Episode 760 | White-Labeling, Founder Mindset, and More Listener Questions (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
But it was just that long list of the same mistakes that I see founders and aspiring founders making thinking they can sell everything on Twitter and they don’t have to do any hard work. It’s common, and it’s unfortunate that so many people kind of fall into that trap as well as the build it and they will come thing or just the, okay, so I built this product, now how do I market it? I see this question on Reddit and it’s like, geez, dude, are you kidding me? It is startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Wallen. Each week on this show, I cover topics related to building ambitious, yet sustainable B2B SaaS companies. So you could be bootstrapped, mostly bootstrapped, maybe you’ve raised buckets of funding as some of the listeners do. Historically, the show has focused on bootstrapping, but really it’s about building independent, self-sustaining startups that aren’t tied to this need for fast, fast, fast growth, billion dollar outcomes, and the constant influx of additional capital. 

In today’s episode, I answer listener questions. It’s a good mix of some voice questions, some intermediate questions, and I think I even have an earlier stage question to answer as well before I dive in to the questions. If you have not checked out SaaS launchpad, that is the best course that I know for early, early stage SaaS founders. So it’s all about finding ideas, vetting ideas, trying to do some validation, building your product, getting to launch, doing marketing before you start coding, doing marketing before you launch the product, and finding those early adopters and early users. That’s at SaaS launchpad.co if you want to check it out, is by far the best course I have ever built has almost 10 hours of in-depth video content that is just packed with tactics and strategies and all the stuff that I espouse. This is stuff that I don’t have in any other books. It’s things that I touch on here and there on the podcast, but have definitely not gone into this depth ever in anything that I’ve released. So SaaS launchpad.co if you’re just getting started. And with that, let’s dive in to our first listener question.  

Craig:
Hey Rob, a longtime listener, first time caller. Thanks so much for the podcast and for the SaaS playbook. I listen to the podcast every week and I’ve read the SaaS playbook five or six different times, and each time I extract new information and insight from it, it’s just such an incredible resource for bootstrap founders. So first of all, thanks so much for all you do. A little context, I’ve built a B2B SaaS company, which provides an analytics platform to HR teams to help them make data informed decisions about their talent. So think about things like collaboration, insights, employee engagement, drivers, predictive attrition. And for this we use a variety of different data sources such as HR systems, business systems, and employee surveys. For MVP, we built many components such as our data Mars and pipelines, but for others, we decided to white label other SaaS solutions. 

For example, for the surveys, there’s so many great survey platforms out there, we just couldn’t justify custom building something given the relatively low expense we would incur by white labeling an existing solution. Ideally though, we would prefer not to have these dependencies on other SaaS companies because we would like to flexibility and control over the cost and features within our platform. Since we are a bootstrap startup, however, we found white label components to be a quick and low cost method of achieving product-market fit and launching our MVP. So I’ve got a few questions around this. Number one, how would you advise thinking about the mix of custom-built versus white label components, does the optimal mix vary based on growth stage? And number two, is there an inflection point at which we should consider prioritizing a migration away from these white label components? And then lastly, if we were to sell the company one day, does the reliance on other SaaS for specific capabilities impact our valuation versus a fully custom solution? Thanks for your time,  

Rob Walling:
Greg. Thanks for calling in and for the kind words at the top of your voicemail, if you’ve read the SaaS playbook five or six times, I take that as a real compliment and I take it as a sign that it’s probably providing some value to you. So thank you for that. I really do like this question because it’s not super common that people will completely white label big areas of their app. I guess I’ve seen folks like they’ll do an integration with an electronic signature app if they don’t want to build that functionality. So I’ve seen it done here and there, but it sounds like you’ve done this with multiple white labeled vendors, which is obviously a good way to, as you said, get to market faster, not to have to build all this functionality. I will admit I do see white labeled integrations like this as a form of technical debt, and it’s one of those that it may never come back to bite you, and that’s great, and I think that’d be a big part of my thought process here is if it’s not broken, I would probably not prioritize fixing it very highly unless I felt like the white label vendor or that part of the app was existential to my existence as a company. 

And so if I was doing half a million dollars a year, unless one of the vendors is jacking up their prices or they’re not reliable or there are bugs or there’s downtime, obviously then it’s broken and I would consider prioritizing fixing it. But with none of those things in place, if there’s not anything going wrong with any of them, I could see getting to a million a RR before really considering swapping them out. And the way I would think about it is which of these is the biggest platform risk? Really what this is, it’s a form of platform risk. Now it’s lower risk than something like building on X Twitter or making a Facebook app or making a Shopify app. Certainly lower risk. And if you go back to the episode where I talked about platform risk, I talked about how there were eight levels and three different factors that contribute to those. 

And I believe what you have only has one of the factors, which is a technical reliance on a third party, you are relying on their white labeled solution and the API for your product to properly function. So one of Craig’s questions is how would you advise thinking about the mix of custom built versus white label components? And for me, white label is a risk. There’s platform risk and it’s a form of I guess technical debt, something that long-term. I mean, if I’m going to become a 10 million a RRR 20 million a RR SaaS company, I have to undo this at some point. Much like if I’m going to become a 10 or 20 million a RR SaaS company, at a certain point I have to go back and fix some of the crappy code that I wrote in the early days when I was trying to get to an MVP. 

These are different, but they’re similarities. And so the mix and the way I would think about it is I want as much of my custom code that I own, that is my custom IP as possible as makes sense. But of course there’s a balance here. If I can get to 250,000 or 500,000 annual recurring revenue much faster by using white label, I want to probably consider that. Then Craig asks, does the optimal mix vary based on growth stage? And I think it does. I mean, there are people that are building a hundred percent in no code trying to get to 10 KA month so they can quit the day job so they can then rebuild it with code. And I would never want to be running a million dollar SaaS company that was in no code personally, I’d be so worried about the brittleness and the scalability and platform risk and just all those things. 

So it really does to me, depend on the growth stage. One of the reasons is the further along you get, the more valuable it is. And if I have an asset, let’s just say you’re at a million or 2 million a RR and throw out a five XARR, multiple growing fast, checking five to 10 million business, that’s when I mean stuff’s real at that point. So that’s when I start getting nervous around these kinds of dependencies. The technical debt, the platform risk that I’m talking about when I’m supporting myself and team members, I’m paying people’s mortgages. I have something worth millions of dollars, makes me more and more nervous. Then Craig asks, is there an inflection point at which we should consider prioritizing migration away from these white label components? I mean, I would do it one at a time over time, and maybe you never replace all of them. 

You go with the least risky one last and the one that is performing really well for you and it’s inexpensive and it’s easy street, what are the factors there? Jacking the price up, there’s bugs, there’s reliability issues. These are all the things that can contribute to that. And so I would probably start thinking about it around a half a million a RR, maybe a million, and I would have a list probably in priority order of what I thought we should do. And then you put that into your roadmap at a certain point. Do you do one every quarter or one every six months? Depends on what else you’re trying to ship. And then lastly, Craig’s question is, if we were to sell the company one day, does a reliance on other SaaS for specific capabilities impact our valuation versus a fully custom solution? It depends. 

It depends on is it 10% of your functionality? Is it 80% of your functionality? There’s a big difference, and are they causing you any problems? Right? That platform risk will probably be factored in, but only if it is, again, more than just a small bit of your functionality. And if you have 10 modules in your web app and one or two of them are white labeled, I could see someone probably saying, well, I’m going to buy it and rewrite those custom, right? But if five of your 10 are white labeled and it’s some pretty complicated piece of functionality, then someone thinks, well, I want to want to buy it and rewrite those, but that’s a ton of work. So they would probably factor that in. So the answer there is kind of maybe it really depends on the extent of it, how hard it would be to recreate that functionality and whether there have been any issues at all with the white labeled components to date. So thanks for that question, Craig. I really do appreciate you writing in with it because one that we haven’t heard on the show before. My next question is from Ian, and Ian was kind enough to send in a question and then they kind of answered their own question a couple of weeks later. So let’s listen to his first voicemail, which was a question about a VoIP system as well as a way to get to his SaaS metrics.  

Ian:
Hi, Rob, longtime listener, first time caller. First off, I wanted to thank you for all the great work you’ve done to help bootstrapped founders and co-founders like myself. Startups For the Rest Of Us has been helping us and encouraging us since we started our business back in 2016. My name is Y Han and I’m the co-founder of Wash Dry Fold, POS. We’re a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that offers point of sale and management software exclusively to laundromats that offer wash dry fold. We built this very niche software because we needed it in our own laundromats located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve recently sold our thousandth point of sale system and hit the 1 million a RR milestone. We just hired a full-time employee and I need help finding the right tools to help us scale. For several years now, I’ve been searching for a software that would centralize virtual phone lines for all employees while also providing a way to centralize our inbox for tech support, customer service sales, et cetera. Beyond this kind of VoIP slash CRM functionality, I also really need in-depth SaaS metrics like LTV based on custom cohorts. We already use ActiveCampaign, slack, Calendly, WooCommerce, and all the Google tools, but I’m really struggling to find a solution that pulls everything together and adds all the functionality without adding multiple new subscriptions that then everyone on the team has to learn. It’s something I’ve researched, but I’d love to hear from a B2B SaaS veteran or from somebody who has deep experience in the space. Thanks so much again for all you do.  

Rob Walling:
So when I heard this question, I thought to myself, Hey, that’s a pretty cool niche and congrats on getting to a million ARR in such a small, what I would consider a small market. It’s not huge, but that’s great. The things that came to mind when Ian asked this question, and then I’ll let Ian answer his own question with the solutions he went with. When I think of a VoIP solution to centralize all the phone numbers, I think of open phone or Grasshopper and Grasshopper’s older school, it’s been around for what, 10, 15 years, but open phone. I know a lot of startups that use it. And then for in-depth SaaS metrics, if you’re using Stripe, I would be using one of three ProfitWell chart Mogul or Bare Metrics. Those are the most popular. We see it across TinySeed and MicroConf companies, but those were the things that came to mind. 

And then for crm, I don’t know, I think of close.com that integrates outbound VoIP with CRM functionality, but I don’t know. I don’t know if they do inbound. I would guess not. And so I was thinking that these are three different tools. These are not, there’s no one tool that does all of what Ian has asked for, but to have Inbound VoIP to have CRM separately, well, I’m like, okay, well pipe drive and close and active campaign. Since you’re already using Active Campaign, I’ve heard their CRM functionality is not the worst. And so maybe that’s a piece I would use. And then of course, SaaS metrics already weighed in on. So with that, let’s cut to the chase and hear what Ian decided to go with.  

Ian:
Hey Rob, it’s Ian. I sent in a question a few weeks ago and I just wanted to give you an update because I think I have a few answers for one for VoIP. I ended up going with Zoom, and it turns out you can bundle a lot of their stuff to get really good values, and they’re still, even with a Zoom Pro license, it was still half the cost of RingCentral and some of the other more VoIP central services. So I think that’s a really nice resource for someone looking for something similar. For the CRM piece of it, I think we’re just going to go with active campaign CRM functionality because it’s got the basic stuff that we need. And then the third thing I was really looking for was SaaS metrics, and I’ve kind of dove in deeper on that. And there’s certain things like net revenue retention where I haven’t really been tracking all the metrics that I should have been tracking or the way that I should have been tracking them specifically because with certain customers, I guess if they add a seat, which for us would be adding a store, that’s an increase in that customer’s spend, but we just track it by store and not by actual customer. 

And so there’s a lot of kind of funny things that I probably need to go back and recategorize go find when they first started with us and calculate their LTV and all that kind of stuff. And so it would be nice to still know a really good SaaS metrics software that somebody’s used and liked, but at the same time, I’m realizing that I don’t really even have all the right data to get the right metrics out of the SaaS software, at least in the past. So anyway, just wanted to give you an update on everything. Appreciate what you’re doing, always listen to new episodes, so keep doing what you’re doing and thanks. Bye.  

Rob Walling:
So obviously, thanks for weighing in on that, Ian. I didn’t know that Zoom had any type of VoIP functionality, so that’s really interesting. And it’s less than RingCentral, which is yet another one of these phone centralization platforms. And then Ian did wind up going with ActiveCampaign, which is cool, and I’m not sure if they’re using Stripe. And so the solutions that I suggested may be a little trickier to get to. But with that, you’ve heard both my and Ian’s take on this question. So thanks for writing in Ian. If you want to invest in founders, you can do so through my world-class accelerator and Venture fund TinySeed. We are currently raising our third fund after having raised and mostly deployed almost $42 million across our prior funds. If you’re an accredited investor or the equivalent in your country and you are interested in indexing across dozens, if not hundreds of B2B SaaS companies that are hand picked by myself, a r, and our team at TinySeed to be the companies that we believe will succeed, you can head to TinySeed dot com slash invest. If you enter your info there, it goes straight to a R. You’ve heard him on startups For the Rest Of Us, and you can have a conversation with him if you have any questions or you can receive our deck and our memo and just the thesis of what we’re investing under because we are a unique venture fund and SaaS accelerator. So if you think you might be interested in putting some capital to work in ambitious, mostly bootstrapped B2B SaaS founders, head to TinySeed dot com slash and invest. 

My next question comes from X Twitter where a listener named or Lee, he’s at sunglasses face on X Twitter, and he asks, what change in mindset do you notice between founders doing $100 MRRA thousand dollars, 10,000 MRR and a hundred thousand MRR? It’s an interesting question. It’s worded in a way where I’m not sure I accept the premise of it. It implies that if you’re doing a hundred or a thousand dollars a month, that you have a different mindset than someone doing 10,000 or a hundred thousand. And if you think about it, the founder doing a hundred thousand MRR was probably at 10,000 a year or two ago and a thousand a few months before that and a hundred a few months before that. And so it’s the same founder, and I just don’t know that your mindset shifts that much, but I kind of want to answer a related but a different question or just reshape the question. 

I feel like orally might be asking, what mindset do you need to be successful? What mindset shifts do you need to have internally to get to a hundred thousand MRR? And the interesting thing is I think there are three components to success, hard work, luck and skill. So if you have a lot of luck, I actually don’t know that you need any mindset shifts. You just get lucky and that happens. But that is by far that the minority of founders that I see being successful. So let’s take a look at hard work and skill. I think the mindset of those two things is you put it in the hard work and you do the grind, and you do the things that sometimes you don’t want to do, and you build your own skills and you don’t shy away from saying, well, that sounds hard, that sounds uncomfortable. 

I don’t think I want to go do SEO or figure out how to do pay-per-click ads. I just want to go eat ice cream instead of eating spinach and working out, and yet I want to lose weight. So that to me is just a big mindset for success, is someone who is willing for a time to grind, to put in the time and to do the things it takes to grow the company rather than the things that they want to do. Your desire of what you want to do to grow a company has very little with the optimal approach to growing that company. Another thing that Einar and I talk a lot about is that the successful founders that we see within TinySeed, and the number is right around 15% of companies that we have backed are above a million a RR. They’re seven or eight figure annual recurring revenue SaaS companies. 

So I mean, it’s a big chunk. The industry average, and I don’t actually know where a R got this number, but the industry average is 4%. And so we obviously have picked some good companies and hopefully have also helped them with the mentorship in the community and the advice and the money help them accelerate. But something we see with our TinySeed founders is the ones who succeed, they get a lot of stuff done quickly, they ship a lot of things, and they’re right enough of the time, and they’re not always right the first time, but if they take a marketing approach and they roll it out, or if they build a set of features or whatever it is they’re trying, they just figure out how to make it work 55 60, 65, 70% of the time, there’s some percentage that’s above 50 that they’re generally right and their gut is pretty good. 

So the mindset of shipping quickly and not being in analysis paralysis is important, but also the mindset of generally weighing options and picking the most likely to succeed and having a pretty good founder gut, but also just a good rubric in their head of what’s the next thing that is going to move the needle? What’s the biggest bottleneck in my business? And how can I relieve that? How can I eliminate that bottleneck such that I then discovered the next and the next one? And to me, growing a company is almost entirely about identifying the next bottleneck and eliminating it and then discovering the next one. It’s this never ending. Yeah, it is a never ending hamster wheel. Now that I think about how depressing and this week on depressing startup stories For the Rest Of Us, let’s talk about the never ending hamster wheel that you’re on as a SaaS founder. 

It is, and that’s why the payoff in the end of being able to sell it for millions of dollars makes it worth it, in my opinion. But it is sometimes, I don’t want to say sad truth, just the uncomfortable truth I guess of this is going to be hard. I don’t see many people building SaaS companies who are like, this is so much fun, this is great. It’s like once you get in it, you’re like, woo, this is hard. But it’s worth it because either it becomes extremely profitable or you can’t exit for that, that never have to work again, money. I’ll even take or Lee’s question in a different way. What do I see in founders? What mindset do I see in founders who get stuck at a hundred or a thousand or 10 KMRR and never make it past it? They make the same mistakes over and over. 

They don’t get out of their own way. They move slowly. They only do things they want to do. They launch multiple products at once because they can’t just focus on something and grind. They think they want to build a media company or an audience and then try to sell it to them. Don’t do that. If you’re building SaaS, build your network, not your audience. It really is. It goes back to the don’ts. What was it? A year ago, 18 months ago, I had an episode of Seven Things You Should Never Do As a SaaS Founder. Go listen to that episode. And then I added an eighth a couple episodes later, but it was just that long list of the same mistakes that I see founders and aspiring founders making thinking they can sell everything on Twitter and they don’t have to do any hard work. 

It’s common, and it’s unfortunate that so many people kind of fall into that trap as well as the build it, and they will come thing or just say, okay, so I built this product. Now how do I market it? I see this question on Reddit. I built it. Now how do I market it? The reason I come across it is then someone will mention me my name or SaaS Playbook or TinySeed MicroConf. So then I get an alert and I go out and check it out and it’s like, geez, dude, are you kidding me? All this information that’s out there. I mean, I guess that’s the mindset is the mindset is you should have sought out someone who’s done this before and who is trying to give advice. Hell, I give 30 minutes of free advice on this podcast every week and every other week, 15 minutes of free advice on YouTube. 

Or you can spend $10 and buy one of my books. Or you can spend $500 and buy the SaaS launchpad course. So you can go from free all the way up, but realize I’m saying the things that can help you not make those mistakes. And of course, if you’re listening to this, you already know that, but the mindset of there’s no one else out there who has done it before me, or I’m not going to spend the time to go seek out advice and learn about this stuff. I’m just going to go build something that’s a dangerous mindset. I left that mindset long ago. I did used to have the mindset of, well, I need to figure all this out. I’m going to figure out a new path. No one else is doing the path that I want to do, which of course was bootstrapping. 

And really there it was almost no one else doing it, and it was like base camp and Joel Poll skate at the time when oh five when I was blogging about this. But I’ve let that go. And now when I go to do anything, when we launched on YouTube, we hired a consultant and a content producer. When we launched on LinkedIn, we hired a consultant. Someone knows this better than I do, and they’re ahead of me, and I’m willing to pay both in time and in money to learn that very quickly. Now, if I didn’t have as much budget as I do these days, running a tiny seat of MicroConf, in the old days, I would have educated myself. I would’ve gone to the subreddits, to YouTube, to audio books, to podcasts to try to figure out what do other people know about this topic that I don’t? 

And that mindset of learning from others and taking advice and not just listening and being like, eh, that doesn’t fit with how I want to grow a business. And so I’m going to say in my head that it just doesn’t work, or I’m going to do this other thing anyways, even though people are saying, don’t go B2C and build a two-sided marketplace and don’t build a media company and don’t price your product at 10 or $20 a month and don’t try to go with one time sales or whatever the advice is, but that doesn’t work anymore or that makes me uncomfortable, or it makes me think I’m going to have to do stuff that I don’t want to do, like market and talk to customers and actually do sales calls. Whatever it is, it’s that mindset of I am going to actually learn from others and I don’t have to do exactly what someone else prescribes, but I’m at least going to factor that in when I ask for other opinions and when I go out and read a book or listen to someone talk about this on a podcast, that I’m going to not dismiss them and I’m going to be open to learning. 

I think that that desire to learn and the openness to learning from the right people, I think is a mindset for founder success. So thanks for that question orally. I hope it was helpful. My next question is from Timo from Germany. Timo writes, I run a two-sided marketplace for German speaking talent living overseas. We monetize by offering a paid subscription to employers. I’ve hired a salesperson to call free signups to sell them to the paid plan, which has positively impacted our free to paid conversion. However, we don’t reach everyone and some people simply don’t want to take the call. When we offer people the chance to voluntarily book a call by email, we get very few bookings. But since I know the calls work, I’ve considered making them mandatory to unlock certain features. I’ve never seen anyone do this after signup, which makes me wonder if it’s a bad idea. 

What are your thoughts on making calls mandatory? We are B2B only, and the subscription costs 90 euro per month. So the cost for one quick call shouldn’t be an issue. Yeah, I would agree with that. I know you generally do not recommend free plans, but in our case, the free plan lacks the ability to contact candidates. So there is no value in the free plan other than testing. Thanks for the work and the podcast. This is a great question. I would try it. I would just try it. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone do this, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it. And I love stuff like this where you’re getting creative with it and you know that something moves the needle and you want to, how do you incentivize someone to do the thing that moves the needle where you can either offer ’em a carrot or a stick, you either penalize them for not doing it, or you offer them a gift or a reward for doing it. 

And in this case, I guess you’re kind of doing both. You’re penalizing ’em and saying, well, that part of the app isn’t available, but also you’re rewarding them right by saying, Hey, you get this feature or this upgrade or this whatever, by doing a call with us, I think I would try it. I just don’t know what else to say other than it might work. And just build it in a way that you can roll it back easily. You get it all in one commit and try it for two weeks, four weeks, whatever makes you comfortable. And my guess is you’ll know pretty clearly within a few weeks of rolling this out, I like the creativity Timo, and thanks for writing in. My last question for the day comes from James M. James appeared on this very podcast several months ago. He is the co-founder of talti and is also now a TinySeed mentor. 

So James asks, I have plenty of questions around hiring at the senior level. How do you balance cashflow with high salaries? At what point is a head of engineering more valuable than a senior engineer? And for product-led startups, what should team composition look like? So I’ll start with the last one actually. For product-led startups, that means not sales led, right? So this is low touch funnel, or you may have sales calls, but low touch funnel, what your team composition look like. So the answer is it depends on your competition. If you’re the only app in the space, you need fewer engineers because you need fewer features to stay competitive. But if you’re an email service provider or a CRM, you need a lot more engineers because you just need to keep pace or you will lose product-market fit. So it does depend, but usually whatever the founders can’t do, meaning if you don’t have any engineering founders, then your first hire has to be an engineer to build, to write the code, build the product. 

Your second hire and product led is almost always customer support because you will be a higher volume, probably a higher volume app with a lot of customers. And so you’re going to have a lot of emails and live chat if you offer it. And then after that, it just depends. That’s where you look at what’s your bottleneck, because I don’t, I don’t believe that there is a great rule of thumb. If there was, I would’ve tried to come up with it, but I don’t believe there’s a great rule of thumb around team composition with a startup because it really is what’s your next bottleneck? And that depends on so many factors like you’re pricing your market, your competition, on and on and on. To me, it’s that decision point. Every time you have enough money to hire that next person, you ask, what’s the biggest bottleneck in the company? 

Oh, we have too many sales demos. Great. I need to hire a salesperson. Or we don’t have enough leads. It’s like, great, I need to either hire a marketer or I need to replace myself, hire someone to take stuff off my plate. So me as a founder can approach marketing and sales. So that’s where I’ll leave the team composition. The answer is, it kind of depends, but that’s the framework of how I would build my team up. The previous question was, at what point is a head of engineering more valuable than a senior engineer? And I think, I know James is technical. I think to me as the founder, if I don’t want to be managing engineers, or at least technically leading them, meaning with the technical decisions, probably by the time I’m at three engineers or four engineers, I’m looking to either hire from outside or promote from within and ahead of engineering. 

Could be like Derek was at Drip, which was, you are the team lead and you’re technically leading them, but I was still managing all the team members at the time. But if you find a head of engineering who has management experience or you are willing to train them up, I mean, again, around three or four engineers, if I didn’t want to be managing engineering myself, I’d be looking for someone to take that off my plate because it is work and it’s one-on-one meetings, and it’s all the overhead of being a manager that you don’t necessarily want to have for the rest of the duration of running the company. And then James’s first question was how do you balance cashflow with high salaries? And I guess my answer is the same way you do with low salaries. If I’m hiring someone for two or $3,000 a month versus 10 or $12,000 a month, it’s similar math. 

It’s just different. It’s just a different amount. I tended to run my companies at about break even because that maximized growth. If I had raised funding, I would’ve started burning cash. I believe Asalt is self-funded, so they can’t burn. But for me, since the beauty of SaaS is that it is MRR and it’s recurring and it’s subscription, I kind of looked at if we grew five grand or 10 grand a month, that was enough for that next person because it wasn’t spiky. Now, if you are in a spiky business where maybe you’re taking a lot of annual payments or you have a usage-based component to your pricing, you just do the best you can. I mean, you can always bring in a fractional CFO to help you model stuff out. You could talk to AI about modeling stuff out. And to be honest, I’m guessing there’s a tool out there that could potentially be built for this. 

But usually what I see companies do, TinySeed companies say when they’re growing quickly and they’re trying to balance cashflow salaries, they get in a Google sheet, they project stuff out, and they do the best they can. It’s always scary hiring more senior level talent. This is why a lot of us resist doing it because it’s a big bet, and cashflow is a big concern. But oftentimes I find if you make the right choice on one of these risky bets, the upside is so asymmetrically in your favor that it can definitely be worth doing. So thanks for those questions, James. I hope that was helpful. That’s my final question for today. Thanks so much for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 760.