by growing fast, and they're the ones that are going
to continue to grow fast in general.
We were talking last week, and you also mentioned another lever besides just expansion revenue,
but more broadly, pricing.
What you said is perhaps the biggest lever that you have as a founder, and also onboarding
being quite powerful, why is pricing the biggest lever that founders have?
I mean, it's just something that, A, most of us get it wrong.
And it's really easy to get wrong because pricing is hard.
But raising your prices is something that you can literally do in 10 minutes by going
to your website and going into Stripe or whatever.
Whereas so many other levers, it's like, let's build this big integration, two months of
work.
Yeah.
It's such a fascinating thing.
In addition, pricing, typically, you find that the more you can increase prices, A,
your growth.
Now, everyone's paying that.
It compounds, and it can really increase growth, but also changes your customer type.
If you're charging $25 a month or $250 a month, you'll have a different customer base, assuming
you can figure out a way to charge $250.
They will tend to be less price sensitive.
These are generalizations, but they will tend to turn less.
And you will tend to then start attracting even larger customers.
The best businesses that I see from the inside are the ones that have low price plans with
really wide funnels, really wide reach in a big market, like electronic signatures,
or I'm just giving examples, or podcasting, or something where there's just a lot of people
doing it.
But that's not their thing.
That's not where they make the most of their money.
They make the most of their money from enterprises that come in and say, you have a $10 plan,
so you have this great brand because you have thousands of customers doing that.
But it's when they approach you and they say, we want to have 20,000 documents a month signed.
All right, that's $5,000 a month.
And you'll see it over and over.
You can look at IPO, publicly traded SaaS companies.
You can look at a member of Woofoo.com, Woofoo they sold several years ago.
And one of the quotes in the press release, one of the founders was like, yeah, 80, maybe
90% of our revenue came from 10% of our customers.
The lower price plans were really just, they are feeders up into the enterprise, but they're
also just a way for you to have a brand that feeds up into the higher price.
I'm not saying every business needs to be that way, because you can certainly make...
There are other models that work, but the ones that I see growing pretty fast are thinking
about it that way.
And that's pricing engineering, right?
It's thinking about how can I balance these things.
I think it also goes back to that obsession that new founders have with just bringing
new customers in the door.
Yeah.
How much money you make?
Well, it's like the price you charge times the number of customers.
And if you're solely focused on just growing the number of customers, you're leaving out
the entire other half of this equation, which is like, you could make twice as much money
by changing a number on your website.
And that is way easier than finding twice as many customers.
And we've had...
This is something we focus on really, really on in the tiny seed with the tiny seed batches.
I was on a call today, actually, with Batch2, and I said, raise your hand if you think you're
underpriced or that your value metric is offered, that something's just off with your pricing.
And I believe it was 90% of the batch.
And we're a weekend, right?
So that's going to be the first thing we focus on.
First thing we iron out is going to be pricing, because everything else flows from that.
Because if you're selling for $50 a month, and you don't have a ton of expansion revenue,
it's not $50 per seat, $50 a month, you can't afford to do enterprise sales.
It changes your customer, it changes your marketing, you can't afford to do typically
cold email outreach, if you're charging $50 a month, probably can't afford Google AdWords.
If you're charging $500 a month, changes all the ways you can market, changes the ways
you can sell, everything else really flows from that.
I started off...
I've been thinking for a couple months saying, pricing is perhaps your biggest lever.
And now it's like, I can't think of a better lever, a bigger lever than that.
There's only three ways to make more money in your business.
The first is to raise your prices.
The second is to find more customers, which you've referred to, which is typically the
default everyone thinks of.
And then the third is to sell more add-ons and such to your existing customers.
But typically, figuring out how to build a more valuable product, how to position it
in a way that it seems more valuable.
Because if you position yourself against cheap competitors, everyone's going to compare your
prices to them.
If you had a way to position and play with the people who are charging $500 a month,
and then that's the baseline, it's incredible, incredibly powerful.
We did this with Drip.
We were an ESP.
People compared us to MailChimp and Aweber.
And one day it hit me, we're kind of a marketing automation platform, which is a lot of people
haven't heard that term.
They're just expensive, complicated pieces of software.
And they started at about $400 or $500 a month and went up and there were thousands a month.
And so suddenly, our $49 a month price point was not compared to MailChimp.
It was compared to Infusionsoft, Marketo, and PowerDot and stuff.
And that was something I stumbled on earlier.
That's where I was...
Positioning is actually another...
Positioning and onboarding are kind of other levers in addition to pricing.
Yeah, I was talking to Baird Hall as a company called Wave, and another company called Subtitle.
And he kind of had the same positioning thing, where his subtitle company was basically doing
this sort of transcription for your podcast videos and with ad text.
And he just couldn't charge that much for it because everybody was comparing him to
Rev.com and it's only like, you know, a dollar or a sentence or something.
It's so cheap.
And then he changed his positioning.
So people started comparing him to more like video editing software, and then suddenly
he could just charge like 10 times more.
And I think I'm interested in this process you're going through with educating founders
going through TinySeed about pricing, because it's something we talk about so often on this
show.
And yet when I go to Andy Hacker's meetups, or I'm on the forum, and I'm talking to people,
they really...
It just doesn't get through.
And I think a lot of founders have this idea that, okay, well, you know, what you need
to do is start off charging $5 a month, and then eventually after you build enough features
and you're well established enough, then eventually you can raise your prices to 50 or 500, but
you can't start there.
What's your take on that, Rob?
Do you think founders should start by picking an idea where they can charge more, or do
you think they need to sort of work their way up from a tiny amount and eventually start
charging more?
You can do either, of course.
There are examples of both that could work.
I would lean towards the stair-step approach, which is to build a smaller product and a
less competitive niche that probably is lower priced, and that will plateau just to learn
the ropes, and then take that money, whether you sell that or whether you just take the
cash off of it to kind of do your next thing.
And that would be more the latter, where, yeah, you start off with kind of a feature,
get live quick.
You're probably going to be dealing with, you know, $5 customers are going to be a pain
in the butt.
But I don't think that that's a terrible way to go, especially if you really are, if it
really is your first time and you just don't know the ropes.
However, I know that if you want to build a substantial business, like let's just say
high six-figure or seven-figure business, the one with the $5 start is you're going
to be wandering for a long, long time.
And when I started, you know, I've started and grown a bunch of companies, and the last
one I did before China Sea was drip, I wrote down, I want to build a product where the
lowest price point is X.
And originally, X was $99, and by the time we launched, it was $49, but the idea was
I didn't want to play that game anymore because I had had cheaper SaaS apps before, and they
were, they just came with baggage, they came with the burden, and they were harder to grow
in my experience.
And so aspirational pricing is what I call this, where like, I aspire to be able to charge
$49 a month.
So then we started building stuff, and I had an idea, and we showed it to customers, and
they were like, eh, not really.
And some people started using it, and they said, this just isn't worth $49 a month.
And so what I didn't do was lower the price, because some people are saying like, you know,
I'd be willing to pay $19 a month for this.
And I didn't say, okay, cool, I'm going to lower the price to $19.
What I said was, what would we need to build for this to be worth $49?
You know, and obviously, it had dozens and dozens of conversations, and it wasn't clear
cut.
And there's a bunch of gut feel.
And it wasn't like all the customers told me the same thing, we did have to, you know,
me and my co-founder had to whittle away and figure out what to build next.
And it took us a while to get there.
But that's, it's a process you have to go through.
This is the hardest.
This stage, you know, when you're trying to figure out pricing and your pre-product market
fit, I would say is one of the most difficult of starting a startup.
There's almost this bright dividing line that I see when talking to any hackers, where on
one side, you have a lot of the founders who are, for example, in tiny seed, and they have
a business, and they're making it work, and they're talking about all sorts of like, SaaS
metrics to optimize and hiring, and like, it's kind of more just advanced tips and worries
that founders have, but they're already making money, and they're just trying to make more
money and grow their companies and be more impactful.
But on the other side, and this is the vast majority of people, like, they're really struggling
just to like, come up with an idea that makes any sense at all to get any customers in the
door.
A lot of people are stuck at like making $100 to $200 a month, and like, they're working
for months just to try to get it to $300 a month.
And you know, obviously, the answer to this will differ from person to person.
But what do you think are some of the biggest differences between people on either side
of this line?
And how can people sort of cross that line and try to figure out how to make a business
that's actually working?
Yeah, man, yeah, there's a lot.
There's a lot there.
I think of success and being able to achieve it really as these three first principles,
these three factors, and it's hard work, it's luck, and it's skill.
And different success stories have varying degrees of those.
So you'll hear a story about a founder who gets incredibly lucky and hit right place
at the right time in their skill set, like what Steve Wozniak's an example of this, right?
He happened to be in this hobby that, you know, turned out these personal computers
and he happened to have done hard work for years to learn how to build these circuits.
And he had built that skill through the hard work, right?
But Apple wouldn't be Apple if they hadn't hit that timing just right, same similar with
Bill Gates and Windows with IBM, or I'm sorry, it was MS-DOS at the time, with IBM, there
was more luck, and I think Zuckerberg, I think a lot of these like, deca billion dollar companies,
there has to be some luck factor, even if that luck is just timing.
Yeah.
So, and you can't really control luck, but I do think you can influence luck by working
hard, which I don't know of any major, there's only one or two, probably one I can think
of, it's a friend of mine who I won't name, but he basically says, I got really lucky
and I didn't actually work that hard.
Usually, the story is, when you hear Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, or when you hear,
you know, I'm trying to even think like Heaton Shaw and Jason Cohen and you know, Rand Fishkin
and those types of folks, they all work pretty hard, especially in the early days, you know,
and DHH and Jason Freed may I know that, you know, they don't work full work weeks now,
I think 30 to 40 hours a week.
But in the early days, my guess is they worked hard, but hard, I don't mean long hours, you
know, I mean, focused effectiveness, you know, you're you're driving working on the right
things and you're, you're just working and putting in the time.
I have tended in my professional life, especially since I've been running my own companies,
I try, it's rare, I work more than 40 hours a week.
But in the early days, I had no money to speak of, and I really didn't have many skills.
So I, I just put in hours, and I would work a day job.
When I say no money, I mean, I could afford my house payment stuff, but I didn't have
a bunch of extra money.
You know, when I heard people say friends and family round, I was always like, what
friend like my we have no money, no one has any money, like my dad's an electrician, you
know, it's like they had money to put food on the table, and that's it.
So yeah, I would go to work all day, and then I come home, I'd eat dinner, and then I would
work for five to six hours, I would check out books from the library, I taught myself
about a program, I would eventually started, you know, building apps, and I built those
skills over time.
And there's a bunch of factors, you know, we could go down rabbit holes of like, is
money, what about money, right?
And I would say, well, maybe you're lucky to be born with money, or maybe you need to
work hard to earn money, you know, and build skills that are valuable, blah, blah, blah.
But those are kind of the three base factors I see is that most founders, I know who are
successful are not afraid of the hard work, they have built skills up over time.
And eventually they get, they stumble into a little bit of luck, or they kind of make
their luck over the course of, you know, a decade of just putting in the time and building
the skills.
I was talking to David Shue, who runs a company called Retool a few weeks ago, hopefully I
can get him on the podcast.
But his story kind of, it's like the thing that I go to when I think about luck as a
founder.
So him and his co-founder bootstrapped to something close to a million dollars in revenue.
Then they did almost the opposite fundraising thing that you've been talking about, like
they're bootstrapped there, and then they raised a bunch of money, now they're going
for broke, almost like Jason Cohen is doing.
But when I talk about like how he found his idea, when he talks about it, he basically
says they kind of lucked into it.
They pick something that they thought was really cool, that they were really passionate
about.
And it turns out that this thing they're building, Retool, which is kind of like these internal
programming tools for companies, has a huge TAM, a huge market, where there's just tons
of customers who will pay a ton of money for this.
It turns out to be a really good business.
But he didn't sit down and plan all of that out.
He just kind of lucked into it.
And there's so many other founders who are probably equally as talented, equally as smart,
who read as many books, who work just as hard, but that luck component is like, their passion
just doesn't happen to be correlated with something that can turn into a really big
business.
And so I think a lot of what you want to do as a founder is obviously try to erase as
much luck as possible and replace that with skill.
And what's cool about you as an investor is, I talked to a lot of founders who choose an
idea and don't consider TAM, but as an investor, that's probably one of the very first things
you look at.
You probably have a whole checklist of like, can this business work?
Is it going to be the right size?
Can it grow fast enough?
What's a competitive landscape look like that a lot of founders just aren't really asking?
So walk us through some of the things that you look at in any particular company and
that you think maybe more founders should look at so they can kind of look at their
companies through the same lens an investor might look at.
That's interesting.
I don't spend a lot of time looking at TAM because we don't need billion...
If you're going to build a billion or a $10 billion company, you absolutely have to say,
this is a massive, massive market because if it's not, it's not worth it.
But if I'm going to say, well, let's build a $5 million, $10 million, $20 million company,
I need to do a little check and be like, do I think there's that many people that are
willing to pay this price to get there?
That's about it.
There's not a ton because there are just so many more opportunities and that is really
the beauty of this.
It's that we can literally have thousands and thousands of companies that can get to
$10 million or $20 million.
The way that I think about it, I mean, yes, we do have a long evaluation criteria, a bunch
of questions, how much traction do they have?
What is the team like?
What is their experience?
Why are they the right people?
Blah, blah, blah.
But it's kind of boring.
So I'll put it into the, this is the Fortune Cookie version that I think of.
It's three Ps.
It's people, product market fit, and price sensitivity.
So the people are the founders.
Do I feel like they love what they're doing?
Do I feel like they have the ambition?
Do I feel like they're shipping?
Are they smart founders?
I mean, there's effectiveness.
There's all kinds of things.
Product market fit is obviously, do they have to build something that people want and are
willing to pay for?
Because building something people want is amazing, but sometimes you can do that and
then people aren't willing to pay for it.
So hitting market fit and then that step after, which I've been calling escape velocity, which
is where you're actually, product market fit is where, all right, we build something people
want.
But you still need to find marketing channels and sales channels that work.
And once you start to do that, even if you find one, that's when revenue really kicks,
you know?
So that's part of market fit.
And then price sensitivity, I could just say pricing, but it's like per our earlier conversation
or earlier question, you know, price is such a massive lever that if you can only charge
$14 for this product and you'll probably only ever be able to charge $14 for this product,
or if your average revenue per user is $14 and I talked to a founder and I say, hey,
how are you thinking about expanding that?
And the founder's like, didn't, you know, I've never thought about that.
And that that's a bit of a yellow flag, you know, not a red flag, obviously, but like,
you should be thinking about that.
That's a really important thing.
And so it, again, low ARPU is not bad if there's an angle, if there's a way to either raise
that over time or to bring in like enterprise customers, because that's the real way you're
going to get into the seven and eight figure companies.
So I know a tiny seed, people applying to join the batches are a little bit more mature.
They're not necessarily in the I don't have an idea phase, but a ton of any hackers are
and the I don't have an idea phase.
And if there's kind of like this checklist of things that they should be aiming for,
you know, ideally high average average revenue per user, like ideally something that can
have good expansion revenue, obviously, they need to find product market fit.
Is there anything that any hacker can do in that situation to try to come up with an idea
that does meet some of these criteria?
And the reason I ask is because it's hard enough for people just to come up with an
idea that makes any sense at all.
You know, if we're sitting around, it's like, I have no idea what to build.
None of the problems that I have seem like they would be good businesses to solve.
And it's even harder to build, you know, not only come up with an idea from scratch or
come up with an idea that checks off all these boxes.
How would you approach doing something like that?
Coming up with ideas is not only really hard, but it's I just question it as an exercise
altogether.
But ideas often becomes a solution without a problem.
So I start I've started from the problem every every time, at least when I've done it well,
when I've done it poorly, I start with my own ideas.
Oh, man, there's this new technology, right as a software developer for years, new technology.
How can I turn that into a product?
That's not the way to go about it.
So there's two things I would say is especially for first time, like again, coming back to
stair stepping, it's like, how can I find a really small product to build just to learn
writing and marketing and customer support and get the experience and the skill and the
confidence and build my tool belt out, I would tend to learn to lean towards these ecosystems
almost these app stores, because the marketing isn't as hard, the distribution is built in.
So Shopify app store, Photoshop add ons, I'm trying to there's a bunch of others, of course,
I wouldn't personally go into mobile apps, because they're just they're so crowded.
But any of these ecosystems, there's like Salesforce add ons, any of these ecosystem
where there are a bunch of them now, because a bunch of companies have built platforms.
And the beauty is, if you can get in there, and you can rank for something, the distribution
is built in, and you won't have have learned all the chops of marketing, but you will at
least now have a resource, meaning you have money coming in.
And you'll have learned these other skills and built confidence in yourself.
But even from there, okay, Rob, so you're saying go build a Shopify app, right?
Which may may or may not be a great idea.
Well, there's already a bunch of Shopify apps, so how do I come up with an idea there?
That's where I go, I try to find where are there disgruntled people, where are there people
complaining about something because people who have pain complain.
And while that rhymed, I literally just came up with that, I'm gonna start saying that
people who have pain complain.
And so some that may be forums that may be private slack groups that may be Facebook
groups that may be the, you know, I don't know where there's there's places you can
go to find this out.
Maybe it's in person conversations where you hear someone complaining, wouldn't it be amazing
if you were going to try to build a Shopify app, if you could go to LinkedIn, find an
ex Shopify email support rep or customer support rep, ping them and say, Hey, I'd love to have
a conversation with you.
I'll you know, I can pay you money for it and just have a conversation with me.
What were some of the biggest things that people complained about the Shopify didn't
do?
Or what were the plugins that were super popular, but didn't do stuff, you know, and just try
to get inside and especially again, it's if they're not there anymore, because otherwise
it'd be inside information.
That's just something I came up at the top, up top of my head, but it's being creative
about not looking at the same data everyone else is and trying to find pain points and
sources that you can suddenly, you know, kind of whittle your way in because even in competitive
spaces like we launched an ESP in 2013 for crying out loud, there were 100, there were
literally hundreds of others and yet we figured out that there was pain, that there was pain
with some of the ESPs and you know, people wanted more from it and that was the problem
that we saw.
I love this approach because it all flows from what you said earlier, which is like
problem first, don't think of a solution, but think of a problem.
And if you really bought into that, which is really it's one of those fundamentals like
get enough sleep, get enough exercise, don't start with the solution, start with the problem.
A lot of people pay lip service too, but don't actually do.
But once you're actually doing it, it looks like what you're saying, you know, actually
talk to people, ask for pain points before you have any sort of idea for what is what
it is that you're going to build, you should be doing this hunting.
And I also like the idea of building on kind of a marketplace, probably the vast majority
of indie hackers who are first getting started know zero about sales and marketing or distribution.
And you can just like make that part easier for yourself, which is what you're advising.
And like, yeah, you're not gonna learn everything there is to learn your first time at bat,
but you're much more likely to succeed because you could focus on all the other hard parts.
How do you build a product?
How do you do customer support?
How do you come up with a good solution for a problem?
And then next time around, maybe you can make the distribution challenge a little bit harder,
maybe not build on a marketplace and sort of stair step your way to, you know, building
on the advantages and the things you learned earlier, rather than making it super hard
for yourself out of the gate and having to learn everything.
Yeah, I think of it like a tool belt, like maybe that, you know, Batman's utility belt,
where when you start, you may only you literally may only have one thing there, and it's what
you do for a living, right?
So if you're a developer, you have code, you know, and if you're a designer, then you have
designs chops, or if you're in sales and you have sales chops, how do you start building
that out to get, you know, SEO, PPC, other types of marketing, copywriting, customer
support, you know, and then you just build those out one at a time, I would not have
been able to start drip 15 years ago, when I really started kicking up my entrepreneurial
career, frankly, 20 years ago is when I launched the first apps, but the first five years was
exactly what you're talking about.
It was me coming up with ideas, spending much time building them, and all of them failed.
But then slowly, it's like, oh, you learn one, and then two, and then three, and then
four, you don't have to learn them all at once, I couldn't have learned them all at
once, and I wouldn't have had success with drip 15 years ago, because I didn't have that
utility belt.
And I didn't have the confidence I could do it either.
Well, listen, Rob, you've learned a ton.
And it's cool to see some of the insights that you've had by working with such a wide
array of companies instead of just, you know, starting your own companies one at a time.
Is there any parting advice you would like to leave these fledgling indie hackers with,
especially, you know, what the times are going through right now, a lot of people are surprisingly
starting more companies than ever, you know, what I've noticed is people aren't as worried
about being out of work as you might think.
A lot of them are just starting companies and not looking for jobs.
What's your advice to people in that situation?
Yeah, I think we're the best time in history for indie hackers and software founders 30
years ago, this was, you know, it was shareware, it was just such a different game.
So relish the fact that we live in this time in history and have the skills as likely developers
or designers to do this, where, you know, the rest of my family work construction, you
know, worked or works in construction their whole life.
And that's fine.
I did it for several years, but they don't have the skills that we do, they haven't developed
them to get out of it to have this freedom that we're all seeking.
And the second thing I'd say is, you know, there's this great quote from, I believe is
Thomas Jefferson, and it's the harder I work, the luckier I get put in the work, like it's
it's, and again, I'm not saying long hours, but I'm saying focus and put in the work and
build that tool belt and hopefully build your own work.
Rob Walling.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Can you let us know where to go to find out more about what you're up to with tiny seed
and microconf and your various podcasts that you have going on now?
I'll only plug one podcast, I have three different ones, but yeah, so if you'd like podcasts and
you're not listening to startups for the rest of us, we're about to hit our 500th episode.
I've been really up in the game over the past six or eight months.
So it's, I do some interviews, but I do, we do a lot of Q&A and it's all about, all about
this stuff.
I mean, this is where all these frameworks come in from just talking about this all the
time.
And then of course, tiny seed.com, you know, if you're interested, even just getting, we're
going to open applications in the fall.
So if you're, you know, one, just want to get on the mailing list, you can head there.
Also if you're interested in investing in, in early stage B2B SaaS companies, we are
doing a, you know, an open raise in essence.
So tiny seed.com slash invest, that is something on your radar.
And then yeah, microconf.com, I guess is the last one and that's our community for essentially
like, you know, self-funded and independently funded startups around the world.
All right.
Thanks so much, Rob.
Thanks for having me, man.
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