Episode 642 | The Pros and Cons of Building a No-Code MVP

Rob Walling:
Happy New Year. It’s another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. This is the 13th calendar year in which an episode of this show has been published. It’s great to have you listening today.
In this episode, I talk with Tara Reed of Apps Without Code. We have a great conversation. We talk about her journey, getting into no-code, then starting Apps Without Code, growing it to a $5 million bootstrap company, actually pulling it back to between $3 and $4 million to make it more profitable. We talk about entrepreneurial mindset. She deals with a lot of early stage founders trying to get off the ground by building an MVP or an app in no-code, and she sees some patterns and some anti-patterns. And then we spend a good bit of time talking about the pros and cons of no-code, the amazing things it can do, and the handful of things that it struggles with.
Before we dive into that, if you want to get a headstart on your 2023 goals, join us for the MicroConf Accountability Challenge. The difference between crushing your goals and falling short often lies in the tiny habits and wins along the way. And sticking with those habits can be tough while you’re working solo so we’re running our second annual January accountability challenge inside MicroConf Connect. You can head to microconf.com/accountability-challenge, that’s microconf.com/accountability-challenge to sign up and get your 2023 off to an amazing start. And with that, let’s dive into our conversation.
Tara Reed, thanks for joining me on the show.
Tara Reed:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Rob Walling:
It’s great to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you. We have mutual friends. And I’ve been hearing about Apps Without Code for at least a couple years now. To get listeners on the same page, your H1 of Apps Without Code is, “Finally launch your app idea. Come up with a strong app idea, build it without writing code and make real money with your business.” You’ve been public about the revenue, $3 to $4 million this year. You help people build web and mobile apps. I think I got to kick it off with the question of what made you decide to start it?
Tara Reed:
I wasn’t really intentionally trying to start this business, it really sort of happened. What happened was I was building my first company, which is the previous business before this. I had launched this art startup. And I built this algorithm to match people to artwork based on their taste. And I was blogging at the time about how I had done that without writing any code. I essentially was like, “Let me see how far I can go just building something myself with off-the-shelf tools.” And I kept pushing that. Every time, I was like, “Okay, let me just see if I can do more.” I kept pushing that and was blogging about my journey of building without code. This was far before we called it no-code or this was really cool. This is maybe in 2016 I was doing this.
And I got invited to do a TEDx talk on building Apps Without Code. And I just had an influx of people emailing me saying, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know this was possible. Can you show me how to do this too? I’ve already spent $20,000, $30,000 on developers and don’t have what I want. I haven’t had the time to just stop what I’m doing and learn how to code, and it doesn’t quite make sense for me to stop what I’m doing and learn how to code because I’m going to ultimately be the business person, not the coding person.” I just kept hearing that. And for a while, my answer was, “No, I can’t help. I’m trying to run my business.”
And after getting more and more of those communications, I was like, okay, I’m going to help five people. I decided to help five people launch their app. They launched it out into the world. I then opened it up again, I think at that point maybe doubled or tripled the price because people have really had a lot of success with it. And there were 70 people, and I thought, oh wait, I think this is a thing. If you fast forward to now, we have open classes and more elaborate eight week training programs. We’ve trained 150,000 people in 14 different countries. And it’s been so fun.
Rob Walling:
That’s amazing. And you told me offline, I had seen I think somewhere on LinkedIn that you were doing $5 million a year ARR, and then you mentioned you deliberately pulled the business back to do between $3 and $4 million. Talk us through that decision.
Tara Reed:
Well I think a lot of the audience here thinks about bootstrapping, so we know that top line is not bottom line. Your top line revenue is not your profit margin. And so last year, we did a handful of things to get more profitable. One of the things that changed, and I think changed for a lot of people, was just efficiency of ads after iOS 14. And we had to do lots of reorganization around that. What it meant was that we changed some of our practices to operate more profitably but to spend less money on ads, and so top line went down a little bit but profitability actually went up.
Typically when I talk to people in the VC track business space, or why would you do that? Why would you ever intentionally pull back on revenue? But for me, it’s really important for me and my team to be operating a profit first business. And so sometimes you make reorganizations of things so that the team can have the life that they want, so that we can have the flexibility that we want, and so we made a strategic decision there.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. And that’s the beauty of having a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrap business. Oftentimes, we call them independent SaaS or independent businesses where you are not beholden to an investor. You could have an investor, but if they don’t own a majority of the company or don’t have all the provisions, you can make the decision that’s best for you, for your freedom. I know that you talk a lot about lifestyle design and travel and such, so that’s a nice luxury to have. How big is your team?
Tara Reed:
My team is 15 people, and we’re in five different countries.
Rob Walling:
Okay. That’s quite efficient. That’s a lot of revenue for only a team of 15.
Tara Reed:
Yeah. No, it’s really great. I think that we operate leanly but we also want to make sure that we get to design our lives and our days accordingly. I wouldn’t say that everybody’s just only work all the time, eight hours a week; that’s not really our culture. But we also operate lean at the same time.
Rob Walling:
You’ve taught all these people to code and you also… Your team builds apps for them. There’s two different pricing structures. You can pay around $1,700 and get instruction. I could pay this, right? And you would teach us how to build it.
Tara Reed:
Yep.
Rob Walling:
Or it’s like $4,800 and you’ll do that plus build the app for us, I guess. Do you have a success story or two of folks who have launched a business off you? I know you do.
Tara Reed:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Do you have a success story or 50 probably? But no, we only have time for one or two of someone who’s built a business that changed their life, in essence.
Tara Reed:
Yeah, there are a ton. I think my favorite success stories are scenarios where people take something that they know a lot about, they’re subject matter experts in. And typically they know a lot about it because it’s related to what they do for work. And there’s something related to what they do for work that is just hard or time consuming and not great.
An example of this, we have an alumni who’s gone through the program who’s in manufacturing. And I didn’t know this, but apparently in lots of manufacturing plants they’re still tracking things with pen, paper and a clipboard. Yep, is that done? Check with pen and paper. And yet everybody’s got a phone in their pocket. He built an app to streamline a lot of that process so that headquarters can really see what’s working, what’s not working, where is this process slowing down? And his first customer was Coca-Cola who white labeled this from him. That’s an example. I can give you more examples.
But the specific thing that gets me really excited about no-code and the opportunity there is that people get to take something that Silicon Valley’s not super excited about building a solution for, the non-sexy stuff is I think the coolest stuff where other people who are not in tech know something about it, they just don’t know how to code and come up with really cool ideas that I think are less likely for us to see in a Silicon Valley based startup or even a venture track, venture-based business.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, and that’s, in all honesty, the name of this podcast, Startups For the Rest of Us. It fits a lot of things. And a little bit cumbersome to say. Originally, it was around I had a family. I couldn’t apply to YC because I couldn’t move there, I couldn’t move to the Bay Area at the time so I was saying, “Well, what about the rest… What about how many millions of us don’t want to do that or aren’t able to?” And it seems to apply in that case as well of it’s for the rest of us who want to start a business that… I call them boring businesses, and I call it that with respect. Most of the businesses I’ve built have been boring. But helping manufacturing or helping-
Tara Reed:
Healthcare. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Exactly. Yep. These are great niche businesses because you don’t have the massive players coming into them. Yeah, maybe one more example if you can think of.
Tara Reed:
Yeah, okay. I’ll give you maybe a few. There’s another alumni we’ve had go through the program; his name is Josh. When he met us, he has this afterschool program where he teaches students about music and music composition, playing music but also mixing music digitally. And schools would ask him to come do these afterschool pop-up programs all the time, but he can only do so many of them because he’s only one person. And so he built an app that allows students to compose and compile pieces of music and songs together and work in teams. The teachers can give assignments and grade and all of that. He built this custom platform for this and then licensed it to 23 schools in the state of Virginia, for example.
Rob Walling:
Wow, that’s incredible.
Tara Reed:
That’s another example of something you know something about that it’s hard or time consuming or manual and creating product around it.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s interesting because when I talk to founders, and what I see across MicroConf and TinySeed is that about, I believe when we did our state of Independence SaaS survey, 90% of the bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders, 90% of the teams have at least one technical founder, at least one developer; nine out of 10, in essence.
And some of the best combinations we see is a developer co-founder plus a subject matter expert. It’s the subject matter expert who can then do the sales and do the customer success and do all that. With no-code, low code, you can maybe get away without that developer because you don’t necessarily need that. Now, maybe you need it later on, maybe you need it to get big, maybe you need it to scale. And we’re going to talk about that in a minute because I love having you on here as an no-code expert to be able to talk about the pros and cons of it. I find it lining up with my experience of subject matter experts who have this deep domain knowledge and being able to build something that they know that they need.
Tara Reed:
Yeah. And I think the bridge specifically, to comment on what you were saying where you need the subject matter expert and the programmer, what no-code allows you to do is you’re still programming. And we can get into some of the limitations here. I do think you still need to have to learn the ability to think an engineer, to the if this, then that, but otherwise this, and really be able to immerse yourself in if this, then that logic. For some people, that’s really hard. It’s not really related to what they do in their day-to-day job so I do think you still need to think an engineer or at least learn to think in that logical, linear way because you’re still programming. You’re not coding, but you’re programming still, nonetheless, with no-code. You’re drag, drop, point, click, and then giving logic sentences of what to do. And I do think that’s one of the limitations, though. One of the limitations and downsides to no-code is that it’s not no effort. And it’s also you still need to be thinking logically and linearly about what you want this to do because the app still can’t read your mind.
Rob Walling:
Right. Just because it’s no-code or low code, however we want to describe it, as you said, it doesn’t mean no effort and it doesn’t mean it’s not complicated still, right?
Tara Reed:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Rob Walling:
Because you can tie together 10, 20, 30, 30 things. A simple example, Scratch, I’m sure you’ve heard of from MIT.
Tara Reed:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Both my kids started doing that when they were three or four. One of my sons built something that was big and I won’t say cumbersome, but I saw it as a… I was a software engineer myself, and I was like, “Oh my lord. No, we need refactor this whole piece.” It was no-code, but it got as spaghetti as code can get. There’s still those types of limitations, right?
Tara Reed:
I think that’s right. I think there’s a couple different waves of no-code that have come out. When I was starting in no-code in maybe 2016, 2015, it was like stringing together lots of different tools. You have your type form which talks to Zapper, which talks to this, which talks to that. That was the first iteration of this. And then we started to see platforms come out in a more cohesive way. The Bubbles, the Glides, the Adalos where you can do a little bit more in one stop shop. Even still, though, you can engineer your logic in a way that is really not that sustainable. There’s still the ability to do that.
I think depending on which tool you choose, they give you more or less space to have something that’s not sustainable. I think if you look at a tool Bubble, for example, which really gives you a blank canvas, I would say bubble probably has the highest functionality capability of the no-code tools out there. There’s also the highest learning curve. If you are not really skilled at thinking like an engineer, it’s really difficult. And also, because it gives you a blank canvas, there’s no training wheels, there’s lots of messiness that you can engineer. If you look at an example that’s more like Glide, there’s more training wheels. You can get moving faster. There’s a little bit less functionality and capability, but it’s harder to engineer something that’s really unsustainable in how you built it.
I’m going to add one additional layer to this, which is that the biggest, I think, capability limit that we see with no-code now is it’s not so much about how you engineered it and if that was sustainable because there’s a lot of tools that give you guardrails, I think it’s more about data limits, how much you can store and what your storage access is.
Rob Walling:
Is it storage or is it throughput? I’ve been calling it scale, issues with scale. And is it both?
Tara Reed:
It’s both, it’s both. If you look at some of the tools, they’ll articulate it different ways. Some of them will do it as rows of data that you have access to and how many actions you can run; and it’s some combination of those two things of your throughput and also of your storage. And those are the places where you run up into limits. And a lot of those limits are just what the platform set as the limit. But those are limits, those are limitations. I still think the trade-off of I got this up and running in a couple weeks, in a couple hours is still worth the limitations you might eventually run into. I think it’s still worth it to get revenue and get going and get customers first, but there are limitations.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, I would agree. We have built, with TinySeed and MicroConf have built, I believe it’s three, and it might be four, we used to call them line of business apps. They’re internal applications to run processes. 20 years ago, I was coding these from Scratch and Pearl, PHP, whatever. And now we needed something, we affectionately call them Pat and Vat. They are podcast Airtable and video Airtable, so obviously what platform they’re built on. But they’re just workflow things where I get a email that says, “A new video needs to be created for YouTube. Here’s the title.” Once you’ve created it, upload it to Dropbox, paste the link here, and click it as ready to edit. Change of status. This is all CRUD, it’s create, read, update, delete. It’s not super complicated.
But the bottom line is before this, it was Google Sheets and Google Docs. And then we moved to Notion with the Trello interface, KanBan interface, which was fine but it was not customized at all so it was clunky. And our producer, Ron, came on. And he’s not a developer, but he’s technical, but he doesn’t know how to write code. And he built both of these in, I think it was two or three weeks.
And look, does it scale to as far as my last SaaS app could? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to because it’s internal. If I was building it externally, if I had to try to productize this and sell it to other people, I do think we’d run into some issues. And we could probably talk about those in a second because those are the cons that I do see around… Cons, limitations, whatever it is around no-code.
But I agree with you that the MVP, if I was not technical and trying to start a company, do I want to pay $20,000? Do I want to spend a year or two learning to code and build these? Or do I want to spend three weeks, get far enough to prove it out to make enough revenue that maybe I can then find a developer who can build it? Or maybe I can raise investment if that’s where I want to go. Are you seeing that type of stuff play out?
Tara Reed:
I’m not only seeing that type of stuff play out, but we do that internally. I’ll give you an example of this. Actually, this year is the first year that we started building tools for entrepreneurs and app planning, app thinking through here are all the questions you need to think through in your app and dynamically show them the questions they need to plan through for things. This is the first time of us doing that. One of the things that we’re doing is opening up our LMS because right now our learning platform is just for students that are in our eight week training program. And we’re opening that up to the public. This is an exact example of how we are even using no-code.
Rob Walling:
You’re going to sell it as a SaaS, the platform that you built internally?
Tara Reed:
Yeah. One of the interesting things that’s happening with the company is we’ve operated as a coaching and agency business and are really moving into SaaS now. And a lot of that is just because we’re able to use revenue from the other side of the business to build software. And it’s good timing because we already have a large audience.
But what I’m saying is even as we open that up and open up the lessons and videos and tutorials to the public, we are going to eventually, down the road, code this just because it’s going to link in with some things that really hit up into the limitations of no-code. But we’re first building it without code. We already have lots of audience and traffic, so we’re still building it with no-code. But the reason we’re doing that is so that we can get quick insights about what’s working and not working and be able to feed that back to the engineering team so that they’re not wasting any time; they know exactly what’s working and not working by the time they get to it. And so that’s an example of how we even use it, where we will build the first version, the first MVP, the first six months to a year of the product with no-code, and then even you transition it from there.
Rob Walling:
There used to be something called paper prototyping where you would draw out a screen on paper, and then someone would click the button and then you would put another piece of paper over it. Or mock-ups. Figma, I believe, has click through mock-ups; probably Balsamic as well where it’s a mock-up trying to simulate an app, and you’re trying to click through and get user feedback. And you’re taking that really just a half step further where you’re actually building it out, storing the data, moving it in and out.
Tara Reed:
Yeah, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly right.
Rob Walling:
And so before we get in, I want to dive a little more into pros and cons of no-code then talk about entrepreneurial mindset. Before we do that though, I wanted to ask your preferred platform. Is it Glide?
Tara Reed:
Glide is my preferred platform. It’s the main platform that we teach. We’ve taught other tools in the past. The reason we teach Glide is the combination of capability and learning curve. I think that they find that middle ground really well. And I think there are other tools that can do more things, but the learning curve drop off is not as balanced and so it’s better to get people something where they can get moving and going and launching and deploying. And so it’s my favorite tool for that reason.
Rob Walling:
Glide must love you. Are bringing them a ton of business? You have to be one of their biggest ambassadors.
Tara Reed:
I don’t know that we’re tracking it, but yeah.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s cool. We’ve already touched on some pros and cons of no-code. And the reason that I bring it up this way is we do get this question at least once a quarter, maybe every couple months of, “I’m trying to build this in no-code. What should I watch out for? Should I try to do this in no-code?” Or even there’s questions that are like, “I’m about to pay someone $30,000 to build this for me.” And then I’ll pop in with this, “Sounds like something you could at least build an MVP in no-code.” Even if you can’t service 1,000 customers, you can get to a point.
I want to throw out to what I think are the three biggest positives around no-code. And I’m curious if you agree with them and then if there are others that you know of. But the first is that you don’t need to spend years learning to code. It’s a no or low developer requirement, which is amazing, so it’s a lot cheaper time wise and money wise if you had to hire it out. Second is speed. We’ve already touched on this. If I were to hire a developer to build or write it myself to build Pat and Vat like I just described, it would’ve been months of effort, no doubt. And we built it non-technical in a couple weeks. And the third one, maybe it’s a combination of the others, but I like to say that bootstrapping is a great equalizer, meaning almost anyone can bootstrap a business of some kind, and you don’t need permission to do it.
You actually have a phrase about building your own playbook. You just built your own playbook. I’m assuming the playbook’s available, they weren’t going to work for you. And then Bryce Roberts of Indie.vc has this phrase, permissionless entrepreneurship where you don’t need anyone’s permission to bootstrap a business. I see it as great equalizer. And I see if you can code, great. If you can’t, maybe no-code gives more non-technical people the ability to find that great equalizer.
Tara Reed:
I get to work with lots of people who do code and who love using no-code because they can move faster, they can validate do people want this? Will they pay for it? What are the main features that they need? And get that answer really quickly, and then they decide to go code it. I would even say it’s useful for people who do code too.
Rob Walling:
Okay. Those are my three. You have others that you’ve thought about?
Tara Reed:
I think your three are right. I think I would put an asterisk on the speed piece because I think that getting something out there quickly or your ability not to get something out there quickly, it’s probably the biggest killer of people’s entrepreneurial dreams that I see, just you’re in analysis paralysis, you never got it out. It went on the back burner, then you came back to it. Not using your momentum, that I think is people’s biggest downfalls in entrepreneurship, not knowing how to leverage that. And so getting something out there quickly is so important.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. I named three, but almost speed should be on there twice because it’s so important. That’s what you’re saying.
Tara Reed:
Underline it. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Underline it. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Before we dive in, I want to talk about entrepreneurial mindset. But in terms of some of the drawbacks that I’ve seen, we already talked about scale in terms of some type of limit, whether it’s the number or the volume or whatever. My last company was an email service provider called Drip. And I don’t even remember the numbers, but I remember at one point we were sending 100 million emails a month. Is that right? Yeah. No, no, it was more than that. But anyways, I questioned if a no-code app could do that, could keep up with it. There’s a scale there. There are limitations on what you can build it. It’s within the limits of platforms because again, I don’t think today you could build… I know today you could not build Drip with no-code. It was a big, complex app. It required custom code, basically, to do it.
And then I think the last one that we’ve run into with Pat and Vat and our other stuff is the UX UI can be challenging. And I’m not that picky but I’m a product guy so I’m picky enough that I’m always like, “Ooh, can we change this? Because it’s pretty janky.” And Ron will be like, “That’s the only calendar widget they have. It just works that way.” I would have a tough time, I think, if I sent Pat and Vat out into the wild. I would almost feel a little bad of it’s great for internal, but for having other people use it, I’m like, “Ooh.” And maybe it’s the fact that we use Airtable. And I think the UI of Airtable is not great, Glide’s probably better.
Tara Reed:
Think that’s right, I think that’s right. I think there are tools that give you a lot more flexibility on the UX UI, all the way to tools that give you full blank canvas flexibility. Sometimes that’s good or bad. If you have no design sensibility… I am not a designer, you should not put me in charge of designing the UI because I’m going to put something wild and not great. If you are one of those people, you actually maybe don’t want one of those tools that gives you full blank canvas. But I do think now there’s a little bit more spectrum of options that you have. I would put Airtable on the least flexibility end of the spectrum there. I would put maybe Glide on the lower flexibility side of the spectrum, but not all the way there, and then Bubble on the far, you design the UI the way that you want to design the UI. I agree with all of those. I think maybe the last one, there’s a little bit more options in terms of UI.
And I think that on the second one that you mentioned about just features that you can and can’t do, there are some limitations there. I think some of this, though, is around mindset about how you’re approaching launching. My question that I usually use for myself is if there’s a feature that is hard to do or I can’t do in no-code, the question that I have for myself is will adding this make me money right now? Right now, not down the road. But will that change the revenue of the business or will that change the user signups of the business significantly? Usually the answer is no. If it is, I think it makes sense to look at other options. But I do think that you’re going to run into one feature set that you want to do that’s going to be tricky to build with no-code, and so I agree with that second one too.
Rob Walling:
Very nice. And do you have any others that you think maybe I missed?
Tara Reed:
Yeah, I would elaborate on the things that you can’t do. Here are some things that I still see are really tricky to do and hard to do with no-code. If you want to build virtual reality headset software, I still haven’t seen a good tool. I have seen good AR tools. And Facebook has one. There’s a couple for augmented reality, but virtual reality not great tools out there.
If you want to build… I don’t know, what are the things people are absolutely not… I do think HIPAA compliance gets tricky. Your list of resources just immediately shrinks. I think that will change long term, but there’s lots of people who are like, “We’re not going to touch that right now.” What else? Randomly, you know those emoji apps or the emoji keyboard comes in, you can’t alter your emojis?
Rob Walling:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Reed:
And let me think of what I’m trying to think of use cases where not at all.
Rob Walling:
That’s a deep cut.
Tara Reed:
Yeah. Not at all.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Only someone who’s knee deep in it, like yourself, would know that. Yeah, wow.
Tara Reed:
Although maybe I have another list I can maybe share with you guys, we can put in the comments, the list of things that we typically get that are like, “We can’t do this at all.”
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Can’t do it. Yeah.
Tara Reed:
But I actually think you would be surprised at the limitation of the logic that you can implement here. And I just think it means that you have to choose a tool that has more flexibility.
Rob Walling:
Awesome. Well, let’s switch it up. Let’s talk about entrepreneurial mindset. The reason it’s so good to be able to talk to you about it is, A, you’re an entrepreneur yourself, B, you work with a ton of people who are trying to get businesses off the ground. And I think between you and I, thousands if not 10s of thousands of entrepreneurs that we’ve been exposed to.
And I think I want to kick it off, it’s like we can go down the design patterns and the anti-patterns. What are the commonalities that you see in folks who come to you? And oftentimes, as you’re saying, subject matter expert, someone who works in manufacturing or medical, no entrepreneurial experience, I’m guessing. Maybe even didn’t have an entrepreneur in their family. That is me, actually. Why do some of them succeed? What do you see in them?
Tara Reed:
Okay, so a couple things. First one is good fear management. If launching a business was not scary, everybody and their mama would have a million dollar business. And so it really is scary. Putting something that came from your brain out into the world for people to look at and see and judge, that in itself is scary. And so I think lots of people are looking for it to feel not scary first, and then they’ll do it. And it doesn’t actually work that way, it works in the reverse. You do the scary thing anyway, and then after you do it a couple times, it’s no longer scary to do, like hitting publish or asking people to sign up, sharing the link with people; those are the things that are just scary to do. That’s the first thing. People who do well have a good ability to manage their own fear around things.
Rob Walling:
And what’s interesting is episode 14 of this podcast, which was 12 years ago, is called Overcoming Fear. And of our first 100 episodes, it was one of the most popular. We’ve actually done replays of it. And even 650 episodes later I listen to it and it holds up because we all have that fear of launching. We have a fear of being criticized, we have a fear of looking dumb, we have a fear that no one will care, we have a fear that everyone will care, we have a fear of people’s eyes on us and saying, “This is great,” and a fear of success we have a fear of… Right?
Tara Reed:
Right.
Rob Walling:
Managing fear, that’s a really good one.
Tara Reed:
And the reality there is most people aren’t even paying that close attention to you. They’re worried about themselves. They’re not judging you that hard. They actually think in reality that what you’re putting out there and the fact that you’re putting something out there is really cool. They admire you. They think that’s awesome. That’s most scenarios.
Another one, and maybe this is a subset of fear, maybe it’s completely separate category, is managing a relationship with money, abundance, success I’ll put in the category. This is something I think for me that was really hard. And I think I’m just now eight years into entrepreneurship as a whole, really getting a grasp on. I think maybe some of that is I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family. The idea of investing in myself felt really scary to do. The idea of putting money into the business felt really scary. Those sorts of things made me really nervous.
I think the second thing of things I see that make a difference for people, success or not success, is really managing that relationship with money and abundance and not being in scarcity mindset of, “I can’t do this. I can’t go learn, I can’t go invest myself, I can’t pay for the software that I need because there’s not going to be enough, there’s not enough resources.” That’s another big one.
Just to put a quick note on this, I had to really invest in working on this for myself. I actually ended up doing a lot of hypnotherapy to help me with this, which sounds like super woo woo. Me several years ago would be like, “What are you talking about?” If I heard myself saying this. But there were lots of scenarios where just I didn’t have the relationship with money management to be able to run a company like I do now. It wasn’t there.
Rob Walling:
I share that, actually. I grew up without much money, and scarcity was my upbringing. We weren’t homeless, I don’t want to exaggerate it, but there were times when I was drinking powdered milk as a kid or my mom… It’s stuff. It doesn’t matter that much. Solidly working class is what I often say, which is fine. And every dollar counted, man. If I could get the socks for $2 cheaper at Costco and Target, I knew it and I would go to Costco. Or if the gas was 50 cents… Or not 50, 10 cents cheaper, then I would drive somewhere.
The problem was at a certain point, I made a bunch of money. I got rich in a way that is… And even me saying that sentence, I feel very uncomfortable saying it, to be honest. But why is that? Because I have this unhealthy relationship with it. And I’ve had to work on that.
And even to spend $100 on something that’s worth so much more to save time for me, to hire someone to come out and replace the [inaudible 00:31:37] on the garage door. I’ll spend six hours on a Saturday. I don’t anymore, but I used to because I grew up construction family, and to pay someone a couple hundred bucks to do something, my wife was like, “Dude, you’re nuts. You have so much. You could be with the kids, you could be doing some work, you could be… Whatever it is, relaxing. You need to chill out with that.” And so I realized at a certain point that I also had an unhealthy… It was an adaptive thing for me as a kid, and even as an adult, to be honest, because we came out of school making/// what did I make? $17 an hour at my first job. Hey, that’s great. Living in the Bay Area, can’t even afford a… We’re going to live in a trailer in a trailer park? We didn’t have the money.
And then suddenly, I had more and more. And I really liked this one because I don’t know that it’s talked about enough, probably not because it seems like whining on the yacht. You’ve heard this phrase of it seems like, oh real first world problem, so much money. But it’s like, even at the point where you… Let’s say you make, for the first time ever in your life you make $100,000. And that may be three times what your parents ever made, or something. That point, you should start adjusting. Now, you don’t go crazy and buy a Maserati, but are there ways that you can do that better? Are there ways that you can manage your money without just this tight fisted fear of every dollar?
Tara Reed:
Yeah. And I think it comes down to a trust in yourself and the ability to generate more. I do think that entrepreneurship really takes that, a trust in yourself that you’ll be able to flow money back to you. You’ll be able to create value for someone in some kind of way that you’ll be able to get resources. And if you don’t have that you, it’s really hard to take risks on an idea. And so that’s where I think it shows up for people. I like the example that you gave of even if you’re just making more money than your parents have made, it still shows up.
I think there’s two places where I see it show up for founders really specifically. The first show up of it is I don’t want to spend money on the software tool that I need because I’m trying to find a totally free way to do it. And while it’s really good to be tight on your expenses, there’s also a scenario that you run into where it’s like, yeah, but we need the tool to keep moving and to get going and to get the customers, so let’s just do that. Well, we’re going to be able to add value to people so we’ll get back.
I also see it show up a little bit later in the stage of but I don’t want to hire anyone to help me. I got to find a way to do everything myself. That’s the next stage place that it pops up. And it just requires a work on your relationship with abundance and not having scarcity mindset. That’s another thing.
Rob Walling:
Makes sense. You have any others you want to throw out? Other adaptive qualities. Or even go to the opposite, anti-patterns.
Tara Reed:
Yeah. The last anti-pattern is around the lack of scrappiness. There’s almost like a if you don’t have money for something, you need help from someone, you don’t have resources to do that, that’s fine. The inability to go, “Okay, how could I make this work? What if I bartered? What if I asked that person what they’re up to in life right now and what they need help with and found something that I could help with and then in exchange, they helped me with this thing that I need help with?” That, I think, is a big one.
And I think no-code is a really good tie in for that. It appeals to people who are scrappy, who are like, “Maybe it’s not going to be perfect.” Like in the scenario of bartering with someone. In an ideal scenario, you would have the payroll budget to hire them, but you don’t right now. In an ideal scenario, you would know how to code or have the technical co-founder, but you don’t right now. Or even if you are technical, you would have the product already out there and have feedback on it, but you don’t right now, so here’s the thing we can do, roll up our sleeves.
And I think what comes with that is a comfortability with not being perfect, it not being perfect when you put it out there. And I think when people are in full perfectionist mode, it’s really hard to launch something. Even if you had a full development team, the first thing you launch is still not going to be perfect. What’s that quote? Reid Hoffman says, “If you’re not embarrassed of the first version of your product, then you launched too late.” That willingness to put something out there and get feedback on and iterate over time. I think that the reliance on everything having to be perfect at first launch is it a anti-pattern.
Rob Walling:
Big time. Better done than perfect. That’s a phrase. I actually had that on a T-shirt, I think user list gave me. But I love the way the last two things you said tied in; lack of scrappiness. It’s like a lack of creativity, a lack of just getting it done, just the inability to just get done when it’s hard, when you don’t have the money, whatever. And maybe to jump in and do it yourself and to learn, I remember teaching myself X, Y, Z even though I only needed it once, but I needed it at that time. And I spent too many days learning it. Facebook ads was what it was, actually, where I spent an entire weekend reading all the books back in 2011. And I was being scrappy because I didn’t have the money to hire consultant and so I just did it. Each of these has, I think, a pattern and an anti-pattern.
The shadow side of that is you can’t then take that too far. You get down to the point where you don’t want to bring anyone in because, well, I can do everything because I’m the entrepreneur. And even if I have the money, I’m going to keep more money for myself and do it. And then of course that’s burnout. You move slower, you grow slower, you don’t whatever. Each of them, I think, has both sides.
Tara Reed:
That’s right, that’s right.
Rob Walling:
Well Terry Reed, it’s been amazing you on the show.
Tara Reed:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Thanks so much for coming on.
Tara Reed:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been fun. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. If folks want to keep up with you, you are on Instagram @tarareed_, and of course also on Instagram @appswithoutcode, and appswithoutcode.com. Thanks so much.
Tara Reed:
Thank you.
Rob Walling:
It’s great to be here on this third day of January 2023. Thanks for listening this week and every week. If you feel like you want to change someone’s year, maybe send them an episode of Startups For the Rest of Us or post a link to the show on Twitter. We’re @startupspod, I’m @robwalling. If you’re still on Twitter, that is, by the time this goes live. It’s great to be back in your ears again this week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 642.