Episode 172 | 12 Signs You Should Continue Investing In Your Product

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 172 | 12 Signs You Should Continue Investing In Your Product

Play Episode Pause Episode

Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds

00:00 /

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify Stitcher

RSS Feed

Share

Link

Embed

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Email

Show Notes

• Rob’s most recent Mixergy interview – story of growing HitTail
• MicroConf 2013 talk videos

The 12 Signs

1. You have X customer who’ve committed to pay for it before you start building
2. You see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing
3. You’re have a concrete estimate of development time, and are making measurable progress towards launch
4. You have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch
5. Your method for growing your list is something you can continue doing after launch
6. You have some kind of marketing plan
7. You’ve surveyed your launch list and now have quantitative data, in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1-10
8. You’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available
9. Your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in
10. The first customer who uses your product tells you “This is a no-brainer, I would like to start paying right away.”
11. Many people are excited about your product and then cancel during trial, or within the first 60 days of use.
12. Your family/friends make negative comments, but you have so much traction you don’t care.

Transcript

[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I look at 12 signs that you should continue investing in your product. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 172.

[00:10] Music

[00:18] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.

[00:28] Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?

[00:33] Mike: Word on the street is that you hate desktop application writers.

[00:36] Rob: I got tweeted at least twice…

[00:40] Mike: I got a few instant messages here and there.

[00:42] Rob: What did they say?

[00:43] Mike: Just to let you know that desktop apps are not dead.

[00:47] Rob: I guess they were giving you kind of encouragement huh? You’re building your desktop app and keep going with it.

[00:51] Mike: It’s an extension of the original product and it’s just more of a different mechanism for using it so…

[00:57] Rob: Right. And if it’s the best tool for the job then there’s no reason not to use the tool. So hey, I wanted to point folks into the direction of mixergy interview, I was on mixergy this week. So if you go to mixergy.com the interviews are only available for a few weeks before they become only available to premium subscribers. So I talk all about HitTail, about growing it. It’s parallel to the story that I told last year at MicroConf and you can see that video at microconf.com in the 2013 speaker videos but there’s just different questions. There’s more mindset and emotional things that I dive into because Andrew went into those areas, so if you’re interested in checking it out, it’s at mixergy.com. How about you? What else is going on?

[01:35] Mike: I was looking through some of my analytics and I was trying to figure out why conversions were so low from my email signups through to my pricing pages and everything on Audit Shark and I realized last month when I had redone the pricing page, I broke all the URL’s and I hadn’t updated the email sequences to point to the right pricing pages.

[01:57] Rob: So could people not get to your pricing page?

[01:59] Mike: It would 404 error out so that was bad.

[02:03] Rob: I did the same thing on software by Rob probably 2-3 years ago. You just make a switch. You don’t think about it and pretty soon you potentially lose hundreds of emails of people who wanted to sign up.

[02:16] Mike: Right. I think the killer was if things had gone like if the numbers had dropped to 0, it would’ve been really obvious really quickly but I just noticed it like the numbers were lower and I’m looking at them. I’m trying to figure out I was like I wonder why that is. It just didn’t dawn on me that I pushed a new set of pricing pages and changed the URL schemes and it was coming in from the emails. It just wouldn’t have got there. With zero it’s easy to figure it out or easy to see what’s going on. But when the numbers are a little bit above zero, it’s just hard to tell.

[02:48] Rob: indeed. So we got some good comments on episode 170 and I actually heard from Dan Felker on Twitter who kind of thumbs up my approach of almost infinitely looping a single song to get in the zone. And surprisingly because I thought I was going to get called out for being crazy on that one but surprisingly got a comment from Jake on episode 170 and he says I totally agree with the music thing. Try high energy protons by Juno Reactor and the whole transmissions album itself. And then he says trigger songs are great. I like that term trigger songs.

[03:20] There’s another comment by Wolf Scott who said this is his first comment ever on a podcast and that he’s been looping songs for a long time and everyone in his office thought he was weird so it was good to hear that there are other folks who loop songs a lot in order to do that. I’ve actually heard Matt Mullenweg talking about how he did a lot of song looping. I remember in his mixergy interview Andrew Warner was kind of surprised by that, it’s a couple years ago but that was when I realized someone else does this.

[03:49] Last comment, Jim Monroe he commented he says great show. Definitely something I struggle with in terms of shiny object syndrome and he says his problem is books. He says I currently have a huge backlog of books I intend to read. I’m sure I’ll get to half of them but I buy them anyway. Basically I’m an addict. One thing that helps me with online content that seems actionable or tactical as you say is using Evernote web clipper. I have a pro Evernote account which does all OCR and saving content you can want. With this, I not only have a bookmark but I can also file it into a specific folder and it saves the entire web page in case the article goes offline. I may never get back to the article but it gives me some satisfaction knowing it’s saved and it reduces the temptation to read it at the moment. Used early and often it will reduced wasted time on things I feel I should be reading. Best of luck.

[04:36] So thanks for the tip guys and you can always catch us on Twitter on @robwalling Mike is @singlefounder or you can obviously call into our voicemail line, drop us an email of questions @startupsfortherestofus.com or post a comment on an episode.

[04:51] Music

[04:54] This week we’re doing a little bit of a counterpoint to last week’s episode. Last week we talked about the top 12 signs you should walk away from a project. And this week we’re looking at the 12 signs you should continue investing in your product. I wanted to kind of look at some signs. Some of them maybe obviously positive signs that you should keep going. Some of them actually appeared to be negative but it can actually have a positive underlying message. And so first one is you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for your product before you start building.

[05:27] This is something that’s being bandied around. It’s been talked about quite a bit these days of getting purchase commitments or of actually collecting money upfront whichever way you do it, if you can find people who are willing to pay you money before you start building a product, even if it’s just a commitment that is one of the signs that you continue investing in your product. Because not only does it show you there is a potential market for it but it will give you kind of the internal confidence to start breaking ground on code and it also gives you a small subset of people to talk to about when you have questions about what features should I be building first?

[06:00] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is something that I did a couple of years ago for my Altiris training site and I didn’t want to dump all the time and effort into recording all these videos and then launching it and having nobody be interested in it so I created a sales website and put 3 or 4 pages together and sold it to people and they just refunded their money as they ordered it. I got I think 10 sales over the course of six weeks, something like that. And they were all for monthly subscriptions so I decided to go ahead and actually build it.

[06:26] If you’ve got the people who are willing to pay for it before you start building something. I mean all it says is that they have not found something else that is solving their problem or it says to you that the competition out there is just so terrible that anything that you come up with is probably going to be better than the other stuff that they’ve tried or is already out there.

[06:47] Rob: And I think a question someone might ask is what should X be? As I said you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for it and that number varies. I think Jason Cohen before he started WP engine, I think he found 40 people willing to pay him either 50 or $100 a month. I don’t remember what it was at the time. With Drip, I wanted to get to 10 people willing to pay me $100 a month before I started. That to me is the range. I’ve never heard of anyone getting more than 40 one on one purchase commitments before starting but you certainly could and I think anything less than 10 and you haven’t done enough leg word and you won’t have heard enough reasons that they don’t want to move forward for it to be worth your while.

[07:24] The second sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing. I like to say that you don’t have to be a better marketer than the rest of the world. You just have to be a better marketer than the other people in your niche. Even if you’re not substantially better than the competition that you see, if you can tell that they’re not doing a good job then odds are that you might be ahead of them or that you can at least learn quickly enough to stay ahead of them.

[07:52] Mike: And that’s the implication right? Is that you look at what you’re doing and you know more than them and I don’t think you necessarily need to know more than them but recognizing that they don’t know what they’re doing in some ways can give you that little extra boost that you need because you can look at that and say oh I just need to learn faster than those guys and you probably out maneuver them. And that’s the important part is being able to out maneuver them because if you can do that and you can start winning whether you’re taking sales way from them or preventing them from getting sales and you essentially out market them, then you can become the number one player in whatever the niche is.

[08:28] I think that applies a lot more to places where you’re not going against funded competition because I think once you start going against funded competition and you’re a boot strapper, it can be difficult to win a head on challenge against them but there are definitely ways to kind of spin your marketing a little bit so that your product is positioned differently against theirs.

[08:47] Rob: And I do hear people coming on the scene and saying there’s no competition, that’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t enter a market with no competition because it means the market doesn’t exist or the market’s too small. And I think it depends on your goals. I think if you’re in that early stage of the stair step process and you really are looking for that first win of getting to 500 or 1000 or a couple grand a month and you’re launching the mobile app, the WP plug-in, maybe a niche site, just an add on to something existing, I think it’s perfectly fine to not have competition in that space because the market is probably really small and you’re going for that early win to boost your confidence, learn marketing and get some revenue.

[09:25] If you’re going after something that you want to be, a mid six figure, seven figure business, you’re really trying to up the level, then yeah. There probably needs to be some, at least overlapping competition in the space right? There’s rarely a blue ocean market that’s that big that doesn’t have other people going after it as well. So take this one with a grain of salt. When you hear people say markets with no competition are bad, stay away from them, think of what size, company are they talking about? Are they talking about venture funded companies because yes, for them, they really do want competition because everybody kind of knows what the hot markets of tomorrow are going to be and there’s going to be a lot of players in those.

[09:59] The third sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a concrete estimate of development time and you’re making measurable progress towards your launch.

[10:07] Mike: Does anyone really have a concrete estimate of their development time?

[10:10] Rob: When I say concrete, I don’t necessarily mean it’s correct. Right? I just mean it’s your best guess and there’s a real number on things. Like I actually mean broken down into chunks that are one day or less, into tasks that are one day or less because you can estimate those. If I told you Mike how long is it going to take you to build a web page that allows someone to do whatever login to this thing or resets their password, you can estimate that within probably 20% accuracy. But I if tell you build this whole subsystem that’s going to build a ton of stuff, it’s too much unless you break it down into its subsystems and break it down into a point where it’s about a day per task and that’s when you’re going to get what I consider the best estimates, concrete estimates.

[10:50] Mike: Yeah. I mean that’s the difference between saying I’m going to build a product versus these are all the things I need to do in order to build a product.

[10:58] Rob: Yup. I mean you can imagine estimating how long is it going to take me to build this house versus how long is it going to take me just to pour the foundations versus just putting in the studs for the walls, just the electrical. I mean you break it into subsystems and then you break it down as far as you can go. Most people don’t do this honestly. Right? Unless you’ve been forced to create estimates, estimating is really hard and it kind of feels like it’s wasted time but every project that I do, I will put together the simple excel spreadsheet. Getting those concrete numbers and at least being able to see where your progress is stalling and being able to see where your progress is moving towards really quickly, it says a lot for your motivation.

[11:37] This isn’t a requirement. Yes, you can absolutely build a product and market it and be successful without this but I think this is one factor that will absolutely contribute towards you making it to launch.

[11:48] Mike: I think the important thing here is just the fact that you have this measurable progress that you’re making. If you can actually see how much progress is being made, it’s a little different than if you just have this block of work to do when you have no idea how far along you are. I mean if you’ve got six months left of development time and you know you have six months left, it’s a totally different story than if you’re sitting there and you’re six months in and you’re saying how much further do I have to go until I actually get to launch?

[12:16] In some ways I think it’s partly motivation but it’s also to help you understand how far along in the process you are and how much time there is left to finish and help you make decisions about what whether or not you should continue or not.

[12:30] Rob: I think that’s a really good point. I think it’s as much mental as it is anything else. So our fourth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch. Notice I didn’t say you have to have a landing page, that happens to be the way I tend to do it. I think you should always have a landing page. But that’s not the only way to do it. You could feasibly gather a launch list of info at a trade show or you could do it with in person interviews or you could do it at a conference.

[13:02] I mean there’s a number of ways that you could look at doing this but the sentiment here is that you get hundreds of people who have opted in to hearing about the launch because that’s what it’s going to take to really get any type of sizeable snowball going from the start. You can’t expect to get 50 people in a launch list who have not already committed to pay, who you haven’t worked with one on one who have just kind of opted in to hear about the launch and then except most of them convert because it’s not going to work out that way. you’re going to be lucky if you get…

[13:31] I mean it depends on what you’re launching price point and all this stuff but I tend to see around 5% on the low end and I see maybe 30% on the high end. And again if you have a relationship with the audience and you’re selling something that’s super valuable to them and super targeted yes, you can get it up into the 50% but I’ve never seen software product get there. It tends to be information that closes that much of the list. Think about that.

[13:57] Let’s say most software’s between 5% and 20% just as round numbers if you only get 100 people on that list, then when you start, you’re going to have between 5 and 20 customers aside from the folks who you initially got to commit. And while that’s good and that’s a great start, it’s better than 0, it’s not enough momentum probably to get you super motivated or to allow you to quit your job on day 1. So getting into digging into that hundreds and hundreds and potentially getting into four figures with that launch list is really a good motivational thing for you. It also will give you a good first day launch, first day revenue number and it’s a sign that people are really interested. This is a sign that you should continue investing in your product because people are interested in hearing about it.

[14:38] The fifth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your method of growing your launch list is something you can continue doing after launch meaning it’s something that you think you could continue to drive traffic and actually turn into trials after you’ve done the initial launch to your list.

[14:55] Mike: And the important part about this is you’ve got something that is repeatable for acquiring new customers and it’s not to say that you can do these one off things that are going to help you for a little while and then you’re really never going to be able to do them again. So for example, submitting your website to a bunch of startup websites. That’s great. It will help give you boost in traffic and boost the number of people on your list but it’s not something that you can do over and over again. What you’re really looking for is those things that you can point to and say I created a landing page and then I was able to drive traffic to that landing page and get people to sign up by doing X, Y and Z and you’re able to do X, Y and Z over and over again whether its writing articles or whether its sending emails out to an email list or doing paid traffic acquisition. I mean there’s a load of different things that you could do.

[15:42] But as long as you’re able to do those things in a repeatable fashion and continue doing that over and over and not only refine the process ‘til the process gets better but also tweak it so that you’re more effective at it and it costs you less I mean because that’s really what you ultimately want to do after you’ve launched is you want to drive the cost of acquisition down. And as long as you’re putting those repeatable processes in place, you’re going to be able to do that.

[16:09] Rob: The sixth sign is that you have some kind of marketing plan. I hate plans in general and anytime anyone said marketing plan to me, maybe five years ago, I would turn the other way because I don’t like a lot of process. I don’t like a lot of plans and what I hated about marketing plans is what I learned is I hate all the BS that people would put in it. So when I was working as a developer, I would look at these marketing plans and it was a bunch of crap. It was fluff. It was paragraphs of pros. It was so ridiculous and it was prepared strictly to impress some executive about how much this person knew about online marketing these days. That’s not what I’m talking about.

[16:44] What I‘m talking about is these tight succinct bulleted list of marketing approaches that you have heard about that you have researched that you have ideas on that you have tried notes about them. It’s everything. It’s all the information gathering that you’re doing maybe by listening to this podcast and others, reading blog articles, all that stuff. That stuff will come and go very quickly if you don’t track it somewhere.

[17:10] The marketing plans that I put together have simply been a Google doc. I will have these in separate categories often it will be SEO and press and content marketing and paid acquisition and high touch approaches and I will put everything in there as I’m learning it. And so over time, I’ve honed that and every new app I get, I make a copy of that doc and I tweak it to the new niche and to the new market that it’s going to go after.

[17:35] Frankly, a lot of the high touch approaches that I’ve tracked and heard about, I have never done because I’ve never gotten to them because to me they’re lower priority. I want to find lower touch approaches that scale first. But having something, yours doesn’t need to be this 12 page extravaganza. Start with one page and put down the ideas you hear people talk about and make the notes so that you can keep them and implement them down the line.

[17:56] Mike: Yeah. The idea behind this marketing plan is really to give you a list of ways that you’re going to get in front of your customers and get them to try out your app and hopefully move them at some point along your sales funnel. I mean this isn’t about listing every single thing that you’re going to do. It’s about listing all the different things that you could do. And then when you get to a point where you say okay now I’ve got some time. I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to start going to my marketing plan and executing, you start picking off those things that you can identify as a high value or high return on the investment that you have to put into it.

[18:29] And again, I mean you don’t necessarily need to know everything about whatever that strategy happens to be. So if you’re going to leverage Facebook ads or you’ve never done Facebook before then that’s okay. I mean you can go ahead and try it. Just understand that your return on that particular thing is probably going to be a little bit lower than if you knew how to run a Facebook ad campaign right up front.

[18:50] Rob: I think that’s a good point. I had a lot of things in my early marketing plan that I had never done and what I would do, let’s take Facebook ads or ad words, as I would come to it, I would then right at that moment I would go and buy a course on it or buy a book on it and when I searched for strategy Facebook ads I think I bought 3 or 4 video courses and I bought 2 or 3 books and I kind of scoured the whole thing until I could get my arms around that trunk until I started hearing the same things over and over from the people so that I was sure that I had covered all the approaches. And I just dove knee deep into it, invested the time, I learned it, got it all in my head and then I just started cranking and trying the ads and learning on my own.

[19:27] That just in time learning which again is a concept that Jeremy of internet business mastery has talked a lot about, that’s the way to go with this kind of stuff. Don’t feel like you need to learn every approach upfront but at least, knowing that it’s there, knowing that it works for some people and then being able to give it a try because it’s very valuable.

[19:42] Mike: I think that helps kind of with information overload where people want to learn as much as they possibly can about how to launch a business or how to structure their business so they’ll go on this information overload where they’re just consuming all these different books and things like that but they’re not actually working on their business. They’re consuming information most of which they’re going to eventually forget anyway long before they’ve had a chance to apply it.

[20:05] Rob: Sign number seven that you should continue investing in your product is that you surveyed your launch list so now you have quantitative data in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1 through 10. Now obviously this is not a requirement. It’s just a sign but this is something that I did early on with Drip and what it allows you to do is match up those initial conversations with the first 10 people will give you ideas of what to build and you probably have intuition of what you want to build as well.

[20:32] Then as you start building up this launch list, let’s say you get to 500 or 1,000 people, you can now survey them and you have some pretty intelligent questions to ask them because you’re knee deep in this product. You know what you want to build, you know what you may not have time to build and getting another couple hundred people to weigh in on a survey not only gives them participation and makes them more eagerly anticipate your product but it can really help steer the direction of where you should go in order to hopefully get more of them to sign up when in fact you do your launch.

[21:05] Mike: This is just the difference between having an idea of what people are interested in versus knowing the specific features that are going to push somebody over the edge from this is an interesting product to where can I plug-in my credit card and get the full version?

[21:18] Rob: Our eighth sine is that you’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available. And then anytime you email your launch list you receive several replies letting you know that the product looks great and people can’t wait to use it.

[21:32] Mike: I think the primary thing behind this is people are still experiencing whatever the pain is that you’re trying to solve and if you’re trying to build a product that is geared for example around the holiday season or something like that, once that holiday has passed, the likelihood that those people are still interested in your products is going to be very, very low versus if you’re still coming up on it or if it’s a problem that they have continuously and they still don’t have an answer for it. That’s when people are going to be asking for your product, when it’s going to be available and when they can see more and when can they get their hands on it because that problem is painful enough to them that they want a solution and they’re still actively looking for one.

[22:12] Chances are good that they’re looking at your solutions saying I’m going to stop looking because it looks like this solution you’re coming out with is going to solve my problem and you don’t want to lose that. I mean you don’t want them to suddenly stumble across one of your competitors and start using them or following them instead.

[22:28] Rob: And I don’t think that receiving emails and tweets asking you when it’s going to be available is a necessity. I think you can launch a product successful without that. The businesses that I’ve launched that have had people kind of chomping at the bit are the ones that have that early success and it really boosts your confidence. Our ninth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in. I think this kind of goes without saying if your launch list is growing that fast, then it’s a good sign.

[22:58] Mike: The point about this is obviously this is much further along. You’re at the point where you probably have a product that is in beta or at very least alpha and you’re allowing people to use that whether its early access or whether you’re charging them for it, doesn’t really matter. I mean the fact is you’re much further along than the previous ones that we’ve talked about and most leads we’ve kind of structured in a way that are essentially in chronological order.

[23:22] So for this I mean obviously if your launch list is growing faster and you’re able to let people in, then you’ve got 1 or 2 problems either 1) you’re having trouble letting people in because you’re suffering from technical issues or your launch list is growing out of control and you just can’t satisfy the demand because you still want to give people that individual hand holding so that you do get some of the feedback that you’re going to need to make the product successful long term.

[23:44] And don’t discount how much that information can help you because even though you do have people chomping at the bit and signing up very, very quickly you do want to get that information back before you unleash it to everybody because you want to iron out the kinks. You want to make sure that whatever processes you have in place are solid enough that you’re going to survive contact with the enemy I’ll say.

[24:07] Rob: Our tenth sign is that the first person who uses your product tells you this is a no-brainer. I would like to start paying right away. Getting to the point where anyone will pay you money especially that first customer is a tremendous amount of work. And the earlier you do that, the better it will feel, the more motivation you have. But once you get to that point, to me that’s a big sign that you’ve solved that at least one person’s problem and now you just have to go out and find another and another and another and all of those are signs that you should continue investing in that product.

[24:40] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is about creating cookie cutter copies of your first customer and trying to figure out not only who they are but how do you find other people like that customer? How do you find other people who have that specific problem? And it involves talking to that customer and finding out as much as you can but you’re right. as soon as you get pass that hurdle of somebody willing to pay you money for a product then you know that you’ve at least solved part of the problem and it may not be the entire problem but you’ve at least solved a piece of it and that’s a very, very good starting point. That’s essentially your beach head for the product. And as you move that further down you can expand that beach head and you can grow that market to the point that is successful in the way that you want and need it to be.

[25:23] Rob: Our 11^th sign is that many people are excited about your product but they sign up and they cancel during trial within the first 60 days of use. This one’s a little tricky because you might think to yourself why is it a sign I should continue investing in it if people are canceling? The thought here is that if people are excited about your product then it shows that you have in fact hit a paying point that people want solved.

[25:46] But if they sign up and then they cancel, you have something wrong it’s not something that’s so wrong that it can’t be fixed. What’s either happened is your product itself lets people down and doesn’t solve the problem that you’re claiming it does. Perhaps your on boarding isn’t good enough to get people actually using the product and getting value out of it or potentially your pricing is too high. And all three of those are fairly easily fixable and it just requires having conversations with these people who are excited to sign up and cancel and figuring out which of those causes it is.

[26:17] Mike: When you run into this situation, it’s definitely a case where you want to start digging and reaching out to everybody. As a general rule of thumb, you probably want to reach out to anyone who cancels regardless and asks them why they cancel and if there’s anything that went specifically wrong that is something you can address? And there’s a lot of different ways to phrase it to them but realistically chances are good that if they canceled you probably aren’t necessarily going to get them back as a customer.

[26:43] So in general a good tact to take with those types of people is hey, I understand you canceled but I’d really appreciate some feedback from you to understand why it is that you canceled so that we can do better in the future. Not that you’re trying to win their business back but your main focus right there should be to learn from that experience and figure out what you can do better in the future.

[27:04] Rob: And our 12^th and final sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your family and friends make negative comments about your pursuits but you have so much traction that you don’t care.

[27:14] Mike: I think one of the things that’s probably difficult for most entrepreneurs to either understand or come to grips with is that your family and friends are not only your target market but at the same time they’re not really drinking the same Kool-Aid that you are. Their brains are not in the same places. So when you’re talking about building a business on the internet and making money selling your products online, they’re like that’s great. I don’t know how you’re going to do that but I’m going to go back to my 9-5 job and it’s just because There’s a difference between what you’re thinking and what they’re thinking, what your goals are long term and what their goals are long term.

[27:50] So for them to really understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it’s not really going to jive because none of the friends and family that I’ve had over the years, except in people that I’ve met at MicroConf and various meet ups and things like that, none of them get it. None of them understand and it’s baffling to them how that could even possibly work.

[28:08] Rob: There’s a really good discussion of this conversation of kind of explaining the entrepreneurial world view to family and friends and that’s tropicalmba.com and its episode 229 of Dan and Ian’s podcast and it’s actually Dan and Damien Thompson discussing it. But it’s this exact concept. I don’t know that I’ve heard a better kind of discussion of it and thought process of what it’s like of just how different we are as entrepreneurs compared to the rest of the population.

[28:36] I would agree with you. The times when I feel most comfortable is when I’m at a place like MicroConf or another gathering of other entrepreneurs because we get each other and we understand where the priorities lie. They’re just these crazy comments that come out of these discussion. I remember at one conference, there’s an entrepreneur who said he had like a SaaS model and he’s made this kind of loud comment. He said I could give a crap about $70,000 in one time revenue. And all of us around were kind of nodding our heads like yeah, I agree.

[29:07] And then later on I quoted that to someone who isn’t an entrepreneur and that doesn’t make any sense to them like why would you turn down $70,000 but in the context of building up these recurring revenue businesses, one time fees, there’s this whole fake logic that goes with that and $70,000 yeah it’s a lot of money but it’s not that much money when you’re talking about this guy’s business. So it’s that kind of stuff that only other founders can really get their heads wrapped around and I think that’s what I liked about having a community. I think that’s one of the biggest benefits that we’ve gone out of this podcast.

[29:40] I don’t want to speak for you but one of the biggest benefits I’ve gone out of the podcast is having folks who I can talk to both in the mastermind group, MicroConf and then just Twitter and other places and the shared mindset makes me feel less crazy. I may be crazy but at least I’m in that subculture of other people who are as crazy as I am.

[30:00] Mike: I think that about wraps us up. If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.