Episode 632 | Hot Take Tuesday: Figma Exit, Side Project Distraction, No Code Dogma

Rob Walling: Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This week we have a show format that I’ve adapted and renamed. Instead of the News Roundup, this is Hot Take Tuesday. Where Einar Vollset comes on the show, and he and I analyze and discuss the Figma exit. We talk about side project distractions, talk about no code and bootstrapping, and look at a tweet that calls them a bit dogmatic. Similar to our News Roundup episodes, normally it would be Tracy, Einar and myself, but Tracy is out of pocket this week. And of course I give people no notice on these things. It’s not like I book them two weeks out, so I literally, I think I Slacked them yesterday and said, “Can you do this at this time tomorrow?” So I really appreciate Einar taking the time out of his schedule to come on the show.
I hope you enjoy this format that we do every few months. But before we dive into the show, I want to let you know that Microconf Remote is next week and we are diving into early stage marketing. We’re going to be talking about marketing with Capterra through SEO, through conversions versus recessions and more. We have Amanda Natividad, who heads up marketing at SparkToro. We have the founder of Gymdesk who is just crushing it and doing really well with Capterra. We have Whitney Deterding from CoSchedule and Gia Laudi, one of the founders of Forget the Funnel. Dates are November 1st through the 3rd, so it’s next week. It’s 11.00 to 12.30 eastern time. So it’s three days, one and a half hours per day. If you buy a ticket, you get the videos, if you can’t make it. Tickets are at microconfremote.com, very inexpensive. This is the least expensive Microconf Remote we’ve ever done. So if you’re in doubt, check it out. I’ll be there live and I hope to see you there. And with that, let’s dive into the show.
Einar Vollset, welcome back to the show.

Einar Vollset:
Hello, thanks for having me.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I’m excited to do a rebrand. So I used to call these The Bootstrapper News roundtable and then we started calling them News Roundups and you know what they are now?

Einar Vollset:
What?

Rob Walling:
It’s now called Hot Take Tuesday. You like that?

Einar Vollset:
Nice. Is that why Tracy’s not here? Because she’s like the considered opinion, that whole thing?

Rob Walling:
No, I want Tracy on. For the listeners, it’s normally Einar, Tracy and I that record these. Tracy happens to be at a place with bad wifi this week. And I basically gave y’all what, like 24 hours notice to record this. It’s not like I say, “Oh, in two weeks can you do these things?” I’m like panicked. Oh my gosh, I got to get an episode out. And so set you a time. So we’ll have Tracy back next time, but for now, Hot Take Tuesday.
And so today’s episode begins with you and I talking about Figma. Adobe acquired Figma for 20 billion dollars and I have a TechCrunch story that we’ll link to in the show notes. The TechCrunch headline says, “Taking out one of its biggest rivals in digital design.” So Einer Vollset, people, consumers, people who use Figma are shocked and surprised and angry and other befuddled emotions. This was, I would say potentially an expensive acquisition, question mark. I believe they were at just under 200 million ARR, 20 billion is about a hundred x multiple, so that’s high. So let’s hear it. You think it’s a good move for Figma? Good move for Adobe?

Einar Vollset:
Fantastic move for Adobe, I think. I mean, I’m not really in the Adobe space. My wife sort of uses those tools more than I do. But I think given Figma’s growth and the fact that being online first and collaboration first, I think that really they sort of had to do it. Basically, Adobe’s interesting in the sense that it’s not long ago that they used to be one time purchase and they made the move to more of a SaaS model with a recurring subscription model. But fundamentally, at least when they started, it was just like, “Oh yeah, now you can download the latest version but you got to pay us a subscription.” Which is very different to a product that’s like first design, online in a collaborative type environment. Yeah, I mean honestly I wouldn’t be very surprised if this doesn’t run up against some antitrust type issues, some competition issues.
I don’t think it’s a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, but I think for Adobe it was an expensive deal. Particularly when there’s like a hundred times ARR is one thing, which obviously it’s going to be crazy now you’d meet founders with a 500,000 ARR business thinking they can sell it for a hundred times. When you combine the fact that they, that’s the payment they did. But also on top of that, their stock price I think declined at about $20 billion as well on the announcement. So effectively it cost them double that. So yeah, I think expensive but potentially long-term value add for Adobe is sort of my view on it.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, the way I was looking at it was at this point with a company, an acquisition like this, multiples are, it’s after the fact, like that’s we’d back how, they didn’t go in and say, “We we want a hundred x for this company.” That’s not what happened. They basically said, “We don’t want to sell.” And Figma basically said, “There’s no one else to buy. We are the one.” So people know that I collect signatures and I collect comic books, right? Old silver age comic books and there will be a comic where there’s 50 graded at this level, but then at the highest level there’s only one. There’s like one in a 9.8. And you know what? That person can ask whatever they want for it, even if it’s a stupid price, if there’s demand for it. And that’s what it is. Figma’s one of a kind, there’s no competitor that’s close to them.

Einar Vollset:
We see that on the M&A side too. Basically if you’re not for sale, that’s the reason why you get super high valuations. People sometimes say, “Oh, we’ve gotten in the past, we’ve gotten offers that are sort of not a hundred x but in the 20 x ARR offers.” And sometimes I talk to founders who are like, “Yeah, we’d love to get that.” I’m like, “Yeah, but you’re not going to get that if you’re obviously for sale.” Get that if you’re not for sale and basically the buyer has to convince you that no, no, there will be a price. Everything has a price. And I think that’s pretty much what happened here.

Rob Walling:
And if there is a replacement, if there is a close second, if there is a slight commoditization, ‘Oh I can just buy this other company here and get 80% of the value.” You don’t get a hundred x. You have to have such a, and have a trajectory. I mean 200 million, I think they were going to double, almost double again next year in terms of revenue. They’re already on pace to do that.

Einar Vollset:
Yeah, one of the most interesting things about Figma actually is how slow they grew. Initially they were for years and years, they were doing the opposite of what you and me usually recommend people doing and start selling. They weren’t really charging anything. And then the first year, I don’t know if we have the growth chart up here in terms of how they grew, but it took them years to get anywhere near interesting. And then it just took off I guess. It just sort of compounded after the fact.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, they really did. They spent a couple years building and then they weren’t charging at all. I think they had a free plan. They had no paid plan for a while. And it’s interesting. Yeah, this is similar. WhatsApp sold for, wasn’t it WhatsApp that sold to Facebook for 20 billion?

Einar Vollset:
Was it that much?

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think so. And then Instagram sold for a billion, which at the time they were like six employees, seven employees and then they had no revenue or barely any. These are shocking numbers until you realize, “No Instagram wasn’t going to eat Facebook.” It’s not like If Zuckerberg had not done that and they weren’t for sale and there was no repla…right. This is why you see this.

Einar Vollset:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Walling:
The other thing is, the day it sold there was so many people upset on Twitter, is where I saw it like, “Oh no, Figma sold, Adobe’s going to ruin it.” And they may or may not. But what do you think? I tweeted they’ve raised two, three hundred million dollars from venture capitalists. What do you think is going to happen? You know what I mean? What is the outcome here?

Einar Vollset:
Yeah, no I think it’s an interesting take. It’s a little bit, the path for them was either to be acquired by someone like Adobe or go public and it’s, “Is the company fundamentally different in how it serves its customer because it’s public versus acquired by a larger competitor?” I don’t know. I don’t really think so.

Rob Walling:
Let’s jump to our second story. This is a tweet and obviously we’re going to link up everything we mention, all the tweets and everything will be in the show notes. You can go to startupsfortherestofus.com to check those out. Or if you want our show notes in your inbox every week, sign up for the email list. You get a couple free guides, you get the 5:00 PM framework that I introduced last week. Einar has been copiously taking notes on the 5:00 PM framework and using it to evaluate.

Einar Vollset:
You introduced the 5:00 PM what?

Rob Walling:
Exactly. So this next story. See people, do you see what I have to deal with? This guy he’s my co-founder, this is rough, wish me luck. All right, so Pierre de Wulf tweeted, Pierre de Wulf is the co-founder of ScrapingBee, a company that has been very public about their bootstrap growth. And last I heard they were talking about what 1.5 million ARR and continuing to grow. They are a TinySeed company so you and I know their revenue. But Pierre’s tweet says, “The energy and efforts to grow 5 products to $1k MRR are far greater than the ones needed to grow one product to $20-$30k MRR. Building new things is fun, but there’s a significant opportunity cost to that…”, and he puts it in bold, FUN, “…to that FUN. Just something to keep in mind.”
So Einar, indie hackers, I don’t just mean indie hackers on the website. I mean developers who go launch side projects, often they’ll do a side project a month and they’ll throw a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks. And there are even some models in this space, some folks you can follow that are balancing all these products and it sounds really exciting and interesting. But I personally I agree with Pierre, I’ve been in this situation and I can tell my story a little later. First I want to kick it to you. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think Pierre’s right and if you do think he’s right, why do people do it then if it’s not essentially the most efficient or smart way to do it?

Einar Vollset:
I think it’s right. I agree with Pierre. I definitely think there’s a cost there, but I think people do it because you get a bump kind of, when you launch a lot of the time to get something and it’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s, there’s a novelty factor.” Maybe you are excited about it as the founder, so you’re maybe pushing a little harder than you might do for something that’s been launched for a while. So you get a little bit of a bump and you get a little bit of that endorphin kick. And I think that’s what people chase a lot of the time. They come around, they’re like, “Yeah, it’s a great thing, now I’m making 500,000 bucks a month, 1500, something like that.” And the reality is post launch, they have to, usually they have to deal with the reality of figuring out whether they actually have product market fit and they’re staring down the barrel of, in some cases pretty significant churn because of your product market fit.
People might sign up for it because you have a big following on Twitter or whatever, try it out. But they’re not going to keep giving you money six months after you launched if they’re not using it, if that’s not something that you’d want. So I think a lot of the time with the launch you get kind of an artificial high when it comes from usage and income and I think people want to, they like that piece and they go after it. And really the hard part is sort of the trough of sorrow as it were where it’s like okay, “We have this product now and now you have this mountain of work to figure out in terms of what features to build, what marketing channels to experiment with, systems that you have to build.” You talk about the difference between building a product, building a business.
I feel like a lot of the people who are doing these multiple products, they just like building products and the newer the better and the shinier the better and they just churn them out. The second step becomes, “How do you build a repeatable sales channel? How do you build out a team? How do you do all that stuff?” And that’s not necessarily as sexy and certainly it’s not as easy to talk about and get kudos on Twitter about. I think that’s definitely true.
I do think there are players who do this well, but they tend to be bigger holding companies. So, our friends at Tiny Capital, they do this pretty well. But if you look at their approach, they very much, like they hire a CEO, incentivize them and let them run it completely. It’s not like Andrew Wilkinson is sitting around and making CEO level tactical decisions for every single business that Tiny holds, that doesn’t work. And I think that becomes the problem because you as an indie hacker or whatever, you don’t have the resources to hire someone for all your five or six or 10 or 12 products. You end up just scatterbraining across them.

Rob Walling:
That’s an interesting take and I like your insight. I hadn’t thought about the dopamine rush over the launch. It had occurred to me that building a product is different than building a business, is different than building a company. And the latter two for makers are a lot less fun, I would say. And so I think that as long as you know what you’re getting into, know the drawbacks to it. Don’t kid yourself that if you are launching a bunch of products and usually the justification I hear is, “Well it’s validated because I scratched my own itch,” or “I’m throwing a bunch of things at the wall and see what sticks.” It’s like nothing’s probably going to stick because you’re going to throw a bunch of things, unless you get really, really lucky. You need to put more into it than just building and launching on Product Hunt and Reddit and Hacker News.
But here’s the thing, it depends on what you’re optimizing for, right? Back in the day, let’s say 12, 13, 14 years ago, I was optimizing for lifestyle. I literally worked about a 10 to 12 hour work week. We had our youngest was little, newborn actually. I was not optimizing for growth, I was not optimizing for even money beyond what I, I was making 150K or something from products. And I lived in Fresno, California and it was totally doable and that was okay. And I actually owned several products. I didn’t build them all though, see I acquired a bunch of them for 12 to 18 months net profit, you know what I mean? I’d pay five grand for something and then invest SEO and I’d be doing three grand a month later. So I was doing a very mini, I was doing a tiny, tiny capital. A mini, tiny capital. But it was more about just optimizing for lifestyle.
And then what happened is I got really bored in all honesty I, working 12 hours a week just isn’t, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be y’all? And that was when I was like, “I want to do something more ambitious.” I had already had SaaS experience but I wanted to double down on it. So I think the idea of working on a bunch of small things is fine, just know what that means. Know that you are very, very likely limiting your growth and if you are an ambitious bootstrapper and you do want to build that 20 to 30K thing a month or you want to build the hundred to 500K a month thing, you’re not going to do it by launching a bunch of small products.

Einar Vollset:
That’s true. If I’m play devil’s advocate a bit on the other side, it’s like there is value in knowing when to quit something that isn’t working. That is the other side of this. It’s like, “Yes, it’s important that you have some staying power I think, and that you can really give something a real go, but if something isn’t working, it isn’t working.” So that is the opposite side of it. It’s almost like you have two extremes. You have some people who are doggedly chasing this thing that just isn’t working for whatever reason. And then you have the people who are just like, “I’m just going to spin up a new thing once a month.” And I think both of those two are probably a mistake.

Rob Walling:
Right. I think that earlier stage entrepreneurs often miss the signals that they would need to pivot the opportunity. Oftentimes shutting it down completely is not the right call. I’ll bring up Drip is an example. We launched, I had a decent audience, I had people watching, signing up. I had 3,500 on an email launch list. I was marketing the hell out of it. And that thing straight plateaued, between about eight K, nine K, just plateaued. Churn was through the roof right. So it was a limited feature set, it was just email capture and email sequences that’s it. Didn’t send broadcast, was not an ASP and it didn’t have product market fit. So one could say, “Well we built something, it didn’t work, let’s shut it down.” And especially if you didn’t have my reach at the time, it would’ve plateaued at one or two K. The only reason it got to eight or 10 is, it was a bunch of people that were following me, that signed up for it and tried it out.
And so it was a challenging road and you can listen to it on startupstoriespodcast.com. It was grueling. That’s like a 90 minute audio documentary recorded over the course of nine months or a year or something. But it was a search for product market fit and it was like “Slight pivot, we’re going to add this, we’re going to figure out this, we’re going to try this.” And getting there was a hard road to your point earlier, it was not sexy, it was not fun. But then once we hit it, it was like, “Ah, that’s it. Right?” And then all the numbers go in the right direction.

Einar Vollset:
Just another point. I think that also applies more than people think. So I think of particularly bootstrappers, and think they have this view that like, “As long as once I get to that stage I’m golden. I figured out that thing. I’m out of that slump at 5, 2, 3, 4, 5,000. Now it’s just gravy train until IPO.” And we’re seeing that with TinySeed companies too. It’s like that’s just not the case. Very often you need to, not necessarily do a pivot, but you need to do something new or different in order to really take that next sort of step and really take the step up.
So because we often see not so much, it’s something in TinySeed but outside it too, is people get to 500,000 or a million or 2 million and then that’s sort of the limit of where they are with their current growth channels, their current product, their current pricing. It really needs to take that next step. And some founders just aren’t up to it. They’re just not able to, either they’re just so married to this thing that was working really super well and they’re sort of sticking their head in the sand about the fact that, okay now we need to do something else, we need to add another step up. Otherwise this is where we’re going to be stuck forever.

Rob Walling:
That’s right. I mean you hit that plateau, you either need another growth channel. If you need more top of funnel, you need another growth channel. If your churn is really high, you need to, well we don’t, part of going to fit with this segment so we need to add another element.

Einar Vollset:
Or maybe you’re serving SMBs and now you need to figure out, “How do we really sell this to enterprises at a much higher price point?” I think that’s part, ties back to the Figma story earlier. It took them a while to figure out, “How do we stop selling to individual creators and actually start selling to enterprises?” And they wouldn’t have gotten the 200 million ARR without doing that change. And I’m sure at the time that was tricky, but it wasn’t just more the same.

Rob Walling:
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Our next story is about Apple’s ad business and AdGuard.com posits that Apple’s ad business is set to boom on the back of its own anti tracking crackdown. So if you’ll recall, Apple basically has the do not track me between apps prompt now when you open apps, so when I opened a Facebook and it asked me I said, “No don’t track me.” I don’t want Facebook and Insta and all these places tracking me. And so it really limits the reach that the third parties like Facebook and Google and anybody else who makes a ton of money from their tracking pixel and their cookies. And now again AdGuard.com is positing that Apple is stepping in and they are essentially, that they are able to track you the whole time you’re on the phone because it’s their phone. And so I’m curious to you Einar, folks may not know, but you have a lot of background in the mobile and the iOS ecosystem going back more than a decade. And so what are your thoughts on this in terms of A, do you think this is true? Do you think this is fair? What’s happening here?

Einar Vollset:
Yes, I definitely think it’s true. I went through YC with an iPhone app basically, me and my co-founder did. So I have experience dealing with the Apple app store and their policies and how they think about things. There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple is working on some kind of ad play. They’ve been doing ads and I don’t know if you remember this and maybe if you weren’t an Apple developer at the time you were, they had I ad I think it was launched in 2000 early 2010, somewhere.

Rob Walling:
Old school, look at you with the deep cut.

Einar Vollset:
Yeah. And it was basically this, basically it was a program, it was like native ads before native ads were a thing. It was basically a programming element inside of native apps that you could build in and roll it out. I think they shut it down after four or five years because they couldn’t make it work. But it shows that they’ve been thinking about ads and how to differentiate and really they’ve been interested in that space for years and years. And I think it makes total sense. I mean knowing Apple, are they the kind of company that could totally decide to crap all over Facebook and Google’s ad revenues and then claim that, “Yeah this is for the good of the customer,” and then come up with some sort of their own version of this but somehow frame that as we’re doing it for the good of the consumer? We’d be basically creating a walled garden of ads that protects the customer, protects the consumer, but really does kind of the same thing inside their own walled garden. A hundred percent.
Definitely, that’s definitely what Apple could do for sure. If you just look at, I’m sure we’re going to link to the thing, you were saying about the sort of log on prompt, do not track you. I think it’s telling, actually looking at the differences between the two prompts. If you’re a third party app, you have to, otherwise your app won’t get approved. You have to pop up this prompt that says allow so and so app to track your activity across other companies, apps and websites. Your data will be used to deliver personalized ads to you, ask app not to track or allow versus their own prompt is personalized ads. Personalized ads in Apple apps such as the app store and Apple News, help you discover apps, products and services that are relevant to you. We protect your privacy by using device generated blah blah blah blah blah.
And they trump this, turn on personalized ads or turn off personalized ads. What would you like, sir, would you like us to turn on personalized ads for you? That just shows what they’re thinking, that and if you also look at it like, someone else said on Twitter, I think it was Zach Coelius. He was like, “I think Apple’s building basically A, a DSPs like a demand site platform, which is what they claim not to have done for years and years. And the biggest play too is going after TV ads.” And I think that’ll definitely happen. I use Apple TV along with Roku and all the other crap, but Apple TV to watch baseball basically most of the time. And the ads that I get for that are atrocious.
Compared to Google search ads, even just banners and stuff. The stuff that I’m getting obviously because it’s just blasted whatever, what audience watchers baseball. The ads I get are inevitably either political ads for local whatever things in San Francisco, even though I don’t get to vote in the city of San Francisco about the things that measures that they’re pushing for or it’s some sort of a horrible disease that I should call my doctor about, related to do you have heart disease and carpal tunnel? Then it’s this thing, call your doctor about provoke or invoke or something random.
So if you just think about how bad that experience is. Do I think Apple’s thinking about building something in that space inside their walled gardens? 110%, I’d be shocked, shocked if they don’t and they’re going to frame it as consumer protection. They’re going to for say, this is what they did. I mean this is what they do with the Apple store. How come there’s now multiple app stores? What an insane system to basically say, “Oh yeah, yeah Apple, you have to go through and we have to approve everything and you have to use our payment processor.” That tells you how Apple thinks about this stuff outside. A hundred percent they’re going to do, 110%. I guarantee it, guarantee it.

Rob Walling:
And I wonder if you think there’ll be antitrust suits that come out of it or, and not by the government per se, but by, I wonder if Facebook’s going to sue for anti competition at some point. Facebook and Google get together, right?

Einar Vollset:
Could be, if you think about it. When you and me were coming up, everybody was like, “Oh, Microsoft, they’re the big bad wolf,” and they got in all sorts of trouble about distributing Microsoft Excel with their operating system. But this is the same if nothing worse. So I’m expecting, depending on how the political winds are blowing, I think they’ll get some sort of a blowback on this at some point. But I still think they’ll do it because the money is too great.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. That’s the thing.

Einar Vollset:
Why not? Because if you think about it, I started using the iPhone just when it came out and it was like tiny, tiny market share. Apple, the iPhone’s Apple market share in the US is 50% now. Basically it’s not infeasible if Facebook keeps cratering and going after this VR dream, fever dream of Zuckerberg, that basically there are more people that are using Apple devices day to day than use Facebook. And so if that’s the case, then of course they’re going to try to capture the kind of income, the kind of revenue stream that Facebook are, have been monopolizing for so long. So yeah, I know I’m for a hundred percent sure. They’d be idiots not to, they’d do great.

Rob Walling:
It’s interesting to me because I’ve always thought of Facebook and Google as ad companies and therefore I share as little as I possibly can with them. And I’ve always thought of Apple as more of the, well we sell the devices, that’s how we make our money. You can be less concerned about it. It’s not like I’ve given them anything except for my credit card number and to buy things. But this will change my, once someone’s running ads, it changes my perception because I know.

Einar Vollset:
But they’re not ads, it’s just they’re personalized ads.

Rob Walling:
That’s the perfect way.

Einar Vollset:
We protect your privacy Rob.

Rob Walling:
To end this story.

Einar Vollset:
We will look after you. Don’t worry Rob.

Rob Walling:
Our next topic is a tweet from Hana Mohan. Hana spoke at MicroConf Europe a couple years ago, an accomplished entrepreneur who has both bootstrapped a company to exit and has now raised venture funding for her second company. This one’s about no code in bootstrapping. She says, “You don’t need to code in 2022, but you should at least try. The #nocode community has a problem with its rhetoric, like the bootstrapping community. I am not writing either of them off. I am grateful I bootstrapped early on. The ‘way of life’ dogma is a serious problem. Like bootstrapping, no-code is empowering. With it, a domain expert with a day job and no technical experience can build products, without having to hire a team of developers. For them, it’s the only game in town. For others, it’s better framed as a gateway drug. And then she goes on to say, “If you’re a young person in entrepreneurship, make your first dollar but then at least learn some coding.”
It’s a whole thread. People can go read it obviously we’ll link it up. I very much share this sentiment where I think no-code’s amazing and no-code is a tool. And much like a hammer and a screwdriver are tools, they are perfectly suitable for the thing that they get done, right. But I don’t reach for my hammer every time that I want to put a screw in or do something else. So before I weigh in Einar, bootstrapping no-code, are they a bit too religious? Oh that’s actually, there’s another tweet and it’s from Jovan. I can’t, I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. But his was interesting because it lines up with something that happened a couple months ago when Ruben founder of SignWell was on this podcast and we were talking about how no code is awesome and it’s really good for this, but there’s some brittleness issue, there’s some scaling issues and that you know, can’t build a full blown ESP with it, right. There limitations is what we were pointing out.
It was based on a listener question. And sure enough people jumped on it and on Twitter were just like, “No, that’s not true.” But then when I asked for examples of actual full blown SaaS apps like, “That’s not what it’s made for.” So Jovan’s tweet says, “No-code is a religion at this point. Look, I do software development for a living. I prefer to do things in the most convenient way possible, but not a single web app I built in the last two years could be built with no-code.” Why do people get angry when I tell them this? You know what I mean? It’s like, “Well yeah, you shouldn’t get mad.” It’s just.

Einar Vollset:
It’s religion? It just is religion. I’ve always felt that, and actually this funnily enough ties back to the whole Apple story because this is to me, feels like a rehash of some of the conversations we had early 2010s. But because people were going to do this similar thing, it wasn’t no-code, but it was cross platform. You don’t have to build any native apps. It was just put together using this framework and then it compiles down to iOS and Androids and Microsoft phone or whatever they call it. And it was going to be totally, it was going to be the nirvana. And inevitably ended up happening was that people would launch something, it be kind of like 70, 60, 70 percent of the way there and then they’d be like, Oh crap, yeah, we need to support this one native thing. And so they would add a little bit of native integration into this other cross platform thing and then they had to do keep two different code bases now because it’s now a cross platform but with compiled specific compiled things.
It quickly diverged into like, “Well, now you have two code bases again, it’s just that you feel good about the fact that it’s, 50% of it is written in HTML instead of Objective C or Java, whatever.” So I’m very much in the same way. The fact of the matter is for me is like no-code is just code. It’s just a paradigm to build apps. And are there environments, coding environments that are more or less visual? Yes. No-code is, to me is basically a visual programming tool mostly. But I feel like the religion that some people feel around this is completely misplaced, right? I’m like, “These are fine for prototyping tools, they’re fine for what they are.” But this notion that this is a revolution in programming, this doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

Rob Walling:
And you know I’m a fan of bootstrapping. Anyone listening to this knows that. I bootstrapped all my software companies and I’m a fan of no-code within MicroConf and TinySeed, we have at least three and there might be four, full blown line of business apps built on Airtable. And I think we have one on Bubble now maybe. I’m all in on no-code. If we can write less code and it works, let’s do that. If I can have a producer, Ron, who is not a developer, go build an entire system to manage the production of our audio and video in three weeks, two weeks, three weeks and it works. And nobody has to write code and I don’t have to hire a developer and I don’t have to spin up a server. Oh my gosh. So I’m a fan of these things, but the dogma of them, it gets a little old.
I’m saying code or no-code, I am bootstrapping. I think I kind of want to wrap up my thoughts with this tweet that I sent out a couple days ago. It says, “Never raise funding is like saying never use a hammer. Funding is a tool, sometimes it’s the right tool and other times it’s not.” And that’s how I feel about no-code and about bootstrapping and about a lot, frankly about a lot of things in the tech world that folks, I think crypto and Web3 and blockchain are really interesting technologies, but they’re not everything. We’re not going to reinvent everything on them, but they are tools and they can be used for certain things that I think are useful.
Our last topic of the day also comes from Twitter. This is where Hot Take Tuesday’s kind of fun because it, what you notice is when we’re doing quote unquote news roundtables, one of the stories, two of the stories is news because so little news is fully relevant to this podcast audience in a way. I don’t want to cover Facebook’s antitrust, blah blah, blah. Who cares in terms of bootstrapping, in terms of mostly bootstrapping, growing SaaS versus is it feels like things that are on Twitter are so much more relevant.
Much like this last story, which I’ll admit is just a bit of a fun one. But basically Ruben Gamez, I mentioned him earlier, he was considering watching 2001 A Space Odyssey. I said I wouldn’t do it, watch a YouTube summary of it instead, it’s very slow. And then he said, “As slow as the new Blade Runner.” And I said, “I like the new Blade Runner.” But I’ll admit we watched it at 1.5 x speed and the torrent of comments lol. Ruben says, “Lol, wtf, are you doing watching movies at 1.5 x?” You chimed in with, “What?” People, there was a gif that Christoph Engelhardt put. [inaudible 00:32:10] It was just this boom. I took a lot of heat for that, a lot. So I want you to tell me what’s wrong?

Einar Vollset:
I think you’re a psychopath that’s what’s wrong.

Rob Walling:
With watching something slow?

Einar Vollset:
What the hell? It’s like a psychopath test.

Rob Walling:
The movie’s too slow. It’s a good movie but it’s too slow. So you speed it up and make it a good movie.

Einar Vollset:
I’m like one and a half through the conversation too to [inaudible 00:32:34] this other thing.

Rob Walling:
But that’s how I listen to all podcasts.

Einar Vollset:
Oh no Romeo, my Romeo, no. Doesn’t it sound really funny? One and a half X or are you so used to with podcasts listening to one and a half X, you think people don’t have this normal life.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Haven’t you, have you never listened to an audiobook or a podcast at 1.5 x?

Einar Vollset:
No, never at 1.5 x. 1.2 yes. That’s a tall order.

Rob Walling:
1.2 holy.

Einar Vollset:
1.2

Rob Walling:
Sir, come on.

Einar Vollset:
1.5? It sounds like a cartoon when you get past one and a half. [inaudible 00:33:07]

Rob Walling:
Every audio book. The audio books I listen to, since they record them really slow, I listen between two and 2.5 x and podcasts because it’s natural speaking speed, usually 1.5. And so yeah, 1.5 sounds perfect to me. Sounds natural.

Einar Vollset:
No, sounds insane. You’re insane. Your brain is like.

Rob Walling:
Superior. I am homo superius?

Einar Vollset:
It would be great if you go through, in a conference setting and just speed people up.

Rob Walling:
That’d be so nice. I could talk to more people. That’d be amazing. Here’s the problem with my argument. I’m going to just fully mea culpa. Podcasts and audiobooks, they’re mostly informational, right. Versus a film that is art. Someone commented, “I can’t wait to meet Christopher Nolan and tell him I watched all, your movies are great. I watched them all at two x.” I was like, “Yeah, it’s like bringing A.1. to a really expensive steakhouse. Bringing your soy sauce to the $400 a plate Japanese sushi place.” I’m still going to do it.

Einar Vollset:
Oh my God. Yeah, no, honestly I was, it’s rare that a tweet genuinely shocks me.

Rob Walling:
Especially coming from me, huh?

Einar Vollset:
Yeah. I was like, “What?” Normally your tweets, my tweets as you know, is usually completely all over the place. That’s a disaster. But you always consider a tweet. I was like out of left field, he’s like, “Yeah, Blade Runner one and a half x.”

Rob Walling:
It was only 2049. Well here, and here’s the thing too, I’ll say because we’ll wrap this up soon, but I do not watch every movie or TV show at that. But there are some that are just filmed like I’m watching House of Dragon. It’s a Game of Thrones prequel. It’s a really good show. It is very slow, it’s very considered. There’s these long pauses and honestly.

Einar Vollset:
You should just do what everyone else does man. Don’t watch it at one and a half x. Just sit on your phone and scroll through Twitter while the video’s all in the back.

Rob Walling:
See I have stuff to do. I got things to go, people to see. Anyways, I’ll leave you all with that amazing drop of knowledge. Video speed controller in your Chrome browser if you want to do that. I went so far as to, my boys both want to, they wanted to watch Breaking Bad and I’m like, “I’m not sitting through five seasons of this show.” It’s a good show, but it’s a slow burn and I’ve already seen it and I don’t want to sit. So I said I’ll make you a deal.
The old one, older one is like me and loves watching things 1.5 to two x. Every YouTube video’s at two x, the younger one didn’t want to. And so we tried it at one and a half X and I have to literally, you can’t just, what do you call it, Aircast or air whatever, AirPlay. Because chrome blocks like Netflix and something blocks Netflix and all the services. So I literally have to get an HDMI cable, plug my laptop manually into the side of the computer. It just mirrors it and plug it into the TV. It’s a lot of work to be really weird.

Einar Vollset:
Poor children. That’s what they’re going to be talking to their their therapist about years from now. They’ll be like, “My dad. He [inaudible 00:35:59] all the time. This is why I talk so fast.”

Rob Walling:
My dad was terrible, so traumatizing. On that note, we’re going to wrap up this episode of Hot Take Tuesday. Would love to hear your feedback and input on it. If you are listening, you can tweet me @robwalling where I will be reading your tweets at 1.5 x speed and you can tweet @einarvollset and he will argue back about how the San Francisco giants are really good, even though they’re not doing so well, are they?

Einar Vollset:
Indeed. And thank you so much for having me on.

Rob Walling:
It’s great to have you, man. See you next time.

Einar Vollset:
Ciao.

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Einar for joining me this week. Hope you enjoyed that show. Thanks for coming back week after week. This podcast audience is growing and it appears to be growing faster than it ever has been in the past, and I really appreciate your support. I see quite a few Reddit threads, Hacker News threads, online discussions where people are giving a shout out to this podcast and to the MicroConf YouTube channel and I really appreciate that because that is the best and easiest way for us to grow. I also appreciate anyone who has left us that five star rating or review. We crossed 1000 reviews. I’m not going to keep pound on this because we hit the goal and it’s just really amazing to have that support from you. So thank you for coming back and listening every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 632.