Episodes

Rob Walling:
If you happen to be listening to this while you’re at Business of Software in Boston this week, my co-founder, Einar Vollset, is there live on the scene in Boston. And if you’d like to link up with him, if you’re interested in perhaps applying to TinySeed or, better yet, if you’re interested in potentially investing in our syndicate or in one of our next funds, you should reach out to Einar Vollset on Twitter. That’s E-I-N-A-R, V-O-L-L-S-E-T. His DMs are open. Or if you happen to see him in the hallway, just say hey. I’ve been a big fan of Mark Littlewood and the team at BOS since years, 2009 I think was the first one that I did attendee talk at and then I spoke at the next event. And as always, we wish Mark and his team at the best as they run their event this week.

Rob Walling:
It’s another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and this week I talk with Nick Swan, the founder of SEOTesting. We run through his experience launching a free tool, starting to charge for that, gaining traction, renaming the tool, getting a new domain name, rewriting the code base. It’s a really interesting and fascinating journey of growing SEOTesting.com to 18k MRR. Before we dive into our conversation, I want to thank you if you have rated this podcast in Apple Podcast, I’ve been trying to get to 1000 worldwide ratings, because there are so very few podcasts that have that number of ratings in the tool, and I believe when I started asking we were around high 800s and now I look today 977 ratings. And a rating doesn’t even need a review, you can just click five stars. So if you haven’t rated this podcast, I’d appreciate it.

Rob Walling:
Our most recent review is a five star review that says my favorite Startup podcast. It’s from Jazz Manders from Australia. I just spent eight and a half hours of a solo road trip listening to back to back Startups For the Rest of Us episodes, such a positive way to pass the time. I really appreciate that sentiment, Jazz Manders. And as always, these are the things that I bookmark and I read when I’m feeling discouraged. When I’m busy crying myself to sleep tonight, I think about these amazing ratings interviews and I really do appreciate them, and they do help this podcast find more listeners like you so thanks so much for helping out. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with the founder of SEOTesting. Nick Swan, welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us.

Nick Swan:
Hi Rob, thanks for having me on. Excited to be on the show that I’ve listened to since the beginning, I think. Long time listener, first time caller or something, is that what I’ve got to say?

Rob Walling:
Yep. Something like that exactly. It’s great to have you on, man. We’ve interacted over the years, because I remembered you applied to TinySeed. You’re just one of the names that I recognized probably from Twitter or just MicroConf events or MicroConf Connect, whatever it is, and so it’s been cool getting to know you over the past several months. I want to give the podcast audience a chance to find out what you’re working on and where you are. And to start, I want to ask you’re running SEOTesting.com and curious where the business is, give folks an idea of where you’re at in the entrepreneurial journey.

Nick Swan:
Up until now we’ve been open with our numbers on Twitter. We do an update perhaps every quarter or so. At the moment we’re just over $18,000 monthly recurring revenue, just over 330 customers. There’s a small team of us, so there’s myself, Phil, who’s joined as a technical co-founder, which we’ll go into, and Tiago, who’s joined to help with customer service or customer support and some content, and then we make use of some freelancers and contractors and so on as well when and where we need them.

Rob Walling:
That sounds like a nice svelte team. I like those early days where it’s three to five people and you’re doing 20k MRI. Are you running at break even? Are you running negative right now given that you have a bit of TinySeed investment?

Nick Swan:
In general, we’re running at break even and that is mostly because any spare cash we would put into testing new marketing channels. Since having a TinySeed money come in, we’ve been back and forth and wondering what to do with it, so it’s still sitting in the bank account right now, which is a nice feeling having it there as a safety cushion type thing, but we’re going to invest that in one off projects or doing one off tests on different channels as well. So we’re going to go through a website redesign that will be a one off project and we’ll put some TinySeed money towards that, then we’re going to try some paid advertising channels that we’ll put the money towards as well. So we will in general run negatively I guess, but on a month to month basis I see it as being break even.

Rob Walling:
I realize I jumped the gun and didn’t do my standard read the H1. I’m supposed to say, “Your H1 is automate the reporting of page updates and changes, run SEO tests to see what works, track the performance of pages changed, tie your work to results in an exact and impactful way.” You want to give one example of how, I almost said webmaster, holy moly, a startup founder and internet marketer, someone who’s thinking about doing SEO, what would they use SEOTesting for?

Nick Swan:
It is a testing tool, that’s how we market it, that’s what we’ve called it, and we go through a bit of history of how we got to this point, but it’s basically a tool for reporting how a page has performed after you’ve made a change, so how it’s performed in the search results from a Google perspective. We’ll get the data before you made the change and then you can make your change and then compare it to the data after that change. So you can compare the clicks from Google, the impressions in the search results, the position of it and the click through rate as well. It’s interesting you say about the H1, we’ve just changed that last week from doing a bunch of customer interviews so it’s in a testing phase in its own, but from the testing point of view of the tool, it’s ended up having two uses.

Nick Swan:
So there is a testing aspect to it and that’s what a lot of customers use it for. So this is good if you are changing page titles, meta descriptions, and you want to test if the click through rate improves from those new page titles or meta descriptions, but we found out again from customer interviews that a lot of people and especially agencies are just using it as a general reporting tool. So as part of their client engagement and their retainer, they’re going to do some content refreshes on pages and things like that. And then so setting up a test, once they publish their changes, they can then show the client how it performed before they made their content refresh and compare it to afterwards to show how they’re making their impact results and giving them our return on investment and so on.

Rob Walling:
I find that so many internet marketing or online marketing SAS tools will start with the idea of, well, I imagine a marketer at a company can do this or a founder and our bootstrap solopreneur founder could use it and over time there usually becomes a use case for some agency to have some type of reporting or a dashboard or a client log. There’s some value to agencies. And sometimes that becomes the bigger and better part of the business because an agency, as a marketer at a SAS company or at a startup, there’s one person and maybe they do one project at a time, but at an agency, if they adopt something and they have 10, 20, 30 staff, suddenly that volume and that usage and even the value to them could be superior.

Nick Swan:
Certainly. And for a long time it’s been difficult for people doing SEO to show the results of their work as well, because it takes a long time or it can take a while for Google to index new content, for the results to start showing through. So anything that you can do to show the impact of your work in a quicker and more effective way, rather than having to look at data every day in Search Console and copy it and paste it into Excel and all those kind of things, it helps people in that way. I don’t know if it was on this podcast or another podcast I was listening to that said eventually all SAS tools just end up with a big reporting section ib their use, and eventually one of their benefits is the reports that come out of that tool. So we are at that point and it’s good. It’s been great talking to customers and finding this out, and that’s obviously how it’s impacting us in terms of changing our H1 and how we’re going to market it and talk to people about it as well.

Rob Walling:
And you sold a prior software company before this, so what led you to start SEOTesting? Now, for the listener, it wasn’t SEOTesting. When we started it was called SanityCheck. We’ll call it SEOTesting for the rest of the interview, but we will talk about that name change and the thought behind it. So you sell your prior startup, was it SAA?

Nick Swan:
No. So it was around Microsoft SharePoint. It was add-ins, web parts, like WordPress plugins but for Microsoft SharePoint, downloadable bits of software. And it was in the enterprise software space, but we weren’t really an enterprise software company. We were a small bootstrapped business. Again, it grew up to about 20 people. We started 2007. I think I sold my shares in it in 2013. I’d got to the point where I’d had enough of SharePoint. I saw it was changing in direction in a big way, so it was going a lot more cloud based so there’s going to have to be a big reworking of the kind of components and products that we’d built. My co-founder Brett still wanted to carry on with the business and so we came from an agreement where it was going to be a management buy out of my shares and we partnered on good terms, which is good.

Nick Swan:
The business is still going now and doing well, which is nice to see as well, but that gave me a bit of runway in terms of looking at what to do next. And what I find interesting is new ideas, new business models, that kind of thing. Lightning Tools was a previous company. I play golf so I thought I’m going to build websites for golf professionals. Turns out they don’t like paying money for golf professionals.

Rob Walling:
How’d that turn out? Yeah, exactly. I wished you’d have written in with a question here. I would’ve been like, “Oh, I hate to tell you don’t do things, but that’s…”

Nick Swan:
Well, I thought I like playing golf. I like going to golf courses. I can spend more time doing that and talking to golf professionals. It all sounds great. That was an idea that didn’t really work. So I ended up doing some affiliate marketing, so I built a voucher codes, website discount codes website. And that did really, really well as it went through Google updates and other people got impacted by updates and so on. And during that I was doing lots of click through rate testing, so we used the same page title format across all our retailer pages. And so coming up with a better crafted page title could lead to a nice increase in click through rate. It’s all a numbers game. You’ll get 100 clicks, four of those would click on an ad or on a discount code and you’d get a little small percentage of each sale.

Nick Swan:
So getting the page title could make a big difference to monthly revenue and so on. I started doing all this page title, click through rate testing, and it was just taking ages to track all the results in a spreadsheet, so every day looking at the results in Search Console and so on. And I think it was through your SEO tool that you made a big switch over from Google Analytics to Google Search Console for various reasons for your data, and so I think that made me think the Google Search Console API is something interesting to look at, and it was from there looking at Search Console. First of all, there was only three months worth of data available within that tool.

Nick Swan:
So the first thing I tried to build was just something that archived the data to put it all into a database and so on. And then it was then I realized that, hey, I can build some tooling around this testing thing to stop me having to look at the data manually each day, each week or whenever, and do some reporting around it. And that’s how the tool came out of just scratching my own itch really.

Rob Walling:
Got it. And so you were building this for your own purposes with this voucher code website. So it was an internal tool much like Drip was actually. It was an internal tool we built for ourselves and then realized this could be a product. And so did you realize there was more potential in SEOTesting and you bail on the voucher code or what happened with that business as you, I guess I’ll say, started focusing on SEOTesting?

Nick Swan:
The voucher codes sector is like any kind of affiliate marketing. It’s a real cutthroat business, so people will block out SEO, everything they can do to get ranking in Google and we were trying to do things the right way, but it was just really depressing seeing people buying thousands of links and ranking above you and Google doing absolutely nothing about it because it’s just a space they didn’t really care about or want to touch or improve. So as SEOTesting or SanityCheck gained a bit of usage from others in the community and so on, I diverted my attention to that. Again, because it was a new business model and a new tool, I don’t want to go to shiny objects syndrome type thing, but I’d done affiliate marketing and that voucher code space for three or four years and so SAS was a good thing to move into, I thought, and a new thing to try out and learn.
Rob Walling:
And so then you scratched your own itch, which if you’ve heard me I talk about this as scratch your own itch is a nice trait to have in a business you’re starting, but it’s not a panacea. It’s not like, “Well, you just do that and everything works.” It’s just Indie Hackers is littered with these projects of people who scratched their own itch and nothing came of it because no one else wanted it or no one was actually willing to pay for it, or you couldn’t reach people at any kind of scale. So you had built something that you wanted, did you do any validation beyond that or did you just start leaning into it and start marketing it to see if people wanted it?
Nick Swan:
I just started leaning into it to be honest. So I tried the approach of building things for other people, which was the Golf marketing website thing, and so I know this is survivorship bias in terms of this story, but I was in the mindset, well, if I build something and it’s useful for me and it’s saving myself time then that’s a good result out of this. And so it was bare bones SAS. I wouldn’t even call it a SAS app. It was just a tool that you could register for. It had the default bootstrap user interface, all that kind of stuff, and I was in a lot of or still am in a lot of SEO communities at the time, Facebook groups and Slack channels and so on. And so I just shared it there and said, “Look, here’s a free tool, give it a try, let me know what you think about it.” And that’s where the initial feedback and initial user group came from.
Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. So you did validate it because you built something for yourself, it probably didn’t require a ton of polish to make a free tool, and you basically say, “Here’s a free tool. Does anyone care?” And if it had been crickets, maybe wouldn’t have pursued it, but people signed up and started using it and then that was your early user base of people. Did you start getting feature requests and people wanting more to the tool?
Nick Swan:
Yeah. Early users, as you know, they love giving feedback and feature requests and so on. And so the feature requests started to roll in. Again, I was building an SEO tool, so it was things that were going to help me with my SEO work, and so a lot of the feature requests were good ones and I was able to build into the tool. And I guess we’ll come into how that perhaps made us have to choose a position that the tool is going to go into at a later date rather than being a general SEO tool. But the good thing about the SEO community is people are outspoken and willing to give feedback and get involved with free tools and help out, always willing to try stuff, which is great.
Rob Walling:
And so at this point, it’s very simple. It’s one or two main features. It’s the archiving of Google Search Console and tracking of results over time. Is that pretty much it?
Nick Swan:
Pretty much it, yeah. From that point of view, people just started saying, “Well, I’m doing this in Excel, can your tool do that? I’m exporting all the data and then doing this in Excel, can you build able a report for me that’ll do that?” And it was always like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. This is a great idea. Let’s do it.” I miss those days thinking about actually, because it was so much easier to build stuff quickly.
Rob Walling:
Where it’s exciting. I can crank this out in a day.
Nick Swan:
I know. And people are like, “Wow, that’s amazing. You’ve done it so quickly.”
Rob Walling:
Because they’re used to month long road roadmaps or quarter long roadmaps or whatever. And I also love the refrain of I’m doing this in Excel, can you build it? Because, as we say often on the show, it’s like every Excel spreadsheet is a SAS opportunity to some extent for another. So then you have a free tool, you’re getting requests to for different reports. At what point do you think I need to start charging for this?
Nick Swan:
It’s interesting. I can’t remember. This is back in 2016, 2017, so it’s quite a while ago, and it was only me working on it. It was probably five months as running as a free beater. So that’s quite a period of time I think. And it must have been at some point I was like, “Wow, I need to start charging for this. I’m a host and a server,” that kind of stuff. And also I need to find out if it is a product that people are willing to pay for, because it’s all well and good that people are using a free beater and so on, but if I want to take it to the next level we’ve got to check that people are willing to pay for it.
Rob Walling:
The Paul Graham quote is the hardest part is building something people want. And I’ve always tacked on building something people want and are willing to pay for, because I’ve seen too many people build things that people want. They want to use it, but there’s no actual desire to pay for it. So five months isn’t bad. I have seen folks launch free tools, get a bunch of users, and then they either let it go on too long where it’s a free tool or they try to charge for it and no one’s willing to pay. That might be called the solopreneur or the indie hacker trap of just, well, I’m going to get as many people. As you were doing it, did you ever have that doubt of I’m giving away a lot, am I wasting a bunch of time?
Nick Swan:
Not really, because, again, I was building a tool for myself so I had that mindset of, well, if no one’s going to pay for it, it’s still saving myself time and my day to day SEO work. So I always had that to fall back on, because I certainly will have had those doubts, will anyone pay for it? That’s really the justification that you’re looking for. And for me, I enjoy building things that to save people time, help them solve problems and they enjoy using and the monthly recurring revenue and the money that comes in from that is by proxy of doing those things, so the money’s good obviously, and the monthly recurring revenue is nice and it’s nice to see it go up, but I think it’s just a result of doing those things in terms of building stuff that people find really, really useful.
Rob Walling:
It sounds like your happiness comes from the building, the making, the creating, and if you had infinite money, you would still build, make and create. Is that right?
Nick Swan:
I think so. Yeah. I can’t see a day where I retire. Whatever happens, I’ll still be working on things and coding on things. Maybe I might go back to the golf professional website idea and do it for free.
Rob Walling:
I love that. So you have a free tool, you’re five months in, you’re thinking I should start charging for this, and what’s next? How do you come up with your initial pricing? And what was the rollout when you told people, “I’m going to start charging for this tool.”?
Nick Swan:
Well, I put together the plans and I started with a price and it was far too low, so we did it on a per website that you’re going to add to the tool model and we scaled it that way. I think it started at $10 per month, which looking back on it in reflection it should have been higher than that, but you’re always nervous and worried and you want to get people on board. But I was all ready to turn the paid plans on, send out the email newsletter to say that we’re going to start charging, but we had been warning people as they signed up for the beater that at some point this is going to become a paid product.
Nick Swan:
But then we’ve got three small children and we had the news that we had to go to the doctors with one of our kids, and we went there, it as a Friday afternoon and a doctor said, “You need to go straight to the hospital.” Didn’t say what it was, but you know it’s going to be serious from that point of view and we were told that our daughter who was three and a half at the time was diagnosed with leukemia. So it went from literally it was the Friday, the Monday I think I was going to turn on paid plans and launch that, and so that turned everything upside down.
Rob Walling:
I can imagine. Really sorry to hear that. So did you postpone the pricing change? Were you just consumed with essentially you have a family crisis going on? How do you react to that?
Nick Swan:
It was just left as it was at the time. So for the first three days, we were just stuck in the hospital, we didn’t leave just as they did tests on Isabelle. Literally, as soon as we got there, she started having blood transfusions and platelet transfusions within two hour, so it was a real whirlwind of stuff going on and a lot to take on board. Then we went from our district hospital up to the main hospital in Bristol where they do all the children’s cancer treatment and so on, and so we were up there for two and a half weeks. I had my laptop with me. I could do bits and pieces.
Nick Swan:
I’d not announced to anybody that the launch of paid plans was coming, so it was just a case of just leaving things as they were and let the free beater continue for a bit longer. But from a work perspective, everything was just on hold for two weeks. Thankfully, story’s got a good outcome, Isabelle’s treatment went really, really well. She’s just a normal nine year old girl now, but it was obviously a stressful time and looking back on it I don’t know how to summarize. It really is difficult.
Rob Walling:
These are these hard things that we want to perhaps summarize and I’m glad there’s happy ending. We want to summarize it in, well, it was a hard time, but I got through it, which is true, but there’s also probably scars. Look, I’ve been through with the deaths in our families and Sherry losing her brother to suicide have been through stuff that has completely decimated us, and I don’t know that I’ll ever heal from that fully. There are still battle scars and scar tissue that I think is just not going to go away for me. Did it recur after they figured it out? And I don’t want to say cure, but what is it? It goes into remission and then she’s fine. Has it been okay since then?
Nick Swan:
Yeah. And it’s funny how you say she’s lucky and you look back on it and say, “We were lucky,” because she had the most common type of leukemia from diagnosis and the most treatable type. And so although it was two years of treatment and in and out of hospital on a weekly and daily basis, once you get through the first six months, it’s called maintenance, so she has 18 months worth of small amounts of chemotherapy and stuff like that. Once the intense bit of treatment is done, the biggest risk to her was infection from other illnesses like chickenpox and septicemia and things like that, but again, thankfully she got through all that without any big issue. The funny thing was because as a family we closed in as a group and we couldn’t go anywhere to soft play or swimming, the normal things you do as a kid. I think we ended up having six months of normality and then COVID happened and it was all locked down again anyway. So when it did go back to being locked down, we were like, “Well, this is almost like normal life for us.”
Rob Walling:
What an interesting adaptive advantage, because you’re like, “We’ve already been doing this.”
Nick Swan:
And in terms of battle scars, it’s funny what you’re saying, I still have. And this is part of the reason for wanting to join TinySeed as well. I have issues with long-term planning because for such a long period of time we would make plans and I would make plans in terms of what I want to do with the product, set some goals, things we want to try and accomplish and where we wanted to get to, but then Isabelle would spike a temperature, we’d be in hospital for a week and all those plans will get thrown out the window. And so I still have an issue with thinking long term.
Nick Swan:
Joining TinySeed has been one of the reasons for doing that was to set some more lofty goals, think a bit bigger, think about perhaps where we can take the business too. But again, it was just a case of Isabelle’s finished, we can get back to a bit of normality, we booked a holiday and so on, but then COVID hits and lockdown, holidays canceled. And so I can see the things that was affecting me from Isabelle’s illness, I can imagine it’s affected other people in terms of long term planning and stuff like that. It’s interesting.
Rob Walling:
Well, obviously glad things worked out and amazing to be working with you with TinySeed to help you think more long term about stuff. I’m curious, so two and a half weeks you’re in the hospital and then when does this click happen in you where you’re like, “It’s not just the time, it’s the mental energy to I’m going to do this big rollout of pricing and charging people for this product.” How long did you wait on that?
Nick Swan:
I think it was about three months. And so after the initial two weeks had been in hospital full-time, I think I sent out an email to all the people who were using SanityCheck, as it was called then, and just said, “Look, this is what happened.” Because I’d become quite good friends with these people as well, because I know I’m them from Facebook communities and they’ve been using the tool and we’ve been emailing backwards and forwards and stuff. They’ve been emailing in over those couple of weeks and they hadn’t heard from me, so I just let everyone know what was going on. And so it was quite nice actually over that 18 months period of Isabelle’s treatment, I’d keep people updated how she was doing, which was really nice. And so in hospital I had my laptop with me, not a lot of time to use it apart from in the evenings and late at night, but there was a lot of time of doing nothing where I could think and plan.
Nick Swan:
And so there was a lot of time of planning and thinking things out on paper. And so when you sit down at your computer and you bash something out, but then you realize you’re working on the wrong thing or you’ll go back and forth between different things, I did all of that thinking away from a computer and on pen and paper and so on, so that when I did have a bit of time to work, it was like I knew exactly what I was going to do and get done. And so looking back on that time, I was probably as productive as I would’ve been in terms of if I was in front of a computer for the full time, just because I did all of my thinking away from a computer. So then when I had two hours to work, it was really focused work that I made sure I got done what I wanted to get done and had it all planned out.
Rob Walling:
That’s super interesting. So then you had all this, I think of it caulking a bow or you’re just pulling back this crossbow and getting ready to let it go and launch this, so you do, you start charging, you let people know this is the pricing. Now the first question I have is did you only charge for additional features or did you charge people for stuff they had already been getting for free for six months? And then the second question is how did it all work out?
Nick Swan:
There was nothing free. We went just to having a paid plan. So we went from free beta to there being a 14 day trial, and then you’d start paying after those 14 days of trialing the product out. And it went well. There was an initial surge of customers, obviously from the people that had been using it as a free beater. And then obviously after the first couple of months where you get that big surge, you get a bit of a reset and then you realize that you need to do some marketing and letting other people know about the tool, and you start the slow SAS ramp of death from that point.
Rob Walling:
I want to call something out because it sounds like from the start you had said, “This is a free beta, but we will charge for this.” It wasn’t this is a free tool and suddenly you started charging for it, because that’s a mistake I see a lot of folks make. Were you pretty intentional about communicating to everyone it’s free for now?
Nick Swan:
Yeah, we had that on the landing page, probably the registration page and so on, so I didn’t want to set people’s expectations that this was going to be a free beater forever and then do a beta and switch, whatever it’s called, and say, “Hey, you need to start charging now.” It was always going to be this is going to be a paid product at some point. It’s an interesting question as to if no one had paid for it what I’d have done then, whether I’d have switched back to a [inaudible 00:26:49] because of the thing I said about just wanting to enjoying helping people and building things that people find useful, what I’d have done then, but we were always very upfront about we’re going to charge. And it’s interesting, I keep going backwards and forth between I and we, but it was only me at that particular time, so it’s funny.
Rob Walling:
Sometimes it’s hard and now you have co-founder Phil. And so were you happy with that initial, I’ll call it a launch, in essence of paid launch, and did it get to a few thousand MRR?
Nick Swan:
It got to a couple of thousand monthly recurring revenue. It continued to grow then and it did well. We did quite well with some paid Twitter advertising. Twitter’s good in terms of a SEO community. Again, I say good, there’s lots of moaning and shouting and arguing on there, but there are lots of SEO people on Twitter, which is when people are all together in one place, it’s a good place to be able to do some advertising also on. And so we’ve got some initial traction on Twitter. Word of mouth has always been good. So people like speaking about the good tools that they’re finding to help them with their SEO work. So we’ve always had good word of mouth marketing, which I know is difficult to scale, but it’s invaluable I guess from a thing you can’t buy or pay for.
Nick Swan:
I’m not sure if that makes sense or is right, so it continued to grow slowly. It’s funny because when we were working on Microsoft SharePoint, we were building on someone else’s platform and every two or three years they’d release a new version of SharePoint that we’d need to weigh our features and things that we built, and so I always said, “I’m never going to build on someone else’s platform.” We obviously did in terms of building on Google Search Console API and so our main part of the tool at this point was the archiving of the data, because only three months of data was available in Search Console. In January after, so this would’ve been 2018, they launched 18 months worth of data for everybody. So that had an impact then in terms of plans for the tool, what we were going to do with it. We didn’t know what was going to happen in terms of people having all that data available, but it had a long term impact on our eventual plans of what we were going to do with it and so on.
Rob Walling:
With HitTail, which is the SEO tool that you mentioned earlier that used Search Console, I was using, it was an unofficial API to scrape Search Console and they would break it about every year or so, and so I’d have to go and hack the code to fix it. And so I was frustrated with that and said, “Next company I start, no platform risk.” And then you start an ESP and you’re like, “I send emails and I can use Mailgun or SendGrid or whatever I want to do, spit out my own service if I need to. No platform risk.” Well, the platform there are the black lists, the spam list, and they are run by just random people, and one person sent an email to the head of one of these lists and said, “These guys are letting people send spam,” and they blocked us with no judge jury. They were the execution.
Rob Walling:
And it’s like, “Screw you.” And they’re one of the top 10 or top five in the world. So it was all of a sudden our IPS were blocked and SendGrid’s freaking out because they’re SendGrid’s IPS at the time. And it’s just there’s platform rescue everywhere is the unfortunate reality. I think there’s different grades of it, different levels. So you start having success, the tool is called SanityCheck at the time, at a certain point you rename it to SEOTesting and you got the .com for that, which is a great domain. Talk me through that, either the thought process, if the domain suddenly appeared and you’re like, “That’s it,” or if SanityCheck you’re like, “This just isn’t it long term,” and you went out seeking it.
Nick Swan:
There were a few things really. So because we were archiving lots of Search Console data, the database was getting quite big and I’m a developer or database administrator, so at some point I knew this was going to become an issue and I was going to have some sleepless nights about it. So there was a thought process of, well, now there’s 18 months worth of data available in Search Console anyway, do I need to be archiving all this data? That was one part of the thought process. The second thing was we’d plateaued in monthly recurring revenue and it started to get harder and harder in terms of getting new customers, so I got to the point where I did a bunch of customer interviews, I looked at some data, so what good customers or successful customers were using the tool for, and it all came back to the SEO testing functionality within the tool.
Nick Swan:
They didn’t really care about the archiving of data anymore. 18 months worth of data was more than enough for a lot of people. And SEO and Google changed so much that data from 18 months plus ago anyway isn’t worth that much. It’s not as valuable as it used to be because of the changes in the search result pages that are going on. So having that data from the customer interviews positioning was a big thing at the time as it still is now. I think April Dunford’s book had just come out, so I’d read that. I actually arranged a call with Asia Arangio, so from her agency she was doing free 30 minute consultation calls. So I got a call booked with her, jumped on a cal, and I said what I was thinking of doing about I’m focusing on the SEO testing bit of functionality.
Nick Swan:
I also said as well to her, and we had been getting this feedback from customers, because we had added ad hoc reports that people were requesting, people were seeing it as a general SEO tool or were thinking it was a general SEO tool. And so they were asking how does this compare to Ahrefs, how does it compare to SEMrefs? And I don’t want to compete with those companies. One’s a public listed company. One’s a massive company. And I’m a customer of Ahrefs as well, so I use their back-link data in bits and pieces. We were never going to go into that space that they occupy, but people were comparing us against those. So I said to Asia, “I’m thinking a positioning myself as an SEO testing tool to move myself away from being compared to those as the bigger tools.”
Nick Swan:
And she said, “That’s a great idea. Positioning yourself away from competitors is a thing to do.” And so she gave it a thumbs up as an idea. The idea was then to focus on the SEO testing functionality. You then, I say you as in you would probably think of doing the same thing, you just start checking domain names. And so I just checked SEOTesting randomly, and I think it was for sale on one of the domain name marketplaces, so I made an offer, quite a low offer, I think to start with and they came back and said, “It’s too low, but here’s a counter offer of, I think, it was $2,500,” which I thought was good value for money.
Rob Walling:
That’s a steal.
Nick Swan:
And so he was quite open, he said, “Look, I’m an IT person as well. I’m a marketer. I think you’ll do some interesting stuff with it. I just want to see the domain name put to use.” Which is from a people that own domain names and market and then sell them is you don’t usually get that take from people. So I was very grateful we bought it off in and that made the decision to go to the SEO testing route cemented it. I then decided to rebuild the app from scratch, which was we can go back and forth on whether that was a wise decision or not, but I needed to remove a big part of the archiving functionality that was in SanityCheck and work directly with just the Search Console API. So it made sense to rebuild it from scratch, but throughout those four months of rebuilding, I was like, “Is this the right decision?” From a positioning point of view, as much as should I be rewriting it from scratch point of view.
Rob Walling:
That’s a big risk. In retrospect it seems to me like it was the right decision, you agree?
Nick Swan:
Totally. Yeah. You’ve got the question about product market fit and my answer is I don’t feel with SanityCheck we ever got to product market fit, but with SEOTesting from launching paid plans on that, because I did a small free beater on that as well, because COVID hit exactly the week that we were launching SEOTesting, so I was at a point again where I was going to launch paid plans for a tool and then something big happened that I had to change those plans, but from the point of SEOTesting launching paid plans within nine months we got to the same monthly recurring revenue point that SanityCheck had got to in two and a half years. And so although a lot of the functionality was the same within the tools, just the naming and the positioning of the tool just made it a lot clearer to people what it was we were doing and it made more sense to them.
Rob Walling:
And that does lead me to our Startups For the Rest of Us segment. Nick, when did you know you had product market fit? And when I say when, by the way, just for the record, when is not just, well, April 2020, because that’s not actually helpful, but it’s when and how. What were the signs where you felt like this is really working, I have built something people want and are willing to pay for. And folks who listen to this podcast know that I asked this question a little tongue in cheek because product market fit I don’t believe it’s a binary, it is a continuum, and so it’s almost like when did you believe you started having stronger product market fit? We could say there’s one to 10 and when did you hit a six or seven or whatever, but it’s just in terms of when did things really feel like they were clicking and it’s like, “We are solving a problem for a lot of people, people are willing to pay for it, and now it’s more how do we get in front of more people.”?
Nick Swan:
It was definitely when we matched the SanityCheck monthly recurring revenue within nine months, but also I’d say, this isn’t a quantifiable thing, but it was just a feeling. It was just people understood the product more, they knew what they were signing up for, it was just an easier sell, and so pretty quickly within terms of launching SEOTesting I knew it was the right decision in terms of a positioning thing, but then also in terms of a product market fit, it was definitely the right decision.
Rob Walling:
And as we move towards wrapping up, I want to cover one topic that I think will be interesting to folks. And it’s you took on a co-founder, Phil, who you’ve mentioned a couple times, but a late co-founder because you started building in 2015, 16 and Phil came on in 2020, 2021?
Nick Swan:
Yes, that’s right.
Rob Walling:
And so what was your decision making process there of bringing another individual who has enough equity in a company that you refer to him as your co-founder?
Nick Swan:
When I started building the first version of SEOTesting, my previous software company, we’d got up to 20 people. The affiliate marketing website, we had 15 people. I just had enough of managing people and doing HR type things, and so with SanityCheck I decided, as an experiment, I was just going to run it as a one person software company just to see how big I could grow it as one person. So I did make use of contractors and freelancers to help out with various design tasks and things like that, but we got to a reasonable moment of monthly recurring revenue just as me, but a lot of people will think this is the dream in terms of waking up and deciding what you want to work on, but that is good for so long and then you need a bit of direction. So I made the decision the summer of last year to grow a team. I was just tired, bored, whichever way you want to put it, of working by myself.
Nick Swan:
I wanted people to brainstorm with, to celebrate the victories with, all that kind of stuff, and so I made the decision that I was going to build a team and I, first of all, looked at who I know already and who I’ve enjoyed working with in the past, and Phil was one of those people. He was building his own SAS tool, but he hadn’t quite got any traction on it yet. So I said to him, “You fancy doing some contracting on some specific bits of functionality we want built?” So he started doing it on that basis to start with, and we got along so well I was like, “Look, do you want to come on board full time? You can take technical co-founder status. There’s a chance of going through this TinySeed route, which will be good for you from SEO testing perspective, but also in what you want to do in the future in terms of building your own SAS tool as well.”
Nick Swan:
And so we’ve gone on from that point and it’s going well. To the point, I’ve got to say actually last Monday I committed to not writing any code anymore.
Rob Walling:
That’s a big step for a developer who’s been writing for a decade or two. How does that feel?
Nick Swan:
Actually it feels really good. I know when we got together in London for the TinySeed get together, this was one of my concerns around I should be spending more time marketing, but I enjoy coding. And I’ve actually got to the point now where I want to stop coding and I want to spend more time on marketing, which I think is a nice place to be in.
Rob Walling:
And I went through the same process and people would ask me for years and years, “What do you do?” I’m a developer. And suddenly I was like, “I still say I’m a developer, but I’m not actually writing code anymore.” And so I think it can be part of our identity and leaving that behind can be challenging, but I know that you’d been thinking about it for a long time. I don’t think this is something that suddenly came out of the blue.
Nick Swan:
No. To prepare for this interview, interestingly, I went through the past two years of journals, so I write a journal every couple of times a week or so on with thoughts about what’s going on and so on, and the past year was this is a marketing week, I need to focus on marketing, I need to get some marketing done, and that was a reoccurring theme. And I can see that although that was my aim for that week, I didn’t get much marketing work done. So having read through those journals, I felt a real sense of frustration and dropping the code is something I need to do for us to make progress, because it’s not just me now. There’s a team around SEOTesting and we’ve taken a commitment to TinySeed in terms of taking some investment and growing the business, so it feels like the right time for me and the right thing to do as well.
Rob Walling:
Nick, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. If folks want to keep up with you on Twitter, you are Nick Swan, spelled just like it sounds. And of course SEOTesting.com if they want to see what you’re working on. Thanks again for joining me.
Nick Swan:
Thanks, Rob.
Rob Walling:
Thanks for listening and subscribing to this podcast. It’s amazing being able to put myself into a creative endeavor like this and have so many folks tuning in and getting value and inspiration strategies and tactics from the work that we’re doing here. So thanks for listening all these months or years, however long you’ve been around. I hope you’re enjoying TinySeed Tales season three. We have another couple episodes of that season before we wrap it. I’ll be back in your ears again same time, same place next week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 626.

Rob Walling:
And so, the big question for me is, is this a vitamin or an aspirin? Is this something that people are willing to pay for, right? Product market fit, when I hear that phrase, it’s a text expander in my head that says, “I built something people want and are willing to pay for.” Paul Graham has famously said, “The hardest part of being in a startup is building something people want, and if you build something, people want.” Boom, that’s it, right? “Success follows.”
This is Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host Rob Walling. This is a show that you listen to if you’re a bootstrapped, or mostly bootstrapped, startup founder, you want to grow your business faster, you’re ambitious, but you don’t necessarily want to grow that business at the cost of the rest of your life. You don’t want to sacrifice your family, your relationships, your freedom in order to build an amazing and life-changing company.
Thanks for joining me again this week. Before we dive into listener questions. We have some really good listener questions and of course, the audio and video have gone to the top of the stack.
Before we dive into that, I want to mention that MicroConf is going on tour. We have MicroConf locals coming up in October. I’ll be in Atlanta, in November we’re in Austin, and then TBD. We’re looking at Amsterdam, Chicago, Denver, and New England in early 2023. If any of these cities are of interest to you, these are our MicroConf local events where it’s like three hours in an afternoon where I connect with a successful founder.
For example, I just spoke with Rand Fishkin last week in Seattle, and I’ll be talking with Ben Chestnut, founder of MailChimp, in Atlanta, and then Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, in Austin and other guests you have TBD for the future ones. But these are three-hour events where the focus is really getting a group of founders in a room and helping them connect with one another.
If you’re interested in any of those cities, some tickets are already on sale for the events that we have nailed down, for Atlanta and Austin, and then for future events, if you’re not already on the MicroConf mailing list, head to microconf.com and get on that so that we will be in touch when these events roll out.
Our first question of the day is a quick one from Dexter. He says, “I’m a new listener. What episodes should I start with to get up to speed?” It’s a good question, right? Because we’re 620ish episodes into this podcast plus I think there’s at least another 50 unnumbered episodes in there. So realistically approaching 700. Two places I would start.
Number one, go to startupsfortherestofus.com and look for the Greatest Hits link in the header. We’ve just updated that. We have, I think 20 or 30 shows in that Greatest Hits, and we redo that every six to 12 months and add new episodes, and remove old ones. So that’s a good place to start.
The other place is while you’re at startupsfortherestofus.com enter your email address and you’re going to get two never before released shows. One is called Eight Things You Must Know When Launching Your SaaS. The other is Ten Things You Should Know as You Scale Your SaaS. So one is for the early stages, one is you pick product market fit, you’re starting to scale.
Those come in audio as well as a written format that’s more of a guide and those are evergreen lessons that I think every founder should know as they’re building their SaaS company. So thanks for that question, Dexter, and if you are listening and looking to get up to speed, hopefully, that helped you as well.
Our next question is a video question from Adam on transitioning from free to fee.

Adam:
Hey Rob. Adam Dusty here out of Madison, Wisconsin area about a year and a half ago. My dad was running a bike challenge at Kimberly Park, Fortune 500 company. So a lot of employees and he was doing it on a Google sheet and it ran through a Google form where you go for a bike ride. And then at the end of the week, you count all your miles and submit it. And what it is a competition between all the different KC locations. So like Brazil, different locations in the US, et cetera.
Anyways, to make a long story short, we made a website, a friend and I made a website to integrate this through Strava. So no more manual input. People just log their rides in Strava, and it gets published. The challenge challenges grown from 80 people that logged a ride. When we used the Excel sheets to our last challenge was 496 employees and friends of employees logged thrives during the May challenge.
And then eventually it ended up getting too much work. We had a lot of support to do. We enjoyed doing it, but we sent a proposal for them to pay for it with some additional features and prizes we can include. They didn’t take us on our offer. They said maybe for next year they could.
But I’m just curious how you would’ve approached this, providing a service for free and then attempting to transition it into a paid service would love to hear your thoughts, really enjoy the podcast, and appreciate all the value we’ve gotten from them. Thank you.

Rob Walling:
Hey Adam, thanks for the question. This is a fun and interesting case study, I think. So a couple of things. One, I want to go off topic real quick and say, “This is such a cool idea to build no code.” I instantly thought, “Oh, I’d build this in an air table or use bubble or something.” This is the perfect example of a tool that I don’t think needs full-blown software to code something this simple.
That’s not your question, but it is something for you or for other listeners to hear that when we talk about no code serving a purpose and being able to build an MVP or to run certain types of businesses off of this feels like one that could probably be done with little to no custom code.
Aside from that, though. Your question is how would I have gone about it? And frankly, probably the same way you did. I think it’s great that you asked for money and you’re not just providing the perpetual service for free, but it didn’t work so far, right? And so, the big question for me is this a vitamin or an aspirin? Is this something that people are willing to pay for, right?
Product market fit, when I hear that phrase. It’s a text expander in my head that says I built something people want and are willing to pay for. Paul Graham, as famously said, “The hardest part of being in a startup is building something people want, and if you build something, people want.” Boom, that’s it, right? “Success follows.” Which he’s right. That’s like the first step. And I’ve always… Ever since I read that essay and this is a probably 14, 15-year-old essay, I thought to myself, “It’s actually, you need to build something people want, which is really hard.”
Then you need them to be willing to pay for it. And you need to be able to find those people at a rate or at a cost. That means that you can grow because if there’s only 100 customers in the world, or you can only find one a month and they pay you $5 the economics don’t work out.
So there’s a lot of things that have to be in place. Even in this simple broken-down bulleted version of product market fit, build something people want willing to pay for it. And are you able to reach them and close them in an economically viable fashion? And at this point you haven’t proven any of those. Well, I guess you’ve built something people want, but we haven’t proven that they’re willing to pay for it. And so, without having some type of urgent need. If they just said, I will use it next year, that’s not a great sign.
I do see a lot of free tools built that then try to monetize and people don’t want to pay for them. I actually built feedshot.com years ago. I don’t even know if that homepage is still up, looks like it is. It’s a static webpage. It hasn’t submitted 132,000 submissions. And then it just went away. Look at that copyright 2015. This is amazing.
So I built this in, I got to be 2003 and this is almost 20 years ago. This is going to sound so ridiculously dated. I’m speaking in old English, not even in modern English, but a blog is a web blog. And when you launched one year and years and years ago, there weren’t crawlers. There were a bunch of directories that you could submit to. And there were at a certain point, there were 90 different directories. And so, you could submit them by hand, you could hire a VA.
I just wrote a bunch of code, right? It was easy enough to hit it wasn’t even rest APIs at the time. I’m pretty sure I was just scraping and actually looking at the forms and then posting to an endpoint too much technical info. TMI, I know but I had 90 of them in there and I built it and launched it for free, and people… It was getting tons of traffic people were loving it. And then I was like, “Well, cool. I want to make some money from this.”
And so, there wasn’t enough traffic to actually make money from advertising. So I was like, “Well, I’m going to start charging for it.” So I was like, “999 per submission.” And like, “No one did it.” So I just kept lowering the price 499, 399. And it was kind of cool. I could see the price elasticity I could see as I lowered it. I did get more submissions. And I think at the time, how did somewhere between 299 and 499 when there were still 50 of these directories?
So these directories just slowly started closing because there’s no reason for them all to be there. So over time they would just stop working. So I’d start peeling them out. And over time I did have to lower the price and the last price it looks like I was using was a dollar 99. And so, I would make fives of dollars on this website each month. And it’s because it was not an aspirin. It was a nice to have, it was a tool. I had built something people wanted, but really nobody was willing to pay for. And so, I don’t know if that’s the case with what you’ve built Adam, but I definitely see the B to C type stuff.
The fitness trackers allow people to decide on a particular schedule or manage a betting pool, just a casual office stuff. Let’s figure out where we’re going to lunch. These are cool, interesting, neat little viral tools. But I think of these things as almost like utilities that people consider are going to be free. And until you figure out a real… Almost has to be a business case for spending money on something like this from a business’s perspective. And so, why would they write? You didn’t mention your pricing, but $1,000, a $10,000, whatever that amount is. There’s a lot of other places they can spend that money.
And so, your question was, how would I have gone about it? Probably, the same way you did what I would do now though, is I’d be thinking my biggest concern is anyone willing to pay for this? Or should we release? If we’re going to build this thing and air table, whatever, release it free, put it on product hunt and just make it kind of a community service almost to where it’s a free tool. And we use it to kickstart the next thing. Or in the meantime, are we doing some cold email, maybe some type of light marketing. I don’t know if you’re doing pay-per-click ads or what it is.
If people are searching for something like this, obviously, you could do SEO or you could go to Capterra or look at Google terms. If they’re not searching for it, then what is it? I mean, it really does become more of a cold outreach thing, which is fine. But you have to ask yourself, is that what I want to be doing? And if it is then that’s what you should start doing is cold outreach, fortune 5,000, fortune 10,000, whatever companies you can get and say, we have this tool. Are you interested? Oh, and I think the other way is obviously, I bet there are sites that have listings of these… I don’t know that you didn’t call it a Bike-a-thon, but that’s what it reminds me of is the bike challenge.
Are there sites that list these kinds of things anywhere, and can you get in touch and be like, “Hey, do have a tool that manages it and figure out?” I think a lot of people they’re raising money for charity. I have my own presuppositions that I’m concerned that no one wants to pay for this, but that doesn’t matter because I’m not the end customer.
And in fact, when I get asked this question, a founder will email me and say, “I have this idea, or I built this thing. What do you think?” And I always think, “You should talk to your customers because I’m not your customer.” And if I’m, I am supposed to be your customer, I’ll tell you, “Hey, I would buy this or I would not.” But for me to weigh in on the viability of this idea, really not having much knowledge of the market is not super helpful.
And so, that’s where I’d be leaning is can you go talk to customers? And if you can’t find any customers now, how you going to find them once you have a full-blown product built. So I appreciate you writing in Adam. I hope that was helpful.
Our next question is an audio question from Taylor about customer interviews as a service for Indie Founders.

Taylor:
Hi Rob, my name’s Taylor. I recently was laid off from tech company here in Canada and unfortunately, it seems to be the ongoing trend. So I had a question for you related to marketing that I think might be potentially interesting to some of your audience members. Although it does skew a little bit further away from the Indie Founder type demographic and more to the marketing side.
But at my past role, I was doing a lot of interviews with SaaS founders and trying to understand their motivation for selling their business. And this got me thinking about doing my own freelance job but instead doing customer interviews as a service.
So I’m just curious if you think there’s demand for that from startup founders who are potentially too busy or just don’t want to actually directly talk to their customers or if there’s potential pivot that you could envision, that would also be good. So yeah. Let me know my name is Taylor Kartavicius and hoping to get some real good feedback from you. Thanks.

Rob Walling:
Hey Taylor, it’s a good question. So I like one part of this and I don’t like the other. The first is customer interviews as a service. I think it’s a fantastic idea. And in fact, I know some companies that do this as part of broader agency marketing packages. And I love the idea of it. I’ve seen pricing for of a few thousand dollars up into the mid to high four-figure range, right? 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, depending on the deliverables where there’s a lot that could be done here.
But I think that as a founder of myself. I would 100% hire this out. And I know that some tiny seed founders would want to know more about their customers, but you don’t want to learn the nuts and bolts of it. And so, if you can pay someone three, four, five grand to do this, I think it’s interesting. That’s the part I like what I don’t like is you say for indie founders. Indie founders, I think you mean like bootstrap founders, indie makers, indie hackers, a lot of especially early stage folks. They still think like the consumer mindset.
And so, they’re going to be very price sensitive. So I don’t like the niching as a service for indie founders. I think you could start it there. My guess is you’re going to have people wanting to pay you hundreds of dollars to do quite a bit of work. And so, maybe if you do that to get your first few contracts, to get the experience, not experience of doing the interviews, because it sounds like you already have that experience.
But just to get your name out there. It’s easy marketing, right? You post to indie hackers. You let people know and MicroConf connect. You have to be careful here because you don’t want to seem the soliciting stuff isn’t going to go over well. But if you do, you’re like, “I’m a software founder. I have good experience with this. If anyone’s interested, almost offering it as a low-cost service.” I think it’s interesting. I want to be really clear to please don’t come in general to MicroConf connect and pitch new services.
But I do think that this is an interesting idea. Reddit like the Reddit SaaS, Reddit startups, Reddit entrepreneurship, any of these could be interesting for trying to figure out what is that price point. If you do build a brand, then you have price flexibility, and you can expand the price as you go on. But do I think it’s an interesting service? Yes, I would not make it a subscription.
I mean, it really is a one-time thing every year or two we do this with MicroConf where we do a group of customer interviews jobs to be done interviews usually to learn more about the new people, the older folks, not old in age, but who have been involved in MicroConf for longer folks who only come to in-person events. Folks who only consume online just to get an idea of what people are looking for. So love the idea. Thanks for writing in Taylor.
My next voicemail is from Andre on making the jump from a software to manufacturing.

Andre:
Hey Rob, this is Andre listener from Brazil. My question is coming from a softer background. I want to make the jump towards founding and manufacturing company. I really believe we can bring your knowledge to the industrial sector. I know this is off, but I’m really curious what you think. Cheers.

Rob Walling:
Andre, this is a tough one. I mean honestly, if someone were to come to me and say, “I’ve been doing software, I want to go into manufacturing.” I would probably say, “Don’t.” And I know that’s tough. That’s not a great answer, but I’m not going to be able to tell you how to make the jump because I’ve never done it. What I do know is I have friends, acquaintances, founders, who I’ve advised, who have been in software for years, and we forget that we have the best business model in the world.
And that’s subscription recurring revenue with very low cost to serve customers and no physical inventory to manage with huge upfront cost, with refunds and shipping and stuff getting lost in the mail and pallets of things, being on a ship. There’s the logistics and the warehousing and the employee count and the margins, it’s just a completely different world.
And so, we have this amazing luxury of being in software and having these incredible margins with accruing revenue. I could not imagine going into any other space like manufacturing or hardware, or look I ran an e-commerce company back from… I can’t remember the dates. I might’ve messed it up 2008 to 2010 or ’11 and it resold… It ranked really well in Google for beach-related stuff like beach towels.
And I did several thousand dollars a month. It was a nice portfolio piece that I had combined to make a full-time income with the other things I had. And oh my gosh, per dollar earned that site was by far the biggest headache. I wasn’t even doing fulfillment. It was drop shipped, but there was so much crap people wanted refunds and then they’d have to ship it back. So then I have these beach towels, they get ship back was like, “I don’t really want these.” I’d eat money on those stuff getting lost in the mail stuff not getting there fast enough.
And people complaining that we missed a birthday, the margins were incredibly low because I had this huge cost of good sold compared to what I was used to. And there were no subscription revenue. It was just one headache after another. And I’m not saying every e-commerce business is that, but it definitely gave me a taste of the other side of where I didn’t want to go anymore.
And at the time I had a productized service. I ran… I was still doing a little bit of consulting. I stopped in 2008. So it was right around that time. I had several eBooks and info products. I had a SaaS I had a job board for electricians. I had all kinds of things. Oh, I wrote a book as well.
I had all kinds of things that were making money and that e-commerce site. It just stuck out as such a sore thumb for me. And so, that was one of the first things that I sold as I started divesting myself and focusing before I made a big run-up that basically dove deep into SaaS. That was part of the reason was I realized info products are fine, but the one-time sales of pain. I didn’t feel it just wasn’t as interesting as building a software company. It wasn’t going to scale in the same way.
And similarly, e-commerce had at its own trouble. So that really is my advice. It’s that I can’t tell you how to make the jump because I haven’t done it. But personally, I think you’re going to… When you jump over. I think you might be taking for granted all the amazing things that we have with this business model.
And I would be wary of diving in, especially thinking I have this knowledge because you probably have maybe some marketing knowledge, online marketing knowledge, and of course technology very well. And so, we can think, “Well, I’m going to come into this space, and I can out-innovate them because their software is crap and they don’t know how to market.” You might be able to, my question is it worth doing? Is it worth getting in there based on the margins that you’re going to make from these products, would the time just be better spent in the software space, even though you’re not going to be able to innovate as much because there are other people doing it?
I just can’t let go of the fact that we have the best business model in the world, and I would have a hard time walking away from that. So I don’t know if that was helpful or not Andre, but I do appreciate the question.
Our next question is another voicemail, voicemails and video questions go to the top of the stack. If you go to startupsfortherestofus.com, click ask a question, you could submit either one of those or email them to questions at startupsfortherestofus.com. This question is from Yuri on priorities from marketing versus development.

Yuri:
Hello. This is Yuri. I’m building a platform for developers on the side and I’m lucky I don’t need to do any development on it already because I hired developer. The question I have is that how much percentage of monthly recurring revenue or some budget or time is reasonable to spend on marketing versus development? Because it’s a development tool. There is endless possibilities to do integrations so I can dedicate 100% of efforts there, but still, I understand that marketing is a very essential part of the business.
So it’s a dilemma, which priorities should I go after in terms of the numbers, we are around 7,000, 8,000 a mark. So we are still pretty early and that is two years in. Thank you very much for all you do. I really enjoy your podcast.

Rob Walling:
I like this question, and this is one that has… Unfortunately, a lot of answers. I’ve seen reports there in SaaS industry reports that ask this question, right? And what’s interesting to me is the range is really wide. And so, if I weren’t to Google any of those and just go off top of my head. I would say in the early days of building your company and I mean like sub 20 camera or sub 50 camera, well maybe like sub 20 camera. I think 50 plus percent should be towards marketing and sales as much as you can.
And I think as product people, we’re going to tend to want to minimize that. But putting that effort and 50%, I mean is time plus money investment, right? And then it has to go down over time. I think as you build the brand and as you maybe compete with bigger players in this space. Now, it depends a lot on the space you’re entering because if you’re building an email service provider, you have to put a ton of investment into the product just to get feature parody and to have the table stakes feature.
So in the early days, maybe it’s weighed more towards product than I was saying. In most spaces, if you get in market, you build a brand and you have enough to get a wedge in. I do think you should be spending a lot more marketing than you think. A couple of places that we can link to in the show notes.
One is SaaS capital did a blog post spending benchmarks for private B2B SaaS companies. And they say across these companies doing at least one million in ARR that the median percent of ARR spending on marketing is 9% or 10% and then spent on sales is 18%. And so, if we combine those, we say almost 30% an article from before.io called how much does SaaS companies spend on marketing? They say the average SaaS company spends between 15% and 25% of revenue on marketing. Now, this does not include sales.
And then there’s a quote from Tomasz Tunguz. He’s quoted in bigdropinc.com’s blog post. How much should your SaaS marketing budget be? Where he says during the first three years, SaaS companies often spend anywhere from 80% to 120% of their revenue on sales and marketing. So he’s combining it and they spend more than revenue because of course he only deals with funded companies because he’s a venture capitalist.
But then it plateaus around 50% from year five on. That’s really interesting. And that’s at scale. I mean these are venture scale companies where you’re a million and over. And so, the answer is it depends, and it depends on the space you’re in. It does depend… It’s like bootstrap versus funded and bootstrap versus venture funded. It depends on how beefy your product has to be. But I do think it is really easy.
If you’re an engineer, who’s building a product and your first hire is an engineer to help you move faster. Suddenly, you can have a team of five. We have three technical people and that’s just way overweight and that’s way overweight, technical talent. Unless you really need to be in a feature race. Basically, and to hit a point where you hit feature parody. I just think it can be a kind of fool’s errand and an easy trap to fall into overbuild.
So if a founder like a bootstrap founder came to me and said, “We’re at 10k MRR or 20k MRR. And we’re spending 10% to 15% or 20% of our top-line revenue on marketing and sales.” I would say, “You’re way too low.” There has to be such a push in the early days to get out there and get in front of people and close deals because not only are you keeping yourself alive with the revenue, but you are learning with every deal because you’re still so early.
And while I wouldn’t say 80% to 120%, it’s funny. I know I fund companies. I still don’t think in those terms of spending more than ARR just on marketing, but it’s a really interesting way to think about it of as a bootstrapper could you spend 75% of your error? What would that even look like? I thought experiments these actually where even if I never take action on it, asking yourself the question, take an hour or two and ask yourself the question. What would our business look like to 10 X in the next 12 months? What would have to happen?
And then just thought experiment from there like, “We may not. I’m not even interested this may be a bad idea.” But to go through those experiments, I think helps expand your thinking and can help you see things in a new way. Similarly, I think asking yourself, what would the company look like if we were to spend 70% or 80% of our ARR on marketing and sales? Does that mean we would have to raise funding, or does it mean we would just back off on feature development for now and product moves a little slower, but that’s okay because we’re closing a lot of deals?
A lot of us build really interesting products that people want. And then we keep building and keep building and keep building. That’s not always the right call. I think it’s a trap. I’ve fallen into. And I think it’s one that is easy as a developer or a product person.
So thanks for the question Yuri, that was a really, really interesting one. That was our final question for the day. If we’re not connected on Twitter, I’m @robwalling, and again going to be at several MicroConf locals here, and over the next six months, head to microconf.com/locals. If you want to buy a ticket for Austin or Atlanta and get on the mailing list, microconf.com.
If you want to hear about future locals, that could be coming to your area. We’re steadily making our way to 1000 ratings around the world in Apple podcast. It’d be amazing if you could sneak in there and click that five-star button.
Thank you as always for listening this and every week, whether you’ve been here for six or 600 episodes. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 624. I’ll see you next time.

Rob Walling:
This is very similar to, I guess, when you and I hang out and have a beverage for happy hour, this is a similar train of conversation, although we may get into more, name more names at the happy hour. So I want to kick off, I have several topics we can run through today.
First thing I wanted to do was touch on a topic that we talked about last time you were on the show, where I had asked you, “You’re really good at product, you’re really good at development, too. But making product decisions is hard, and it’s hard to know what to build next. It’s hard to know what not to build. And then there’s a whole other thing of how to build it, how it should look.”
And I don’t think we’ll get in that today, but just that decision, that filtering process, if you’re getting all these customer requests, and deciding what to do, in what order, and all that stuff. Last time we talked about, generally, and I said, “How do you decide?” And you kind of said it, a high level thing.
And I listened back to that one, and I realized, “You know what? I think an example could be really helpful.” What I want to ask is, recent is whatever you want it to be, what recent feature did you ship, that you feel like was the right decision?
And what was the logic behind deciding to do that, whether it was tons of customer crest, or whether you just knew in your founder gut, or whether it was a competitive … There’s a bunch of reasons why you would do it. Then let’s touch on one feature or more, frankly, that you haven’t built, probably aren’t going to build, and why.
So let’s start with that first one. What have you launched that you think is a really, really good feature?
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, so one of my favorite ones that we shipped this summer, I think, it was about a month ago, is this feature. It’s kind of a simple one, but it had been on my radar for a little while, and it’s sort of just, in reviewing my backlog, and I like to keep a backlog of things, just ideas. Any time someone requests something, I usually log it in there, and then sort of store up, any time someone mentions it, and it helps conversation, I drop a link to it just as kind of a knowledge repository.
This one had been floating around and resurfacing for a while. It’s basically a little feature that allows you to toggle on a setting to require approval for new bookings before they make it onto your calendar.
So think if you’re really busy, and say you’ve just a busy person in general, and you have one reusable link that is just out in the wild, people use it all the time. We often have our one multi-use link, that maybe we store in our text expander or whatever, and it’s just the one that gets shared around, usually like, slash chat after your name.
So a lot of times, people who are in really high demand will just see people using their link, and grabbing time on their calendar. And so there’s something very visceral with people who feel this pain. It’s like, “This is really a major problem,” so they either resort to not having a multi-use link, or using an unguessable URL, or just, other solutions that just don’t quite feel right, and feel like we could be doing something on the product side to alleviate this.
This also happened to be one of the favorite features from a scheduling tool called x.ai that was acquired, and then shut down last year. So I hear, anyone who comes over from x.ai, is likely to request this one.
So it’s been coming up over and over. But again, it’s one of those decisions, even though it’s just a toggle in the UI, and just this light modification to the booking flow, it’s still not a foregone conclusion that we’re going to build it.
But the things that really tipped me over the edge on it were one, just strong visceral demand from a group of people who are really passionate, and I would say, scheduling power users. And we have gradually become a tool, that I think a lot of people in their minds think of it as sort of a scheduling power tool.
Obviously, when you’re young, you’re behind the competition in a lot of different ways, so it’s hard to foster that perception early on. But we’ve been at it for a few years now, and have mostly caught up on feature parity, and now, people actually see us, once they get in the product, they realize that a lot of our UX is an improvement over the status quo, and they can do more things to guard their time.
They can use our ranked availability feature, and some of these things that we have that help people who care a lot about shielding their time, protect it, basically. So this one felt like it was philosophically aligned with where our product’s going.
It doesn’t overcomplicate the product in confusing ways. Most of the complexity actually lives under the surface, and for the user, it’s just, “Do you want to enable this or not?” So yeah, it was basically it was combination of strong demand, differentiation, alignment with the philosophy of what we want SavvyCal to be.
And I always think about, too, is this attracting the right kind of user, the kind of user that we feel like we’re able to serve well. And I think those who care about toggling this on is an ideal user of SavvyCal, because of the things we care about, yeah.
Rob Walling:
I really like that. I think that’s something that more founder, I don’t think that’s intuitive for a lot of people. And the fact that you’ve just called it out, I think, is a huge deal. It’s like, how many people we use it, and what kind of customer will use it?
Derrick Reimer:
Yup.
Rob Walling:
That’s super cool.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think there’s a certain magnetism that features have, and they can draw in more of the people that you are really in the sweet spot for. We have built some things, I’m trying to think if I have a specific example, I might think of one in a minute, but I feel like there are some features that we build, that suddenly start attracting people who aren’t a super good fit.
That’s always, it can be a frustrating process, for the user because they’re all excited, and they think SavvyCal’s going to be the tool for them and then realize that we’re missing the mark on a number of things, but they were attracted by this one thing. So I just want to be mindful and careful about, just thinking about that, giving some thought to that, when marketing features and building them.

Rob Walling:
How about on the flip side, the feature or features that, for the foreseeable future, is not going to build? Or a recent thing you decided, “We’re not building it?” And what was the thought process there?

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, so one of the big ones is SMS notifications. So this one does come up. It’s certainly requested from time to time, and it’s a feature that a lot of other scheduling tools have built into them.
Think of, classic examples in my mind are ones that are, “You’re going to get a haircut, or a dentist appointment,” or something. They’re often sending text messages to remind you.
This is one, where I’ve struggled a lot with it, trying to understand why people want it, because I personally never want to receive a text message from a scheduling tool.
I think I do have, even though I’m not a perfect representation of my customers, I think a lot of my customers are similar to me, in that we’re using this for kind of business to business meeting scheduling, and we’re near our calendars a lot and we probably have Google Calendar installed on our phone, and we’ll get a little notification through there. So I don’t know, just the need for it kind of eludes me a little bit.
I’ve spoken to a number of folks who have endeavored to do this. Actually, I was speaking to some former colleagues at Drip, and they added SMS support into the product. And I got to hear some war stories about just how much of a bear that is to maintain, and things like you think dealing with e-mail spam is bad, wait until you deal with all the regulations and constraints around sending text messages on behalf of people.
Even though there’s tools like Twilio, which are amazing, and give you a nice API on top of the lower level SMS stuff, it’s still, certainly doesn’t solve all of the complexity that you have to deal with, when doing this. So it’s just one of those giant iceberg features, certain percentage of people would just toggle it on, “Sure, send a text message. Yeah, why not?” And maybe not even give much thought to it.
But under the covers there’s so much complexity to maintain. And there are honestly other ways around it, too. People can accomplish this with Zapier. There’s different integrations that you can connect to your Zapier account.
So if you really need this, you can do it today. And I would much rather push that complexity off to Zapier for the foreseeable future.

Rob Walling:
And with an N of two, one being you and me being the second one, I would never use that feature. So I wonder, and we at TinySeed, MicroConfer, obviously a SavvyCal customer, would it attract to the right kind of customers, going back to the feature you said earlier? And obviously, if you listen to this podcast, it’s like, two people does not a focus group make.
I can imagine my uncle, who’s a realtor, wanting to turn that on, and it’s like, is that where SavvyCal wants to be right now? Because I think more perhaps sophisticated founders, entrepreneurs, executives, tech entrepreneur, tech senior leaders, whatever it is that you’re focused on at SavvyCal, those folks are probably more in our line, in our situation, where I’m also in front of my calendar all day. My phone buzzes with a little reminder, and that’s all I need. And it’s an interesting, interesting filter.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah. Another one that comes to mind is, so some people use SavvyCal. A very small percentage of our customers use SavvyCal for a lot of internal scheduling, which theoretically is a pretty powerful way to use it.
You share a booking link to someone inside, internal to your company, and they can use that as of a curated window into your availability, even though most companies of a certain size these days are either using the built-in Google Calendar sharing technology, Microsoft Outlook has it also. So then there’s a lot of sophisticated tooling built up in those ecosystems, around sharing calendars with your colleagues, and adding colleagues, and finding times that work for everybody, and doing collective scheduling.
So a lot of these problems are already solved, which is why I’ve been hesitant to try to build SavvyCal as an ideal solution for doing internal scheduling. It’s like, you can use it for that, but it’s probably not going to be better than the built-in bundled solutions into the ecosystem.
I had some requests the other day from a customer, that he was asking for the ability for events created by SavvyCal to be editable by anybody added on the calendar invite, which struck me as curious. So I dug into it a little bit, and asked him some more questions, and discovered that he was basically using this as a way to use round robin, and put time on one of their internal team members’ calendars.
From that point, that person would take ownership of the calendar event, and literally take ownership of the event. It would get transferred, so that would sever our connection to the event, because it would get a new owner in the calendar system. And then they would add external people onto the calendar event, and reschedule it if needed. And this was just causing all kinds of problems with our ability to stay in sync with that calendar event.
I thought for a second, “We need to solve some of these problems, and maybe add a setting to allow it to be editable,” but then realized, for anyone who’s doing the traditional path of sending a link, scheduling, something with an external party, you would never want it to be fully editable by all parties. And a lot of these other problems just simply don’t surface for that happy path.

Rob Walling:
Right. And when that comes up, you have to say, “Oh, is this a new market that we should build for? Is this a use case that no one has been paying attention to, and this can open up a bunch of new customers, and are the customers we want to work with? Can this help alter my vision?”
You have a pretty strong vision for your product, I’m the same way. Sometimes, you get a feature question, and you’re like, “That’s not in my vision, but should it be? Is this such an opportunity? Building workflow is like building automations? It’s like, this changes the whole direction, but it could be amazing.”
Or, is this one of those things I’m going to add, that I’m going to regret? Because one person wanted it, or the people who do want it are just not good fits for us? Or they’re using it in a way that really, that’s not where we’re headed. We can grow faster, we can get more customers, through easier wins.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah. It’s important not to get too myopic. Sometimes, you do want to keep an open mind, and especially, I think, as a pretty horizontally positioned product, there’s all the more, it’s more difficult to know whether you’re making the right decisions in general, because you have a lot of different, a variety of people using the product.
Most SavvyCal users care about creating an optimal booking experience, but they are horizontal across a lot of different industries and use cases. So making sure you’re staying in line with what your market needs is extra difficult when you’re positioned in this way, which is why I’m a big fan of logging most things. This runs counter to that traditional 37 signals wisdom, of never write down a feature request, and just expect it to resurface if it’s important.
I used to think that way, but more and more, I don’t trust my own brain to remember when certain trends start to emerge, because there’s so much noise all the time. So I like to log these in a place, I used our backlog for it.
Some people are viscerally opposed to that, but even just a spreadsheet could be a good place to just keep track, “How many times has this come up? Has this up more recently? Should I be thinking strategically about potentially building this thing?” And that’s just helpful, and I review it periodically, and just kind of keep it fresh in my mind.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I can imagine, much like, I will take notes on anything. When I used to think of business ideas, or now I’ll think of, “Oh, this interesting marketing approach, or maybe I should write a book chapter about this, or record a podcast episode about this crazy topic.” And I just write all that stuff down in notebooks, and periodically, it’s a backlog. It’s a backlog of ideas.
Periodically, I’ll revisit them, and usually it’s like, “Hey, that’s not a good idea, and here’s why.” But in a year, it might be a good idea, because you might change direction. Strategy changes over time, and the direction of your product and your vision, it can change. So I can see that being valuable.
That was super helpful, man. I’m glad we did that.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
It’s the specifics of those examples, and hearing that both the features you mentioned are completely reasonable. Yet you said no, and then you said why. I remember being a brand new baby founder, and just, feature question, it was like, “I’m going to just build everything people want.”
That’s where I struggle with the customer development, or leaning too much into, “Just build what your customers want, and then you’ll hit product market fit.” Because I don’t think that’s actually true. You have to have that filter, that founder filter, to keep that vision in line, and to keep the product going in a direction that doesn’t just duplicate all your competitors, which is often what less technical users want.
More technical users often want you to just build shit that’s just way too complicated. And your power users can push you in a direction, where it’s like, you build an unusable product, or a product that then no one else wants to use. There’s all these dangers with listening to every request a customer makes.
There’s a reason you are the founder, and your customers are not, of your particular company. You have to, much like guarding the quality of your code base, we have to guard the quality of our product, the UX and the clutter, and the overwhelm that can happen, by just putting a bunch of settings everywhere.

Derrick Reimer:
I mean, it’s a pretty common trope, but learning when to say no is just extremely valuable, because you can’t be everything for everyone. And it’s hard to resist that temptation, especially early on, when you’re just clamoring to get any customers to pay you, and try to get some kind of traction.
It’s very difficult to stick to your vision, and know when to say no to certain things. And I think that part, in one sense, gets a little easier as you go and you have more traction, you have a better sense of who your market is. So it’s not for the faint of heart in the early days to try to solve that equation. But yeah, that’s just an important skill to develop.

Rob Walling:
And as you said, it does get easier. It’s really hard in the early days. And then, you’re a year two, three, I think the filtering process is much easier.
Tim Cook, Apple, he says, “There will always be more great ideas than we can implement. We’re going to have to say no to some great ideas.” And I think that’s being an entrepreneur, as well.
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
So I want to switch up our topic, and get your opinion on something. It’s a Twitter-related thing, and so …
Derrick Reimer:
Oh boy.

Rob Walling:
I know. Here we go. “Why did I even …” Because I don’t normally go to my home feed in Twitter. It’s not something that I particularly enjoy, even though I follow you. But Tweets get surfaced from you, and people that I want to hear from otherwise.
I was reading this e-mail newsletter, it’s for bootstrappers, indie hackers, it’s called High Signal. And in it, he linked to a Tweet where, a founder who I don’t know, but it’s a founder who I guess has bootstrapped to a million dollars in ARR.
He says, “I’m interested in investing in indie SaaS businesses.” And he has some criteria, and he’s looking to put in 10K or more per investment, and wants to buy at least 25% of the company. And those terms are, they’re bad. they’re like, they’re not in line with the market.
I read through it, and I was like, “Whoa, that is a …” Let’s say, 10K for 25%, or let’s say 50K for 25%, whatever the number is, compare that to TinySeeds’ valuations, or YC’s valuation, any accelerator. And frankly, accelerators are lower valuations, than if you were to go get angel money, because accelerators bring the community and all the mentorship and the advice and all that.
So TinySeed valuations say, 120 to 220 for 10 to 12%, whatever, those numbers are substantially higher than 10, 20, 30K for 25%. Not only that, but if a founder came to us, and we’re going to invest at the same, usually it’s the same phases. He was talking 1K to 10K MRR, and TinySeeds in that realm, plus higher, obviously.
But if a founder came to us, and applied to TinySeed, and we really liked them, and they were doing five or 10K, and they told us they sold 25% of their company to someone for a low five-figure amount, we would be pretty unlikely to fund them. It can ruin your cap table, it can remove optionality.
So when I read that, and here’s the thing, man, I’m into, especially online, I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and try to give what Patrick Campbell … Well, he’s now with ProfitWell. They have a value in their company called MCI. It’s the Most Charitable Interpretation.
Within the company, one of our values is, if someone writes something in Slack, if someone says something in a meeting, please give the most charitable interpreter. And that’s what I have tried to do for years online. It’s just kind of how I roll.
So when I read that, I’m like, “I don’t think this guy’s trying to screw people. I think he is interested in investing, and these are the numbers that make sense to him.” And in the thread that follows, it’s actually a good thread, Some people are like, “Your valuation’s too low,” and he said, “Well here’s how I got to that.”
He’s saying, “1K a month is 12K ARR, and then a 3X to 7X ARR multiple is 36 to whatever,” you can do the numbers, but it’s not typically how investment, especially in early stage SaaS, is valued. So I was like, “Well, I want to reply to this, but truthfully, should I? Am I doing a public service?”
Because here’s what annoys me is, when I’m having conversation with someone, or I’m on Twitter, or I used to get pulled into conversations that it’s like, “This is none of your fucking business. Why are you nosing in on my shit?”
It’s like, here we are talking about features on Drip, and someone comes in and it’s just, “Well, I have a support issue, blah, blah, blah,” and it’s just, “What are you doing, man? This is the worst of social media,” I think. It’s just, everyone just wants this, is mouthing off, and is like blah, blah blah.
So I don’t want to be this guy who comes in and is just, “You’re way out of whack, man, this isn’t good.” But also, I don’t want founders to screw their cap table. So it’s like, is it a public service announcement to chime in?
Of course, I would do it very thoughtfully and tactfully. I would try to do it, but who knows, they may not give me the charitable interpretation, and it may blow up into some stupid argument fest, which of course I would tap out of. I’m a one and done, remember my Twitter rule?
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
If someone picks a fight with me, I’m one and done. I post one response and it might be two Tweets or three Tweets in a chain, but, “Here is my stance.”
And then, when they come back with the, “Oh, but, and I’m picking,” and, “Oh, and that sentence is incorrect,” and they start quoting each individual word, and pointing out how you [inaudible]?
I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not going to, I’m done. I’m done. One and done.”
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
So all that said, I’m curious to hear your take?
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of the answer comes down to whether you have the stomach for wading into the fray a little bit, because we know how these discussions can often go. And they turn into needing to die on some hill over something.
Or often, the case is with Twitter, it’s like, they’re short messages. So you have to be efficient in use of words, but also it’s impossible to capture all the nuance. So the medium is limiting in that way.
But all those caveats aside, I’ve known you to be a fairly disciplined one in sticking to your one and done, not taking the bait, and just speak what to be true. And I think you are kind of the right authority on this, to provide context to the conversation in a thoughtful manner.
So I would say, it seems very much in line with just where your career’s at, and what you’re an expert in, to provide a little bit of commentary into the public sphere on this, provided you have the stomach for what potentially could devolve into a classic Twitter debate.
Rob Walling:
Do you want to get in that fight, yeah?

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Well, A, I appreciate that. B, you should tell that to my YouTube commenters on our Microsoft channel. Because dude, I did this whole video about growing HitTail to 30K a month, and talked about the process and this and that.
One person said, “I call BS on this, I went to hittail.com, and it doesn’t exist,” and in the video, I said, “I sold it, seven years …” It’s just, instant, like I’m not credible.

Derrick Reimer:
Oh, that’s hilarious.
Rob Walling:
But anyways, I appreciate that. And that is, honestly, that has gone through my head. I typed up a response, and I hadn’t sent it, when I had sent this Tweet to you, and said, “Let’s talk about this on the show today.”
Since then, I did reply, and I just felt eventually, “You know what? I’m going to try it. If it devolves into something, I do have the stomach, to just one and done it, to agree to disagree, basically,” which is fine.
So I responded, and I said, “Genuine comment, not being a hater, but these terms are far under market. SaaS at this phase can easily raise at low seven figure valuations from accelerators and angels, even those that don’t come with VC strings attached.” Because that was another thing.
Someone said, “Well, they can raise at high valuations.” And he said, “Yeah, but then you have venture strings attached.” And it’s like, “Well, that’s not true, actually, from TinySeed, or other angels.” Then I said, “Funding at these terms will damage your cap table, per what I just said.”
And the cool part of it, it doesn’t happen very often, but he responded, and he said, “That might be, I’ve had a few people say that in the comments already, which is fine. In the end, my goal is to invest in people in businesses in terms at affair for everyone. I’ll see what this gets me in opportunities, and will adjust if needed.”

Derrick Reimer:
Nice.
Which is like a …

Rob Walling:
Wow.

Derrick Reimer:
Perfectly reasonable, you know what I mean?

Rob Walling:
Yeah.

Derrick Reimer:
It wasn’t some big argument. He actually posted something later and said, just in general, he said, “I learned a lot from reactions to this Tweet. One, these are lower multiples in raising. Some people can raise that 30-plus multiples, that’s really awesome, but won’t be for me, and maybe I should just acquire 100% of the businesses instead.” Just interesting, so …

Rob Walling:
Yeah.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I thought it was cool, it was a sensible … And we don’t know each other. Here’s the thing.
If we knew each other, if you and I are having this conversation, it’s going to be civil, on Twitter, or I’m doing it with Anar, or Reuben or anybody, it’s going to be civil. But it’s when people don’t know each other, this stuff goes sideways, usually.

Rob Walling:
Yeah.

Derrick Reimer:
And we don’t know each other. So I thought that was just a redemptive arc. I’m still not going to do Twitter, though. I’m still not going to do it. It’s just …
Probably a good call.

Rob Walling:
Yeah.

Derrick Reimer:
I don’t over generalize this one, but yeah, I’m glad this one worked out.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, honestly, I mean, it sounds like … Just speaking about the topic overall, there’s probably a lot of, still, misunderstanding about what’s possible in the funding realm.
That’s where a TinySeed can sort be an authority on talking about this kind of alternative funding strategy. People think in this binary, “It’s either venture capital, or this feels like Shark Tank valuations,” or something very, I don’t know, super high risk, but it’s not venture capital, so we’re going to take 30% of your company.
And he had more nuance around it. I’m not saying he’s trying to be a shark, but it just feels like a misconception about this middle ground type of funding, and how this space has evolved in the last few years, so …
And continues to do so.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
So I have a question, then. Staying on the topic of Twitter, I’m on your Twitter profile, it’s twitter.com/derekreimer.
Folks want to subscribe and get you over that 9,000-follower mark. Look at you, you’re almost at 8,700. I know that’s a KPI you track. Yeah, I know you don’t.

Derrick Reimer:
Jeez. Yeah.

Rob Walling:
But you have the newsletter feature at the top, where people can just one click. I’m going to click Subscribe, and it says … Yeah, yeah.
They already have my e-mail, so if I confirm it, they being Twitter, already has it. So cool, so now I’ll get an e-mail from Revue.
Twitter bought Revue a couple years ago now, or whatever, and they now have built it in. The only way you can subscribe is Revue.
We looked at it, we being MicroCon, TinySeed, Startups For the Rest of Us, robwalling.com, every Twitter account that we have. I was like, “I’d love to do this, because I like to build lists.” and when I want to do it, I can only use Revue.
The only way I can do is, I can use Drip or any other tool, is to pipe it in via Zapier. So then it’s a terrible user experience. Because you subscribe, you get an e-mail from Revue that confirms your subscription. Then suddenly, and it’s very upfront of, “You’re going to get the Revue newsletter.”
Revue is all over it. It’s not white labeled to be, “You’re going to get Rob Walling’s newsletter.” It’s like, “You’re going to get the Revue newsletter, and Rob Walling might be involved with it.”
It’s way down. To suddenly be, “Hey, I’m sending this from Drip,” it feels not very cool. So that’s why we didn’t do it.
But I’m curious. It says you have 2,300 people subscribe, so are you using Revue to send?

Derrick Reimer:
Sounds like you guys did actually a lot more diligence on the overall experience for this part of the motivation. So I did this a couple months ago, around the time that I stopped doing the podcast for the summer.
I had seen someone remark … Again, this is something I know to be true, you always want to own the platform as much as possible, own your list.
I’m like, “I participate in Twitter, and I get new followers all the time.” But like most of those people, if Twitter were to go away, or I decided I want to stop using it, all of that would be gone.
So I was like, “This is an interesting kind of way to put a subscribe button, right front and center.” And I have not been a good steward of my mailing list so far.
I haven’t e-mailed them in probably well over a year, at this point. It was like, one, I’m not super active on mailing my e-mail list, which means it is decaying over time, sadly.

Rob Walling:
This is a list you had before this, subscribe for …

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Because the subscribe feature has only been for a few months, but you had built it up at derrickreimer.com, I believe, right, to a couple thousand? Okay.

Derrick Reimer:
Yup. And I had e-mailed, probably pretty actively during the Level season, when I was building Level, and sent the retrospective about that to that list.
At that point, it was still quite a warm list. So I’m still keeping it around, and would love to add more folks to it, and at some point, probably share more to that list.
I still don’t have a full strategy in mind about what that would look like, but I want to keep my optionality open. And I want to make sure that, even if I decide to drop Twitter, at some point, I will have these e-mail addresses of people who want to keep up with what I’m doing.
So I just more, did it for the placement, honestly, to put it right there on anyone who’s coming to my Twitter profile, can click Subscribe really easily. And yeah, if I did want to send an update out, I looked at Revue, and it just looks like a very simple tool for sending out basic small newsletters.
So I think, the plan right now is, if I do end up mailing the list, I probably will do it through Revue, at least for little one-off things. If I want to get more sophisticated with my newsletter at some point down the line, then I’ll have to cross that bridge, and figure out some kind of automation pipeline to pipe them over, and explain the confusing confirmation e-mail they got, and all that jazz.

Rob Walling:
Did you import your existing list into Revue?

Derrick Reimer:
I did, yeah.

Rob Walling:
Because, I was going to say, if you got 2,300 subscribers in the past few months, I’m going to add it to all …

Derrick Reimer:
No.
Rob Walling:
I don’t care about this stuff.
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah. No, and that was partially so that the numbers would be representative of my current newsletter list size. And I just didn’t want it to start at zero on there. It’d look kind of sad.
Rob Walling:
Join 12 others, right? It’s such a …
Derrick Reimer:
Right, right. But then, also, I was like, “Yeah, I probably will use Revue. If I just want to send a little one-off note. Seems easy enough.”
Rob Walling:
Right. You’re not doing sophisticated automations, or anything. Cool. Well, let’s go to another topic.
I’m curious. You’ve raised funding from TinySeed, and then from, you did a subsequent small raise. You have money in the bank, presumably, and you’re growing quickly. I don’t know all your expenses.
I do know your top line revenue, because you’re a TinySeed company, and I think you’re profitable, and probably throwing off, putting more cash into the bank than you’re pulling out. So how do you think about that, as a mostly bootstrap company that could just become profitable, and just start pulling … You’ve raised your salary, you’ve pulled out dividends, you could do all that, right?
Versus reinvesting at, basically running at break even, maybe you could burn, because you have money in the bank, and going for growth, which is probably a longer … Or it is.
It’s a longer term thing of, well, the growth is what gets you, let’s say, high valuation, in essence. How are you thinking about that?
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s a big topic, and I feel like my thinking on it has … Well, it continues to evolve, to be honest, as the business goes through different phases. But I think where I’ve landed with this is that the key tension is that, I’m both ambitious, but also want to make sure I’m architecting a journey that I can enjoy, and that minimizes my stress as a founder.
I think what you see happening a lot with people who are ambitious, and optimize for growth is one, you see very, very low founder salaries happening. I’m always stunned when I hear these stories of, “Well, I only made 50K for the first six or seven years of my business, and we lived on Ramen.” I just can’t … At the stage I’m at in life, that would create a lot of personal stress, I think, in my life.
Then what you often hear is, folks in that kind of situation then really start to yearn for taking some money off the table and de-risking, maybe selling part of the company, and doing a secondary, or something like that, to reap some of the rewards of what they’ve been building. And I may yearn for that at some point in the future, for sure, if I’m building SavvyCal for a really long time.
But I think a lot of that, for me, can be mitigated by just making sure that one, I’m paying myself a healthy enough salary where I can live comfortably, I can live in the city, I can travel a bit, I’m not watching every single grocery bill, that kind of stuff. Basically, anything beyond that, I’m totally okay with treating as, “This money, this revenue is there, in service of optimizing this asset that I’m building,” and aggressively reinvesting it. So I think that’s, for me, is the balance that I’m seeking to strike.
I do always have the, I think it’s a Jason Fried quote running through my mind, “Calm is in the black.” I think for me, staying profitable, or at borderline profitable, is probably the goal.
I don’t really have an appetite for dipping too far, taking huge bets, where we’re burning a ton of the reserves for a long time. But I know that it’s often the case, that when you get that extra bump in revenue, you find another way to deploy that revenue. And you get back close to break even, or maybe slightly unprofitable, and to me, that’s totally, I think, within the realm of my risk profile.
So yeah, I think that’s kind of how I think of it is, make sure that I’m paying myself enough, where life is not super hard, and I’m not feeling a lot of personal stress, or I’m putting a lot of pressure on personal finances. I think that will give me the energy to go long on the rest of the profits, and make sure I’m reinvesting them.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think that’s a really healthy way to look at it. You often hear me talk about lifestyle bootstrappers, and then, growth bootstrappers, or ambitious, whatever the difference is.
And the lifestyle businesses are awesome. They’re built as cash flow machines, and they have these incredible 70, 80, 90% net margins, where you’re just kicking off cash. It’s a great subscription, it’s a great business model.
It’s the best business model in the world, in my opinion. And then, that growth or ambition of, “I want to build something bigger, but also, I want to build something really valuable, and I don’t ever want to have to sell. Yeah, I want to be ready and able to, if that time comes.”
Something that I tell bootstrappers, or really, just any SaaS founder, or any startup founder, is SaaS multiples, if you do decide to sell, at some point, are … They’re just crazy. They’re high.
It wouldn’t be the best time to sell, right at this instant, given the economy, and all that. But they’re high.
I always give this example of, once you have product market fit, adding 1K of MRR a month is not that hard. You need the leads. It’s just math, right? 1K, 2K.
For every thousand in MRR you add, you’re adding 12K of annual recurring revenue, $12,000. And if an exit multiple, the range is four to eight, four to 10, whatever the range is, but let’s just say five, selling it five times your ARR.
So every month, if you’re adding 1K of MRR, you’re adding $60,000 to your net worth, pretax, right? You have to pay tax on that. But just think about that. Where else can else can we do that in our lives?
If I were to buy a bunch of real estate, yeah, I know there’s tax advantages to this and that, buy stocks, if I buy collectibles, whatever it is, there’s just no other place that you can get that kind of leverage. And I’ll even go further, because the example becomes kind of crazy when, I mean, you remember when we hit the point where Drip was doing, we were adding 5K a month, every month.
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
As you scale up, you do, you add 5K a month, you have 10K a month, and that sounds crazy in the early days. But you just get the flywheels, you get the brand, whatever. 5K a month, 60K ARR, 5X multiple, every month, $300,000 to your network. Obviously, it’s hard work to get there. It’s hard to build a SaaS company, it’s hard to get the product market fit, it’s hard to do all these things.
But once you are there, every month that you wait is literally adding 300K to your net worth. Every six months, if you’re growing at this pace, almost $2 million, and that’s exit multiple. So it’s a little funny money, right?
Not everybody can sell, and I’m not saying that everyone should be, or that that’s the end goal. I do like that it has been, I think, destigmatized in our space.
I think 37signals did the bootstrapping space a little bit of a disservice, in how they used to talk about never selling, and also, about not marketing and not tracking. There’s a lot of things I think they didn’t need to do, that a lot of companies and founders should be doing.
But I do think it’s been destigmatized, because at this point, everybody sells. I didn’t think Adi Pionar, and Josh Pigford, and MailChimp, and who else has sold … We didn’t plan to sell Drip. I mean, it just happens at a certain point, right?
Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Walling:
I won’t say it’s inevitable, but I jokingly say, “Everyone sells, eventually.” And I truly don’t truly mean everyone, so please don’t e-mail me.
But it’s interesting, when you think about it that way, in terms of, if I take, much like Warren Buffet would always agonize over spending a dollar today, because he knew what he could turn that dollar into, in five, 10, 30 years of compound interest. If you listen to his biography called Snowball, he talks about that. He’s super cheap, because he doesn’t think of money today. He thinks of money in 40 years.
That’s I think of SaaS revenue. Again, if it’s a lifestyle business, cool, take all the cash out. But if you are going for that more growth stuff, every $1,000 you take out is $1,000 you’re not using to grow that business. Again.
Well, every K is 60K of value. So yeah, I think that’s something folks should keep in mind, if they haven’t already heard me rant about it.
Derrick Reimer:
That’s a nice succinct way to just describe what it tangibly means to be reinvesting, and increasing the value of the asset. Because I’ve had conversations with founders before, who have really struggled with the notion of, “Do I want to reinvest this? Or should I just pull it out, just dividend it out every quarter, or whatever?”
And they’re looking at this pile of money sitting in the bank, and saying, “No, this is the spoils, I’ve earned this. I’m going to pull it out.”
I’ve tried to have this conversation before, and probably not gotten to the crux of it as well and as succinct as this, where it’s, “You can. You can pull that out now, but I’m basically putting my entire career energy right now into building this asset. That money, if it adds to this recurring revenue machine, will yield so much more in the future.”
I think the balance there is, it doesn’t have to be, you don’t be literally living a eating Ramen lifestyle while you’re building the asset. You kind of can have both, once you get to a certain stage of traction where … That’s where, I think, for me, I just determined early on, it’s important to not be super, super thin on my salary.
That’s the base that I want to get to. And then everything else? It can just be freely reinvested.
Rob Walling:
Glad you called that out, because I was going to say that, too. The flip side of what I said is, you can go too far, you can be a cheap bastard, you can take 1K out a month, live on Ramen, and then your life sucks. You shouldn’t do that either.
So it’s just finding that balance, and this also supposes that, like you, when you’re in this situation where having more money will help you grow faster, because you are deploying money intelligently in marketing experiments with Corey Haines, and other stuff you’re doing in product, you hire a developer. Each of these things is helping you grow faster.
If you can’t do that? I’ve had businesses where they just plateaued, and more money wouldn’t help them grow faster, because they were just in a small niche, they had high churn, whatever it was. And in those cases, then, maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it, but …

Derrick Reimer:
I’d say that’s probably one of my fears is, and I don’t foresee it happening, but it could happen, where you suddenly have more money than ideas coming into the business. I feel like, that’s a risky spot to be in, if you’re trying to really build something meaningful.
If the goal is to make this as meaningful as possible, then that’s a tricky spot, if you don’t know how to deploy the capital coming in the door every month.

Rob Walling:
That’s where having knowledgeable friends, mastermind partners, advisors, investors, or even third parties, marketing strategists like a Corey Haines, like an Asia Arangio, going to people. Look, most of the calls I do with TinySeed founders are around big strategic questions like this, like two in the past two weeks. “I have too much money in the bank. I have 24 months of burn or something, you know what I mean? It’s just, I’m too conservative, and I’m trying to figure out where I should spend this.”
Then it’s like, “Cool. Let’s walk through where you’re spending it now. How big is your team, where are your bottlenecks?” It’s a logic puzzle, and pattern matching for me, because I’m seeing where founders are succeeding.
It’s definitely something, I think, we all encounter. But if you get in that position, you would figure it out, right? Because you have knowledgeable people in your corner who would give you the advice to get past it.

Derrick Reimer:
Those have got to be fun conversations to have, huh?

Rob Walling:
Yeah, they are. I’m living my best life, man.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
This is exactly what I want to be doing right now.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
They’re a hard problem, man. I have office hours twice a week, and I’m exhausted at the end. It’s so taxing, because it’s all your glucose, and it’s like, “I really want to help you make the right decision here.”
We’re just diving in, and it’s like, “All right, tell me all this stuff.” So when I’m done, I’m tapped out, can’t record a podcast today, can’t do whatever. But they’re super meaningful. What’s cool is, it’s working with founders who are getting shit done.
Because the next time I talk to them, they’ve done what we talked about. Versus sometimes, whatever it is, on a podcast, or you meet someone an event, and you give them all this advice. And then they just don’t do anything.
It feels like, “Why did I waste all that good glucose on that? Why did I offer to help, if there’s just going to be excuses why you can’t do it?”
This is something about people, Anar and I talk about this a lot, what are some factors of successful founders? One of them is that they have bias for action.
They do stuff, and even if it’s going to fail, they try a lot of things. And it is fun. I definitely enjoy it.

Derrick Reimer:
I had a question jotted down in my notes, that actually, the last couple times we’ve recorded, it’s just been in my back pocket, I feel like you probably mostly addressed it is, the question was, “Are you scratching your maker itch by being an investor in companies through TinySeed? Or are you missing the SaaS game, being in the arena?”
Rob Walling:
That’s a really good question, man.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
For the most part, I’m not missing the SaaS game. My maker itch now is scratched by recording podcasts. I don’t know if folks have noticed, but over the past year or two, the podcast used to be Mike and I chatting about things, and we would talk through an article, we’d do something.
Now I’m pouring myself into the podcast, like the solo episodes I do, or even conversations like this, where I’m really trying to bring it, the deep stuff, the philosophical and the tactical, and the strategy stuff. I’m trying to bring it more.
I’m also finishing up a book, so that’s very maker-y. It’s brutal and painful. I like having written books, I do not like writing them.

Derrick Reimer:
Yup.

Rob Walling:
But that’s about all this stuff. So I’m trying to bring my ideas there, writing talks, I’m giving talks every couple months.
And then, the advising, the consulting, they’re still really hard problem. Not consulting, but advising and mentorship, right, of TinySeed companies.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
There’s still so many hard problems, and I feel like every week, there’s something new that challenges me to think about it, this whole thing in a different way, of, “Oh, man, I don’t know. I haven’t heard that one before. Now how do we creatively get to a reasonable path forward for you?” So that’s nice.
It is fulfilling, because it’s not just, “Oh, I’m going to give you advice.” I then see the progress, and I see the results of it, even if I don’t do the work myself. But I am still vicariously maybe living a little through the founders.
Because I see the success they had, and I’m able to celebrate. “Man, I was a small part, I was able to play a small part in that.” And that feels good.

Derrick Reimer:
That’s awesome. Yeah, I think you’ve remarked to me before, probably on the podcast, too, that you’ve been able to hone in on what’s the most valuable use of your time? If you’re not behind a mic, or advising a founder, or whatever the short list is, then you’re probably doing the wrong thing.
I think that’s always food for thought for me. Am I using my time in the best way possible? Of course, as an action biased founder, I’m wearing many, many hats, and bouncing between a lot of things. But yeah, there’s a lot of fulfillment that comes from knowing that your time is being used optimally, and you’re obviously still taking on a lot of challenges like these.
Like you said, these are not easy conversations to strategize and problem solve. But getting to deploy everything you’ve learned from a career of building these things has got to be pretty fulfilling.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it really is. It really is. And I’m less stressed day to day than I have been. Even though the stakes, I still see the stakes are high, the stakes for each of you as founders, the stakes we’re raising.
We’re raising venture funds, and we’re writing big checks, and there’s money moving around, and whatever. And there’s always operations and stuff to deal with. But I am less stressed than probably any company I’ve ever run. And I think it’s part of that.
There’s a maturity that I wished I’d found in my early thirties, but it took me a long time. But also I love the work, so it’s good. I’m happy.
I feel like I’m working my best job, living my best life. It feels good, till I go on Twitter… No.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, stay off of Twitter if you want to keep that.

Rob Walling:
No, it’s all good. As we wrap up here, people are saying I should be on TikTok, Derrick, and I don’t want to be on TikTok.

Derrick Reimer:
TikTok? Oh, man.

Rob Walling:
It’s like, “Oh, just be me. You can get a million views by just talking about SaaS, or something.”
It’s like, “Really? Can I? And are those views going to turn …” And I’m just so skeptical about it.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Probably because I really don’t want do it, so I’m coming up with skeptical excuses. What I should do is probably test it out.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
But I downloaded the app, and I cannot bring myself to even create an account. Because I’m like, “Is this a good idea?”

Derrick Reimer:
Man. Yeah, and it seems like you would need to get the right advice on, what is the exact format of video? Is it supposed to be super attention grabbing? Or can it be a little more in-depth?
How do you set yourself up for success on a platform like TikTok? I wouldn’t even know the first …

Rob Walling:
I’d go hire a consultant, is what I would do.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Walling:
Or hire someone, or at least talk to someone who has had success at it in the B2B space, which, as far as I can tell, is zero people.
Because everyone I talk to is always, “Well, but we’re kind of B2C,” or it’s, “We’re B to prosumer,” or whatever. It’s not like, “Oh, so it’s not going after hard …” Or it’s B to wannaepreneur, right?
It’s B to aspiring entrepreneur. Versus, I want to talk about how difficult it is to start a company rather than blow smoke up your ass, and tell you that it’s this easy thing, and you can make all this money online, so …

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I’ve definitely feel the influences of TikTok. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I mean, you’ve probably haven’t spent a ton of time on Twitter recently.
But the algorithm feels to me like it’s been shifting more towards trying to surface viral videos in general. There’s a lot more of that, kind of based on … I don’t even know what they’re basing it on.
They say, “based on your likes,” or whatever, but it’s the secret sauce. And they’re surfacing videos, that most of them are just comedic. And it’s like, “Okay, that’s funny,” whatever.
But also, it just feels slightly strange, because it is a noticeable shift in the type of content. But you can feel the effects of the TikTok format bleeding into other mediums, too, so …

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think so, Instagram, as well. I’m not on there very much, but there’s a lot of TikToks that get re-posted to Instagram, I guess, and …

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Walling:
It is. It’s noticeable. Well, sir, thanks for hanging out with me and chatting.
Again, folks want to keep up with you, Derrick Reimer, on Twitter. Of course, you’re working on savvycal.com.

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Rob Walling:
Thanks for coming back every week, and listening to Startups for the Rest of us. Whether you have listened to six episodes or 600, I hope that you enjoy the time and the thought that I put into this show.
In case you missed it, I was able to wrestle with the RSS feed goblins, and able to get the last 300 episodes of this show now, in the RSS feed. That has always been a problem, because we have full transcripts in our posts, and I was able to, it doesn’t matter technically work around it.
So 300 episodes, which is the max that Apple Podcast allows are in the feed. So if you want to go back and reminisce down memory lane, that’s almost six years of shows, you can go back a lot further than you could prior.
As I said at the top of the show, if you haven’t left a rating or a review, it’d be amazing. Other than that, I’ll be back in your ears again next Tuesday. This is Rob signing off, from Episode 622.

Rob Walling: The third most important metric in SaaS is churn. Churn can be the death of SaaS. Net negative churn is also the cheat code of SaaS. It’s a power up. It’s a cheat code. However we want to classify it, having net negative churn is an incredible, incredible business hack when you have a subscription business.

Welcome back to another episode of Startups With the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling, and I’m going to dive into listener questions today. We’re going to cover SaaS business metrics. Talk about customer pain, choosing that and ways to handle it well. And talk about how to find a good SaaS idea. And then we might even get to the question about transitioning a task level thinker to a project level thinker. Before we dive into that, MicroConf Europe tickets are still on sale. We just have a few left. It looks like we are going to sell out. We have a limited capacity this year. It’s in Malta at the Intercontinental Malta, November 15th through the 17th. Head to microconf.com/europe if you want to join me and other bootstrap, then mostly bootstrap founders. The co-founder of Lemlist, who has bootstrapped his company to eight figures in ARR is one of our speakers, as well as myself and a few others. Head to microconf.com/europe for all the info and to pick up your ticket.

If you want to ask a question to have myself or a guest answer it on this podcast, head to startupsfortherestofus.com, click ask a question in the top nav, or just email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. I love audio questions and video questions, but we’ll answer text questions as well. So let’s dive into my first one. First one is what are the SaaS business metrics that matter the most and why? And so if you were to force me to pick, let’s say two or three metrics, the first one has to be MRR. MRR shows where you are. On the journey from here to there, 5K MRR, 50K MRR, 500K MRR, it shows where you are on your path to growing a company. Second one is month over month growth rate. And you can look at it as a percentage or as an absolute dollar amount.

I like to look at it both ways. I like to look at the absolute dollar amount, because that’s something that I can directly control. And it’s something that if you have a repeatable funnel with the same amount of traffic coming to your website and the same conversion rate, the same conversion to trial, to paid and churn, you can have a pretty predictable month over month growth rate of an absolute dollar amount of 1,000 MRR, 5,000 MRR. And frankly, if you look at the percentage of that as you grow, your percentage month over month growth rate will decrease over time. Because if you’re doing 5,000 a month, a $1,000 growth rate is 20% growth. But by the time you’ve grown to $20,000 a month in MRR, 1% growth rate is 5% growth. So your growth looks like it is declining, and on a percentage basis it is.

But to me, if I’m a mostly bootstrapped founder, growing at 1K or 5K every month predictably, repeatedly, say it’s 5K a month and I’m at 45, then I’m at 50, 55, 60, 65 70, all during that time, my percentage is going down, but that’s still an amazing business. It’s an incredible business. So I look to look at the absolute dollar growth rate because it’s a realistic picture. Dollars are what I can spend to hire. Dollars are what cause me to grow. The percentage is almost, it’s a second order thing. It’s then comparing it to where my monthly recurring revenue is. That’s really what it is. And it’s fine, you can look at that too. And do I want to keep a constant rate of growth or an accelerating percentage of growth? Of course. Of course you do. It’s very, very hard to do. And I think seeing both month over month dollar amount and percentage and looking at both of them, I think can be helpful.

So those two metrics for a SaaS company are what I would call North star metrics. Now I’m going to go through my three high, three low framework, which is where I have six metrics, and you want three of them to be high and three of them to be as low as possible in essence. And really the third most important metric in SaaS is churn. Churn can be the death of SaaS. Net negative churn is also the cheat code of SaaS. You’ve heard me talk about net negative churn here. It’s a power up. It’s a cheat code. However we want to classify it, having net negative churn is an incredible, incredible business hack when you have a subscription business. It just means that as your customers use your product and get value, they add more subscribers, they add more seats, because your pricing has been structured intelligently that as they get more value from the product, they pay you more. That negative turn.

That’s actually called expansion revenue, and we’ll look at that in a minute. But that’s net negative turn. So churn is both the death, but also an amazing cheat code for SaaS. And it’s the first of the three low. Churn, you want to keep as low as possible. If you have 2% churn for a bootstrap SaaS company that’s 2% per month, you’re doing amazing. That’s great churn. 3% is good, and 4% is fine and 5% is not great. It’s okay. But look, once you start looking at 5 or 6% churn, you’re churning half to three quarters of your entire customer base every year. That means you need to be replacing them just to keep your head above water. So 5% a month doesn’t sound that high, but it’s not great. It’s not great churn like 2% is. And then once you’re up at the, you get 7, 8 and above, it’s kind of business on fire. This is where in the span of six months, nine months, your entire business is turning over.

And unless you have a massive, wide funnel and just a huge number of incoming leads, you’re going to plateau pretty early. Usually high churn is due to low price point, customers being more consumerist, or VSMBs, very small businesses where they’re extremely price sensitive, and they cancel, or they go out of business, or they just decide they don’t need your software and they replace you with a Google sheet because it can save $20 a month or whatever. So churn, we could do entire podcast episodes. I have an entire section of my next book. My next book is a spiritual successor to Start Small, Stay Small, which is my first book. And it really is the path of once you have some type of product market fit, getting to seven figures in recurring revenue, building a seven figure, a million dollar, multimillion dollar SaaS company. And I have an entire section on churn and how to think about it. And it’s so important.

When I say it can be the death of SaaS companies, it is the death of many SaaS companies. It’s true. And churn is also an indication of how much product market fit, or it can be an indication of how much product market fit you have. So that was the first of the three low. Cost to acquire a customer, something you want keep low. But it’s a bit paradoxical. You don’t want high cost to acquire a customer it’s C-A-C, or CAC, as we’ll say. You don’t want a high CAC. But at the same time, if you can spend more to acquire, if you have the budget, if you have basically the annual contract value to support high CAX, then you probably should spend more if it can allow you to grow faster, if it can allow you to find better customers and it allows you to do more marketing approaches. I have looked at all the B2B SaaS marketing approaches that exist, and give or take there are about 20. There are not hundreds. There’s about 20.

Some of that is high level grouping, like SEO or organic search is one. And you could think of organic search in Google, in YouTube, WordPress plugin repository on Amazon. So there’s more approaches. But in terms of generalized B2B SaaS marketing approaches, almost exactly 20 in my experience that I have listed out and I talk about. And when you can only spend $100 to acquire a customer because your monthly fee or your annual contract value are so low that that’s all you can afford, then you can do two or three, maybe four marketing approaches, and the rest are too expensive for you. And then when you have kind of a mid-level annual contract value, let’s say you’re at 5,000 to 10,000, you can do about, I think it’s 9 or 10 depending. And then when you have a cost acquire of 20,000 or more, and maybe even 15 or whatever, you can do almost all of them. You can do in-person events. You can do cold outrage. These are things that are really time intensive and inexpensive.

And so your cost to acquire, while you want to drive it low, the higher you can push it, the faster you will grow. And realize that if you are in a position where you want to sell your company at some point, whether it’s this year, three years from now, any acquirer who’s going to buy a SaaS company is going to value, most likely value growth over profitability. This is if you’re in seven or eight figures. If you’re selling to a value buyer who pays based on your net profit or your seller discretionary earnings, then of course maximize profit, keep your CAA low, do all that. But if you are building the more the ambitious bootstrapper and you’re looking to get to 2, 3, 4 million, maybe 10 million ARR before you sell, the buyers at that level, they’re not buying it for financial in almost all cases.

If you’re growing fast, they know that they can figure out profitability. SaaS is incredibly profitable. It’s an amazing business model. But growth is hard to come by. Profit in SaaS can be engineered. So that was a cost to acquire. And sales effort, you might think of this as sales cost, cost per sale, you want this to be low. And this is the difference between a low touch, mostly zero touch software funnel, like snappa.com has Chris Gimmer was on the show a couple years back talking about how, yeah, it’s just self serve. And the price points, I forget what they are, it’s 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month, so that you’re not going to spend a bunch of time doing demos and doing a multi demo close, versus sometimes your sales effort is months long, and maybe it’s a six call close, where you’re convincing a number of people at a Fortune 500 company to buy.

If you’re doing that much sales effort, obviously your cost to acquire goes up, your timelines for closing sales go up, you have to have a price point that justifies that. You cannot be doing five call closes over the course of several months and charging $100 a month. It’s just the economics don’t work out. The two. Businesses are different. You have to raise that price to 500 a month, 1,000 a month, 5,000 a month in order to justify a lot of the sales effort. And then the three high in this framework, remember three high, three low, so the three high are annual contract value, I’ve already talked a little bit about this, but this is how much you charge. And this dictates a lot of things. Usually the higher your annual contract value, the lower your churn. The higher your annual contract value, the more you can spend to acquire customers, which then gives you not just the ability to have more money and hire more people, but you can try a lot more marketing approaches because you can afford to experiment with them.

The second of the high metrics is expansion revenue. Touched on this earlier with net negative churn. But expansion revenue is when people get more value out of your product and so they pay you more. It’s something I talk about a lot. But expansion revenue is amazing. If I were to ever start a SaaS again, I would want expansion revenue. That doesn’t mean every SaaS can or should have expansion revenue. And there are plenty of great SaaS businesses built with minimal expansion revenue, but it makes it just a little harder. And lastly, referrals. You might think of this as virality. If you can build it in, that’s perfect. That’s the ideal way to do it. Referrals is when people are word of mouth referring you, and you can ask for those referrals. This is a hard one to engineer. This is not something that you can go out, and like you do SEO, you do cold outreach and you can kind of build that up in scale.

Word of mouth and referrals doesn’t scale per se. It isn’t usually something you as a founder can control, but it’s certainly something you want to encourage and you want to ask for, because having a lot of referrals is an amazing way, very low cost to acquire on referrals. My next question is from Devon. This was in MicroConf Connect. If you haven’t checked out MicroConf Connect, we have more than 3000 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders in a Slack channel, in a Slack workspace, I guess is the technical term. And head to microconfconnect.com if you want to be part of that. It’s a free community that we heavily moderate, and it’s a great conversation happening in there. So Devon’s question was, “I’m actively picking customer pain for my company’s segment, as opposed to competitor pain. Do you have any general observations about SaaS for non-technical customers?”

You probably heard me talk about this before, customer pain is when you have customers that are going to be maybe more difficult to sell to, more difficult to support. Competitor pain is when you have a lot of competition, but usually the customers are going to be more tech savvy. The worst is when you have both competitor pain and customer pain. I would personally probably not enter a market like that. But some amazing businesses are built with customer pain. You think any business that serves, realtors, probably a lot of legal software, serving construction firms. And it’s not just about being less technical, but I think that is a big piece of it. When I watch my mom use a computer, she uses it in a very different way than you or I do. And it’s almost a tentativeness that she’s going to break something by clicking a link, or just very uncertain and really can’t figure out what you and I would consider obvious UX paradigms, obvious things that happen in software.

And so picking customer pain, realize that. One is your going, no matter how good your UX is, you’re always going to have folks who don’t understand it. And you just need to admit that there’s a problem is the first step, and realizing that I can’t imagine you’re ever going to conquer that. The second thing is you need to be priced accordingly. When I think through the companies in TinySeed or in MicroConf who have customer pain, they usually have a lowest price plan around 150 ish to $200 a month. And frankly, their average revenue per account of the ones that I’m invested in, I’m invested in over 100 SaaS companies, they’re higher than that. The average revenue per account is 3, 4 or 500, because you need to justify all the time that you are going to spend to close a deal, that you’re going to spend to onboard and that you’re going to spend to support. Customer pain folks often want to be able to talk to you on the phone, and that’s something you’re going to have to figure out if that’s something you’re willing to do.

Not saying you have to, but I’m saying you’re going to get more requests for it than you will than if you were serving developers, for example. Live chat may work, but even again, if you were supporting my mom or my dad, they don’t type very well, for example, and so being on the phone is an easier thing. So consider that. Price point, as I’ve already said to support. I think you should have some type of concierge onboarding essentially that people can pay for, because if let’s say a realtor has a bunch of contacts in MailChimp or in some old system, they don’t know what a CSV is. They don’t know how to export that and then import it. And if there’s any problems with the import. You’re going to build an amazing import tool for CSVs, and someone’s going to figure out how to screw it up because it’s just what happens. When you don’t understand a paradigm, it feels overwhelming and complicated.

And so that’s the type of thing where if you build an internal tool, where even if the tool’s available in their account and it takes you 10 minutes to export, reorder some columns, upload, that can save them an hour of frustration. And so charging for onboarding, I almost think of it like almost product walkthroughs. Live documentation, I guess I would say of, hey, your setup and this is how you’re going to use this, I think is probably going to be worth your while. One more thing I would say, if you’re going to tackle customer pain, realize that a lot of these folks are not going to want to dig through a knowledge base. They’re not going to search and try to find a solution to the problem. They’re going to want one-on-one proactive help. And so I would consider having a weekly office hour, and whether that office hour, maybe that starts with a 10 minute demo, one feature in the app or one section just to get everyone on the same page, hey, this is how you send an email. This is how you prune your list, whatever.

And then it’s open Q&A and you do it as a group. There’s no one-on-one, unless you want to maybe you charge extra for a one-on-one support package where people can reach out to you, but you are then able to scale that in a way that can be difficult. It can be challenging if you have 10 people all wanting to do one-on-one calls with you. It’s possible. If you want to have a dedicated account manager, either that’s an add-on or you’re just expensive enough, you build that into your pricing. But I think thinking about doing group office hours or doing office hours in some way that allows you to help people in a scalable fashion is something that I would be thinking about. So it’s a great question, Devon. Thanks for asking and I hope that was helpful. My next question is from Paseedu on YouTube, and it’s how to find a good SaaS idea. This is a big question and it’s one that a lot of people ask.

I think the answer is there isn’t one way. There’s no blueprint to doing this. Everybody comes about ideas in different ways. What I would say is don’t think that this brilliant idea is going to jump out at you if you think about it long enough. I do have an idea notebook where I’m constantly writing things down that I’m thinking about, and sometimes I’ll go back through and be like, that was a genius idea. When I wrote, why C for bootstraps back in 2011, 2012, that’s what TinySeed became 7, 6, 7 years later. So that was definitely a winner for me, but a lot of ideas you’re going to have just aren’t going to be that good. So I think having a lot of ideas is one way to think about it. So many people get stuck at this phase, and I think analysis paralysis is just, it ties in, and I think you should probably move towards validating rather than getting stuck on this stuff.

One expression people throw around is scratching your own itch. And that just means solving your own problem or solving a problem you have. I don’t think that’s a bad way to go, but it’s not the only way to go. And in fact, I’m going to take a little tangent here, scratching your own itch is not guarantee for success. And in fact, people, I think ascribe a little too much importance to that, because I see just as many companies failing with a developer is scratching their own itch, founders scratching their own itch as when they’re not. I see no difference. And when I hear someone say that their success was because they scratched their own itch, but when you look at the company, it’s like, no, the success happened because you had an amazing network in this space and an audience, and you had $100,000 of your own money, and you hit a market that was expanding in just the right way with hated competitors, and you were able to piggyback on the success of another bootstrapper.

There was all these reasons. And you executed well, and you built a great product, and you marketed it, and you used your network and et cetera, et cetera. Those are the reasons why you were successful. Scratching your own itch was one decision that you made five years ago, and if you hadn’t done that, I still think you would’ve been successful if you had picked an idea that didn’t scratch your own itch, but that still had all those attributes. It had your unfair advantages that you could take advantage of, in essence. So I’m not saying don’t scratch your own itch. I’m saying don’t think that’s the only way to do it, and don’t think that is somehow some key to success, because the world is littered with indie hacker projects from people who scratched their own itch. And they were the one of one, they were the one customer that needed that. Did no validation.

And even if other people need it, are they willing to pay for it? Can you reach them at scale? There’s so many questions that you needing a product doesn’t prove, it doesn’t answer. The world only needs so many project management, bug tracking and to-do list applications. And so just before you scratch your own itch, I would consider really validating the idea. Drip was actually scratching my own itch, but I went out and validated it and figured out other people would pay for the initial version before we went and built it. So beyond that, one thing that I start with is what are my unfair advantages? Do I have an amazing network in a space? Do I have an audience in a space? Am I early to a space that I believe is growing? Then I would take advantage of those and I would limit the idea to take advantage of that.

And in fact, I didn’t do that for many, many years. Drip was the first one that took any type of advantage of my audience or my network. And it was the fastest growing and most successful software company I ever launched. And I think that was part of it. I also think that it was because I entered a fast growing space with hated competitors. I executed well. I had a couple hundred thousand dollars from HitTail being thrown off. And there’s a bunch of reasons why that was successful. So with MicroConf, we have the State of Independent SaaS Report where we survey between 500 and 1500 bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders each year, and we ask them how they came up with their ideas. And we start with the assumption that you’re selling B2B SaaS, and so you’re solving a problem. Start with a problem.

And scratching your own itch is a problem that you had. But you can also find problems at your day job. Maybe it’s not a problem that you have, maybe it’s a problem the company has. You have to be careful with intellectual property here, but let’s put that aside for now. Problem at your day job. Problem of a spouse, a relative or a colleague. Poor customer experience that you yourself had. And this is how CodeSubmit was founded. You heard the founders here maybe six months ago, but they launched CodeSubmit out of the founder’s desire to never solve a contrived programming exercise during a job interview again. They didn’t want contrived, so they built these real coding challenges. It’s codesubmit.io. It was a poor customer experience, poor candidate experience. And those four things that I just listed, scratch your own edge, day job, spouse, relative, or colleague or customer experience make up, it’s like 85%, 90% of the respondents of how they came up with their idea.

So those are the ones that I’d be looking at. There are a few, one is I acquired the product, which is 2 or 3% of respondents. Then there was one, I copied a competitor, which I thought that was kind of interesting. And then there’s another one that’s very low single digits, 3%, 4% is finding a problem online. So it’s like Facebook groups, Cora threads, private Slack groups. It’s an approach you can take, it’s just not one that a lot of the indie SaaS founders take or have had success with, at least according to the data we have in the State of Independent SaaS Report. So those are some ways I’d be thinking about it, Paseedu, in terms of finding SaaS ideas. Last thing I’ll say is I talk about the stair step approach. If you haven’t Googled this, go to Stair Step Approach to Bootstrapping and read the article.

In it, I link to an article on rocket gems, where there are 60 plus SaaS app stores or marketplaces. So these are the Shopify app store, the WordPress plugin repository, the Chrome app store, Heroku, Salesforce. I’m sure Oracle has one. There’s this big list of app stores. And these are things that if you’re in a step one or step two and you probably shouldn’t build a full-blown SaaS, I would be looking at ways that I could take apps in one app store that didn’t exist in another and figure out ways to adapt them. This is Rip, Pivot and Jam from Dan and Ian on Tropical MBA. It’s not trying to be too clever, because I think people get really clever with their ideas and they want to build something just incredibly novel and solve just a problem that no one has a solution in search of a problem is the term for this.

And it’s the worst when you’re a developer. I did this 15, 20 years ago where a new technology would come out, and suddenly in the browser you could drag things in a web browser. Can you imagine? Oh my gosh. Ajax, Dynamic and DHTML, that’s a solution, so I’m going to go find a problem to try to solve with this. That’s not a terrible way to go, but I never found any problems with it because it was the wrong way to go about it. It didn’t start with a problem and then say, what’s the best tool to solve this? And coming back to this sentiment of being a little too clever, I think product people, and makers and engineers often do want to build something a little too novel. If you look at some of the incredible successful, whether they’re bootstrapped or not, SaaS products, a lot of them, what was Drip? Drip was an ESP that added automation.

There were already email service providers out there. They added automation a year after, two years after Drip did. There were already marketing automation providers. All the automations that Drip did, not all of them, but like 80% of them were accomplished by these larger enterprise tools. We were not being this massively innovative, I’m going to build something brand, brand new. But we did it in a way that was easy to use, we made it super approachable and we made it cheaper. So when everyone else was charging 300 to $3,000 a month, our lowest price was $50. So the entry level to get into email automation is what made Drip incredibly successful, is it just lowered that bar to entry. You didn’t need a $2,000 custom onboarding like a lot of our competitors did. You did not need a consultant to run it, which a lot of our customers did. You could use it yourself and you could pay that 50, or 100, or $200 and get a tremendous amount of value.

So the innovation was perhaps in the business model or in just bringing it to a new space and making it more approachable. There are tons of apps like that. Even the idea of taking a piece of software that’s generalized and making it more specific to a niche, like CRM software exists, where I’m kind of managing my list of customers and I’m doing sales. What about what the founder of Builder Prime did, where he said, “I’m going to make CRM software for home improvement contractors?” And that’s what he did. Builderprime.com. It’s a TinySeed company. It’s not some incredible innovation. I would call Drip a relatively boring business. I would call Builder Prime a boring business. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I actually mean it as a compliment when I say it. Boring businesses are great.

It’s not this constant sprint to stay ahead of the bleeding edge. You’re building a software that solves a desperate pain point for customers who pay you real money on a recurring basis. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. So thanks for the question, Paseedu. I hope that was helpful. Last question of the day. I really liked this one, actually. It’s from Twitter. It’s from Noah Tucker. And they ask, “how can I assist an employee in transitioning from a task level to a project level thinker? I’d be super interested in any insights you have.” I had not thought of this question, but it’s an obvious and a really good one, actually. If you’ve heard me talk about task level, project level and owner level thinkers, it’s just a progression you’ll probably make during your career.

When I was young, I was a task level thinker. You could give me a task, I would do it really well. But I didn’t think at that next higher level where I could actually run projects, manage freelancers, get things done by a deadline, do a lot of complicated things. And then eventually you might transition, everyone doesn’t, you might transition up to become an owner level thinker, where you’re not just thinking about projects, but you’re actually thinking 6 months, 12 months out. You have vision and you’re executing at maybe an even higher level. So transitioning someone from a task level to a project level thinker, I think it’s something that in your career, if you’re a good boss, if you’re a good mentor, good manager, good leader, think you’re going to have to do this. And the way I would do it is I would look at my process for managing projects.

So if I do it in Google Sheets, or I do it in Notion, or Trello, I would then take my task level thinker and I would say, you’re going to manage your first project. And it’s going to be a super simple project. I’m managing projects with 50 or 100 steps. You’re going to have five. Here’s my Notion template. Here’s my Google Sheet. Here’s whatever tool I’m using to manage it and the thought process that I put behind it, so that I know who’s doing what, what the status is of everyone. Here’s how I get updates. Here’s how I track deadlines and report back. Here’s the system that I have so that I can function as a project level thinker. Because I’m going to be honest, most people, including myself, we don’t have it innately in us to do these things well, and so we need systems to help us do these things well.

And so I would show a task level thinker, here’s how I manage projects. Here’s the tool. Here’s the thought process. And now we are going to touch base together two times a week, five times a week, maybe it’s a daily standup where you report on the status. And we look at your task board, your Notion board, Trello board, and you show me where things are and who’s doing what. And that is to teach that person the discipline of they have to revisit and come back to these tasks over and over and over. Because if you’re managing freelancers on a project, oftentimes you’ll ask them to do something and then they just never report back. And so you need some way to close that loop and to get back to them two days, three days later, hey, pinging you again. Haven’t heard back. You’re trying to teach the good habits that you’ve learned as a project level thinker to this task level thinker.

And I would simply do it as almost an apprenticeship. Let me shadow you while you manage this relatively simple project. And something with five tasks or five steps is a great size. If you don’t have any small projects, I might look at grabbing a lower priority project, not making a project up, because that feels contrived, but looking at some lower priority ones that are just simpler and they can get on board. And then the next one has 10. The next one has 20. The next one has 50. And you’re mentoring them and teaching them along the way. And what you might find is some people, funny, I’ve talked about my mom twice on this podcast, but she used to say, “I’m great at doing tasks, but I just, anything complicated, and big processes and projects, that’s just not my thing.” And you may find that some people either don’t want to or just aren’t naturally good at it. Can’t follow the systems, whether you call it, they aren’t type A enough, whatever, whatever the term is, some people, that’s going to happen.

And you’re going to find that maybe they are amazing individual contributor, but they shouldn’t be a task level contributor. And that’s okay, as long as you have that role for them and as long as you know that and they understand it. But I think a lot of people that you hire will probably have a lot of not only aspiration, but talent if you’re hiring well. And you’ll see that you can, in fact, with a growth mindset in mind, teach someone to go from a task level to project level thinker. So that’s all we have time for today. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m at Rob Walling on Twitter. If we are not linked up, let’s do it. And this is at Startups Pod as well, if you want to see the weekly video that we tweet, which is usually a 90 second snippet from every episode. And a reminder, there still are a few MicroConf Europe tickets available. It’s in Malta, November 15th through 17th. And it’s microconf.com/europe. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 619. I’ll be back in your ears again next Tuesday morning.

Rob: We have a time and a place for MicroConf Europe 2022. It’s going to be from November 15th through the 17th at the Intercontinental in Malta. This will be a limited capacity event. It’s going to be smaller than previous MicroConf Europes due to a number of factors. It’s definitely something that if you want to go to Malta, to MicroConf Europe in November, you’re going to want to head to microconf.com/europe for more details and to buy your ticket. 

In terms of speakers. I, of course, will be speaking per usual and we have Guillaume Moubeche, he’s the founder and CEO of Lemlist, which is a company that has bootstrapped to eight figures in ARR. Hope to see you in Malta from November 15 through the 17th, that’s micrococonf.com/europe. 

Welcome back once again to Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling. This week, I speak with Sam Dogen. He’s the founder of the Financial Samurai, which is one of the longest-running and most popular personal finance blogs or news websites. He writes all the content himself. You’ll actually hear about that in the interview. 

He’s written, I believe, 2500 essays/blog posts in the past 13 years. Just an incredible example of relentless execution. He’s also written a book called Buy This, Not That that we dig into. We talked quite a bit about achieving financial freedom personally, about how to think about money, and a lot of really great mindset stuff in this episode from Sam. 

Before we dive into that, we get a new review in the Apple podcast from Adarcus. Five stars and they say, “Practical and relatable advice for all entrepreneurs. Startups for the Rest of Us truly educates and inspires with each topic and guest. The show is a must listen for anyone considering stepping into the entrepreneurial space. Please keep up the incredible work.” Thank you so much, Adarcus for that review.

If you haven’t left us a rating, you don’t even need to leave a review. You can go click the five stars and wherever you consume this podcast, we’d really appreciate it, or log in to the Apple podcast. I believe we’re at about 940-something worldwide ratings. You don’t even have to write anything. You can just click the five stars and I would love to get to that 1000-rating mark. With that, let’s dive into my conversation with Sam Dogen.

Sam Dogen, thanks for joining me on the show. 

Sam: Hey, Rob, thanks for having me. 

Rob: I was mentioned to you offline. I came about your book because of the Tropical NBA podcast. A long-time fan of Dan and Ian. I heard Dan interview you and I was intrigued, so I went and bought the audiobook, as I’m apt to do. People know I’m an audiobook addict. I have almost 900 audiobooks, I think it is in my Audible account. 

Buy This, Not That is not one of them. If folks want to jump to the end. Your book is called Buy This, Not That. You’re the Financial Samurai. What I like about your book is that it isn’t a lot of typical advice. I’ve read all the personal finance books, both from the old guard from the 1990s and early 2000s, and then there’s this new wave of bloggers and podcasters talking about it. And you start to hear the same advice over and over, which I think is good, but you have a lot of stuff in your book that I hadn’t heard elsewhere. 

I want to kick us off by looking a little bit at the 4% rule. The 4% rule for folks who don’t know, do you want to define it really quickly, like where it came about and what it means? Then I want to talk about your sentiments and mine around it. 

Sam: The 4% rule was devised in the 1990s by Bill Bengen, a retirement researcher, who said that if you withdraw at a 4% rate, you will unlikely run out of money for the next 30 years in retirement and that has been a great rule. 

The inverse of 4% is 25X. If you can accumulate a net worth equal to 25 times your expenses, you’re financially independent. I don’t agree with the 4% rule at all, not at all, but it’s because I left in 2012 from my day job, so I’m a practicing retiree. I’m not a researcher retiree who has a nice paycheck and a pension. I’m actually living through this. 

Then two, since the 1990s, the risk-free rate of return, which is the ten-year bond yield, has come down from 5% to 6% to now 2.8%. Back in the 1990s, when he came up with a 4% rule, of course you wouldn’t run out of money if you could invest your money at a risk-free rate of return of 5%–6%. Over the past 30 years, many things have changed, including the Internet or more globalization, and the rates have come down. I disagree with the rule and I can tell you what a better rule is. 

Rob: Let’s stick into that. 

Sam: If you want to achieve financial independence, you need to have, I believe, enough investment income to cover your basic living expenses. You don’t have to work if you don’t want to, you can do whatever you want. Instead of using the 4% rule or the inverse 25X expenses, use a multiple off of your income. If you use a multiple off of your income, you cannot cheat your way to financial independence, which is what I see a lot of people do. 

It’s up to everyone to decide what it is they want to do, but you can’t suddenly say, I’m going to slash all expenses down to $20,000 a year, eat ramen noodles, and just drink water, that’s it. Boom, I’m financially independent. If you use a multiple based on income, it always forces you to continuously save and invest as your income grows, which is hopefully for most of us. 

Rob: I have similar sentiments around the 4% rule, but I think for different reasons. It’s based on the Trinity study. What they did is they looked back at returns, I think from the 1920s to the 1930s until essentially present day. It was like 80–90 years of returns. They did a Monte Carlo simulation and they said—we’re getting deep in the weeds here. I like this, though—it was like 80% or 90% of the years between those two if you retired that year, then you would last 30 years. 

There was a good chunk of years where the sequence of returns would have screwed you. Meaning, if you retired right before 2008–2009, your investments get cut in half or more, you don’t have enough for 30 years. Even then, the percentage they were using was pretty high. It was like 8% or 9%. That’s the average over that long term which sounds great until you look at what expected returns were like. 

In 2016, I sold a company. I had a ton of cash come into my personal bank account. Expected returns for stock at that point, the expected ten year returns were 4% because valuations were higher. When I looked at 4% returns of equities, that’s not risk-free, that’s equities. That’s if I was 100% of equities. I was like, there’s no chance the 4% rule makes sense I would say in this day and age, but in this economic climate, that was 2016 or that was 15 or 20 years ago.

When I started looking at what it would take for me to have enough money in the bank to never have to work again? I was like what about the 2.5% rule or the 3% rule? I just started jacking that number down, meaning I needed more cash in the bank. It’s just a mental cushion that I had. 

Sam: Instead of 25X expenses, my recommended target is 20 times your average annual gross income. So $100,000 gross income, $2 million and so forth.

Rob: You touched on this earlier, but you said, that way you can’t cheat your way to it. Let’s talk about FIRE real quick and define it. Financial independence, retire early. What is the FIRE movement? 

Sam: It’s a movement that I think I helped Kickstart in 2009 during the bottom of the financial crisis. I literally started financialsamurai.com in July 2009 because I thought I was going to get blown out. I lost 35% of my net worth in 6 months that took 10 years to build. 

FIRE is basically an idea where you save and invest aggressively so you have enough passive income to cover your basic living expenses. The more your living expenses can be covered, in other words, the better your lifestyle that it can provide. Then there’s just different degrees of FIRE when you go up to a fat FIRE. 

I’ve noticed that since 2009, the definition has changed a lot, where there are all these different types of subfires because everybody’s on a different path to financial independence and it’s actually really hard and takes a long time to save and invest your way to generate enough passive income. 

You have these new terms that come up to fit someone’s stage which is totally fine because you need the motivation. At the end of the day, you can’t lie to yourself about your own financial situation. I hope people just focus on the basics of enough passive investment income to cover your living expenses. 

Rob: That’s an issue I’ve had with FIRE. I don’t know if listeners of the show know this, but if I was not like a startup bootstrapper blogger type podcaster, I would be personal finance. That is my second love—personal finance or investing. I sneak a personal finance or investing episode under the show about every six months. That’s about what the audience will allow.

I’ve struggled with FIRE and you know what? To each their own. If it works for people, that’s great. I struggled with it a lot because when I started hearing about it, I was 35. I had two kids, a mortgage, and frankly, the people who I heard talking about FIRE are like a 24-year-old with really low expenses. This comes back to cheating. It’s like I can live on $15,000 a year because I have two roommates and I don’t run my air conditioner and I only eat Top Ramen. 

I’m always like, yeah, I guess that’s not a life I want to live. I’d rather work at that point and not live like that. I kept hearing those stories and I was like this isn’t appealing at all. The idea of retiring early was appealing, but the idea of doing it almost like I’m in prison, I’m living on bread and water. This is dumb. That was always my issue with it. 

Now I’m hearing, like you said, there’s regular FIRE which is where people “cheat” their expenses down to $20,000 a year or $30,000 a year, which, look, of course that’s possible, but it’s not a life I think a lot of us want to live. Then there’s fat FIRE, which is where it’s like $100,000 or $150,000 a year. Whatever I need to live. I just need a lot more money saved. Then Barista FIRE, I saw in your book, I’d never heard that term, but it’s basically where you keep some type of side hustle. Is that the idea? Or do you still have income coming in from a day job type thing? 

Sam: Well, the idea is that you work, let’s say at Starbucks, you’ll get healthcare insurance. Right now, my family pays $2200 a month in unsubsidized health care insurance because we don’t have a job. That’s the idea, to get some income going, and to have that healthcare benefit. 

Rob: That is a crying shame and it’s something that, if you’re not in the US, you don’t realize how catastrophic our health insurance system is for entrepreneurs. I run TinySeed. We funded 80 entrepreneurs, 80 companies, I’ve invested in 20 others. I’ve over 100 companies invested and one of the biggest issues with these early stage bootstrap founders is I don’t want to lose my health insurance because it’s $2000 a month to get it. How are we going to fix that? That’s not the topic for today, but do you have any thoughts on that? You’ve obviously been impacted by our health system. 

Sam: Strategically, understand that if you have an income that is 400% or less of the federal poverty level limit, you can get subsidized healthcare insurance. What actually happens is a lot of the FIRE folks will actually not have a lot of income. That’s only four times at most from the federal poverty limit. The federal poverty limit per person is something like $13,000–$14,000 per person. Again, that’s the lean lifestyle you would be living if you wanted subsidized health care. 

The other solution is, as an entrepreneur, you start your business, you get a group health care plan, and then you deduct that as an expense. If your effective tax rate is 25%, then it’s 25% off let’s say $2000 a month for a family. That’s the way you can use it. It’s an expense, but it’s still a lot of money. 

Rob: That’s interesting. I didn’t know any of that. You’re bringing that in. You are obviously someone who’s been doing it. With Financial Samurai, because it started as a blog, are you still actively blogging or do you now have staff that blog on the site? 

Sam: No, starting 2009, I’ve written 99% of the content, published three times a week, every single week, without fail, since July 2009. My wife edits my content as well as my father, and she does the backend, the taxes and all that. We try to keep as lean as possible, which is just my wife and me. In that way we don’t have staff, we don’t have to manage anybody. There’s no turnover.

We decided a long time ago to go the lifestyle route versus the big payout route because at the end of the day, why are we doing a business? I wanted to do a business because I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted. I didn’t want to have schedules. I didn’t want to manage people, or get told what to do at all, or count out any shareholders who wanted a meeting or an update. That was our plan. 

Rob: That makes sense. Folks who listen to this podcast know that my definition of success or my definition of personal happiness, is having freedom, purpose, and relationships. At any given time in my career, there was a time when I had freedom and I had sold a company and I was working on an autopilot cash flow business, bringing in $30,000 a month. I was totally free to do whatever I wanted and I was incredibly bored. 

I didn’t have a purpose. I lost my professional purpose, which is something that I need. I need to be learning. It’s a personality thing. Then relationships, I think, are self explanatory of healthy friends and family relationships. 

It sounds like you have had freedom for quite some time. Has it ever gotten boring for you? The reason I ask this is because this podcast has run for 615 episodes over 12 years. I started a blog in 2005 that I did for about six years and I stopped because I got tired of it. There are certain things over the years, like I get tired of businesses and I sell them and move on, but that’s a personality thing that’s not everyone. 

I’m curious if you’ve had moments where you’ve thought, I’d love to work on something new or I want to do something else. Or is it like three posts a week not a grind, and it’s just something you love doing. 

Sam: First, I made a promise to publish three times a week for 10 years to see how things would turn out because I generally feel that if you can stick with things long enough, good things will happen. After the 10th year of doing it, I said oh, I can sell the site or just chill out now. And I developed a muscle, just like breathing, where if I can breathe forever, I can write forever. 

Three times a week is perfect cadence because it’s about 15 hours a week of writing, so that gives me 2 hours a day of writing purpose. I believe the ultimate amount of time to work a week is about 20 hours. 

Once I had my son in 2017, I got more motivated again. I don’t know if it’s like DNA evolution where once you have children, you just get pumped up to want to grind harder and provide more. I decided, you know what? Maybe I’ll make another 15 year commitment to publishing three times a week, because I think that the world is a really competitive and really brutal and beautiful place and I worry about my children. 

What if they can’t get into a good school? What if they can’t get a good job? I always thought, well, let me run Financial Samurai until they’re in their teens, teach them everything I know about communication skills—written and oral—marketing, finance, investing, real estate, and give them those tools. 

If they are spit out by society, they’re rejected from everywhere, they can’t get a job, at the very least, they can come back to work for dad and maybe take over the business one day. I’m starting to think about the future. 

Rob: You don’t just think about the future. You planned a decade ahead and now you’re looking 15 years out. Man, hats off to you because when I plan for the future, I look at next year, maybe two years, definitely, but you committed to three posts a week so let’s just say 150 posts a year for 10 years.

Right from the start, you’re like I’m calling a shot. I’m going to write 1500 posts. I’m committed. That’s crazy. Is that a personality thing? Is that just how you think? 

Sam: It’s just commitment. I feel like I’ve seen everybody who has actually succeeded at anything, they just stick with it. I’m not very smart. I didn’t get great SAT scores, they were quite mediocre. I didn’t go to elite private school, but I saw the people who succeeded. I was like wow, you just have to stick with it. You can’t forecast what’s going to happen, but sooner or later, something good will happen if you stick with things. 

I plan to live for another 15–20 years. I just want to live until my kids find someone that loves them as much as I love them and then maybe I can die and then be peaceful. During that time, I might as well work on Financial Samurai and teach them what I know because I think that’s our duty as parents. 

Robb: That’s crazy. How old are your kids? You have a five year old and a? 

Sam: Five-and-a-half and two-and-a-half. That’s why I think 15 or 20 years, hopefully they’ll understand the waste of life by then. 

Rob: That’s cool. I have two kids as well, 16 and 12. When they were 5–7, I started showing them—I don’t know if you’ve heard of them—these videos on YouTube are called Cha-Ching. There are a whole series of cartoon videos that animated to music. Check it out. 

It’s great. They’re 2–3 minute videos and there are 10 or 15 of them. Each one covers entrepreneurship and one covers just money, earn, save, spend, and donate. There are just all these fun things. 

Anyway, I’m saying it for you, but you already know all this stuff. For folks who are listening who have kids, it was a fun thing at once or twice a day, and I love the idea. I didn’t have money education as a kid. Certainly, they didn’t teach anything in school, and my parents were busy working and just trying to pay the bills. All the money education I got was on my own. I sought out some magazines. This is before the Internet existed, but realistically, it was like Money Magazine and whatever personal finance books I could scrape from the library. 

What was your path? Did you have a mentor, someone like a parent who taught you or did you go out and just self educate? 

Sam: My father was my mentor. I remember I think it was my sophomore year in high school, he sat me down at the breakfast table, showed me the back of a newspaper, and educated me on what these tickers were and what the movements were. That was really the start of it. 

I always wanted to be wealthy because I had friends—poor friends and rich friends—but the rich friends always were the entrepreneurs with the mansion in the hills, with the nice cars, and the chauffeur. I was like, wow. Then my poor friends were just minimum wage laborers, so the dichotomy was really eye-opening when I was growing up in Malaysia as a middle school student. 

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t have the courage, I guess, and then the lack of options because once I graduated from college, I was able to get the job at Goldman Sachs in New York City, which was a top investment bank at the time, and it still is. It was too risky for me to say no, especially after 55 interviews. 

I was like, okay, I’m going to go the tried and true route. Try to go for it for 10, or 15, or maybe 18 years. My original plan was to grind it out until age 40 and then have enough capital and have enough courage to try to be an entrepreneur and do something on my own. 

In the end, I ended up leaving several months before my 35th birthday because I was able to negotiate a severance that paid for 5–6 years of living expenses, which was something like in other words, being able to work until age 40. 

Rob: Tell me more about that because you mentioned that a few times, I think, in the interview and maybe in your book. When you quit, you don’t get a severance. How did this happen? What was the story? 

Sam: Fundamentally, please understand that if you quit, yeah, you don’t get a severance and you’re probably not eligible for unemployment benefits for 26 weeks. What I saw during the global financial crisis was rounds after rounds of layoffs and then some of my friends were laid off and I said, how are you? Is everything okay? Can I try to get you a job where I work? They said, I’m okay and they talked to me about their severances. 

I was like, oh, you got two to three weeks a year in severance. Two to three weeks per year you worked as severance. I was like oh, that’s pretty good, that’s not bad. You can actually take it easy for six months or eight months, you’re good. 

I finally developed an idea in my head in October 2011 because I was sick of work by that time. I said, if I could negotiate a severance, in other words, just get laid off and get that severance check and all my deferred compensation of stock and cash and this private investment we were forced to make at the bottom of the market, I’m out of here. 

That severance was a lot of money and it could pay for at least five years of normal living expenses, so I negotiated with my manager. I said look, I’ve been here for eleven years. I found my replacement. I’m going to provide a seamless transition for me to leave and to train my employee over the next three months so the clients are good, you won’t see a drop off in revenue. I was selling myself on the way out. 

Most people sell themselves to try to get the job. I was trying to sell myself on the way out and I said, look, you can save on my base salary, compensation, and my bonus because you’re going to pay the junior guy and the business will rebound and do well. 

At the end of the day, they said, okay, let’s do it. If you don’t want to be here, we understand, thank you for your service. Let’s do it. 

Rob: Wow, that’s crazy. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. 

Sam: Here’s the thing. If you plan to quit your job or retire early or start a business, there’s no downside in trying to negotiate a severance and try to raise your hand for the next layoff. I think most people don’t do that because most people don’t actually think about the company. If you leave your company with a two weeks notice, you’re leaving your colleagues and your boss in a lurch. It takes a while to find someone, to train someone. It’s actually not being thoughtful by just quitting. 

Then two, I think people are afraid of confrontation and maybe it’s why people break up over text messages or they ghost people. They ignore it because they feel bad trying to come up with a win-win scenario. Please always think there’s a better solution to any problem that you have. 

Rob: On the entrepreneur side, because obviously you run Financial Samurai, you’re a solopreneur, it sounds like with your wife and she’s helping out and you don’t have employees, you said that you made the choice deliberately to be a lifestyle entrepreneur versus on this show, I often talk about ambitious bootstrappers and lifestyle bootstrappers. Both are great paths depending on what you want to do. 

In fact, I was a lifestyle entrepreneur for several years and then I got a little bored and I decided to get ambitious and then that was really stressful, actually. I’ll tell you, a lot of people who I see make the lifestyle choice, they get bored with it and they switch later after three, four or five years, but you haven’t done that. 

I’m curious what made you decide to go this route? I think you touched on some of it earlier, but why do you think that you’ve been able to stick with it all these years and been happy with that path? 

Sam: Well, I think the first reason was when I joined Goldman Sachs in 1999 at the age of 22, Goldman went public that year, so the partners ended up making tens of millions of dollars and the VPs were making maybe $5 million or $10 million of windfall, and they didn’t seem happier to me. 

I knew that if I worked for 10, 15, or 20 years, I might have a chance to get to that level of wealth one day. I saw right away that, okay, maybe a lot of money doesn’t buy a lot more happiness. I saw divorces, I saw stress, I saw people working until 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM and I was getting in at 5:30 AM and leaving after 7:00 PM already, and I was feeling crushed. It gave me that perspective right after college that okay, maybe money, greater money doesn’t buy me more happiness. 

When I left in 2012 at age 34½ I achieved my enough number, which was $3 million and I was able to generate about $80,000 a year in passive income, which provides for a normal lifestyle for one person, maybe two people in San Francisco, which is a very expensive city. The drop in active income by about 80% was tough for the first couple of months, but the freedom that I was able to achieve afterwards, to be able to go for a walk in the park, no more stress, no more commuting. 

I started getting gray hairs at 33 and all those gray hairs went away by age 35 because my stress went away and my chronic pain went away, my lower back pain, my sciatica, all this stuff. I was like, wow, the health benefits alone of living a more peaceful and less stressful life was worth it. 

I really enjoy writing and connecting with people. If you think about it, Financial Samurai since it’s been around since 2009. A lot of people have grown up with Financial Samurai now. The readers that started in 2009 or 2010 have told me about the families they started, the wealth they have built, and the things they’ve been able to do. It’s been such a great and rewarding journey that I just don’t want to quit. 

Rob: It’s really impressive. The term that I use on this podcast is relentless execution. It’s someone who shows up and ships every day, every week, for years and years, and you have obviously done that. The fact that you are still coming up with topics, you literally must have written thousands of blog posts. 

Sam: Yeah, 2500, probably over. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s really impressive.

Sam: Life is life every day, if you think about it. If you just look at your, let’s say, Twitter feed or your newsfeed, there’s something crazy going on every single day. I don’t know. I think there’s always something interesting to write about and to analyze and it’s just a fun journey. 

I have friends who are worth a lot, hundreds of millions of dollars. I know a couple of billionaires and I don’t see their lifestyle being that much better, except for private jets and mansions. If you’re friends with them, you just say, okay invite me on the jet next time you go to Hawaii. Why not? I’ll mansion sit for you. 

Rob: Realistically, then someone comes to you and says, I want to give you $20 million or $30 million for Financial Samurai. Would you do it? 

Sam: I wouldn’t do it because let’s say it’s 20 million so after taxes, that’s like $12 million, maybe it’s $10 million. That sucks. I mean, having to sell something you love and then create economic waste through taxes is the worst. I studied economics and taxes are the worst. It’s such a drag. 

I’ve done it for so long that I just feel like, man, I sold it just for money? It’s part of who I am. If you love your baby, you never sell your baby. If you do sell your baby, maybe it’s because you really didn’t love your baby or you stopped loving it. 

Let’s be brutally honest. I’ve had many people in the personal finance space sell their sites and why did they do that? Because they wanted the money more than they wanted to do what they wanted to do. That’s just the way it is. That’s capitalism. 

I feel like Financial Samurai is like my second or third child. My first child, actually. I just want to see it grow up. If it can help people. I’m not writing stuff to SEO optimized to make affiliate rep, that is soul sucking to me which is why you don’t see that. 

What you see on Financial Samurai are real stories that pertain to real people in every aspect of their life over the course of their lives. That’s a key point of Buy This, Not That as well, is to tackle some of life’s biggest dilemmas so you can move forward with confidence and less regret. 

Rob: Yeah, the book title, Buy This, Not That, what is that referencing? 

Sam: It’s referencing that we can’t make every single choice possible. Every choice we make is an opportunity cost of not making the other choice. The longer you live, the more joy you will have, but the more regret you will have for making suboptimal decisions. 

As I’ve grown older—I’m 45 now—I’ve seen a lot of these things where, man, I wish someone could have told me why you should make this decision over that. I provide a lot of examples, such as whether you should join a startup or an established firm in your 20s or 30s, whether you should live in an expensive city or a lower cost city to save money, or whether you should marry for love or marry for money, or have children sooner rather than later. These are big life events that I wanted to address because money is just a means to an end. 

Once you have enough money to cover your basics, life is about living those decisions. I want to help people stop saying, if I knew then what I know now, my life would be better. The simple solution to do that is to read and learn and listen from someone who’s been there before. 

Rob: I want to circle back to something you said earlier. You said you had assets of I think it was $3.5 million, and you were making $80,000 a year in passive income off those. Do you want to walk us briefly through? If there’s a listener out there who has a few million saved, like your mental model of how you allocated assets and how you were able to pull passive income to that extent? 

Sam: It was $3 million and about $80,000. I worked in equities and investment banking. What I did was I tried to save 50% of my after tax income every single year and diversify into real estate because I was already tied to the equities market with my stock and career. 

I try to invest as much as possible into real estate, because real estate is a real asset that just doesn’t go poof in valuation overnight, loses 30% of its value because it missed some earnings estimate by 5%, whatever. I wanted a real asset that generated a higher yield, that was less volatile. 

About 50% of my current passive income, which is greater than $80,000 now, comes from physical real estate, over four rental properties, and online real estate in terms of real estate crowdfunding private real estate deals. About 25% comes from dividend stocks, and then about 7% comes from bonds like tax-free municipal bonds. The rest comes from savings, CDs, and private equity distributions. 

You’ve got to understand where you are in your business and how you want to diversify. The key is, once you achieve a wealth that you’re comfortable with, that you’re happy with, where you can just kick back or leave completely, you don’t want to lose it. You want to invest in a risk-adjusted manner and a risk-appropriate manner based on your goals and your lifestyle. 

I’m relatively risk-averse because I have two kids. My wife doesn’t work, I don’t have a job, but of course, I have Financial Samurai and my investments. Unlike perhaps most entrepreneurs who plow back their retained earnings into their company, I plowed back my retained earnings into investments so I can have more money soldiers, so that one day, if Google says Financial Samurai, you stink. I’m okay. I’ll be okay. 

Rob: Very cool. Sir, congrats on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller. I know that this happened. That’s awesome. 

Sam: Thank you so much. 

Rob: Again for folks listening, the book is Buy This, Not That. It’s available in Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s, all the bookstores you would go to. Obviously it’s financialsamurai.com and then on Twitter, a lot of our folks are there, it’s @financialsamura. 

Sam: You can go to financialsamurai.com and then if you want to get the book, it’s financialsamurai/btnt and you can get all the details. On Twitter, it’s @financialsamura without the I, because I started it in 2009 and it didn’t have enough space for the I, so I just was like, all right, whatever. I just stuck with it. I guess I could change it, but whatever. 

Rob: That’s so funny. I’ve had a few friends who changed their Twitter handles over the years. Well, sir, thanks so much for joining me on the show. 

Sam: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun. 

Rob: Thanks again to Sam and for you for coming back every week for another dose of tasty goodness from Startup for the Rest of Us. If you have not checked out our YouTube channel, I’m releasing a weekly video at this point, it’s microconf.com/youtube. 

In the past few weeks, I’ve covered topics like SaaS sales funnels, micro-SaaS products, are they actually profitable? Winning go-to market strategy, two things investors look for in a SaaS business, and many other topics that are related to building, launching, and growing SaaS companies. Check it out, microconf/youtube if you haven’t already. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 618. See you next week.