Episode 737 | Key Takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2024 (With Derrick Reimer)

Rob Walling:
It’s another episode of Startups For, the Rest, Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I sit down with Derek Reimer as we review the key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2024, which happened just two or three weeks back in Dubrovnik, Croatia. You’ll hear us discuss in this episode several of the most notable talks, as well as some takeaways that we received from the speakers. In addition, I give an overview of the event and I talk about how it sold out in only seven weeks, and there were many folks who wanted to attend the event that weren’t able to get a ticket. So if you’d like to attend the next MicroConf, it’s going to be in New Orleans next March, you can head to MicroConf dot com slash us to get your ticket. Now, the tickets as of today, are the least expensive they will ever be. They’re only going to get more expensive. And this event, if our past events are any indication, will sell out. So MicroConf dot com slash us if you’re interested in heading to New Orleans in March of 2025. And with that, let’s dive right into my conversation with Derek Rimer. 

Derek Rimer, thanks for joining me on the show to talk through MicroComp Europe.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s my pleasure to be back. Just sinking back into central time, having left Europe yesterday.  

Rob Walling:
So you woke up at five 5:00 AM all bright-eyed, Moshi  

Derrick Reimer:
Tailed. I get glimpses of what it’s like to be a true morning person.  

Rob Walling:
Indeed. I love flying West. It’s so nice. And then flying east is like, oh no, I need to take gobs of melatonin and still wake up. Actually, the first night I was there because I got two or three hours sleep on the flight to Dubrovnik, and then first night I was there I stayed up just till eight, which is like a victory. I’m so tired. Oh my gosh. So I take melatonin and I figured usually if I can make it to four or five, I’m super happy. So I wake up and it’s all dark outside and I was like, I got to go to the bathroom and I look at my clock, it’s 10:30 PM and I was kind of awake and I was like, no, I just took a nap. I basically, and I was like, I need to take more melatonin now  

Derrick Reimer:
To  

Rob Walling:
Get down. So I took again and then I was out till three 30 and I was like, no, that’s not enough. So I hate flying east.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s tough. I don’t have a ton of experience with it. And it’s funny, I was chatting with a R on the opening night and regaling it with my story of the 12 hour layover that I had on my way out to Europe. We came a little bit early to do a little vacation ahead of time, and then he was just laughing at me like, oh, you sweet summer child, you don’t know the tricks. Here’s how  

Rob Walling:
I would not do that. As someone who’s gone to Europe a bunch. Yeah, you do start to get a little travel hacky with it. I’m the same way. So this was your first time to MicroConf Europe and you’ve been to many of the US events? Almost all of them, if I recall right.  

Derrick Reimer:
All but the first one because I didn’t know you then. Very first one.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Yeah. What a trip. I guess to kick it off, let me give folks an overview of the European event maybe compared to the US event because the US event pre Covid was 300 people and post Covid has been about 2 25, 2 50, and the Europe event is the biggest event we’ve ever done in Europe. This year, I think it was 150 ish, maybe a little more, 155 attendees. And that’s the biggest it’s ever been. We sold it out in seven weeks and that’s been the new thing since covid is obviously there was a huge drop off and then we feel the momentum has come back to the event. So I expect Atlanta sold out, this sold out, and I expect MicroConf New Orleans. This is the announcement. No one’s heard that before. Now. Yeah, aside from, unless you were in dub, brunick, new Orleans, which is going to be next March, I expect that to sell out as well in the next couple months. So 150 ish, 150 to 160 attendees. The room was packed, great energy. There were 30 countries represented and interesting tidbit, we had 30 better half tickets. The guest passes where people can, your spouse or significant other can join you at an evening event. 

30 of those, so that’s 20% of the attendees brought a spouse or significant other, which I believe you yourself did.  

Derrick Reimer:
I did, yeah. And that was really awesome because I feel like I got to meet a lot of people’s plus ones and that gives you a different sense of the person. For sure. When my wife’s with me, she’s hyper social and very good at getting conversations steered towards, I want to meet, I want to talk about you as a person and not just the work, not just the startup you’re working on. Whereas a lot of times for me, a MicroConf conversation will just be like, oh, what are you building? Here’s what I’m building, what are you struggling with? And those are all interesting, but when you start to get a better sense of who the person is, that’s where real connections start to form.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, big time. I like that about MicroConf. I don’t know of other events that do it. I’m sure there might be some, but one of the important things that we’ve always emphasized is family, relationships, kids if you have ’em, spouse, if you have one, it’s like this is all part of your life and we’re doing this to better our life, not to make a dent in the universe. We’re doing it because we want our lives to be better and your lives are not better if you torch your relationships. And so that is something I enjoyed about this event was that a lot of folks brought, as you said, significant others, that hotel though. So we Dubrovnik, we’ve done it there four times. We’ve done Europe, micro Europe, I believe 11 or 12 times, and four of them have been in Dubrovnik. So no matter how much I say on this podcast, it’s the Dubrovnik Palace Hotel, I believe it’s called. And I say it is one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever stayed in. The rooms are nice, but the view, every room has a full slider view of the Adriatic. You have a deck and all this stuff. I say it and then people don’t believe me. So when you got there, was it one of the best views you’ve ever had in your entire life out of a hotel?  

Derrick Reimer:
Oh, hands down. Yeah. I mean that place is just, yeah, it’s all about the scenery and I didn’t fully know what to expect. Having never been to Croatia before, I never been to Dubrovnik of course. But you get there and you just feel like you’re in another land. The landscape is just different than anything I’ve seen in the us. It’s just, it kind of its own thing. And you feel like you’re transported into another world and there’s not a bad sight line to be seen in that place. It’s  

Rob Walling:
Pretty magical and that’s why we keep coming back to it. And I don’t know, I mean basically I asked the attendees at the end, let us know, do you want to come back here again? Because it is a hotel that it’s hard to get to. I mean for me, for us coming from the US, it’s just a few more hops than I would like. But aside from that, there’s just no drawback to it. It’s such an amazing venue. So with that preamble, I mean I’d like to get into the talks and hear your thoughts and stuff. Talk about the excursions. That’s something we’ve started to do over the past few years as we’ve reshaped and reprogrammed to the event. It used to be nine talks in two days and now it’s like five or six talks, and we fill in the rest of that sometimes with workshops and all the time with excursions where you get out. There was what kayaking this year there was wine tasting, which I believe you did. There was a boat ride to an island and a kind of scavenger hunt. There was some other stuff. I actually don’t remember what all of ’em were. But let’s kick off with excursions. Before we get into the talks, tell us, you picked wine tasting. What was the logic there? And then I guess generally, do you feel like the excursions are a benefit to the event or that you prefer to watch two or three more talks?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think the excursions are definitely a benefit. I remember the first few years of going to MicroConf, just feeling almost I’d been sitting in a classroom all day long, not in a bad way. It’s good information coming from the stage, but sometimes it’s information overload and then you’re trying to fit hallway track type conversations in between the cracks and you’re just completely exhausted at the end of the day if you’re maybe more so if you’re introverted like me and a lot of people in that room are, I think so, yeah, the excursions are nice. We go to lunch and then it’s like, alright, you break after lunch for whatever activity you chose. I chose the wine tasting partially because I figured it would just be a good chill environment to sit around and have kind of those ad hoc conversations with folks. Sometimes I think it’s a little more difficult when there’s a big activity. 

And for me, I was like, I don’t know if I want to pack hiking boots and whatever else would be necessary for the more rigorous activities. But yeah, so my excursion, I can say we went into Old Town, tried some olive oil and some wine and it was fun. It was fun to just kind of walk around. And honestly, every time I’ve been on one of these excursions, there’s always at least a small bus ride or something and then you sit on the bus next to someone else and you have a conversation there and then it kind of continues or you kind of cycle around a bit as the excursion goes on. And yeah, I think it’s just a good way to put an around the hallway track. I think sometimes just literally standing in a hallway and having these conversations can feel a little bit stilted, so it’s good to have something to do while you’re having those conversations.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s a good perspective on it. And that’s really why we started. It was like how do we facilitate more relationships in a way that is fun? And we’ve done, there was a hike, right? That was the other one I forgot. But yeah, we’ve done, it’s called beer tasting, what is it? It’s just like a brewery tour is really what we’ve done and we’ve done, gosh, all types of boating and anytime there’s water around, it’s like, Hey, you want a kayak? Hey, you want to get on a boat? So it’s neat to be ax throwing. I think there was a trapeze even here in Minneapolis, Sherry took people to trapeze, which is kind of crazy to think about. But yeah, so those have been fun. And generally we’ve never gotten complaints of like, oh, I wish there were more talks. No one has said that. So that was a change we were going to make in 2020 and then obviously didn’t have the event for a couple years and when we came back we were like, yeah, let’s really do that, kind of change it up. So it has been fun.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Alright. So curious to get your take on what you think, having been to a bunch of us events and not the Europe event, what’s the biggest difference or key differences between the two events?  

Derrick Reimer:
So yeah, I would say first and foremost, the location is just completely unique compared to, well Las Vegas where the US event used to be. And then even being in more major US cities, it feels like it has a different vibe, maybe a chiller vibe, I would say being in this amazing old city on the Adriatic Sea, and I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s a certain energy that comes from the US events, and I think that’s partially due to the attendee size too. So there’s more people, there’s more connections to make. The rooms are a little bit louder just because more voices. And at the year event it felt reminded me a little bit of MicroConf us maybe six, seven years ago, a little bit earlier stages of the conference where there’s fewer attendees and you can feel like you can make the rounds a little easier through the room. I honestly felt at us, I’ve been coming so long and there’s an increasingly large cohort of people that I’ve just seen over and over again. So it’s like now going to the US events, it’s like, okay, there’s 30 people that I’ve definitely met before and would love to reconnect with, and that’s almost a little daunting. So being a person based in the US going to Europe, there’s a lot fewer people that I’ve met before at the event. So it feels kind of like an open clean slate to go make new connections, which was cool.  

Rob Walling:
Well, with that, let’s dive into the talks, and we’re not going to talk about every talk obviously, but I like to touch on some key takeaways. I know you astutely took notes because you always take notes, but I was like, Hey, you want our quote a podcast with me after? And I’m sure that’s inspired you to be a little more nerdy on this one. So the event kicked off with KO’s fan favorite Pel Gioni who has done, I don’t even know, man, this is his fourth MicroConf talk. Maybe he’s come to the US a couple times, done some Europe, and he doesn’t really do conference talks anymore, but I emailed him and he’s like, you know what, man, MicroConf, I haven’t done it in a while. I’m going to come out and do it. So I really appreciated it. And his topic was, it was moving from developer to entrepreneur to founder to manager, or I don’t remember the exact details of it, but yeah, why don’t  

Derrick Reimer:
You maker to founder to entrepreneur,  

Rob Walling:
Maker to founder, entrepreneur. Yeah, that’s right. So what were, I don’t know, one or more takeaways that you had from oc?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, he came right out of the gate. I feel like this was a very strong first talk to kind of set the stage. I mean, he in my mind is sort of a mainstay of the community. He’s almost at the Basecamp level of he’s been there, he’s been executing and just doing his thing and obviously doing really well as a company. I think he said there millions in a RR 29 employees. And yeah, he’s obviously been kind of maturing in the way he thinks about business and that’s what came out in this talk. So I think a lot of us are kind of absorbed in the Twitter sphere of people who are trying to often reinvent the way they run their business or trying to just come up with all of the solutions from first principles, thinking of their business as a product. So that’s something that Dy talked about right out of the gate was like, this was a big mistake I made early on was thinking about my business as my second product and thinking, you know what, I’m not going to do what the MBAs do and what people go to business school that’s for big companies. 

I’m a small indie company and I’m just going to do stuff my own way. And I think he has learned over time that often you should just kind of follow the best practices. I mean, management theory is there for a reason. So employees standardized job titles actually because they want something to look reasonable on their resume, should they decide to go work somewhere else and be able to have this transferable experience that’s not just like a happiness engineer or something, but an actual job title. People want to know if they’re getting paid fairly. So what are the salary bands for this role? How do you actually define whether someone fits in a role? So it was very interesting to hear him talk about how he made that progression because I think even if you’re earlier stage, well the earlier you are, the easier it is I think to fall in this trap of now we’re just going to do things differently. We’re just going to come up with our own rule book. So I love to hear this kind of wisdom, this hard earned wisdom from a founder who’s been at it a long time,  

Rob Walling:
Who’s been at it, and it’s not just the number of employees, but he’s been doing it now 15 years. I believe he launched in oh eight or oh nine. And this is the conclusion that pretty much everybody I know eventually comes to is you think you’re going to invent job titles or not have ’em or be, whenever I hear I’m going to do a completely flat org or a democratic org, I’m always like, Nope, good. There’s two in the world that have survived longer than 10 years doing that. It just, we are makers and we want to do creative things. And I love that analogy he said, of your company’s not your product because your product, you have to make a bunch of judgment calls and you’re making stuff up basically as you go along, but your company, there is standards for that or at least frameworks for it. Now I will say that I’ve never run an entire company of 30 people that’s bigger than any company I’ve run. But even at 30, I don’t know that I would have as much process as he does now. Maybe that would be a mistake on my part. Maybe that’s hubris, but I really don’t like process this. I’m not telling you anything 

But listeners, I tend to shy away from it. So I need someone who does bring process because even at a 10 person company, you need some process. And we had no process at Drip because I was just like, eh, this is whatever, we’ll just do the things and it worked, but then it was like it wouldn’t have scaled very well. So there’s this balance. I think Pel D has gotten into the frameworks and used them well. I would almost dial it down a little bit from what he’s done, but maybe, hey, maybe at 30 people, that is what you need. And his learnings are the reason I almost wasn’t going to have a big section in the SaaS playbook about job titles and salaries and management and when to hire managers and how management versus leadership, just all that stuff. And the shock of after we got acquired and seeing a bigger 170 person company, how they operate and how differently it was from us. I was like, oh, there are some really helpful things that smart MBAs know. I’ll discount half of what they know. But the other half is actually quite helpful and the hard part is knowing which half do you take.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think there certainly is the risk of overcorrecting on this, especially at different scale. I came away from this thinking like, oh man, I need to be thinking how I could be maybe a little more rigorous about stuff and not just trying to make it up, but I’m also realizing for me, I’m a three person company, so it can still look a lot different. But there’s one kind of overarching principle that he stated that I kind of starred and underlined on my notes. He said, the job of the CEO is to provide clarity, and that takes many different forms. So if you’re talking about a job title or something, it’s like, well, how can you make this as clear as possible so that the employee understands what’s expected of them and you’ve made your expectations clear, you’ve communicated this appropriately. And how do you communicate a product roadmap to your team and how do you communicate to your support people how they ought to respond to feature requests and bug reports and all this stuff? It’s going to look lighter when you’re smaller, but you still ultimately have to provide as much clarity as possible so that no matter how small organization can function well,  

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Rob Walling:
Our next talk was from Andrew Davies, he’s the CMO at Paddle. I assume most people have heard of Paddle and he brought in, it was data-driven approaches to growing your company, right? What were your thoughts on his talk?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think he just sort of brought a little bit of his own story into the talk, talking about his experience from being kind of in the earlier stage startup land to now being the CMO of Paddle of big payment processing company. So he had some various tidbits. One thing that he talked about was the kind of general advice in the MicroConf community is raise your prices, always be raising your prices. And he had some nuanced take on that to say, at least in the current climate, he’s finding in the data that just blunt price increases are not working great. And so it’s better to think a little bit more strategically, maybe especially in this current season, about how to segment your pricing, how to maybe play with packaging or add-ons or some ways to say, people who are getting the most value out of these features, you can put them in a different bucket and charge a higher price, but just blanket raising your prices across the board. He’s seeing some pushback against that in the data of not being super effective. And he also talked about pricing localization as a growth driver. Even just this example of expressing your prices in Euros if someone in Europe is viewing your pricing page. And I thought that was really interesting. It doesn’t necessarily change under the covers, I don’t think how your Stripe checkout flow works, but on your pricing page, if you express it in the localized currency, he has seen a nice conversion rate lift. So I thought that was an interesting one too.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s always neat to have speakers who have a large swath of data and paddle certainly has a lot of subscription and SaaS companies. So I enjoyed Andrew’s talk. One thing I forgot to say at the top when I was kind of giving the overview was this stat about the attendees in the room that I was shocked by. I was so shocked. I asked producer Sonia to verify it, and then I said, can you please show me who responded yes to this? And it’s that 24% of the companies in the room had at least a hundred KMRR.  

Derrick Reimer:
Wow.  

Rob Walling:
At least 1.2 24% shock. I was like, nah, I think they misread that. I think they meant a R. And I started looking and I was seeing the guy and I was like, oh no, I know them. I know them, I know them. So really impressive room to be in, to be honest. And there’s a huge swath that are in the mid to high six figures in terms of a R, it’s a side jack, but I just wanted to mention that of the quality level of the accomplishment of the attendees. And that was evident in the conversations. I have no qualms with someone coming who is pre-revenue, and there were, I dunno, 20% of the audience or something was pre-revenue, which is fine. That’s great. Come and learn and hang out. But if all of the audience or 80% of the audience is pre-revenue, the conversations get a little old looking for an idea. But when people have a business and you can either learn from them, you can hear their war stories, you can maybe give ’em advice from your learnings that that’s the fun of being at a MicroConf.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, at risk of this sounding, it’s was all positive or something. That is one thing that I noticed about this MicroConf in particular. And there are ones in the past, I think in the us I think you guys experimented pre covid with starter and growth tracks to try to address the issue of people being at different stages. And I think whether it was by happenstance or just the way that the Europe event has grown over time, it did feel like a pretty good spectrum where there were people ahead of me and people behind me. And those are both interesting conversations to have.  

Rob Walling:
And I like to, in this podcast kind of recap of the event, I like to call out things that went wrong because I don’t want it to be a big puff piece of like, Ooh, wasn’t it great? And everything was great. It was one of the best MicroConf Europes we’ve run. It was in the top two for me personally. And someone asked me, well, what makes it great? And I was like, the attendees, the energy, the vibe, the positivity, and then the talks were all good or better. Usually we do. I mean, usually I spend so much time curating and trying to get, I want everything to be exceptional. That never happens. It just isn’t the way it goes. Even a great speaker has an off talk or an off day, or you’re betting on new speakers and you coach ’em and you do everything you can, but when they get up there, sometimes it doesn’t work. 

So there’s always some mishaps. There’s often logistical mishaps, sprinklers going off in the middle of a room, or small things like the audio popping or the audio qualities, but the room’s too hot. There’s just all things wifi goes out, there’s all things that can go wrong. And I just kept waiting through the event. I was like, don’t say to producer Sonya, wow, everything’s going right. And I’m so surprised. Don’t say that. Don’t say that because the moment you say that, something’s going to go wrong. But I just kept waiting and then we got to the end and I was like, that was one of the least stressful events I’ve run in a long time. And it was just really a really positive event. So I’m guessing that’s how it felt on your end too, as an attendee, I’m hoping.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah. Yeah, it was honestly kind of hard to find anything to complain about. It was pretty windy down by the ocean, I’ll say that. Good point. Yeah, you guys couldn’t have turned the wind down, but the sun  

Rob Walling:
Was in my eyes when we were at the evening event. Oh, probably. Here’s one thing that I would do differently is the opening night reception was in a lobby and it was loud and I don’t like loud stuff. So that was probably the one. But I mean, come on. That’s such a rounding error compared to the thing. Totally.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Anyways, yeah, let’s talk about the next talk was actually because we did excursions that afternoon. And then the next talk was Mr. Omar Zen home talking about 10 things he had learned starting and selling Webinar Ninja. What were your thoughts there?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting to kind of contrast Omar with pedi because I think they’re both successful in their own. Obviously Pel has gone the path of the more traditional organic bootstrapping, keep running your company until maybe you want to retire kind of mode. And Omar was definitely more from the lens of, alright, I set out to build something really valuable and I went after it and I hustled. So he started out the gate saying, I intentionally stayed poor while doing this. And I hear the ways that I kind of structured the sacrifices I was going to make in my life so that it was him and his wife. I think they were both part of the business, how they could make this run at building something really valuable and eventually exiting. And he did exit. So it was kind of cool to see a couple of the speakers having this long arc of like, alright, I started, I built and then I sold and here are the lessons that I have. 

So he obviously had 10 of them. I won’t go through all of ’em, but he talked about making it personal, having your, why are you doing this? What is your motivation when things get hard? And that was a good reminder. He talked about hiring. He said, hire slowly fire quickly. Which is something that I think is pretty common wisdom at this point, but always helps to hear it. This just keeps getting reinforced over and over again by people who have been in the trenches for a long time. You talked about evolving your product over time, holding loosely to your product. And this is something that a lot of us hold very strong onto our product and we love it and we love what we curated, but sometimes that’s not what the market needs and you have to be willing to adapt. And so it was just fun to hear these hard-earned insights from someone who made it out to the other side and sold his business.  

Rob Walling:
I really enjoyed his talk. If folks want to see the talks, we do package ’em up and sell them. I believe it’s a hundred or $150 for all the talks. And those obviously get on email list microcomp.com if you want to get notified when those are available. And with that, let’s jump to our next talk, which was Marie Martins from Tally. She’s the co-founder of Tally, and she was on this podcast just, I dunno, two, three months ago talking through her journey, but she told that story with more depth and more details and slides and all that. So what were your takeaways from hers?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I mean, what a fascinating success story. I remember listening to her on the podcast and thinking, wow, how did they do this? So it was fun to hear her talk even more about it. And I still don’t know if I fully understand all of the ingredients of the success that went into why it worked to Tally. For those who don’t know, it’s this Form Builder product competes with Typeform and they’re managing to make freemium work at really good scale. What do they have? 400,000 free users,  

Rob Walling:
400,000 free users, and they’re building public. So the a RR is what, 1.8 million I believe, and they are fully bootstrapped and it’s just her and her husband and then one support person. So freemium is the driver for them.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, obviously she talked about this on the podcast episode as well, but about their sort of early cold outreach strategy to just hustle and seed the pool of free users. And I’m sure within that got a lot of micro influencers who had audiences or communities they were part of where this could just take hold and spread. She talked about how they latched onto the Notion community in particular. I think their product, she talked about being very aesthetically similar to notion. So people who are in that ecosystem would feel like, oh, this fits naturally with the rest of my tool set. So I think there’s some kind of dynamic there around positioning yourself next to a product that is beloved by a lot of people and feeling like, oh, of course if I use Notion, then of course I’ll just use Tally. And obviously she is a very, very talented marketer, knows how to put her finger on the pulse of what this, at least the initial seed community of people who would latch onto this free product, what these people wanted to see and cause ’em to jump over. So it was inspiring to hear her talk about that. I definitely would love to replicate some of that if I can find ways to do it.  

Rob Walling:
Easier said than done a lot there. There’s a lot happening that’s going right for them that I have a lot of respect for what they’re doing, but man, making that work is one in a hundred or something, you know what I mean? 

And I have a lot of respect for her husband who I got to meet Philip Philippe, I believe, pronounces. But everyone just kept saying, that product is so amazing and so simple and so gorgeous, and so this and that. And so I’m like, obviously he’s a damn good dev. Probably a full, he’s a full set. Cause he’s the only dev on it, so that’s cool too, right? It’s like to me, did you look him in the eye and be like, all right, which of us is better, sir? Which of us is a better full stack? That would’ve been a heck of a, I think if the two of hands touched, does the universe implode because it’s like the two amazing full stack devs? Is that how that works?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, yeah. I think he actually does, she mentioned this in her talk, I wasn’t sure what their division of labor was around design. A lot of times there’s a lot of times it’s a backend front end developer and then someone who does design separate. And it sounds like Philippe does a lot of their design work as well. So  

Rob Walling:
Were you alling him and you’re like, bro, I don’t come from my title. Everyone thinks I’m the best full stack. Don’t even bring it. Yeah. Who’s the full, I don’t know why. I think there’s some has to be some big rival where you both are super chill and super respectful and somehow I want there to be a beef 

Fist fight in the parking lot. So anyways. Yeah, no thanks. I appreciate your sentiments about her talk. It was great to hear the deeper story because in the podcast we can only cover 30 minutes with no visuals, and she crafted it in a way that I really appreciated. Our next talk was an attendee talk. Actually, we only had one attendee talk this year, and it was Tim Vander Castile who submitted a talk about things he had learned building his business. And I hadn’t heard of Tim. And so Tim gets up and starts talking and I’m kind of like, I’m getting tired. It’s the afternoon. And I’m sitting there zone out a little bit, and he’s like, yeah, and then we got our a RR to 35 million. And I was like, whoa. And they bootstrapped and I was like, that’s a thing. And they said, then we sold four and there was an asterisk. It was like, according to public records, I am under NDA, but I can quote a public thing. Then we sold for $300 million. And I was like, what just happened? How have I not heard of this guy? So I was, that was the second slide. I was like, well, now I’m super interested because I just need to hear this story. So with that intro, what was your takeaway from Tim’s talk?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, what a humble guy to be having those numbers attributed to you. I had a chance to talk to him in passing, and my wife actually sat near him at dinner one night and talked to him a bunch more than I had the opportunity to. And he’s just such a normal guy for having sold your business for allegedly $300 million,  

Rob Walling:
Allegedly we’re pretty confident it was at least that is that sentiment.  

Derrick Reimer:
So he had obviously just a 10 minute talk, so three takeaways. But it’s interesting how these sort of dovetailed nicely with both what Omar had touched on and what Pedy had sort of touched on. So he talked about the mistake of being a benevolent dictator for too long early on. You kind of have to control everything that’s happening in your company, but once you start building a team of hopefully people who are smarter than you and better than you at their individual discipline, you start to loosen the grip a little bit and trust your team. So he talked about what he would’ve done differently is empower people earlier and remove himself as a bottleneck more aggressively. And boy do I definitely feel that even with a small team, I think I have the tendency to want to micromanage too much of the business, and even if it’s working on the surface, it’s still, there’s a cost to it. 

My own mental burden and my own managing my own energy can be tough if you’re trying to stay literally on top of every single detail. So that was helpful to hear. He also talked about not thinking enough about culture, and this is something that Pedi talked about a lot. He talked about kind of defining your values and your mission, which again, those sound like very MBA esque concepts that US Bootstrappers wouldn’t want to spend time on, but I thought pedi talked about the benefits of those in a really pragmatic way. Even if your mission is just to stay alive at an early stage, you should state that and everyone on the team should understand that this is what we’re trying to do. And so the way we operate needs to be in service of that. And so Tim talked about, especially as you get bigger, being more thoughtful about the culture you want to craft, that’s one of the few decisions that you do get to make. And the rest, a lot of other decisions should just kind of fall in line with best practices, but you get to choose your culture. So yeah, those are two of my takeaways from Tim’s talk.  

Rob Walling:
And the last talk of the event was yours. Truly, I like to talk on the first day to get it over with, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve talked on the second day actually, but due to scheduling and reasons, I talked last and I talked about breaking through the seven SaaS plateaus, and I finally took that doc that I’ve referenced on this podcast where I have three pre-product market fit and seven, wait, did my talk have eight in it? It had eight, that’s right. I added an extra one 

Because this was the interesting part. Yeah, so I have this document, right with three pre-product market fit plateaus, and I had seven kind of pros once you have strong product-market fit, ways you could plateau. And then those were mostly out of my head and experience and stories and such stories from other founders as well as my own. Then I asked a bunch of TinySeed founders, I have easy access to revenue graphs, so I would look to see where there were plateaus and I was asking founders and an eighth one came up and that’s why I added it. So I guess the title was eight breaking through them. And so I wanted to have, I’ve never presented that material. It’s been sitting in a Google Doc and one reason I never presented, it’s kind of challenging. You can say, well, this is why you plateau because you don’t have enough traffic or leads. 

So the solution is drive more traffic or leads. It’s not actually that helpful to know. So the talk really was to name a framework or at least have to be able to identify. I’m like, I find that it’s helpful for people for me to say there are only 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. That’s it. Otherwise you think there are thousands and it’s just like, no, here’s the list. Pick one. Now, maybe I missed one. Maybe there’s 21, but it’s pretty much all of them. So if I say there are eight, is there a chance there are nine? Yeah. Is there a chance there are 23? No, there’s no chance. I know that. I’m not off by that level of magnitude. So trying to codify and get your around the thing is really the goal there. And then I had a story for I guess six or seven of them, like a real life story with a graph that showed someone breaking through the plateau. All that said, that’s the precursor. Did you have any takeaways from the talk?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I think I know that plateaus are top of mind for a lot of people in conversations that I have at honestly, the last couple of micro comps in particular, I just feel like this is something that a lot of people are coming up against or at least or seeing on the horizon. So I think it’s was really good to get some knowledge out there, at least defining the parameters around the types of plateaus and how to think about fixing them. I know for myself, as I’ve kind of seen plateaus coming in my own business, it’s like, okay, I feel like I could probably be working on many different things. So then the challenge becomes, well, how do you narrow your focus? Because obviously, for example, getting more customers through the door will theoretically solve any plateau if you can just get more customers. But that’s not always the most rational thing to do, just to try to increase top of funnel. So I think this is, yeah, it was just some helpful nuance to think about. Okay, if you look at your churn, is your churn too high? Well then, and you kind of compare that against maybe bands for your industry or whatever, or at your price point,  

Rob Walling:
Like rules of thumb or whatever.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, go to profit. Well, they have a bunch of industry data that you can compare against. And so you can start to use these to hone in and then start thinking about it in a narrower sense of, alright, yes, maybe the answer is get more customers. But also before you try to do that, it’s most rational to think about how to improve retention or how to move out of the churn percentage range that you’re in. I think I’m in a range at a relatively low price point where my churn is higher than I want it to be, and that’s probably just going to be the case because of my price point. So perhaps the solution is think about how do you attract customers who will pay more and that will move you towards a lower churn average, for example. So just some good frameworks I think, to think about this stuff.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I appreciate that. That was part of the reason that I decided to do this talk was I see this on Twitter where someone’s like, I’m plateaued. What should I do? And then there’s all this random advice and it’s like you can’t give advice unless you know the Cause. It’s like trying to prescribe a medication when all you see is a symptom. You’re not treating the actual source the actual cause of it. And that was when I realized, all right, somebody needs to get this info out because the thing that I’m going to ask now on Twitter, I’m plateaued. What should I do? I’m going to say, what’s the cause? Which of these eight is it? And if they say, I don’t know, then I’m going to say, you go figure it out and then come back to us and say plateaued because of this. 

So probably next there needs to be a diagnosis criteria of like, well, how do you know which of these eight it is? And I can tell because I see a bunch of businesses, I have the rules of thumb in my head if I can look at your churn or your funnel or whatever, but how do we get those codified in a way that is actually helpful? Here’s the other thing, and I said this, the bleak information or the bleak conclusion is most companies that I see that do hit a plateau don’t make it out. And I think the number of the graphs that I looked through, it was like 80 to between 80 and 90%. Once they plateaued, they just haven’t yet made it out. Now maybe they all will, but it’s like, no, it’s kind of brutal. Yeah, I didn’t know that.  

Derrick Reimer:
I suspect that’s because I think in reality, a lot of the solutions to the plateau involves a pretty significant re-engineering of the business in some way. Whether it’s like tap a new market, add on to the product, or add a second product to your product line to expand your value or going up market, I mean, it’s easy to say and very hard to do because you have to rejigger your go to market strategy and potentially learn new skills or hire new people to do those things. So all this stuff is easier said than done, but it’s helpful to have some foundational frameworks to begin strategizing around it,  

Rob Walling:
I think. So if you’re listening to this and you regret that you did not go to MicroConf Europe, you should come to MicroConf in New Orleans. microcomp.com/us tickets are now on sale, and they are the cheapest they will ever be. The price will only, it goes up every month or two. So if you’re thinking about going, it’s next March 16th through the 18th, that is 2025 in New Orleans, and I hope to see you there. Do you think I’ll see you there, Derek?  

Derrick Reimer:
Oh, for sure.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Yeah. Have you been in New Orleans yet?  

Derrick Reimer:
I’ve never been in New Orleans.  

Rob Walling:
Oh, that’s a good excuse to go down there.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I would be going to MicroConf regardless, most likely. But it’s also a nice little thing to have a new location to check out. That’s an extra incentive.  

Rob Walling:
It is like going back to Vegas again. It’s like, well, I’m definitely not going for the town.  

Derrick Reimer:
I’m  

Rob Walling:
Going for the event. But yeah, we’ve hopped around Atlanta. It was neat to pop in there. It was neat to see Denver. I’ve been there several times. I’ve only been in New Orleans once, so I agree. I’ll do a little sightseeing. I was trying to think of some other places that we could host it that are interesting. Austin, Texas would probably be high on my list, but I think I like the idea of continuing to bounce it around for exactly that reason.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, totally.  

Rob Walling:
Alright, man. Well, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. Folks want to keep up with you. You are at Derek Reimer on X, Twitter, and of course savvy cal.com if folks want to use the best scheduling link on the internet.  

Derrick Reimer:
Indeed. Well, thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks so much to Derek for jumping on the mic with me and helping refresh your memory if you went to MicroConf or to drop some new thoughtful takeaways to you in case you miss the event. Obviously, we’re going to have videos available, as I said during the episode, MicroConf dot com if you’re interested in signing up for the mailing list such that you hear about the video package once that’s around. Thanks so much for joining me this week and every week. I’m Rob Walling, signing off from episode 737.