Episode 630 | Approaching $1M ARR as a Niche SaaS Founder

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling. This is the podcast for folks who want to build amazing startups, but they want to maintain their freedom, their purpose and their relationships as they do that.
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Today I talk with Jonathan Weinberg. He’s a single founder of an app called Builder Prime, which is CRM software for home improvement contractors.
Jonathan is approaching a million ARR as a niche SaaS founder. He’s serving home improvement contractors. Obviously, there are only so many of those in the country and only so many of those who don’t want to use paper and pencil or don’t want to use Excel, and actually do want to purchase a SaaS app to handle a lot of their client communication.
We touch on how he came up with the idea, how he got early traction. We of course, have our recurring Startups For the Rest of Us segment, when did you know you had product market fit and others. I hope you enjoy this story. Let’s dive in. Jonathan, thanks for joining me on Startups for the Rest of Us.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Rob, come to be here.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s good to have you, man. You’re a listener of the show. Right?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I am. I was a late starter, to discover the podcast, but since I did discover it, that’s basically every single week.
Rob Walling:
Oh, awesome. That’s cool. So we’re here to talk about Builder Prime, sir. This is a pretty incredible SaaS company that you’ve built.
I think a lot of folks listening to this, would love to build a company that has been mostly bootstrapped to this point and have the success that you’ve had.
Your H1 is the only does-it-all-contractor, CRM software suite. Builder Prime has every tool you need to scale your home improvement business. That’s how I usually describe it when I mention it, here and there, ’cause it’s such a good example of a niche piece. I’m always like, it’s CRM software for home improvement contractors. Is that how you describe it too?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, that’s the brief version of how I would describe it. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Talk about where you are, in terms of progress.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Absolutely. So we’re about to hit a pretty big milestone in the next month or two. We should be hitting a million in ARR. So, pretty excited about that.
We’ve got five people on the team, including myself, right now. Looking to grow that out a little bit further. Hopefully going to be hiring another couple of people here in the next few months, just going from there.
Rob Walling:
That’s cool, man. A million ARR with only five people, so you’re running it pretty profitably I’m guessing.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, I’m looking for places to spend money now, but yeah. The last two employees to the team was actually pretty recent, started just a couple of months ago.
So, we were three for a while. Now we’re five. Hopefully getting to seven in the next couple of months, but yeah.
Rob Walling:
Do you find it hard to decide on what the next role is to hire? Because this is something I hear from a lot of founders. It’s like the first hire, I can give a lot of guidance. It’s like, usually support’s pretty easy to outsource. Or you have to build features to keep up with the market, so you’re going to hire developer, or well, we need to do marketing set.
I would say the first one may be easier to figure out. But as you go, once you’re at five, it’s like, well, what is six? Aren’t there competing priorities for that? How do you think about that as a founder?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, it’s actually not that difficult. It’s one of two things. One is, well, what job do I want to fire myself from next? That certainly provides input into it.
The other thing that, for example, I find myself keep trying to get to, I keep trying and trying and trying to focus on marketing. I can never focus on marketing, so I need to hire somebody for that. So, it’s pretty straightforward.
I’ve gone back and forth, as to whether my next one should be that marketing person or another developer. But yeah, I’m going to do both of it at the same-ish time. So, it hasn’t been too difficult to figure out what’s next.
Rob Walling:
I want to take people back to the early days of Builder Prime, so they can hear how you came up with the idea, whether you validated it, whether you built it.
I’m chuckling because you are the reason that in the State of Independent SaaS survey, when we ask, how did you come up with your idea, and you are the reason that there is an option on there that says poor customer experience. Is that the origin of this?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It’s not, actually. No. It was actually a great customer experience, which is the odd thing. I had no experience in the home improvement, business prior to this.
We bought our first house in 2011. We went to get our bathroom remodeled. We went through the whole process of selecting a contractor and getting the job done. It was actually just an amazing experience.
Loved the transformation. Started thinking about, oh, this would be cool to have a business, my own home improvement business, where I can do work like this. But I was never really going to get away from the tech side of things.
So, the idea just started to sit in the back of my head as far as, well, if I were doing a business like this, what type of tech would I want? What type of systems would I want, to be able to manage this effectively?
There were inefficiencies, in terms of how our contractor operated. Yeah, if I were doing this, I would fix those things, for sure. I could do this much better, if I pictured myself in his shoes, with these types of tools. So, that’s really where it came from. But it was a great experience really, that drove it.
Yeah. I did not validate the idea. Not the most advisable thing, but it seems to have worked out. So, it really just from there, after I got the idea in my head, sat there for a while and finally started to tinker and all of that.
I called up a couple of contractors that I knew, including the one that did our bathroom and just asked, “Hey, is this something that you think is needed? Is this something you would use?”
Of course it was, “Oh yeah, that sounds really cool,” but nobody committed to anything. Nobody said, “Oh yeah, I want to pay you now and once it’s ready, let me know.” Nothing like that.
So, it was really just building stuff and building and building and building and hoping that it was going to work.
Rob Walling:
So playing with fire a little bit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Which is dangerous. You could’ve built for a long time and not got traction. Yeah.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, I was getting a lot of early feedback. As I was building, there were a few different people in the industry that I was getting feedback from. So, it wasn’t like I was completely building in a vacuum. So there was a lot of that.
But yeah, it was 2016 that I quit my job. It was really not until mid-2017, that I got my first paid customer.
So, I was just building the whole time. I wasn’t even sure if it was ready yet. I was getting feedback the whole way, as I was developing. But my first paid customer is not the one who was providing that feedback, actually.
Rob Walling:
Couple things that are interesting. One, for some reason I had it encoded in my mind, that you had a home improvement contractor who did work and you thought the work was good, but you didn’t like the experience. Therefore, you set out to build it.
It sounds like that’s a half truth. It’s human memory. You told me this story once, three years ago, probably, on TinySeed interview or at a 2- minute thing, where I’m doing six calls back to back. I think I encoded that in my head.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Part of the sales experience was not the greatest. For example, the part of getting the contract, it was a Word Doc. I had to print it out, sign it, scan it, send it back.
So, there were parts of the sales process and parts of the communication that were not the greatest. That’s where I set out to try and solve some of those issues. So, that could be where some of that’s coming from.
Rob Walling:
Right. So you didn’t do much validation. You had a few phone conversations. You quit your job without a product. So, did you have money in the bank? You have a trust fund?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I did pretty well in my career. For the first 12 years I was in corporate America, worked my way up the ladder into middle management. Middle management was not for me.
For me, I either got to be all the way at the top or all the way at the bottom. I think I can be happy in either of those spots, but I don’t like being in the middle. But yeah, that just wasn’t the right thing.
I saved up money. I’m a conservative spender, so I saved up a good bit of money. I knew I wanted to do this. I was saving up for that purpose. I wanted to have some runway to be able to basically not make any money for a little while.
Rob Walling:
Were you married at the time?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I was married. No, I had both of my kids, so they were five and two.
Rob Walling:
How did you get your wife on board with that decision to quit the day job with no income?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. She was always very supportive. Part of it, we were living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the time. She wanted to move back to New York City, where we had lived prior.
I’m originally from New York. I really liked living in Pittsburgh. So part of her idea was, hey, let’s move back to New York. We’ll be closer to your parents. We’ll get more help with the kids. You can quit your job and do what you want to do. So, that was part of it.
So we moved back and to a much more expensive place to live. I still quit my job.
Rob Walling:
Was that scary for you? Because that would feel very stressful to me, to quit the job. Or did you just say, worst case, I go back and get a job?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Oh, man. The first six months, I would say, at least of making no money, was a shocker for me. It was so stressful. I’ve never been in that position before. That part, it was an adjustment. It was definitely an adjustment and a roller coaster.
Rob Walling:
I can imagine. So you quit the job. You have two young kids. You’re building a startup, which I’ve been in pretty much the identical situation. Not where I quit the job though. I had other income coming in from products.
So you built for a year before you got your first customer, it sounds like, 12 to 18 months.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, about six months. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Oh, only six months? Okay.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, there were nights and weekends before [inaudible 00:10:51] all that, but yeah.
Rob Walling:
Sure. Sure. In process, yeah. How did you get your early traction? How did you get your first whatever, five or 10, 15 customers?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It was just iterating, listening to feedback. There was one really interesting and helpful thing that happened. I believe he was my third customer. I met him at a local home improvement contractor association meeting here, that I joined up.
He became my third customer, was really into it, lots of great feedback. He was helping me to understand some of the things from the industry and what kinds of things were important. A lot of it was really great.
I tried to use my filter as far as, okay, yeah, that makes sense. This, I’m not so sure this fits with the vision. But he was giving me a lot of really good feedback.
At the end of 2018, start of 2019, he was already a customer for a while, but he called me up. He’s like, “I had to fire my office manager.” He’s a window and door company.
He’s like, “I had to fire my office manager and I really need some help. I need somebody in the office. Why don’t you come and work for me? I’ll pay you to be my office manager.”
Nah, I can’t do that. I’m working on the business. I got to keep growing this thing. I got to keep working on it. I got to focus on it.
He kept coming back, “Why don’t you come? Why don’t you come work for me? Why don’t you come work for me?”
I thought about it a little bit more. Honestly, my runway was running out. At that point, I don’t think I had started paying myself yet. So, it was like two years in and I still hadn’t paid myself. The runway was starting to get less than I was comfortable with.
You know what? He said I can do demos. I can work on it half the time. I just got to be in the office, do about half… basically work four hours, half the time each day.
It’s like, all right, you know what, let’s try it. Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could’ve happened.
I got to use my own product as a user, every day. I got real time, amazing feedback, as far as what’s needed and what this industry really needs. That was the time that I did a bit of a pivot.
Prior to that, to be honest with you, I didn’t know I was building a CRM. If you would’ve told me when I was first starting it that, hey, you’re going to pivot this into a CRM, I was like, I’m not going to build a tool for sales. I’m not the sales guy.
But based on where the need was and the feedback from him and from other customers, it’s just kind of where things naturally went. That’s where the gap was. That’s where the need was. That’s where we started getting a lot of really good feedback about those types of things that we were building.
So, it was during that time of being a user of my own product and working directly in the industry at the same time and learning a lot more about the industry, that I didn’t know, that actually helped to shape what it is now.
Rob Walling:
What was it before?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It was more of a project management tool.
Rob Walling:
For during the project?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, it did the contract process, like I was saying earlier, about how the process around signing the contract wasn’t great. So, we built the e-signatures and all of that type of… and the ability to create the estimate, get it signed and do all of that early on.
And then it was about scheduling the job and scheduling your employees and your subcontractors and having a Gantt chart, with dependencies between this task and that task.
All of that stuff is actually still there. It’s still in the product. That’s one of the things that that’s made us a little bit unique compared to our competitors, is because other CRMs in this space, there are other CRMs for home improvement companies and they don’t have either that production project management at all or some of them don’t even have the estimating. The ones that do, it’s much lighter.
So, like you were reading the H-1 earlier, the does-it-all CRM software suite, it does more than the CRM because that’s kind of how we started. We started with the estimate and the production management side, and then the CRM pivot came later. But that’s really been the focus of the product development for the last three years.
Rob Walling:
In terms of finding early customers, a lot of folks find that’s very difficult because it’s the cold start problem, where you basically have no brand name. No one knows who you are. No one knows how to find you, no one knows that they should be looking for you.
So was it cold outreach in the early days? Did you make it to the top of Hacker News and the r/construction subreddit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
One of the things, so with that pivot and repositioning as a CRM, that’s what people search for. That’s why we always say, hey, what do you do? Oh, we’re a CRM for home improvement companies, because people are searching. The people know the term CRM. They know they’re supposed to have one. They know it’s a big part of what their businesses are, especially the ones that are growing and scaling and have a significant volume of leads that they need to track and manage. So, people searched for that.
We built out a couple of… I’ll say maybe five or so different copies of the landing page, with different H-1s on it. It was best CRM for painting contractors. It was a different header image. It was best CRM for window and door companies, with a different header image.
It was basically just a copy of the landing page, but it seems to have worked reasonably well for people that were looking for us in those real specific niches.
Rob Walling:
Right. So it was an SEO play then?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. And then there’s some word of mouth as well.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, I would imagine that. Construction is a small industry. My brother runs an electrical contractor. There are not a kajillion of these contractors.
Even if you talk in California alone or in the country, they talk a lot. The owners talk to each other. So, I can imagine if you get a reputation that that brand… Once you get past the cold start and you are now known as a solid product, I would imagine people would be passing that around.
All right, Jonathan. We’re going to do the Startups For the Rest of Us segment, when did you know had product market fit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Like most people will say, it’s a sliding scale of product market fit. I think in the early days or the earlier days, I’ll say, started to realize that we’re getting there, based on just customer feedback.
Even though we didn’t have a lot of customers just yet, the ones that we did have, we’re talking to them all the time. It’s very hard for us to get any kind of customer without talking to them, at least for one or two meetings, if not a good bit more. So, we get a lot of feedback.
We would have people come and say, “I’ve been searching for something like this for so long, I can’t believe I finally found it.” They would say different things where it’s like, they were fans. They were actual fans. It’s not often that somebody says, I love my CRM, but we were getting people saying, “I love this CRM.”
It was like, all right, we’re on the right direction. We’re finding a need. There’s a need here. We’re filling it, at least for some of them. We got to do it for more, but at least for some of them, we’re filling it. So, that was the first part of it.
A little bit later on, this is a little over a year ago, we had a really bad outage. I did a database upgrade over the weekend. Monday morning came.
During the week is when we have much higher traffic than on the weekend. Monday morning came. About 10:00 AM, everything started to crap out.
There was just, people couldn’t use it. The database was just obviously not able to keep up with the load. We just upgraded the database. Why is it now having all of these problems? We’re out for probably at least a good four hours. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
But the thing is, we’re getting calls from customers saying, “What’s going on? I can’t access it. Keep us posted.” They’re saying, “I don’t know what to do without the system. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know how to do anything.”
So, it was clear that, people are using this software. It’s helping them. With it not being there, it’s a big problem. So, that was another little clue I guess, as to, yeah, it sounds like we’ve got some product market fit.
People are really using it. They’re getting a lot of value out of it. Being down for any period of time is a big problem. So, that was another part of it.
Then as we continued on from there, net negative churn. So that’s a pretty good indicator that people are not churning out. That’s another really good indicator.
Even just yesterday, we got a phone call from a manufacturer for concrete coatings. We have a lot of customers that are dealers for this particular product. They do concrete coating jobs. We happen to work really, really well with them.
They called us yesterday and they said, “We’re having a national dealer meeting in December. We are going to kick out your competitor that’s been sponsoring for the last however many years. We’d really like you to be there, because we keep getting such great feedback from all of our dealers, about the product.”
That’s just the next level. It’s like, all right. I mean, they’re not just telling us they like the product. They’re telling everybody they like the product. Obviously, the revenue and the metrics tend to speak for themselves as well.
So yeah, it’s been a sliding scale. I think it’s something that you’re always trying to get better, in terms of the product market fit.
We’re continuing to do that. There’s still a lot of things that we’re continuing to do, to evolve the product and keep up with a changing market.
I mean, markets aren’t static. Markets change. So, you also have to keep the product up with a changing market. It’s never ending, trying to keep up with it.
Rob Walling:
I’m glad you called that out because I always say on this show, product market fit is a continuum. It’s not a one or a zero. It’s more like a one to a hundred.
At different times, with different audiences, you have more or less product market fit, stronger and weaker, as we like to say.
In addition, you just said markets are not static and they change. I have absolutely seen products get pretty strong product market fit, and then the needs of the market change.
An open source tool comes out, for example, that suddenly a lot of people start using and is almost the equivalent of what you’ve built. And suddenly it’s like, now I have strong product market fit again, not have people canceling, have people really, really want what I’ve built. I have to pivot. I have to add more features. I have to give more value. There’s something there.
So there aren’t that many software companies that last 10, 20 years. There are some. We can call them out. But even those that last, they don’t do it with one product. Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit, whoever we could throw out who’s been…
Even, I guess MailChimp’s one. But man, there’s some exceptions around there. Their product is now several products, just under one subscription. It’s not just email marketing anymore. It’s landing pages. It’s Facebook ads, I think you can build directly, MailChimp. So, they’ve added a bunch of stuff.
These are good problems to have because you don’t run into these until you have the kind of traction that you do, until you start getting bigger and you do have product market fit. Then you get the competitors coming in.
The other thing I want to call out is this idea that folks are such advocates for you. They’re such fans of your product that they’re telling everyone they know, it sounds like.
That is what Jason Lemkin calls a mini-brand. He says, when you hit about… once you get north of one million ARR….
I distinctly remember this happening with Drip. It was a little before that because of the circles we ran in, where everybody talks online. So, it was somewhere between half a million and 750, if I recall.
But you’re seeing that now, where you’re not Pepsi, you’re not Disney, you’re not Marvel. But a mini-brand is that, you have a brand within your circle, that a lot of people have heard about you.
In fact these days, I bet if a group of contractors are sitting around the campfire, I bet they’ll be surprised if a person there hasn’t at least heard of Builder Prime.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I think that the market is also a lot bigger than people might expect. We’re still such a small player in this space. There’s so many people that are using other CRMs and estimating tools and all that kind of stuff. There’s so many people that are not using anything or don’t even know that this is something that they need, or maybe it’s something they don’t need yet.
So, I think there’s still a lot more opportunity to break in, in terms of name recognition. People really, even if they’re not customers, at least hearing of us, a lot more have these days.
It’s funny. There was a story… this was about a year ago or so, where one of our vendors got an Uber. Somehow, they got to talking about what they do. The vendor that got the Uber, the person driving actually also worked at a home improvement company that was a customer of ours.
They got to say, “Oh yeah, I use Builder Prime every day.” The vendor’s like, “Oh yeah, we work closely with them,” which was kind of crazy to hear.
There’s still so much room to grow, in terms of this industry and then that name recognition, but we’re definitely starting to make a dent.
Rob Walling:
I’m looking at your MRR graph. There was a point, it was maybe late last year, early this year, where you hit what I call the bootstrapper hockey stick. Because venture says the hockey stick, and you see Facebook and Google. That’s just next level stuff. But for bootstrappers, your growth really started accelerating at a certain point.
You and I had had a conversation last year, where you said, “Right now I’m growing at,” whatever you were growing at. You’re like, “I want to double or triple that by the end of the year. How do I do it?”
Came up with a bunch of strategies. You obviously executed pretty well. So my question on this is, how did that happen?
Every bootstrapper wants to achieve the bootstrapper hockey stick. What do you think you did that worked?
Jonathan Weinberg:
The flat part of that hockey stick is actually where we screwed up. We made two big changes at the same time, right around Memorial Day last year.
We changed our pricing, which essentially resulted in an increase in price. We also started moving away from emphasizing, book a call with us. Book a call with us. Let us help you. Let us help you.
So, we tried to push people more to self-service. They weren’t looking for self-service. They wanted that hand holding, those calls, those Zoom sessions. So, we did both of those things at the same time.
We weren’t quite sure what the problem was, but basically, we flattened out for a few months. And then it’s like, well, people aren’t complaining about the price. That doesn’t seem to be where we’re having the resistance.
Let’s reverse course. Let’s go completely the opposite on the phone calls and the onboardings and all those Zoom meetings. Let’s get meetings on the calendar. That’s our new focus. Let’s get meetings on the calendar.
So, we did that and things turned around. Not only that, they turned around with higher pricing. So, we had that little blip, but the higher pricing definitely was a driver.
Besides that, it was also just continuing to iterate, add some key features. For example, we added automated text messaging and SMS-based marketing and all of that kind of stuff.
That was actually a big driver for people to upgrade their subscriptions. It a completely different revenue stream, because we charged separately for text messaging, in addition to being on a higher tier subscription.
So, some different things like that. But definitely the price increase, continued seeking of that product market fit and some key new features and revenue streams, I think altogether, is what really helped to accelerate that growth from that point.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Often, when we see an acceleration in growth, pricing has something to do with it, pricing and/or the sales model. It’s both things you were trying to change.
Obviously, your recommendation at this point would be, don’t change both of them at once. That would be mine as well. Right?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
You do one. You let it settle because you know all your metrics, you know your numbers. When you change two things, you’re like, uh-oh, I don’t really know. I don’t know which of these impacted it.
But what’s funny is, you quickly reversed course. You were A, willing to make pretty drastic changes, like raising prices and changing your sales model, which is scary and risky, but you were willing to take that risk and maybe make a mistake.
B, you did them relatively quickly and you undid the mistake relatively quickly and you pushed forward.
That’s what I see great founders doing is that, A, willingness to make mistake, B, the willingness to do things quickly and C, the willingness to make potentially scary, strategic high-level changes because those are often the ones that move the needle a lot.
You can make a bunch of little tactical things like, well, let’s do a little more SEO, or let’s do a little more cold outbound. Or you can say, well, let’s double our pricing. Let’s go demo only or no demos anymore. These are drastic changes, and they can be scary.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Definitely don’t do both at the same time. One big thing at a time. But yeah, at least we figured out what the… We let it go for a couple of months. It was the summer. Everyone was saying, oh, the summer is slow.
So, it was like, oh, it was probably just slow summer. We just happened to make these changes right before that kicked in.
But that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t because of the slow summer. We screwed that up, and we didn’t know which one it was. But we took an educated guess, reversed as quickly as possible, and everything started coming back stronger than before.
Rob Walling:
Before we wrap up, I want to ask you maybe one or two more questions. With permission I want to talk about this topic that you raised to, I think it was Anar and I, via email a few weeks back.
You were saying, “I’m working a lot and there’s a chance I might want to… What’s next? Should I sell the business? Should I think about selling the business?”
You had a big decision. Where are you today? Where did you wind up? What was that decision process like for you? Because I know that there are a lot of folks who build a great business and who get to this point, whether it’s half a million, two million, five million ARR, where you have a lot of options on the table, to get liquidity. You also have, not enough diversification is what it mines to. ‘Cause you have literally millions of dollars in net worth, tied up in a software company. So, talk us through what you were thinking and where you wound up today.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So we’re reaching that stage where there are more options on the table. I work a lot. I work too much. I am seeking more balance.
I think the idea of selling is a bit of an overreaction to that. I would go from working too hard to not working at all.
I love doing this. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for six years now, and I’m not tired of it.
I don’t want to work quite as much as I’m working now. I’d like to get that down to normal levels, be more present for other areas of my life and my family and everything like that, but I don’t want to go to not… I don’t know what I would do next. I like doing this.
So I started thinking more about, well, maybe take some chips off the table and see if I get some investment, take on additional equity partners or something like that.
Honestly, I could do that, but it’s going to take time and effort away from what I want to do. That’s continue to build and continue to just…
I can hire more people. I can grow the team, I can do all that stuff. I don’t need the money for that. It would just be really for me, personally.
You had mentioned something on the podcast just recently, about how every additional, let’s say thousand dollars in MRR that you add, well, that’s times 12 for ARR and times whatever multiple you want to go with. Let’s say a 5X multiple. Every month, you’re adding 60,000… for every thousand dollars of MMR, that’s $60,000 in equity that you’re adding to the value of the company.
You start thinking about that even in higher amounts that you’re adding each month. And it’s like, wow, that’s pretty powerful.
So I’m going to keep trying to fire myself from as many things as I can and grow the team and just work towards working less, but there’s no need to do anything different.
I love what I do, and I really want to keep building this. See how big we can make it. Keep helping more people. Keep getting more of those fans. That’s really what I’ve always sought out to do, is to build something that people use on a large scale and get a lot of value out of.
So, if I can continue doing that and just not stressing myself out quite as much as I am now, that’s really where I want to be at.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Given all that, for you, where you’re at, selling would be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because you’re going to be able to figure out how to get around the overwork and the stress. I believe in you to do that.
I do think a lot of founders come to that point where they feel the stress and an exit just becomes… it’s one possible solution, but there are many others. It’s to be less stressed. It’s to figure out how to do that, whether through hiring, whether through… I mean, there’s tons of options.
I’ve done therapy. There’s a lot that you can do. You can take a sabbatical. I know a founder who took a sabbatical just a couple months ago. He’d been working on a company like 10 years now. He’s kind of burning out. He took three months off because they’re bigger. He could actually do that.
So, there’s a lot of ways to think about that. I think if you’re listening to this and you’re at a point where you’re thinking about selling, A, now’s not the best time to sell because the economy. But B, just make sure that there are permanent reasons why you want to sell. It’s not just temporary roadblock stuff.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, no, very well said.
Rob Walling:
Thank you so much for joining me, sir. If folks want to see what you’re up to, BuilderPrime.com. I appreciate it.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Rob.
Rob Walling:
Thanks so much to Jonathan, for joining me on the show. It’s always great to have longtime listeners on the show. It’s great for a couple reasons, because they know the format of the show, they know how we tell stories here.
But also, it makes me feel incredible to have folks who may have not had a business at all and decided to start a side hustle, and then they go full time. And then, eventually they’re approaching a million ARR. They’ve built an amazing company, that has changed their life and provided them with the freedom and the purpose and allowed them to maintain incredible relationships, while they remain in control of their company and of their destiny.
Very meaningful to me, to have folks like Jonathan on the show, who have followed my journey, have followed this podcast, have followed MicroConf, TinySeed, whatever it is. That’s the mission of all of those things, to multiply the number of independent SaaS founders in the world. So, thanks for joining me again this week and every week. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 630.