Episode 668 | 9 Key Takeaways from MicroConf U.S. 2023 in Denver

Rob Walling:
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Today, I sit down with Arvid Kahl and we talk through nine key takeaways from MicroConf US 2023 in Denver that happened just a couple months ago. It was great to get Arvid back on the show. He was on here about two years ago talking about his exit with Feedback Panda. And today, we talk through MicroConf in Denver. As mentioned in the episode, our next MicroConf is in October in Lisbon, Portugal, and then we have one in Atlanta next April. You can head to MicroConf.com if you want to find out more and to buy tickets. We try pretty carefully in today’s show to offer takeaways that have meaning, even if you weren’t at the event. I think a lot of event podcasts are great if you were at the event. And then if you weren’t, they don’t have much meaning.
So hopefully, this is a helpful walkthrough of things that we took away from the event. And if you’re not familiar with Arvid, he and his wife bootstrapped Feedback Panda to an exit. I’m trying to think. It was four or five years ago now. And since then, he’s been writing and building in public. He has about 114,000 Twitter followers, and that becomes important if you make it to the … There’s an after credit scene. It’s a hidden track at the end of the podcast. That’s basically why this is long. We end the episode, and then we talked through some Twitter strategy because I really wanted to hear how he built such a large following so quickly. But Arvid is a maker, he’s a developer, he’s a writer, and he’s a teacher, and he’s written multiple books. You can find out more about him at thebootstrappedfounder.com. And with that, let’s dive into our conversation. Arvid Kahl back on Startups for the Rest of Us. Man, it’s been a while.

Arvid Kahl:
Oh, it’s been a while indeed. Thanks for having me back. I’ve really, really enjoyed the year-and-a-half, two years in between the last time we talked, just post my exit. And now, I’m here. Man, it’s really nice for you to have me on. Thanks so much.

Rob Walling:
I really appreciate you the taking time. I want to talk about MicroConf 2023, which was in Denver just a couple months ago. Usually, I try to record these the week of the event or the week after. But due to circumstances beyond my control, a lot of travel, we’re coming back to it now. But yeah, appreciate it. I want to set the stage for folks who maybe didn’t attend. I mean, there were about 240 attendees at MicroConf Denver this year. That is down from our standard 300 attendees. That’s a pre-COVID number.
So every year, we used to sell it out every year. And in 2019, we had 300 folks there. And then COVID. Two years was zero. And then Minneapolis, which was 2022, was about 150 people, so about half capacity. And this year, we’re back up to 240. And it feels like across all our events, that’s about where we’re hitting. We were at 50% for a while, then 65%, and now I think we’re up around 75%, 80% capacity. And I’m curious from your perspective, obviously COVID kind of scared a lot of us. Some of us, until the moment we got the vaccine. And then I was like, “Yep, I’m at in-person events.” And then other folks are still nervous to come. How do you think about that? When did you start returning to events?

Arvid Kahl:
In Denver. That was the first time I ever went to anything.

Rob Walling:
After COVID? Whoa.

Arvid Kahl:
2023. April 2023. It’s the first time that I left my house effectively.

Rob Walling:
Wow.

Arvid Kahl:
I mean, that’s not really true. We moved from Germany to Canada during the pandemic, so there was a lot of moving there, I guess. But ever since then, I kind of hunkered down at home, built my little media empire or whatever I am doing right now. I don’t really know what to call this. But just built my brand to just write, interact with people, but all online. All on Twitter, all through communities and stuff, and never, ever trying to meet anybody. We got our shots and everything, mostly for the health of our extended family. Because when we moved to Canada, it was really the idea to move to Danielle’s family. Her family is from the area we moved to, and there was a lot of older people here and we just wanted to protect them. So that was the idea. We all got vaccinated, but we still kind of hunkered them. We took tried to protect everybody there.
So I was very much afraid to go anywhere until I thought, “Now it’s kind of time to live a normal life again,” or live a life as we knew it. And when you just said you were at half capacity with 150 and now you’re getting back to 240. Honestly, just thinking about how I perceive this time, it is an incredible accomplishment for you to even have gotten more than zero people back into a conference. It just feels like there’s always this little bit of risk that is involved. And particularly among bootstrappers, I think we look at risk and we have a bus factor that is intense in our businesses. Every single one of us leading a SaaS business with two to three people. If we are out for a week or a month or, God forbid, half a year trying to recover from this thing, the business is gone. So the risk is very strong, which was what always kept me from going anywhere.

Rob Walling:
Well, that’s a ringing endorsement for MicroConf, the fact that that was the place that decided to bring you back.

Arvid Kahl:
You’re pulling out the best in people, right?

Rob Walling:
Indeed. And yeah, it feels really good. I mean, in 2022, as we ran events, I remember saying just getting 50 of us in a room is a W, is a notch in the win column basically. And now that it’s building back up, it’s really exciting. So for folks who don’t know who was is in Denver, I co-emceed it with Lianna Patch, who’s the founder of Punchline Copy. And then we had a handful of speakers, Claire Suellentrop from Forget the Funnel, Dev Basu, Patrick Campbell, John Ndege. And then we had facilitators like yourself, Arvid Kahl from The Bootstrap Founder, talking about founder mental health and such, and then Anthony Eden, Quiet Light, and a few others. It took place over two-and-a-half days and this continues the evolution of MicroConf, where in 2011 we had 12 speakers in two days, and in 2012 we had 10 speakers, and then we had nine for many years.
And now, we literally had five or six main stage speakers this time, and that’s been by Popular demand because we know the value of MicroConf is the connections between people. It’s about the community, it’s about introducing and then deepening those connections. No matter how much founder-by-founder time that we have, there’s always one person who’s like, “We could have used more,” which is a cool sign, right? There’s a bell curve. You’re never going to be right in the center of it. But in this case, we pulled out the stops and really made a lot of efforts towards introducing folks. You have any opening thoughts? You and I each have our top five key takeaways, but you have any opening thoughts before we dive in?

Arvid Kahl:
Man, you’re absolutely right. People come there for other people. And I think, just in general, that’s what makes this conference such a different conference. My opening thought, I compared this to the other conferences that I went to in my life, mostly software conferences or startup conferences. I went to Web Summit one year in Portugal, this massive, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of attendees, and these gigantic stars that they invited. They had Ray Dalio on stage and I was like, “Well, that’s not helpful at all.” I mean, it’s great. Ray Dalio is a great writer and investor and he has all these things to share, but I came there and building this little SaaS business. We even had a little booth there just presenting the thing to people and see what they say. And then you have people on stage that are quite unreachable, both in terms of where they are as a contributor to the entrepreneurial community, and just physically unreachable because it was a massive stadium and they were on stage half a mile away from you.
It’s like, “Yeah, this is not about connecting with my fellow people here. This is just about looking at this stage and clapping loudly and big bombastic effects,” and MicroConf is the exact opposite of this. People come not necessarily for the talks. They love the talks and they’re insightful. They take away something from the talks. But the moment the talk is over, people turn to each other. And not to the next thing. They don’t go to the next room. They go to a conversation that they may have already started a couple hours ago. That is super valuable that people don’t turn away from each other, they actually turn towards each other, and I really, really like that.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And as I was saying, that’s the evolution of MicroConf. In the early days, we started it more as an educational event because there was no one talking about just nuts and bolts, marketing, and launching of startups in 2010, 2011 when this podcast started. It was all these headlines and it was a venture capitalists saying these really high level things that didn’t apply to our type of business. And so MicroConf was like, “Well, let’s educate based on what we know and what other successful founders are actually doing, not just the, ‘Oh, I raised a big round.'” But it’s like, “How did you grow your audience? What are the marketing approaches?”
The first two, three MicroConfs, we were discovering these things together. “Oh, B2B is superior to B2C.” We didn’t know that. I mean, it’s so fundamental now, but that was discovered at MicroConf. “Raise your prices. We’re all underpriced.” That was the first three years. It’s basic things like that that have helped us. I think, collectively, it’s kind of raised the rising tide and has raised all boats. So with that, let’s dive into our top five takeaways. Why don’t you kick us off? These are in no particular order. So if we say it’s your first takeaway, it’s not necessarily the most important. But why don’t you kick us off?

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, I was going through my experience, my mental recollection of the experience of the conference, which is mostly talking to other people. That’s kind of where this is coming from. And one thing that I noticed in many, many conversations, that just looking at the community of founders that was there, almost everybody was struggling in some way. Obviously, we have a economic situation in the post-COVID world and all that. The internet is weird. Privacy is weird. There’s a lot of stuff going on. Lots of people were looking for ways to pivot, and they were quite expressly mentioning that. They were saying, “We are doing this, this, and this, and this is not working well anymore. Our low-touch SaaS thing that we had running for us so well all of a sudden is not making as much as it did anymore”.
And instead of saying, “Well, how are we going to try to force people back into low-touch SaaS,” which, for some people, the first idea is to go for the golden goose that worked so well until now, a lot of people were asking about, “Well, what else can we do?” And that I found very interesting because that’s such a founder-centric thing, such a bootstrap-y way of, “Well, what else can we do? What’s some thread we can pull?” So I heard a lot of people talking about finding high-touch service offerings, in addition to their low-touch, B2B SaaS that they were already running. That was something that I hadn’t really found that expressly-mentioned anywhere else before. It was a very strong current throughout the conversations that happened with me involved. Obviously, there were different conversations there too. But almost half of the conversations I had were kind of about that.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, and I do think that’s a sign of the increased competition in SaaS today. Bootstrap SaaS is different than it was five years ago and different than it was 10 years ago. And we can say, “It’s easier to get something launched, but that means more people are doing it. It’s harder to be heard through the noise,” or whatever it is. There’s just a lot of SaaS. Everything is becoming SaaSified. Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, and that does lead to needing other options to maybe keep it going. I mean, I see more bootstraps SaaS founders raising funding now than ever before, and I think that’s also part of it, of, “Huh, you maybe need a little more to get started today than you did a few years ago.” So I could see that as well, adding consulting or going up market. I mean, there’s a bunch of different ways to get that money to get going.
So my first one is going to sound … Well, I don’t know if it sounded obvious to people because I think we sometimes forget this. But nothing beats being in a room together. There’s nothing of higher fidelity. I have four VR headsets in my house and I play VR fishing or golf or other things with basically kind of mastermind-ish folks, kind of mentors or colleagues of mine. Instead of sitting staring at each other on Zoom, we go into VR and we talk business and do this once a month, once every other month. And it’s cool and it’s VR and there’s avatars.
And it’s just not the same because I still have a headset on at my own house. And when I’m at Zoom, we’re staring at each other. You ever been on a four-hour Zoom call, six-hour Zoom call? I have. It is exhausting. And yet at MicroConf, four hours I’m in a room with people, six hours, eight hours. And even though I’m tired and even though I’m extroverted out … I call it an extrovert hangover that I think a lot of us get … even though at the end of eight or 10 hours at MicroConf during the day, in the evening, I’m like, “I want to talk to more people,” because nothing beats being in a physical space together.

Arvid Kahl:
That is my experience too. Just the facilitation of new ideas coming up. Even solutions to people’s problems. I’m kind of getting almost into another one I had here, but let me just throw this in. Let’s do these not in order, but completely randomly and disperse them. But the idea that you could just go to a person that you probably kind of already know from Twitter. I had a lot of people that I had already talked to virtually, met them for the first time, had these wonderful conversations that kind of piggybacked on what we had already done in DMs. You have this baseline understanding of each other’s world already, and then you just jump into other people’s issues.
They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Man, this doesn’t work.” And then you have these opportunities where you can say, “Well, that guy over there,” you can literally point at the person, “has solved this problem just last week. Why don’t you just take it by the hand? And we’ll lead you over there, introduction, bam. Problem solved.” This is just something that no other place could ever potentially solve like this. Unless we live in the Oasis from Ready Player One, but that does not exist. No VR situation can ever facilitate just an actual room with physical beings.

Rob Walling:
And such a big element of that is this thing that I say from stage often, which is you are in a room unlike any room you’ve ever been in before. And I don’t mean these four walls. I mean the 239 other people here. It’s that except for MicroConfs … and maybe there’s other events like this, I haven’t particularly found them. BOS is similar. And the Dynamite Circle, their DC events are similar. But if you are a Bootstraps House founder, there is no other room that you will be in where everyone else is doing what you’re doing and we’re all on the same page.

Arvid Kahl:
Well, that kind of brings me to my number two. If I can just throw this in right here. What I noticed is exactly this, and there is such a common baseline of shared experiences in that room that makes conversations, that makes exchanges, or just even collective problem solving much easier. Everybody has the same problems. And in my talk, I got to actually facilitate conversation between people because everybody has mental health issues. Every single founder in that room was like, “Yeah, I have mental health issues.”

Rob Walling:
We all do.

Arvid Kahl:
And I was talking to people. Literally throughout the whole conference, from day one, meeting them, coming to the hotel, a couple people already there kind of recognized me. I went over, had a chat. And 10 minutes in, I told them what I was going to do. I was going to get people to share mental health issues and how they dealt with them with each other during the talk, if I could call it that because it was mostly people talking to each other not onstage, but offstage. And everybody had a story ready. That was one of the craziest things that I’ve ever, ever noticed or ever witnessed in my life was that I told people, “Yeah, I’m going to talk about social isolation and living with anxiety,” and they were like, “Yeah, so last week.” There was immediately a story. Every single person had a story.
And that shared sentiment of knowing exactly what the other person is talking about when it comes to anxiety, stress, and all these things, that makes conversations so much easier and it makes it so much easier for people to open up. I went on stage, shared my own story, gave them permission to share theirs. And I wasn’t even off-stage for this little 15-minute segment that I gave the audience to talk to each other that the room was buzzing with people sharing their story. That was such a monumental experience for me to see that people were just waiting to get permission to share this. And that is something that MicroConf can do like no other conference because we are the same people trying to build the same kind of businesses.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. That’s a really good point. And to be honest, it’s something that I didn’t realize when we started this. I genuinely thought we’d get in a room together and chat about some things and we’d learn marketing and education or whatever. And after the first year, 2011, I was telling everyone, “Yeah, this is the last one. There’s no way I’m doing this again.” It was so much. It was so hard and so much work. This is back when we ran the logistics, Mike and I ourselves. And people were like, “No. Raise the price. I need this.” That’s when we realized. It’s the “shut up and take my money” meme. We found product market fit. We stumbled into it that first year. But to your point, that’s what it is, is there’s never another time in my year when I’m in a room with that many other people where I know I can go up to anyone and I can tell them, “Oh my gosh. I’m so stressed out because things are bad.” I can say, “Here’s my MRR and my churn. What do you think? Help me with my funnel.”
It’s just all the crap that we talk about on this podcast and on Twitter that’s all just jargon to everyone else. It’s the opposite of jargon. It is our language. It’s our love language at a MicroConf. All right, my number two. So MicroConf, like any SaaS company, is a startup. I mean, we’ve been around now for a while, for 12 years. But we are still experimenting and changing things year to year. And so one learning that I take away every year is that experiments are always scary and they’re often risky, but they can also have a big payoff. And I want to call out what has now been known as the Chaos Lunch. I was calling it the Cluster Flunch. So Producer Xander had this great idea.

Arvid Kahl:
That was awesome. That was great.

Rob Walling:
He said, “What do you think if we send people off in groups of,” I don’t know, it was between eight and 20. “Just get people together and we pre-assign the groups. We put a credit card on file at a bunch of local restaurants within walking distance, so big radius.” And he got, I don’t know what the number was, 10, 15, 20 different restaurants that he called and made lunch reservations. And I’m like, “That sounds cool. That sounds great.” And so I was like, “Sounds like a big risk, though. Are people going to do it? Are they going to walk? The logistics sound complicated.” This is always my thinking, and Xander is great at logistics. It’s one of the things he’s amazing at.
And so it’s noon on the second day and I’m like, “Great. And now, go to this URL within your MicroConf hub and you’re logged in. It should have a number there.” And then, people were in Slack and raising their hand, “A number’s not showing up,” and I was like, “All right.” And so I look at Xander in the back of the room and I’m like, “Xander, what are we doing?” and I see him point to his watch and make a circular motion, which means stall for time. So I’m like, “Lianna Patch with ChatGPT jokes!” and I’m like, “Where’s my magic trick? I left it in my bag.” So we stall for five, six minutes, and eventually I’m like, “Okay.” And people start kind of wandering out the back, maybe thinking about their own lunch because it’s 12:06, 12:07. And eventually, it just came together. We literally all stood around Xander and he’d say, “What’s your name? Here’s your number,” and people were just gathering in groups, and we just figured it out.
If it was 2,000 people, it would’ve been catastrophic. But with 240 people, we were able to figure it out. And that was one of the highlights for me was being matched at these tables. I didn’t know most of the people. I knew a few of the people. Had some amazing conversations because I was forced to meet and we were paired up. Xander and his team were pretty smart about it. They were deliberate. He knew that there should be a balance of … They didn’t put me, you, and Patrick McKenzie at the same table, right? You were at a table. I was at a table. Just to help spread it around. But Chaos Lunch is probably what we’ll call it from now on. And I think it won’t be chaos in the future, but it was a big experiment. It was risky. And in the moment I was like, “Oh my God. This is not going to work.” And then in the end, people raved about it to me personally, and then in the after-event survey.

Arvid Kahl:
It does remind me so much of the Paul Graham “do things that don’t scale” situation. Xander was literally the concierge doing the thing that doesn’t scale at all, but it was really great. It was fun because people were all smiling. I was standing pretty close to Xander because we were trying to find my number, and he was smiling, kind of slightly stressed. But everybody was still, “Ah, we’re going to figure it out.” This is the best potential audience you could do this with because people’s expectation for how things can break immediately are just, “Yeah, sure.” Obviously, we all had downtime. This was literally the non-SaaS version of a little maintenance issue.

Rob Walling:
That’s right.

Arvid Kahl:
It was fun and it gave people great opportunities to just commiserate together. I guess that would be the word. “Okay, this was fun. Now we’re here. Now let’s have a chat. Now let’s get to know each other.” You have this shared, funny, and maybe not the best positive, but still interesting experience. I think that was great.

Rob Walling:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
I think that was a wonderful idea. You should do this every time. Let’s see if you can orchestrate the chaos. Let’s see.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it reminds me. Basically, we shipped a bug to production is really what that was. But then, we recovered. You fix it and you move on.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that’s right. That was fun.

Rob Walling:
With that, what’s your number three?

Arvid Kahl:
I think my number three is a bit more kind of tactical at this point. Dev gave this wonderful talk and he talked about all these different kinds of new ways of getting your product in front of people. He mentioned discovery ads, and there was this kind of moment in the room where people were like, “What is this?” And I love the fact that we’re 10 years in to this conference where everybody’s sharing stuff with each other all the time, and there’s still something new that people have never really figured out when it comes to marketing your product. And particularly, that whole discovery thing when he explained it, everybody’s like, “Whoa! We can do this?” The idea was really to put your ads in front of, I think, through Gmail or something so that when your competitors’ renewal emails come in, your product gets placed there as an ad, as a competitive product.
You have this thing you mentioned in your opening talk. You have STIR. You have strategies, tactics, inspiration, and relationships. And as much as I love the whole inspiration and relationships part, which is the hallway track and all the things we just talked about, the S and the T, the strategies and the tactics, they’re still there and they’re still amazing and people still get something out of it that they didn’t expect to get. So that was really cool. As an example of this, you still have these super impactful, novel things that you never thought about. And now you know how to do it, which is just really cool.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And back in the day, MicroConf was 80% strategies and tactics, and then inspiration relationships was kind of like, “Oh, that’ll be the icing on the cake,” and it’s kind of flipped. And I think for the better, where it’s 80% inspiration and relationships and then 20% strategies and tactics. But to your point, my number three is also Dev Basu’s talk. He had five playbooks that he showed. One was discovery ads. I made a note of a couple others. He talked about building comparison pages, how to do that, and then taking advantage of competitor price increases, and then he had two others.
Folks, by the way, if they want to buy the videos for the talks, I think they’re $50 for all of them and it’s at MicroConf.com/US. But I felt the same way, where throwing out a bunch of tactics, talk after talk over a couple days gets old, but hearing a couple that blow your mind throughout the days makes it worth it in addition. Not that the relationships don’t on their own, but if you take away a couple things to experiment with or a mindset shift or anything like that, I think it’s pretty incredible.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah. It’s kind of front loading value, right? We do this a lot in SaaS, trying to convince people. Eventually, they could convert into a paying user by giving them as much as possible right at the start. I think Dev did an amazing job at that. He gave people something tangible that no matter if there was anything else at the conference that may or may not work for them, that was going to be at least worth considering as something that everybody could do for their business. So that was genius on your part, I guess, to put that talk there, and genius on him to actually put that in the talk. The ST in STIR is at the beginning of the word for that reason. I kind of felt like that was strategic. I’m not sure if it was. But if it was, great. If not, just act like it was.

Rob Walling:
So I used to put together the run of show and put who goes where in the schedule. Xander does that now, and then I review it and sanity check it with him, and it is intentional. If you run events, you learn where to put things. You learn where to put different people in different topics. And certainly, leading was something that’s either high level or tactical. That was very much an intentional decision.

Arvid Kahl:
Thank you for putting my talk right in front of the chaos lunch, so that was a lot of fun.

Rob Walling:
It was. We didn’t know. We just thought it was before lunch. Now, it’s chaos. So it sounds like we shared the same number three. What’s your number four?

Arvid Kahl:
My number four is the thing that you also did in your opening talk presentation. What I noticed is that people have wildly different reasons for why they run their SaaS businesses and they’re all proud of it, and they’re all following these many, many different goals for many, many different reasons, but with the same approach. You did this thing where you had a slideshow up and people were sending in pictures of the reason why they’re coming to the conference, why they’re building their business pretty much up there. You saw people having photos of their family up there, lots of them. People have photos of their pets up there, including our little puppy. She was up there too. I took even a photo of that. It was adorable. I showed that to Danielle. She was like, “Oh my god! Our puppy is at MicroConf!” It was really fun. And you had people sharing objects, private planes or places they wanted to go to, places they wanted to work from, places they wanted to visit.
You had all these many, many different reasons that people were running their business, and I think that level of diversity is really, really cool. It’s not that people are there just for the money. That was one thing that, again, with many of these startup conferences that I’ve been to in my life … and even coding conferences, maybe more technical, not as much money … but people are career driven and they want to reach that next step, the money milestone, or whatever. But this was just, “Yeah, I’m doing this for my kids,” or, “I’m doing this so I can have my own home and that’s it. That’s all I want.” The whole lifestyle business thing? That was so palpable in that moment, and the fact that we opened up with this? That was awesome. That was just, “Okay, we’re all in this together. We come from different places. We have the same experience. Let’s just bring it all together.” That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that.

Rob Walling:
Well, that’s what I love about bootstrapping in general is we can all have these different motivations. When you raise venture, you really are going after big money and big impact, I’ll say. I think people often will say, “Oh, I want to make a dent in the world,” kind of because they don’t want to say they want to get rich.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
There’s a few maybe that truly want to do that. And look, I’m not taking anything away from it because I started startups to get rich as well. But also, I had a purpose beyond just money. Freedom, purpose, and relationships. These are the reasons I do it. That might be the reason you or any listener does it. Or maybe it’s because they want to have 12 cats in their house like Lianna Patch. Ooh, throwing shade at Lianna.

Arvid Kahl:
Right.

Rob Walling:
Or like you said, that they want to own a home or that they want to travel and visit places. That’s the beauty of bootstrapping is that you’re in control.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, you’re in control and it’s kind of aimed at something. It’s not this kind of, “Oh, I have to follow the path that others have laid in front of me.” Our parents tried to push us into a certain direction. Get a job, get a career, and then die, right? We’re not on that path. We are on our own path and we have a goal. We have a reason. And I think that is a strong, strong thing to have, to be surrounded by people who have this.

Rob Walling:
And just to be clear, Lianna and I agreed, before we got on stage, what was on limits and off limits for basically ragging on each other, making jokes at the other expense.

Arvid Kahl:
Okay.

Rob Walling:
I said, “I’m going to joke about how many cats you have,” and she’s like, “Oh, that’s totally fair game,” so I’m continuing that effort here on the podcast. My number four was a talk/workshop from a guy named Arvid Kahl. There’s a lot of takeaways there. But a big takeaway for me is something that I’ve learned for years from my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling, but that you echoed and said in a different way from the stage, which is at any given time, each of us is struggling with something. Sometimes, it’s imposter syndrome. Sometimes, it’s mild depression. Sometimes, it’s deep depression. Sometimes, it’s anxiety. Sometimes, it can be OCD. Just whatever. We are working with something that other people probably don’t see from the outside. And that founder mental health in general is something that has become more talked about, but I still don’t think is talked about enough.
And so I enjoyed your session where you do a slide or two, you talk and then you say, “Talk amongst yourselves and talk about this thing.” And people would awkwardly look around, we had round tables, and then they’d start talking. And then before long, you couldn’t stop them talking, right? Because they were like, “Oh my gosh. I haven’t opened up about this to anyone else, and this is so cool to be able to talk about this in a way that no one mocked me.” I didn’t feel bad. I actually felt better having said this thing I’m struggling with.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah. Thanks so much. That is most appreciated. I really enjoyed it. It’s weird because it was a very vulnerable moment, not just for me, for everybody in there because you don’t really open up. And I love being on stage. The biggest stage I’ve ever been on, by the way, so thanks for allowing me to even be in the room like this. And after my talk, I guess pre-Chaos Lunch, or mid-chaos, pre-lunch, somebody came up to me and said, “Something just happened at our table that was really interesting.” And I think she said, “I saw somebody who started talking about their issue that they had.” Obviously, everybody was talking about mental health issues, and she saw that this person had never talked about this to anybody else before, and she could see the physical relief that was on their face after and during talking about this.
She thanked me. Not for herself, but for that other person to be able to do this. And I was like, “I just really said you can do this. You all did it all by yourselves.” But it was such a strong moment of, “Okay, we really need this. There are people here who have had these problems for decades and never thought it was worth it or allowed to ever talk to anybody about this. So what I really hope the people, these 250, 240 people that went there, went away from this conference with was we can all allow the people around us to talk more about these things. It’s kind of the pyramid scheme situation where you have one person getting 240 people to open up. Each one of them gets 240 people to open up as well. I would like to see that because you’re absolutely right. It’s severely underrepresented in our community. Even though it is much stronger in our community than others, it needs to reach way more people. That’s for sure.

Rob Walling:
With that, what is your number five, sir?

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, number five. I think the biggest thing for me at the conference … you mentioned it a couple times already, but I really want to bring it home … is the power of the hallway track. The fact that you can talk to anybody and there is no caste system at this conference. The hallway track obviously is everybody can talk to everybody, hopefully not during, but around the talks and in the evenings and during breakfast. And people meet each other, they go to breakfast together, they organize a dinner with each other or something like this. It extends beyond the literal hallway. It’s just around the conference all the time.
But what I really, really enjoyed is that I noticed that there were masterminds being founded during the hallway track. People met for the very first time and they were like, “Hey, we are vibing. Let’s connect. Let’s go on the Slack, the MicroConf Connect Slack and just have a mastermind there. We always thought we should, but we never did. Now that we know each other, we can do this.” Or people just had ideas that they were pitching to others that were immediately crushed and invalidated. It couldn’t have been better. You have this feedback loop there. And caste system, why I’m saying this is you did a really good job not bringing in the Ray Dalios of the world.
As much as it would probably be super cool to have that kind of person and then talk to them during the hallway track, I think it’s much better to be able to talk to them, or to talk to Claire, or to people like John. Everybody who was a speaker is just a person sitting there as well. You could have a chat with anybody. And I really appreciate that because that’s what makes the conference not one of these “looking at other people” conferences. It’s looking at your peers, everybody around you, and that is super valuable.

Rob Walling:
I’m glad that you noticed, and I’m glad that you’re calling it out because we absolutely get suggestions for speakers like Gary V., Seth Godin, whatever other celebrity person who talks about entrepreneurship or marketing or whatever. And look, I don’t mind those people. I like Seth Godin. I’ve seen him speak. He’s actually a great speaker. I question if he’s a MicroConf speaker. He’d probably do a good job. But to your point, he would fly in and he’d speak and he would leave at lunch, and that is different than what we’ve traditionally tried to do, which is to get folks who are boots on the ground. And actually, most of our speakers want to attend the event as well. And we’ve had a lot of speakers that will speak one year, it’s their first time attending. Then they’ll come back year after year because they’re like, “Oh, this is one of my favorite events,” because of the way it’s run.
So my five is a moment from Patrick Campbell’s talk. Well, actually, there’s two moments. So my favorite word spoken at MicroConf, and I’m totally doing this to call him out, was the word “yet.” And Patrick Campbell, you might wonder, “Rob, why are you paying attention to ‘yet?'” Patrick Campbell was talking about he had this $200 million exit, money in the bank. And at a certain point he was talking about being a bootstrapper, but being able to raise a small amount of funding. And he’s said, “Rob runs TinySeed and I don’t have a skin in the game. I’m not an LP there yet.” And that “yet” told me, “Oh, heck yeah.”
So anyways, that was a side jack. But really, my favorite part of his talk is he has these mental frameworks. One of them was an operating framework of cadence of company and this and that. He had I think three or four of those frameworks. But one that I liked and that I’ve talked about on this podcast, with different naming conventions, was he talked about the journey framework. And there are three founder paths if you’re going to do a SaaS, a startup. I call it lifestyle bootstrapper, an ambitious bootstrapper, and venture track. Those are kind of the three that I say. And notice, venture track is about raising funding. But lifestyle and ambitious, you can raise funding, small amounts or not, it doesn’t really matter. And lifestyle is truly like, “I want to get to $10K a month, $50K a month,” whatever the number is. It’s usually not millions a year. Could be, but usually it’s not. “And I want to work as little as possible. I actually don’t care about growth. I care about massive cash dividends and I’m just doing it for the lifestyle.”
And that’s great. I’ve had many businesses like that and they were amazing. And then I transitioned, and some people do it at certain points and they’re like, “No, I now want to build that multi-million dollar startup. I want to have an eight-figure exit,” eight or nine frankly, because Patrick bootstrapped to a $200 million exit, “and I’m going to hire, I’m do what it takes, and I am going to grow this thing because that’s my ambition. I want to build something big.” And maybe it’s to get rich, maybe it’s to have an amazing purpose, maybe it’s to make an impact. But Patrick had the same thing with different names. There were three founder paths. And it was something like a lifestyle bootstrapper, and then it was in-between, ambitious, which is what he did. That’s what they did with ProfitWell. And then, venture track. And he actually said, “The mistake we made is we didn’t raise some funding. We wanted to grow like a venture-backed company, but we never raised venture, and so it was very, very hard for us.”
So I liked that takeaway of him, his mental model of there being these paths. And as we said earlier, if you’re bootstrapped, you can kind of do what you want. Now, once you raise venture, you can’t anymore. And that’s a decision that people make. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just know what you’re getting into.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that was really interesting. It was really nice of him to, I feel, share the little secrets from inside of his own mind, the things that he wished he had, but hasn’t, and was still successful. But he still kind of talks about it as if it was a mistake to have made, right? Just the insight into somebody’s mind. Even him talking about how his dad asked him if he’s now going to finally become a doctor because he still wasn’t happy with him exiting for $200 million. That’s just the insecurities you have as a person. You just laid them all out and that was really nice. It was a great talk. I really enjoyed it too. That was a lot of fun and really helpful.
I’m just thinking about this because you were mentioning it just now with these three different paths. That’s something that I’ve heard a lot of people figure out because their co-founders are on a different path than they are, right?

Rob Walling:
Yes.

Arvid Kahl:
That is super risky. Something that I just want to throw this in here. If you found with other people, figure out which path they are actually on. Even though you’re working on the same business, they might be thinking about very different outcomes in the future.

Rob Walling:
Right. With any major stakeholders. So it’s co-founders, and if you truly want a lifestyle bootstrap, go do that, but know that your co-founders should be on the same page. And don’t take investment. If you’re going to do that, just don’t take it there. The numbers don’t work. So I see people taking money and then wanting to be like, “I’m going to work half-time on my business and do five other businesses at once.” Even in this day and age, they still do. Even at TinySeed or at NDWC, they don’t work that way. So anyways, if folks are stoked about MicroConf, if they like this and they want to be in a room with a couple hundred amazing people, we have a MicroConf Europe coming up in Lisbon, October 1st through the 3rd. And then, we are in Atlanta next April. And I don’t know those exact dates, and I seem to be having trouble locating them and with my Google-fu right now. But have you decided? Are you coming to either of the next two?

Arvid Kahl:
I’m totally coming to the one in Atlanta.

Rob Walling:
All right.

Arvid Kahl:
That is happening for sure. Not so sure about Europe this year, but I do want to come to the Atlanta one. It would be marked in my calendar if I had the dates, but I’m very much looking forward to that. And just even as an attendee would be great. I would love to do more stuff too with the community there. But it was just fun. My first MicroConf I ever went to in Dubrovnik, back there at the Europe one in 2019, that opened so many doors for me just to meet so many cool people. And now, I got to do this here. I would just come to stand at the window and look inside if that was an option. If you sold out, I would just claw out the window from the outside. It would be worth going to Atlanta for that.

Rob Walling:
You are too kind, sir. I will, of course, be at both of them as always. And so folks who want to check it out, head to MicroConf.com and there’s an events tab at the top. And I will get Producer Xander and his team to add Atlanta because it should be on the list by the time this episode goes live. We will have that there. Arvid Kahl, you are @arvidkahl on Twitter. 114,000 Twitter followers. Look at you!

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, yo! Isn’t that bizarre?

Rob Walling:
It’s pretty impressive, man. And thebootstrappedfounder.com if folks want to listen. You have a podcast, you have a YouTube channel, and you consult with folks. Well, you have books as well.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah. I got a lot of small bets going.

Rob Walling:
Email, newsletter.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that’s right.

Rob Walling:
This sounds familiar.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah!

Rob Walling:
You do a lot of things. I do a lot of things too. It’s fun. And you do consulting for folks as well.

Arvid Kahl:
Well, thanks so much for having me. That was really nice. It’s really nice to just relive the experience, because the two days, they were great. I wish it was two weeks, but obviously …

Rob Walling:
I always do too.

Arvid Kahl:
Not sure if I would. I’m also one of these kind of introvert/extrovert people that are extroverted in their group of people, but introverted usually. So I think two days was perfect. But reliving it with you just now, that was awesome. Thanks so much.

Rob Walling:
Absolutely. Thanks again to Arvid for appearing on the show and for sharing his takeaways from MicroConf US. I hope to see you in October in Lisbon, or in Atlanta in April of 2024. It’s great to have you here this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 668.
Congrats. You made it to the not-so-hidden track that I announced in the intro of the episode. I don’t normally do that. But actually, I’ve had a few people reach out when we have these hidden tracks if I don’t intro them, and they say, “Oh, I think you left something that should have been on the cutting room floor in the episode. Did you mean to publish that?” Yeah, we do. Before we dive into Arvid and my conversation about his Twitter strategy and just how he built a following, one of the funniest moments of this year’s event was when my co-emcee, Lianna Patch, fell off the back of the stage. So let’s roll the audio to that right here.
Want to grab the water bottle?

Lianna Patch:
Why do I have to grab it? The patriarchy. Okay, I’m fine.

Rob Walling:
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Lianna Patch!

Lianna Patch:
Thank you! Please tweet about that. (Beep) my life.

Rob Walling:
You kicked!

Lianna Patch:
I kicked the light off the stage. I’m not going back down there.

Rob Walling:
After that moment, of course, we continued to joke about it for the next two days because she was fine, not hurt, which is kind of the best of both worlds when you have something funny happened that doesn’t hurt anyone. And with that, let’s roll back into my conversation with Arvid where I asked him, “How did you grow this audience so quickly on Twitter?” Turns out it was maybe three-and-a-half years, and he mostly went from zero to 114,000 Twitter followers.
Anyway, sir, I wanted to keep you around here to ask you how in the hell did you grow your following to 114,000 people so quickly? A, how long did it take from when you really started focusing? And then, what did you do? I mean, these days you are actually doing Twitter consulting in a way. I could hire you to come give me advice, or give me a teardown screen class.

Arvid Kahl:
Teardown is what I call it. Yeah, that’s right.

Rob Walling:
So how’d you figure this out? What are you up to?

Arvid Kahl:
So let me look at this with perfect hindsight. Let’s just start with that. Now honestly, I think I had 400 Twitter follows for most of my life, for many, many years. I think that MicroConf in Dubrovnik that I was mentioning earlier, the one in 2019, that kind of put me on the map in the community because you allowed Danielle and me on stage at both MicroConfs. You kind of pulled me out on stage and we gave this little talk about how we did our business, how we exited it, and what we built into the business for it to be able to exit, and people really seem to like that. We had a YouTube video of that available. There’s a lot of credibility that comes from this.
And that helped me get an initial little footing in our community. People looking at my profile, they knew, “Okay, this guy apparently is not just lying like everybody else on Twitter.” You have a lot of scams, a lot of people with “trying to get rich quickly” stuff that you see, these Hustle University stuff, things where people just paid loads of money to become part of a pyramid scheme. I did not do this because I didn’t want to, and it didn’t look like it because I had some kind of credibility. That really helped me in the beginning. And I started my blog at the same time. So I had something for people to look at, to see if there was actually meaningful content backed up. Not just me talking about it on Twitter, but there’d actually be something else so that was also a thing. So it’s kind of the tandem there.
And then, I just relentlessly engaged with people that I already wanted to talk to on Twitter. That’s been my story and my approach to Twitter for the last, what is it now? Three-and-a-half, oh boy, almost four years soon? Interesting. That’s a long while. Yeah. Every day, I spend at least half an hour actively contributing to other people’s conversations, and that has been my only engagement strategy. I don’t do “follow for follow” or I don’t do weird giveaways every day, or these weird things where you sell your product and you have the countdown thing, “Only 10 left, only nine left.” I just don’t care for this. I try to banish all growth hacks from my Twitter strategy, which only leaves me with being myself.
And that is actually quite enjoyable to some people, that I’m just me talking about the things I like and talking about things that I think are interesting in a way that I think is interesting. That’s really what it is. So my strategy is one of not having too much of a strategy, but actually just engaging with people like you in the hallway track. I would go up to them, talk to them, they say something, I’m listening in as I walk over, I contribute something that I have to say. And I just do this every single day and have done this for years now.

Rob Walling:
And do you get more followers from a standalone tweet or a tweet thread that you start, or from this engagement? When you say engagement, do you mean like, “Oh, Jason Cohen posted something. Hiten Shaw,” whoever. “I’m going to respond to that whether it’s a question or whether it’s a whatever,” is that what you mean by engagement?

Arvid Kahl:
That’s exactly right.

Rob Walling:
Okay. And does that actually get you followers, engaging?

Arvid Kahl:
Way more.

Rob Walling:
Really?

Arvid Kahl:
And not just more, but also better. The followers you get from a viral tweet. You always have to think about Twitter as a funnel, right? We know how funnels work. You have all of the big stuff up top and it gets smaller, smaller, smaller on the way down. And any message that you send on Twitter, be it a reply or a tweet or quote tweet or whatever, can be that initial part of the funnel for somebody, right? Somebody sees your tweet for the very first time. They see your face, hopefully, and not just some weird Web3 avatar. They see a name, hopefully an actual name of a real person, and your Twitter handle, and the message you write. That’s all they see for the very first time when it comes to you. And if that convinces them that you are not an absolute idiot, then they might even click on your name to go to your profile.
And then, it kind of funnels further down. They look at your header image, they look at your bio, they look at the link, how many followers you have, they look at your pinned tweet and your history of tweets. And on every single part of these steps, somebody might or might not follow you or exit the funnel, so that’s kind of how you have to look at Twitter. So obviously, if you present a very, very involved and helpful and contributory message as part of an ongoing conversation, their likelihood of thinking, “Hey, this guy or girl is cool,” is so much higher than when the random wisdom that you just posted into the nether appears on their feed. Because we’re all kind of competing with each other’s tweets, right? The thing you write is kind of absolutely competing with what I write on somebody’s activity feed. So if it happens in the context of somebody else’s conversation that that person is already following, you have this kind of proximity effect by association.
They associate, “Okay, this person is talking to that person. I know that person already. They can’t be that bad. Let’s look at the conversation,” which is why this kind of in-conversation or ongoing conversation engagement is so much stronger. And I said it attracts the right people. A viral tweet where you do something really funny, or you say something that is pretty smart and people amplify it, people come to the viral tweet mostly for the reason of proximity of association. It appears in their feed because somebody they know has retweeted it or talked about it or mentioned it or whatever. So they follow you not because the thing you say is good, but because somebody else they follow follows you as well. And that is a weird expectation level. They don’t follow you for your content. They follow you because somebody else kind of likes you.
These people are so much easier to churn. They will very likely unfollow you because you’re not the right person they thought you were. Or if you had a funny tweet, but you are mostly talking about serious stuff. They come to you for the funny tweet, they don’t see more funny tweets, and they’re gone again, right? It’s like giving somebody something for free. Giving your book away for free and then hoping that the people that you attract are actually going to pay for something. Well, the people who come to you because you gave them something for free likely are not the people who would come to you because they can buy something of you. That’s the kind of methodology why engagement in other people’s conversations is so much stronger.

Rob Walling:
So you’re not selling a growth hack. It’s just engage. Isn’t it always? It’s the Occam’s razor. It is usually this. It’s the most obvious thing. Be yourself, you’re interesting enough, and comment on things.

Arvid Kahl:
The thing is most people don’t believe that they are interesting enough because they only see other people’s highlight reel, their best and brightest. I saw a TikTok recently and it was … I forgot her name, a famous actress. And somebody asked her, “How do you deal with self-doubt?” and she said, “Well, just go see stupid stuff. Go to the theater production of Oliver that is really, really bad. Sit through it and you will know that whatever you have to say is actually meaningful because look at what just happened in front of you. Watch the worst movies, daytime reality TV. Just see how bad other people are at what they want to do and you will find you’re actually quite good at what you do.”
People just have this tendency to think that they can only ever present the most perfect thing to the world and that is worth it. But just even sharing what you think about and what your decision making framework is, that can be valuable to somebody else. It’s really people are self-limiting so significantly that it’s kind of hard for people to just talk. They want to be a persona. I went through this journey. I started as a person, then I kind of became this founder persona, this neval-esque kind of wisdom person. And now, I so rarely ever tweet one-liners anymore. I just share my thoughts and links to cool stuff or highlight other people’s work, which is so much more enjoyable anyway because you get to expose them to a much bigger audience, which means that at some point in the future, opportunity, surface style, they will come back and something will happen that benefits me. I don’t care about it. I don’t plan on it. But it’s likely to happen, so why not talk about them instead of myself?
There are so many ways where you can actually be a contributor and play the long game, the infinite game, instead of just looking for these growth hacks for the finite game, short-term gains that we’re all kind of looking for because we want to see those numbers go up. Numbers mean very little. When you say I have 100,000 followers, I love the fact that I get to talk to so many people, but I don’t check my follower account. I’m at 114,000 now? That’s interesting. I think last time I checked, it was roughly at 105,000 or something. I try to not focus on these metrics. SaaS founders focus on certain metrics way too much anyway. I’m trying not to make the same mistake on Twitter either.

Rob Walling:
Ladies and gentlemen, wise words from a man who knows how to build a Twitter following. Thanks again, man.

Arvid Kahl:
Absolutely.