Episode 713 | Our Top 5 Takeaways from MicroConf US 2024 (with Arvid Kahl)

Rob Walling:
Can you believe it’s time for another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. As always, I’m your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, Arvid Kahl joins me to talk about our five key takeaways from MicroConf US 2024 that happened just a couple days ago as of this recording in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a great event and I don’t just say that as someone who ran and organized it. The feedback, the positivity, the energy, I tell you, it brought me back raring to go, ready to get stuff done. 

My guess is as you listen to this conversation between Arvid and I, that you will feel some serious FOMO and you probably should because the event was, it was that good. If you know me, you know that I have a tough time talking up the things that I do too much, but this really, really was a special event, so you don’t want to miss future events. Head to microconf.com, sign up for the email list. We have another flagship event happening in Dubrovnik here in October of ’24, and then next spring, probably April we will have another US event and you won’t want to miss it. And with that, let’s dive into our key takeaways from MicroConf 2024. 

Arvid, thanks for coming back on Startups For the Rest of Us.  

Arvid Kahl:
An absolute pleasure now that I’m awake.  

Rob Walling:
I am trucked. Punch drunk was the expression I use. So we are two over-caffeinated, very tired geeks home from MicroConf Atlanta.  

Arvid Kahl:
That’s right.  

Rob Walling:
And I believe this was our… I was trying to figure out, I think this actually was our 10th US event. Because we started in 2011 and we skipped two for COVID. So I think that’s how it works out. I actually, I’m too tired to do the math right now and I think this is going to be a great episode y’all. I’m so punchy and then I think it’s our 24th if you include the Europe flagship events, which I do. So coming up on, I mean it’s a lot of events. There were 218 attendees from 15 different countries and the shocking stat was, I think, it was like, what, 75% had revenue, but that 28% of the attendees had more than a 100K of MRR. That was really-  

Arvid Kahl:
That is crazy.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah.  

Arvid Kahl:
You just look to your left, you look to your right and statistically one of these people is just making millions a year just from their business. That is bizarre, but equally awesome. Where do you ever get that? That’s crazy.  

Rob Walling:
I know. It’s crazy and that’s why being in the MicroConf room is just unlike any other room I’m in throughout the year. It was a good crew this year. How many MicroConfs have you been to?  

Arvid Kahl:
This is my, or has been my third. The first one was in Dubrovnik, the European one just before the world changed forever. And then last year, Denver and this one, my third. I talked to so many people and asked them what their number was and anything above 12 was like, “I forget.” People were just there for 20 some and they just stopped counting because they didn’t care. It’s really great.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. Patrick McKenzie’s like that, he’s been to a lot of them. Mike Tabor, Brennan Dunn, he didn’t make it this year, but he is got to be approaching 20 MicroConfs. And I don’t know, that’s a testament to the specialness of that room, I think.  

Arvid Kahl:
For sure.  

Rob Walling:
So we are going to do our top five moments, our top five, it’s not takeaways necessarily, it’s just the top five things.  

Arvid Kahl:
That’s right. Even that is not specific. That’s too specific. Top five vibes, I don’t even know. There’s just something there.  

Rob Walling:
Five things we thought about before we jumped on the mic. So as the guest, do you want to kick us off with your first one?  

Arvid Kahl:
Oh, thanks so much. I’m going to do something slightly boring and pick a talk. But I’m not going to pick it because necessarily of the talk itself, but more like what it did to the room and that’s by Dr. Sherry Walling, your wife’s wonderful talk on motivation. I mean as somebody who really cares about mental health in entrepreneurship and all that stuff, I care about this. I talk to a lot of people about this and I read a lot about it and all that. That was my talk to begin with. I really wanted to be there for that. That’s kind of what I came for to hear just how we deal with things, where things come from. 

And, man, what this talk did, people in the room and we were seated around these little round tables, groups of four, groups of six just by default, which was great. You could just start talking to the neighbors on your table and stuff and it was so incredibly interesting when we talked about where our motivation is sourced from. Sherry kind of gave us these seven different archetypes of where motivation for founders comes from and once we talked about it, I realized that everybody has their own little story. I knew it before, but that kind of calcified it. 

It was like this guy really has to fight against people telling them they can’t do it right. This guy really has to make sure that they show their parents or they show their friends that entrepreneurship is something they can do. And here I’m sitting, I’ve always been super supported by everyone, so my motivation is something completely different. Turn to the next guy, they do it for the money next guy. They do it because they love building a product. It’s so crazy to think that we all are so differently motivated, yet we all have the same dream and we all are on the same path. That was such a cool both dividing and unifying thing that Sherry did by allowing us to explore this with each other. I really love this and you have to be there to experience this. I think you can kind of experience it probably from the recording of it, but in the room right there in that moment was like, okay, I’ve learned something here that I did not expect to learn and I did. It was really cool.  

Rob Walling:
It’s one of my favorite talks that she’s ever given, this one about motivation. I love how she broke down motivation into micro and macro. And micro is the day to day, hey, I’m going to cold plunge or I’m going to crank Eye of the Tiger. She threw me under the bus on that one and said-  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, she sure did.  

Rob Walling:
“I hear Eye of the Tiger playing in Rob’s office at times,” but Smells like Teen Spirit, whatever. There’s punk music. That’s the micro stuff of day to day, how you say mode about macro. She had, like you said, seven archetypes. And I loved that as she went through them, I remember she obviously showed me the talk before she gave it and I was like, “Oh, I’m those two.” It was just really obvious to me. And then she said, “And what were you 10 years ago?” And I was like, “Oh, I was these other two different,” it changed over time.  

Arvid Kahl:
That is really cool. We did that in our group as well and we all had a story attached to that change. For me, it was selling the business. Now all of a sudden money’s maybe not that important anymore. What came and replaced it, something I didn’t expect, was being a people person, that kind of stuff. It’s so cool to have terms to put it into just something that you can actually internalize instead of just having it wishy washy around it. It was really cool.  

Rob Walling:
And it’s concrete and the moment I saw the slides, I was like, this needs to be a chapter and whether we redo the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your ShTogether and update it and add this, or if it goes in another book, there’s just no reason that framework should not be in a book. 

So my number one was the last talk of the event. It was from Steven Steers. His talk was about sales scripts and about how having a script when you’re doing demos and refining that over time not only helps you essentially build an SOP, a standard operating procedure, but it helps you yourself improve even if you’re going to do the sales for six months or a year. He had almost an entire script memorized. At the end, there was a Q&A of someone saying, “Well, how would you do this part of it?” And he just recited it and you could tell he just recited it. He had memorized it was super impressive.  

Arvid Kahl:
It was absolutely incredible. The Q&A was like, he had it ready. Every single thing you threw at him, he had a picture perfect eloquently phrased thing he gave you, for free, that you could then immediately use. That was so awesome. I really enjoyed it too. And the fact that he dropped off his book as well. You could just grab a book and read all of these things later at home. That was so, so cool. That was a great talk. It was very polished, let’s just say that. I think it was more than the talk. Again, I guess that maybe a theme. It wasn’t just the talk, it was way more than that.  

Rob Walling:
And he has a book that is either, I mean we had physical copies at the event, so that was great. But it’s called Superpower Storytelling: A Tactical Guide to Telling the Stories You Need to Lead, Sell and Inspire by Steven Steers. So that was definitely one of my highlights. Oftentimes the sales we usually have… We try to have a talk about sales. It is a very common thing in the MicroConf community, and usually those are, I’m not a salesperson and I tend to find co-founders who do sales or I build businesses that don’t need sales or whatever. But I was just really impressed with that talk and I think I liked Steven’s delivery and I liked the information that came with it.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, there was a lot of sales-centric stuff that people really wanted to know more about. You could feel it from the audience, you could feel when people ask questions, they had things just queued up for an expert to help them with. People they have to sell and I mean, I don’t want to generalize it, but I don’t like it either. I have to because everybody has to. So you have these issues that are always kind at the forefront of just your mind at this point. So having somebody on stage, both with him and the attendee talk that was just couple hours prior to that, was also about sales conversations. So it was a pretty strong theme during the conference just to be open and talk about sales, which was nice because you kind of have to.  

Rob Walling:
How about you? What’s your number two?  

Arvid Kahl:
My number two was something that happened on stage as kind of a life event as well. It was the life valuation of a business by the folks over at Quiet Light. It’s really cool to see people who deal with M&A all day, all week, just really tear into in the best way possible a business and the numbers that it presents. It was really fun. The founder went on stage. They had prior given all of their, I guess stripe metrics or something to the Quiet Light folks and they just looked into the numbers, they asked questions about the business, the market and all that. It was super interesting because you could feel how in your own mind as a founder, even just listening to a question coming from an M&A professional make you think about, hmm, this is something I don’t know. Or this is something that I should really optimize because if that’s something they ask, I should have an answer and I should have a good one. 

So it was really cool and I talked to the founder that was on stage after the conference when we had our last reception there, and I asked him, “Well, do you want to sell now? Do you want to keep it? What do you think about it?” And that started another conversation just really about, well, how much work goes into this business? Is this something that I have to sell to get where I want to go next? Or is this something that I actually have to keep to get where I want to go next? So it was just such an interesting thing to do this live and then have access to everybody involved that also made it very, very special event. It wasn’t rehearsed or anything, it just happened and you could really see how the founder was thinking about stuff, how he made logical connections between things. And I think this is something, it’s just an example of something super helpful for MicroConf because everybody has their own questions, but they all are going in the same direction. That was really cool. Really love that.  

Rob Walling:
This is the second time we’ve done that. And I was, dubious is not the right word, but I was like, is this going to be entertaining? Is this going to be engaging? And I always think about that if we’re going to put someone either in a workshop or on the main stage. Both times, it’s been both of those things I just named where I’m like, oh, this is fascinating. And every business is different. And you hear the thought process. Like the one MicroConf Europe in Lisbon, I believe it was country specific, their SaaS was. And so it was in Danish for example. And so he’s like, “Here’s how that’s going to count against you.” And it’s like, oh, of course. I kind of thought about that. But he actually was able to almost put a number to that of this is going to probably lower your multiple a little bit, blah, blah, blah. Here’s all the factors. 

And at the end he’s like, “I think you’ll get between,” whatever the number was, “four and six X or five and whatever X. Therefore your valuation is about this. And if I would’ve really peg it, I would list it at this price.” And I was like, “That is so cool.” And they’re experts. They’re just such experts.  

Arvid Kahl:
And you can feel that the kind of tacit knowledge that they have that they probably can’t even codify because it’s tacit, because it’s something really internal that is implied that comes out. It comes out in these little moments and then you get it that you get to be there in the moment when it happens, when it comes up, when it clicks for them and for you at the same time. That’s just life and workshop. That is where this comes from. I think you can’t do this if you’re not doing it in front of an audience. It’s really fun.  

Rob Walling:
So my number two were the micro excursions. And here’s the thing, I didn’t even go on the micro excursions. I actually took the time to kind of decompress and just have an hour or two to myself. But the reason that I like that we started doing these is because it really does follow this through line of MicroConf slightly pivoting away from, oh, it’s a bunch of education, it’s nine talks in two days, eight talks in two days. To where it’s like there’s four or five main stage talks, there’s some attendee talks, there’s workshops, blah. 

But it’s really about relationships. It’s about the founders being able to connect with one another. And that’s what the micro excursions, they’re just an excuse to go do adult big wheeling with each other, to bake biscuits, to do graffiti. I mean, fowling was the other one where you take a football and you throw it at bowling pins. It’s not the activities, it’s that you’re doing it with founders. You’re like, “Oh, hey, I kind of know you. I recognize you from Twitter.” Let’s have a conversation while we’re throwing a ball at some random thing of bowling pins.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that’s what I did the fowling. And it was really funny because in the beginning you could see all these founders, they weren’t really sure, do we want to play this? Do we just want to chat? Do we want to have a beer? But then people started playing that. People started playing ping pong. It was billiards. People just hung out outside in the sun because it was a beautiful day in Atlanta, so it was probably the best day for this of all the days that we had. And you could see little groups of people were just chatting about something, other groups were just enjoying the game. It was so flexible in particular, and you could have a nice drink with it. It was a really cool atmosphere, I got to say. And that just opens up communication as well. You’re not stuck in some meeting room or something, you’re in a place with beer. So it’s not the alcohol that does it, but it’s the atmosphere of the place. That was pretty cool.  

Rob Walling:
For sure. What’s your number three?  

Arvid Kahl:
It kind of is very much related to this, and I think all of these are obviously related the same event. But to me it’s the hallway track outside the venue and that includes the excursions, but it’s so much more. The excursion is kind of the organized, getting people together and having them do stuff with each other, which is really nice. But it happened organically through Slack, through the MicroConf Connect Slack and through private messages on Twitter and all that stuff, people were going for coffee in the morning before the conference started. We literally did a 15 minute walk or something to a coffee shop that was supposedly very good and then turned out to be actually quite good. We were having dinners with each other. Almost everybody went out with a group of people for dinners and had a chat late into the night, which is not necessarily smart, but it was a lot of fun. 

People did morning runs, they just gathered to run. They did bible readings in the morning. There was so much going on where people just organically and intentionally willingly congregated and just kind of let their lives intersect beyond just a professional thing. Just be together, talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And that created a very diversity of people, people at different stages of their journey, people with very diverse, different backgrounds. I personally met my customers there. I met listeners of the podcast there. I met my heroes there. I met my peers. I met so many different kinds of people from all walks of life. The conference, what you said, the educational stuff that is really cerebrally, interesting. But emotionally, relationally interesting is everything else. And it never stops. You get on the elevator, some other MicroConf person is in there and you start chatting, you cannot stop. It’s really, really cool. It’s quite exhausting, but it’s awesome.  

Rob Walling:
So my number three is basically the same. Mine is nothing beats being in a room, which is what you’re saying, it’s the hallway track. It’s being in a room with other individuals to where you can just have these lingering conversations and then some person floats into it and someone floats out and so the conversation changes. You learn about their business. To your point of people getting together for coffee and dinner, I saw a comment on Twitter, I fly in tomorrow, meaning Sunday, which is the event starts Sunday evening with the reception. And he said, “I didn’t realize so many people would be getting there on Saturday.” And it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know if it was the majority, but it was a lot of people. I mean a lot of people got into on purpose.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that’s right.  

Rob Walling:
To get in there. How many conferences do you show up a full 24 hours, 36 hours before? Not many. But you know that the MicroConfers are going to be there and that you can do the coffee and you can do the dinner. The other thing, I just want to tack onto this while we’re on it, I loved the FOMO that I was hearing of people who have been to MicroConfs and they’re like, “I’m not going to go this year.” I mean the FOMO was deep. It was both on Twitter, it was in the TinySeed Slack. And I could see people like, “I so regret not going.” And I’m like, “Here’s the law. If you don’t go to a MicroConf, there’s going to be FOMO. You’re going to regret it.” So just don’t not go to MicroConfs. That’s the deal.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, I think this year in particular, but I think it’s just getting better and better over time. Not just the conference, but also the communication around it. It just a very organic, honest sharing of what people enjoy. You don’t force it. I mean obviously on stage you tell people, “Here’s our hashtag if you want to use it and all that.” But that’s more like a cosmetic thing than anything else. People just take photos of their friends, like selfies with the people they like and they share it. They talk about the things they learned. It becoming just a normal thing to talk about it. And obviously that induces FOMO in people who would’ve kind of maybe come at this point. It’s nice, I really enjoyed it. 

Also, one thing I noticed now that you said it coming on Saturday, I arrived on Saturday as well like so many others and didn’t even make it to the hotel counter before somebody talked to me. I didn’t even check in the hotel before I had my first MicroConf related chat. This is how present people were at that point.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, something similar happened to me. And as you said, every time I got on an elevator, I’d be like, all right, now I’m going to chill. “Oh, hey, you have a MicroConf badge on. We haven’t met yet.” It was cool. We didn’t quite take over the hotel, but it felt like a little bit. 

We’ve been partnering with Lemon.io for several years and they’ve proven to be a great choice when it comes to hiring for a highly skilled developer to work on your project. Here are five reasons why you should consider working with Lemon.io. 

Number one, the time from your request to getting a candidate is just 48 hours. Number two, their developers have previously worked with tech giants like Apple, Google, Netflix, Airbnb, Intel, and Lego. Number three, they only provide senior devs with an average of seven years experience. Number four, their talent pool covers more than 300 dev languages and frameworks. And lastly, number five. Your hire comes with a zero-risk replacement guarantee. Customers of Lemon.io typically stick around for at least a year, proving they know how to gain your trust by delivering consistent results. Quit wasting time searching for a solid developer at a great price. Get in touch with Lemon.io. As a bonus for our podcast listeners, you’ll get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer at lemon.io/startups, that’s lemon.io/startups. 

So with that, what’s year number four?  

Arvid Kahl:
Well, it also, again, related. And I’m going to start with a little story here I guess because the elevator is where this happened. I was just taking the elevator down. It was on the 21st floor down to the lobby because it was the middle of the day or whatever. And there was a woman that was not there for MicroConf for something else, and she was like, “Hey, so what is MicroConf? Because I’ve been seeing so many people and they’re all so nice, they’re all so friendly, they’re all so happy. What are you guys doing?” It was like some professional, some surgeon or something, and she was like, “What cool conference is this where people are so much enjoying their presence and then being together?” 

So I explained it to her and she’s like, “Oh yeah, I guess it’s a very tight-knit community of very friendly people.” And that’s kind of what I think. It’s this flat hierarchy between people. I can talk to you, anybody can talk to you. Somebody who’s done it four years is super successful and you just treat them like a peer, because they are. Everybody is a peer and we treat each other just like that. There’s no hierarchy. There’s no kings and queens in here. If you walk up to somebody, you have a chat. No matter if they make millions or nothing, it really doesn’t matter. That is so liberating. Because you can just have a chat. You don’t need to queue up or hope for a good introduction or whatever. Nobody is really pitching their stuff on you. Nobody is trying to recruit you or anything. It’s just people who are there for the same purpose. 

And that is the flat hierarchy is something that I have never, anywhere else, seen to this degree. In other conferences, you have a lot of stars and then they run away. Here, the speakers actually stay for the conference. Asia was around the whole time and she was just commenting on stuff and just talking to people whenever there was a coffee break. Where do you get this? MicroConf.  

Rob Walling:
That is dead on and it’s something that we did by accident the first year in 2011. And everybody stayed because we had Heaton Shaw, we had Andrew Warner, we had Ramit Sethi, we had a bunch of people and they did just that. They mingled. There was only a hundred of us. It was a small event and everyone was commenting on that. And so we said, “Oh, from now on, let’s invite…” We don’t force our speakers, but we invite them. “Hey, it would be great if you could be around, interact.” And for the most part, most of them do. There’s certain folks I think we’ll get to on our number five who zipped in and out, but he has a lot going on, you might say. Yeah. That’s always been a hallmark, I think, of MicroConf and something I really enjoy about it. 

On the MicroConf team, we actually had a new team member start just like three or four weeks ago. And so this was her first opportunity to, aside from being in Connect to meet MicroConf people, MicroConf community members in the flesh. And the first day she said, “Wow, everyone’s so nice and supportive and they want to help each other genuinely, and they’re offering advice and they’re asking for it.” And I was like, “Yeah, what did you expect?” And she’s like, “Well, some business events you go to, everyone’s grumpy and everyone’s kind of mean to each other. Or they’re trying to sell each other or they’re trying to put the other down or show how they’re better or whatever.” And she’s like, “That’s just not happening here.” 

And I guess I take it for granted, it was surprising to me. I was like, “Well, what is the other option?” And it’s like, oh, I guess that people are mean to each other. That just wouldn’t… Look, I wouldn’t run the event if that was… I run MicroConf because it’s an event that I want to attend and if people are going to be mean, I don’t want to attend that event. 

All right, so my number four is Liana Patch’s talk. It was about her copywriting swipe file, and she went through a bunch of very specific examples of how you can make subtle changes to copy, whether it’s the we-we problem, you don’t say we on your website, you should say a lot of you and talk about your customer. There were just a bunch of really tactful, helpful rules that could be applied pretty much to any website, anyone, whether you’re selling SaaS or whether it’s our MicroConf TinySeed website. I started thinking, oh, how often do we make these mistakes? So very highly rated talk. And of course Liana Patch is amazing. She’s funny and smart and a great copywriter. She’s written a bunch of copy for us. And I did a show of hands in the room, who here has hired Liana to write copy? And a lot of hands went up. So I really enjoyed her talk.  

Arvid Kahl:
So that was great. And again, it’s examples. This is a workshop. It was effectively a workshop disguised as a talk and also disguised as a comedy routine. So all of this together is just so amazing. Yeah. I hope one day to be one of the people raising their hands as well. It feels like she just has it figured out. So it was very noticeable how helpful this was to people and I really enjoyed it too.  

Rob Walling:
Here we get to our number five. We almost should do five down to one because this for me is my number one, the moment for me of the event. And I think we share it. So why don’t you lead into it?  

Arvid Kahl:
I mean, it is hard to lead into something that you have been working on for a good decade or so, but the fact that Ben Chestnut finally graced the community with his presence on stage and immediately was the most likable person in the room. That was incredible. I have many words to describe the moment, anywhere from awesome to adorable. I know. But he had such a presence and he was one of us that was so unexpected from somebody who sells a business for billions. You don’t necessarily expect that he is just like everybody else in this room. But within seconds he had people’s attention and trust and it was a wonderful conversation to see you have with him as is kind of finally, finally this happened after so many years. Please do explain the story of this and the history of that.  

Rob Walling:
So Ben Chestnut is the co-founder of MailChimp, and they started it in 2000, 2001, and they sold it in 2021, so just about two decades. And they sold it for $12 billion. It’s considered by all measures, the most successful bootstrap startup of all time by both revenue and exit. So I started emailing Ben back in, I was trying to remember the year. I bet it was 2012 to get him to come to the second MicroConf. I don’t know that I thought about it in 2011. I guess I could just search email. And he was always very gracious. 

And here’s the thing, the first time I emailed him, I’m like, “Hey Ben, you probably don’t know who I am, but I run this event for self-funded startups, bootstrap startups.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah. Hey Rob, you blog at softwarebyrob.com. I used to read your blog and a couple other bootstraps.” And it just showed me how small the community was in the early days. He read it. He was saying from like ’05 to 2010 or whatever, which I stopped blogging after that. But it was really neat that he responded every year that I asked him and very gracious. And sometimes it was like, “Oh, I might be able to make it pencil me in, but don’t announce me.” And then, “I forgot it’s my birthday that weekend or something’s come up with MailChimp.” He’s running this company that by 2021 is 1,200 employees and sending, I believe it was sending a billion emails a day. What an incredible business. 

Anyways, I continued to email him every year and he would politely decline or whatever. And then eventually we did do a MicroConf local and we brought it to Atlanta because that’s where he lives. And I said, “I want to get you on the MicroConf stage,” the locals, there was like 30, 40 people, but let’s just have a chat. And the first time I met him, I was like, “Oh, you’re one of us?” A lot of us are kind of accidental entrepreneurs. We want to be entrepreneurs. But he and his co-founder just built a thing and then people started paying him and then they’re like, “Well, we’re getting too many checks, so let’s try to figure out how to charge credit cards, and then should we charge a subscription for this?” Because there was no SaaS, this is ’01. And he was engaging and he was respectful of everybody in the audience. He had been in the shoes of all of us. And that’s the thing is, as you’re saying, he’s a billionaire several times over, but you didn’t feel that on stage.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, I do wonder about this because you got to interview him. Did you feel like starstruck in a way? Like a little bit.  

Rob Walling:
Yes. But I try to get that out of the way before I interview them. So he and I have had a couple conversations to where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I need to act super professional here because I run Micro…” But I’m also like, “Oh boy, this is a big deal that I’m talking to him.” Same thing happened. I talked to Jason Fried on stage. I talked to Patrick Collison and John Collison. And as I said at MicroConf, those four make up my Mount Rushmore of, I’ll say, bootstrappers. Obviously the Collison brothers with Stripe raised money, but really their ethos is that it’s that practical, pragmatic charge for things and be that way. 

So yes, I always feel a little starstruck, but I frankly feel that way even with some of my friends now. They’re friends that I respect so much that I’m like, you execute. So yeah, when we were up on stage, that wasn’t on my mind. It was more like, how do I make this interview amazing? And here’s the thing, you could ask the same questions that I asked of 10 entrepreneurs and nine of them would’ve just had so-so answers and just every one of Ben’s answers were intelligent, funny. We’re going to have a video of it. I assume we’re selling the videos after the event, but it’s for sure one of my highlights of the entire conference.  

Arvid Kahl:
I did not expect to have something so relatable in that conversation, but it was on every single level. And it was really, really cool. And I also liked you were a competitor to him. That was a fun part when you talked about how Drip, you asked if it was even on their radar at all, and even that sparked a really, really gracious and kind exchange.  

Rob Walling:
The one where he called me a bastard for starting a competitor to him? He’s like, “This bastard, I thought we were friends. This bastard…” Like that. And people just ate it up. I was like, yeah. Those are facts. What you’re saying is a complete fact. I was like, were we a nat or a rounding error? I was going to get to the point of did you spend more on toilet paper than Drip’s entire ARR? But I didn’t want to derail the conversation.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah. You got to keep it on a professional level. I get it. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, that was great. That was a wonderful moment. And hey, for somebody who’s never, ever anywhere, even just gracing us with an hour or so of his time, that was great for the community and it was great for everybody who was there and who gets to watch it, so it’s perfect.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I was very grateful because as you said, he just doesn’t necessarily like the limelight. He doesn’t really do podcast interviews. He’s done a hand… Not even a handful over the years. And he doesn’t travel really for interviews. Because he doesn’t need to, he can do what he wants. So that… Yeah, it really [inaudible 00:29:37].  

Arvid Kahl:
Isn’t that a lifestyle business?  

Rob Walling:
For real. Talk about the ultimate lifestyle business, where for the rest of my life and my kids’ lives and their kids’ lives, we could do what they want. Pretty amazing.  

Arvid Kahl:
It was a great conference, man. You’re doing a great job at hosting these and making these happen. I really appreciate it. Always fun. I cannot see myself skipping any one of them anymore, so there you go.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks, man. It means a lot. I really appreciate you coming back each year and for spreading the word. Like you spread the word on Twitter on your podcast, and 100% that helps. Because we can’t, with MicroConf, I can’t go run Facebook ads and Instagram ads and sell tickets to it because you have to know. You have to know. Why would I spend a thousand, $1,200 whatever tickets for? Why would you spend that much money on an event? Because you have to know it’s really, really good, and people trust you and other attendees when they say it is unlike any other event that you will attend,  

Arvid Kahl:
Well, thank you. And then they come to the event and then they notice that they’re actually supposed to be there. That was something, and you said this, and I think Rand Fishkin said it too, the people in this room, they belong here. The people that come to MicroConf, they are founders, and even if you’re just an wantrepreneur or whatever you want to call it, the fact that you’re making the leap to go into this community to learn from people, you don’t need to raise VC. You don’t need to do whatever other people tell you to do. Just be around the people that are aligned with you and you will learn from them and you belong in that room. You made that absolutely clear. 

And I talked to people after you said this and after the whole event, and they felt like this was the right choice, like coming here, I’ve put this off for years. I thought I wasn’t ready. But then they came there, talked to two guys and half of or one of them would say, “I’m also not ready, but I’m still here.” So it’s really taking the step is the step you need to take in that regard.  

Rob Walling:
That’s right. I’m glad you brought that part up because I’ve been starting to become pretty deliberate about it because I realize the amount of imposter syndrome that I think a lot of us feel. And if you’re in the room at MicroConf, you belong in the room at MicroConf. That’s the tautology.  

Arvid Kahl:
It’s a good one.  

Rob Walling:
That was fun. I tell you, if you’re listening to this, if you saw the tweets, if you experienced FOMO while we were doing it, don’t miss out on the next one. There’s one in October in Dubrovnik, and then one next probably April ish again, back here in the States, we haven’t signed final document, so I don’t want to announce a location, but show up. I have never had someone tell me they regretted attending a MicroConf. And I’ve never even, whether in surveys or whether anonymously, maybe someone wouldn’t tell me to my face. But it’s just something that, and I’ve never regretted, which sounds weird. It’s like, well, aren’t you the host? You’re running it. You have to attend. It’s like technically, I guess, but I go because it’s the event that I want to attend every six months.  

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, if you do something for 10 years straight or 12, I guess, and you still love it, that’s kind of an indicator.  

Rob Walling:
It’s like this podcast and MicroConf I did as a hobby on the side while I was doing everything else. So that tells you something. I didn’t have to do any of the either of those things. The podcast and the event.  

Arvid Kahl:
That’s right.  

Rob Walling:
Arvid Kahl, you are a scholar and a gentleman. Thanks so much for waking up. It’s not even that early, it’s just we’re conferenced out. It’s the extrovert hangover.  

Arvid Kahl:
That’s right.  

Rob Walling:
If folks want to keep up with you. You are @ArvidKahl on Twitter, you are the Bootstrappedfounder.com, and what do you doing these days? You have your Zero to Sold book folks can check out. Anything else that you’re… Oh, Podscan.fm. Of course, I am a paying customer of Podscan.fm. How can I forget? So you want to tell folks just elevator pitch, what does Podscan do?  

Arvid Kahl:
So as a media monitoring, alerting, it’s Google alerts for podcasts. You have a key phrase or a word or a name or whatever you want to see, if people mention it, that’s what Podscan does, sends you notification. Also exists as an API. So if you’re a founder who wants to get every podcast out there and get all the transcripts, because I transcribed millions of these behind the scenes and you want to use it for your own products, API exists as well. But thanks for mentioning it. I met customers of Podscan. I met people who are interested in Podscan at the conference as well. Didn’t pitch, didn’t have to. People just came up to me and talked about it and it was so much fun. Yeah, MicroConf has all the layers. It was so cool.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again for joining me, sir.  

Arvid Kahl:
Pleasure.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks so much to Arvid for taking the time to join me again on Startups For the Rest of Us. And thank you for listening this week and every week. If you keep listening, I’ll keep recording. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 713.