Episode 712 | Revisiting Burnout + Updates on My Progress in 2024 (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
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Welcome back to another episode of Startups of the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling. Today, I’m going to look at a couple of the predictions that I made three or four months ago. Just revisit them because I feel like we’re a third of the way through the year and I had a few thoughts on them. And I also want to give you an update on my situation. I’ve talked over the past really nine months, maybe a year, about how I was experiencing some burnout last spring, and then it hit me really hard in the fall. I want to revisit that and also give you a general update on the inside baseball of my world, Startups for the Rest of Us, MicroConf, TinySeed, maybe my books, SaaS Playbook, and the new ones I’m working on if there’s time. 

So this is definitely an inside baseball episode. I know some folks love these and other folks skip them, and that’s okay. I like to have a variety of topics and guests and formats on the show to keep you interested, but everything is focused on helping bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap SaaS founders get to where they want to go faster. And if in each episode I can have some type of nugget or wisdom to help multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, then my work is complete. 

So I want to kick it off by looking at maybe two of the predictions. I think I had seven predictions for SaaS Bootstrappers in 2024. This is episode 697, released in mid-January, and there are a couple of them that I have additional thoughts on because we’re now four months past. The first one is that there is opportunity in vertical SaaS, and obviously horizontal is where you cater to all industries. Vertical is where you focus on a specific industry or niche. And in a YouTube video I released about a month ago, I coined the term orthogonal SaaS, which is something that it was on my radar in the back of my mind, but I didn’t have a good name for it when I recorded the podcast episode. But Orthogonal SaaS is this third type, it’s horizontal SaaS that is focused on a specific role or title within a company. 

So think of software that helps HR or people ops, recruiters obviously that can be used by almost any company around the world to help them find new people or onboard them. Think of an ATS applicant tracking system, but it’s focused on a very specific role or title. It’s not a true horizontal play, much like think of Savvy Cal, Signwell, and Castos, which can be used across industries. And if you think about those tools, you could have one of many titles using electronic signature or a scheduling link. So those are not orthogonal, they’re just horizontal and it’s not a better or worse situation. But what we’ve seen across the TinySeed companies we’ve invested in is that horizontal plays, true horizontal plays get really competitive and there’s often a big player that you’re fighting against, which is okay, but it can make marketing and sales more difficult if you don’t have that specific title to focus on. 

And so the nice part about going vertical is oftentimes you pick an industry, it’s accounting for hair salons or whatever. That’d be a terrible idea by the way, don’t do that. But accounting for whatever niche industry you want to pick, and you don’t have to be the best marketer in the world, you just have to be the best marketer in your space. Similar with orthogonal SaaS, you have this product and you know exactly who your end user is. So you can go to in-person events, you can target them with cold outreach, you can go where they hang out. Are they on Quora? Are they on SEC overflow? Are they in private Facebook groups or private Slack groups? It really lends an advantage if your ICP is actually categorized with a title or a role at a company. And I just wanted to add that on because in the episode, I talked about opportunity in vertical SaaS and I was pitting vertical versus horizontal as if it was a bimodal. 

But really there’s this third category of orthogonal. I want to tack that on here that some of the more successful companies we are seeing with TinySeed are vertical or orthogonal. So I’m excited to see what 2024 brings for those types of companies. The second prediction I want to touch on is I predicted that Twitter changes hands in 2024? 

And I don’t know about you, but does it feel like the writings on the wall that Twitter is going to be snapped up by someone at a deep discount? Obviously there’s rumors about this happening. There’s no updated news, but as the months go on, I’m more and more convinced, especially with recent Tesla decline. They just did a big round of layoffs. I can imagine that the lack of focus, Elon trying to run all these efforts could lead either him to sell it or someone to swoop in and want to acquire it. 

So I mean, there’s ridiculous rumors or even just people speculating on Twitter about Yahoo buying them or Microsoft, or it could be any one of a number of players, but I still think this is totally going to happen, and I double down. A lot of the predictions that I’ve made over the years haven’t happened for two, three or four years. So I would be off by a few years, but I have a feeling that the clock’s ticking on this one. 

All right, so now an update on me, what I’ve been up to, how I’ve been feeling. So about a year ago, I think it was April or May of last year, I started talking about how I was experiencing pre-burnout. I started feeling like just a lack of desire to go to work every day. And that’s weird for me because I love what I do on a day-to-day basis. 

And over the summer it had decreased and in the fall it came back with a vengeance. We did, I don’t remember how many, but it was… I think I took seven business trips in 12 weeks or something. It was crazy. Some of it was MicroConf, some of it was TinySeed, and some of them were speaking engagements around my book, the Sass Playbook. And what I realized as I hit the end of the year was I was pretty deep into burnout. I stopped being able to show up and be present when… I was shipping YouTube videos and shipping podcast episodes to the best of my ability. But there was just no spark there, no desire to get up and do it. It was purely because the show had to go on. So what I did, I talked about this four months ago. What I did was I was able to back off from some day-to-day responsibilities just for a few weeks. 

It was probably about two weeks that I took almost completely off. I still recorded YouTube and podcast episodes because I had to, and I did some thinking and a little bit of writing. But really I didn’t go to any meetings. I didn’t show up day-to-day for work. People could reach out to me and I handled it, but I was “off work” for about two weeks. And then the week before that was Christmas and I went to Cancun with my family and the week before that was the week before Christmas, which is always pretty slow. So I wound up having a month of relative downtime in quotes. And I also made the decision that I just cannot travel this year nearly as much as I did last year. And so talked to the team and everyone else felt the same way. That was the good news. 

So there are some TinySeed events that I’ve gone to in the past that I won’t be going to this year, and we decided to shelve the MicroConf Locals for now. So MicroConf Locals are where we swoop in for a three-hour event and we bring MicroConf to you. And the toll that it was taking on not just me, but my whole team and the level of effort and cost and time for a relatively modest turnout, it just wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t moving the needle in the way that so many of our other efforts do. And when you’re doing, we have six or seven major efforts in MicroConf. If you think about it, TinySeed is one. State of independent SaaS. There’s the YouTube channel, there’s this podcast, there’s Mastermind Matching, there’s MicroConf Connect, our subscription community. There are in-person events, there are remote events. We do a lot with MicroConf and some of them are beloved and amazingly successful. 

And obviously so, and some of them you get a kind of lukewarm reception. And so when we would fly to Miami and there’d be 30 people, 35 people in a room, producer Xander who flew in from Hawaii and me from Minneapolis, we were kind of asking ourselves, is this worth it? If we can get 75, 90 people in a room, that feels good. But when 30, 40 people show up, it started to be like, is this the best use of our time? And so we’re shoving those for now. What that means is I’ve only had one work trip in the past three, three and a half months. And with MicroConf, we’re only doing two in-person events this year. It is our flagship event in Atlanta, which happens probably as this is going live. Actually, I believe it happened last week based on the publication day, but MicroConf flagship in Atlanta and then MicroConf Europe, which looks to be in Croatia in early October. 

And that’s it. And that’s great. It feels good. It’s kind of like getting back to how we used to do it a little bit. I mean, we certainly experimented and I don’t regret doing that. I mean, we had planned to do Locals 2020 and then COVID happened and we did some in 2021. I think we did three or four at the end of the year, and then we did eight in 2022 and between six and eight in 2023. And it feels like an amazing accomplishment that we pulled those off. But at a certain point, as an entrepreneur, you have to make the decision of where do we put our focus and our efforts. As I’m recording this, of course, a couple days before MicroConf in Atlanta, and I’m stoked. I hope I am able to see several of you there. The event last year in Denver was just a smashing success in terms of engagement and ticket sales and all the folks who showed up. 

So I hope to see you there. On less happy news, you may have heard that producer Xander, who has produced MicroConf for 10 years is moving on to his next adventure. And for the first five years he worked with me on MicroConf. He was a contractor that just ran the two flagship events. And then about five years ago, we decided to really double down. This is when MicroConf went from a hobby to a full-time project for me. And Producer Xander came on full-time and had been running the team for the past five years and doing an amazing job of it. And if you’ve been to any event, you know how good he is at what he does, and MicroConf would not be the same without him. So it’s obviously bittersweet to have him move on, but 10 years is a long time to work on a project. And obviously I wish him nothing but the best, and I hope that you are able to give him warm wishes on his way to his next adventure. 

Update on this podcast. The numbers continue to grow slowly over time. That’s what podcasts do. It’s not like YouTube where everything goes up into the right so quickly. The April Fool’s episode was a ridiculous hit. I had no idea how many comments and how much feedback I would get on it. And no, that does not make me want to do another one next year. I think part of the reason it worked is because we’ve done two or three in the history of this show, 14 years, 711 episodes, and this was the third time, and I think it’d been six or seven years since the last one. So I am just happy that folks got a kick out of it. 

I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s disgruntled about it because they’re a grump and don’t like April Fool’s, and that’s fine. But I personally don’t like April Fool’s either, and that’s why I don’t do April Fool’s episodes very often, but I really did. I cringed as I recorded that episode. It was fun to push live and it’s so fun to see the responses. I’m still getting them. It shows you the delays of podcasts. It’s two, three weeks later and I’m still getting emails. I’m getting comments on Spotify. I’m getting comments on the YouTube channel. I don’t know if you knew this, but there’s a little known YouTube channel that we don’t promote that is just the startups for the rest OS feed. It is audio only with a logo because producing video is just expensive enough that we push the audio only, but a lot of engagement on all the platforms and it’s always striking the things that resonate with people are the things that get people’s attention. 

And I guess on April Fool’s episode and going back on things that I’ve been saying for a decade was surprising enough that folks wanted to weigh in. So I appreciate it if you reached out to me about it. Oh, I realized I tangented off of burnout and just how I’m feeling when MicroConf started for the rest of us, but it totally recharged me, taking that time off and just looking ahead at the next year, meaning 2024, re-energized me on my mission and for the team and for just everything we’re doing. It made me so excited and I came back all guns blazing and the excitement to record this podcast, the excitement to work on a new book, which I’ll talk about in a minute, returned. Just everything clicked for me. And by mid-January, I was through it and it hasn’t come back. 

And I am very thankful for that because I’ve been in burnout before where it’s just off and on for months and months and months and it sucks. And I’m glad I was able to get ahead of it this time. Glad I was able to notice it and glad I had the luxury to be able to step back, that the timing kind of worked. I will admit I was going to take time off in February or March, and I eventually just said, I’m going to take whatever time I can off now and just try to get it done. And so I’m feeling so much better overall about how things are going. And when your outlook is positive and ambitious and optimistic, it changes everything. It changes every day, it changes every effort that you make. 2024 has already been a pretty amazing year, aside from obviously Xander moving on. 

There’s just been a lot of stuff that continues to work. TinySeed, the funding arm of MicroConf and the startup accelerator that I run with my good pal, Interval Set. So we have just made all of our offers for, I believe it’s 13 and 14, we’ve actually lost count, puts us just over 170 companies that we will have invested in all B2B SaaS, and it puts my total to a low 190, so almost 200 companies overall. That continues to be a relatively unique vantage point in the world. I don’t know how many people have insight into that many startups, much less SaaS startups. It’s not thousands, I think it’s hundreds if I were to say. And so as a result, it allows me to see patterns across many companies, to see trends and not just wonder is it an anomaly? If I’m looking at one company or five companies, the N is very small, but approaching 200 starts to become pretty… I mean, I would say it became pretty statistically significant even in around a hundred, 150. 

But so much of what I’m seeing becomes fuel for content on this podcast or fuel for the SaaS Playbook. A lot of that came out of TinySeed experience or fuel for my next books that I will talk about in just a minute. So I continue to feel like I’m kind of serving my highest calling by doing MicroConf TinySeed in this podcast. And TinySeed feeds my entrepreneurial desires and drives in a way that I hoped it would, but I wasn’t sure. That was one thing when I said I’m not going to start a SaaS app again, which my wife, Dr. Sherry Welling told me that’s bullshit, but I have not started another one. It’s been eight years. And one reason for that is that Microconf and TinySeed keep me in the game, so to speak. They keep my head in the entrepreneurial game because I’m around founders. I’m giving advice to founders, I’m thinking through founder level problems pretty much every day. 

And so it feeds that part of me, the desire to accomplish. And I live a little bit vicariously through the founders that I’m invested in and advising. And it’s the desire to just be in the game, and I still feel like I’m there. So that’s good because I know when I first started TinySeed, what was this? October of 2018, so going on six years now, someone said to me, it was an acquaintance, but he said, “How long are you going to do this? You’ve never stuck with anything more than three years or whatever.” Drip was three and a half years from start to sale and then another almost two years. So about five and a half years of working on it. But he was kind of trying to call me to the carpet, but also pointing out a factor that I do tend to bounce from one thing to the next. 

And obviously that was on my mind of if I start TinySeed, how long do I have to do it if it gets to the point where I don’t enjoy it? Because if I do it for a year and then bail, that’s going to suck because we have this fund, we’re investing and all that. And I realized that that hasn’t happened, and it’s probably the first job I’ve ever had in my life that I haven’t gotten really tired of and wanted to move on from. I just haven’t really had that desire. Aside from when I was burned out, I was like, I don’t want to do anything. But I knew that that was temporary and it wasn’t TinySeed. It wasn’t MicroConf. It wasn’t the job. It was, I just didn’t want to do any work. And that’s what, of course, burnout can do to your mind. So I’m very happy to be past that. 

One other big win on the TinySeed front and then I’ll move on to my books is that we ran our first annual Tiny Fest. While we didn’t know it was going to be annual, it was an experiment. It was an event that was for TinySeed founders only. It was in Cancun in January, and it was the first work thing I did after coming off of my few weeks of vacation. And it was a great time. It was awesome to get founders together from different batches and different years that had seen each other in our Slack but had never met in person. So my hats off to Tracy Osborne and Alex Mccuaid, part of the TinySeed team for pulling that together. And we are already talking about having another one later this year. So if you’re curious to learn more about that, actually it was a super fun event and you can search for Tiny Fest and they did a write-up with photos on the TinySeed blog. 

Oh, one other update before I get to my book. Some folks have asked me about TinySeed Tails and whether that is continuing. Yes. So season five of TinySeed Tales, which appears on this feed is in the works, the Founder that I’m interviewing had to completely reboot, basically do a massive pivot. And so it’s almost a restarting. And so as a result, there isn’t really a season story arc to put out. We’d kind of be leaving it dangling if we published what we have now. So I am slowing down the recording pace. Usually it’s every four to six weeks, but now it’s about every two, two and a half months as the founder is making progress. I’m doing the same documentary style recording that we have done in the past where I talked to a founder over the course of a year. In this case it’s going to be maybe 18 months. 

And then we compress that into seven to 10 episodes to show their whole journey and has voiceovers and music and all that. So that is in the works. We’ve also ran into some issues with editors and producers, and so we are working to get that resolved, but hope to have season five of TinySeed Tales here in maybe the fall of 2024. All right, last update for today is on my books. So the SaaS Playbook has continued to sell really well, and I don’t know if I should be surprised, but it is quickly going to outpace Start Small, Stay Small, I believe Start Small, Stay Small, my closest estimates have it selling around 30,000 copies, just over 30,000. And for a self-published book published by a guy with a quite small audience 14 years ago, that’s good. It has had a life much longer than I originally anticipated, as you can tell by some of the examples are a little bit dated and many of the links don’t work. 

But the Gestalt, someone read it the other day for the first time and said, oh, 80% of what’s in here is mindset and it’s still as valuable as the date was written, so I really appreciated that sentiment. But just over 30,000 with Start Small, Stay Small over 14 years. The SaaS Playbook is almost at 24,000 and it’s been out less than a year, and it continues to sell over a thousand copies a month between 1,000 and 1,200 copies, I believe. And I guess that kind of makes sense, right? Start Small, Stay Small, it is a niche. It’s like that cult film that gets a following, but mainstream folks would never pick it up, partially because the cover’s so ugly and partially because it’s just very focused. What’s the subtitle? A Developer’s Guide to Building a Startup. So if you’re not a developer or you don’t consider yourself building a startup, you’re just not going to pick it up, versus the SaaS Playbook, build a multimillion-dollar startup without venture capital. 

I just think the appeal is so much broader and I’m really pleased to see that all the hard work. I mean, I put a lot of time and money and effort into writing the book, then having it edited, then having it designed, then having the cover design, then doing the Kickstarter and on and on and on. And it is very gratifying to see that into the hands of literally tens of thousands of people. And again, my mission is to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups. And the SaaS Playbook is yet another way to do that and a way to do it relatively cheap. I enjoy giving stuff away for free. This podcast, the YouTube channel, and SaaS Playbook might be viewed as the next rung up the ladder. You can get it for $10 in PDF from SaaSplaybook.com or $10 in Kindle from Amazon. 

Or obviously you can get a paperback copy and Audible and all that. But it’s a nice way to be able to offer what I hope is a lot of value in a compact package for not a lot of money. And so it is very gratifying to have a lot of people reading it. And that leads me to my next two books. So my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling, is a psychologist and a founder and entrepreneur coach who runs a successful consulting firm at ZenFounder.com. So many of her clients have exited, are thinking about exiting, are agonizing over exiting, are in the middle of the exit process. And I, of course, having my own stories, but also secondhand stories of dozens of founders that I’ve talked with given advice to and just learned from the agony of it. So we are writing a book and I would say we have about half or three quarters of the content kind of outlined and in play, but it’s not actually written. 

So I would say book’s probably 20, 25% done, and we’re looking on… We’re hitting it hard over the summer, but it’s really focused. There’s a little bit of the mechanics of exiting and there’s a lot about the mindset about before, after, how to think about your team, about how to mentally prepare for it, about thinking through whether you should sell, about whether you’re going to have regrets, about just on and on and on. And the cool part is just everything’s taken from our experience of talking to founders who have done this, are doing it, are agonizing over it, got screwed, have regrets. Whatever it is, is going into this book. So I don’t want to say it’s the Psychology of Exits because that sounds a little academic, but it is definitely a different take on selling your company. It’s not necessarily focused on SaaS. 

Obviously there’s a lot of SaaS examples because of my network and the folks we’re interviewing around it, but Sherry’s clientele has some SaaS in it, but there’s a lot of just business owners that own brick and mortars or that own consulting firms or agencies or some variation of a business that sells. And so we hope that it has a little bit wider appeal than even say the SaaS Playbook, and we hope when it comes time that you will check it out. Last update is a book I’ve mentioned offhand a few times, but I’ve since decided on the title. 

It is called the SaaS Launchpad, and I just got a cover designed, the manuscript is complete, but I need to reread it and rewrite some pieces of it. It goes out of date so quickly, even if you try not to or really my thinking changes or I have better examples and better thoughts and better ideas around certain things as I create more content on this channel, more content on the YouTube channel, do thinking, speaking and writing. And I’ll revisit the book and be like, oh, I don’t necessarily fully agree with that anymore. Or there’s a better way to say that now is what happens a lot. 

So I started reading through it the other day and I was kind of like your software’s never finished, and frankly, books are never finished. You eventually just ship them and you give into the fact that a week later you’re going to look at something and say, ah, I wish I’d said that differently. I wish I’d added more. But I’m excited about the SaaS Launchpad because it is kind of like a prequel to the SaaS playbook. So the SaaS Playbook is about bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping multimillion dollar SaaS companies. It starts, you have a product, you have some revenue, and you have what I call weak product market fit. You’re kind of figuring it out. You’re at an early stage. How do you strengthen product market fit is an early topic, pricing, marketing, building your team mindset, all that stuff. The SaaS Launchpad was almost a harder book to write because it is the earlier stages. 

It’s like, how do I come up with ideas? How should I think about competition? How do I validate ideas? Can I pre-validate ideas? How do I think about building a launch list? What does it look like to launch? How do I think all this through? The challenge is you can’t be as prescriptive because there is no blueprint for this early stage ideation stuff. There is kind of a blueprint. The SaaS playbook is pretty prescriptive about a lot of things because I do think there are best practices, rules of thumb that can guide you to get to the next level. Obviously, every company is different, every startup is different, but if you flip to the early stage, it’s a lot of wandering, but at best you have a compass. It’s not a map. And so at best it’s like directionally, this is kind of where you have to go. 

And so that’s what I was trying to do and hopefully have accomplished it in this SaaS Launchpad. And I don’t know when I will publish it because there’s a bunch of other stuff going on. I’m actually recording a video course for MicroConf right now, and you know how it is. It’s just priorities. I also don’t want to launch three books within 12 months of each other because I do think that it can become a little oversaturated. But that’s in the works. Obviously, if you’re interested in this book, keep listening to this podcast. You can go sign up. Oh, I should tell you StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com, the email list, if you sign up for that, obviously you’ll hear about my books, but you’ll also get an email every week with detailed show notes of each episode, and you will get two never before heard episodes. 

One is called Eight Things You Must Know When Launching Your SaaS, and the other is 10 Things You Should Know As You Scale Your SaaS. And not only do you get those episodes, but there are PDF guides that come with them. And in addition, there is a PDF we created of the 5:00 PM Idea Validation Framework that you’ll get if you sign up for that list. So a lot of bonuses there. Startupsfortherestofus.com, sign up for the email list and you’ll hear about my new books as well as all the stuff I just named. 

That’s all I have time for today. Thanks for sticking with me through this update. I hope this was interesting. Certainly feel free to weigh in if you have thoughts, cheers, advice, questions, anything like that. You can always email questions@StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com or head to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com and look for the ask a question link in the top navigation. I’ll be back in your earbuds again next week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 712.