Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling:
So what I did is I emailed Einar Vollset, who, as many of you have heard on the show, has a lot of experience with in particular SaaS M&A, and his response to that question was, and I quote, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is the dumbest (beep) thing I’ve ever heard in my entire (beep) life. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
Welcome back to Startups For the Rest of Us, I’m Rob Walling, and this week I was going to walk through some Rob solo adventure topics, but I realized that we have such a backlog of questions, and actually several of the questions are kind of Rob solo adventure type topics, asking questions about broader strategic things rather than just detailed tactics, so I am excited to answer several of those. There are many video questions and audio questions, and if you don’t catch the video snippet that we throw up on Twitter each week, you should follow @startupspod on Twitter, because oftentimes you can see the question asker and then see a bit of my response.
Before we dive in to listener questions, I really wanted to thank everyone who has posted a rating into iTunes, a five star rating or review. We passed 1000 ratings, and I’m stoked. 1024 as of a couple hours ago, and reviews ranging from, “Great content every week. Thanks, Rob, for putting out a great show.” To Toms Carb who used the phrase, “Startups For the Rest of Us is truly an MBA on my iPhone. Tuesday mornings are incomplete if I don’t listen to the latest episode.” And lastly, this one from Mark 79 I really like, he said, “Pretty much all the episodes are timeless, so even though a show might be a few years old, the information is still relevant.”
Thanks so much for helping me on this drive to get north of 1000 ratings. We have now joined a select few podcasts that have that many ratings and reviews in the iTunes Apple Podcast store. I know they keep changing the name. And for the record, we have 1024 worldwide ratings and 498 worldwide reviews. So I’m guessing within the next few weeks here we will also cross the 500 mark there. So thanks again for that.
As this episode airs, I am in Atlanta talking to Ben Chestnut at our MicroConf Local. We are going to be in Austin next month. If you’re interested in checking it out, head to microconf.com/locals. And with that, let’s dive into our listener questions.
This first question is anonymous and you’re going to have to forgive me as I think I will probably have uncontrollable laughter at a certain point during this one, and there are some swear words as well, and those will be bleeped per usual. But I received an anonymous question from a longtime listener with the subject line, “Rewriting Our Code Base for Possible Future Sale.” And the question reads, “We have a small dev team at the startup I work for. We have several million in funding and we are growing relatively quickly. Our web app and our tech get rave reviews from our demos and our users. We know it’s scalable and it’s built on one of the standard stacks.” He tells me which stack it is, but I will tell you it’s either Django with Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP Laravel, it’s one of the standard startup stacks that you would expect.
He continues, “Our new CEO is worried that being built on our current stack instead of something that’s more corporate, that our multiplier might be lower for a future exit.” And when he says something more corporate think .NET or Java, something that’s not as common in the startup space.
He continues, “He’s considering building version three of the software from scratch in a more corporate stack instead of continuing, developing, and adding features to our current product. We’ve talked to him about all the startups, deca billion dollar startups, that are literally built on our exact stack and how popular it is, how common it is, and how easy it is to find developers for the stack. Is there any validity that changing our stack in part or full will get us to a higher multiple at a future exit?”
When I received this question, my first response was, “I’ve never heard of that. That sounds very odd.” And I was almost upset by it, because it sounds like someone who maybe doesn’t know what they’re talking about or has a really unique frame of mind. Maybe they have not been in the startup space and they’ve only been in the Fortune 500 space, where perhaps tech would be weighted differently or something. But I was like, “Yeah, this seems like not a good idea.”
So what I did is I emailed Einar Vollset, who, as many of you have heard on the show, has a lot of experience with in particular SaaS M&A, and his response to that question was, and I quote, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is the dumbest (beep) thing I’ve ever heard in my entire (beep) life. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
And then I was sitting there like, “Okay, so he has confirmed my thoughts on this and that’s good. It’s good to get a second opinion.” Four minutes later I receive another email from Einar that says, “Man, I’m still laughing.” And so then we went back and forth a bit about it. But the last thing, and the one caveat to it, is Einar said, “The only smidge of truth in this is if a particular acquirer already had a team that is qualified in a particular tech stack and your product is built in that tech stack. But really it doesn’t matter for the size deal this would probably be, and how the heck would you know what a specific acquirer is into years from now? Cargo Cult Management. I’d be worried about the CEO cratering the company to be honest.”
So obviously Einar has really strong opinions about it. I also had that inclination. I think he actually put it more eloquently than I did. But I wanted to bring this up because there’s two points to this. Number one, I think we should all be reminded that our frame of reference in the startup space, if we were to move into the Fortune 500 space can often be off for a bit. And this is actually why it’s hard to transition someone, let’s say a project manager or a marketing manager or even a developer at a huge company, 1000, 10,000, 50,000 person company, and pull them into a startup. Because it takes three months, six months, of just undoing what I’ll say are perhaps adaptive habits for being at a large company and really bad habits for being at a startup. Taking way too long to ship things, thinking about things too much, waiting for everybody’s permission, politicizing things. There’s all these things that happen at these big companies almost inevitably.
Vice versa, if you work at a startup and you get a job for a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 company, it can be really challenging for you to try to fit in because the culture is so dramatically different and the pace and there’s a lot of differences there. So I think this is a good reminder of just how different companies function and how drastic the differences can be in the thinking between someone who maybe had run a half a billion dollar, billion dollar company, and who’s coming to run a handful of million dollar company.
But then the other point I want you to take away, of course, is, unless you’re written in a really odd stack that no one can find developers for, no one’s heard of, usually an exit is not going to depend on your tech stack. Again, if you’re using one of the standard tech stacks, it’s not going to be a big deal.
Now, I will say that when I acquired HitTail back in 2011, it was written in classic ASP, which essentially was a deprecated language and it was very hard to find developers for, and I did rewrite that in Ruby on Rails. And I think I would’ve had a very hard time selling that because it was such an old stack. It was old, it was crufty, it had a lot of issues, so rewriting it in Rails was a decision. Now, I didn’t rewrite it in Rails to fix technical glitches or the code is crufty or anything like that. If it had been Rails, I would’ve left it in Ruby. But the fact that ASP classic, which had, what, come out in ’99 or ’98 or something, and really had been superseded by .NET in 2001/2, I mean at that point it was a decade deprecated language and it would’ve been even worse when I went to later sell it in 2015. So those are some thoughts on rewriting your code base for a potential future sale.
The second topic is one that I saw some folks chattering about on Twitter, and it’s around founder salaries. And there was a comparison between companies that had raised a lot of funding and bootstrap companies. And there were companies that had raised, let’s say, 10 million, 30 million, 40 million, and the founder/CEO was making several hundred thousand, two, three, $400,000, and then someone had bootstrapped a company to a million or two million and they said that they were taking home more money than that founder. Which is probably true. I mean, this is no secret. We know that if you solo bootstrap or do a highly efficient SaaS company and you get it to a million, million and a half, in annual recurring revenue, there’s a ton of profit to be pulled off that and that’s an amazing business.
But the thing that it got me thinking about as folks were discussing it is this balance between near term and future earnings. And Derrick Reimer and I talked about this a few episodes ago where I asked him, “How do you think about this? Because you could take a pretty substantial salary out of your company.” In fact, he’s a TinySeed back company. He could take a quarter million dollars a year without paying TinySeed to anything, because that’s our salary cap. Anything above that, then he would pay us our prorata share of dividends. But I said, “You could take a quarter million out a year. I know that you are not. Why not? Why not just take that out?” In fact, he could take out more than the CEO who raised $50 million and then be happy that he had done that this year and next year. And his response was, “But I can use that money to grow my company and I’d rather grow it faster.”
And it comes back to that multiple of, if I add 1K MRR, that is 12K ARR. And if you think about an exit multiple, if you ever sell, and I’ll just say again, everyone sells, then take an exit multiple of say five times ARR and you’re looking at $60,000 for every 1K of MRR that you add, and usually more money if you’re smart and you’re executing well and you’re a knowledgeable founder and you have that hard work, luck, and skill, usually more money in your bank account means you can grow faster, or you can at least attempt to grow faster. And so the less money you take out, the faster that growth, and so you are actually thinking ahead.
I think of it like Warren Buffett used to say, and I’m paraphrasing, “I’m not cheap, but when I look at a dollar today, I know that I can turn that into 50 or 100 dollars a decade or two from now.” Because I know compound interest and I know compound returns specifically of investing in the stocks in the companies he buys.
And I’ll admit, I think about SaaS the same way. I think about startups the same way. That taking a dollar out of your company today is potentially reducing the growth, and it’s potentially taking an extra five, 10, $15,000 out of your company today, let’s say you could turn that into 1K, MRR. And I know there could be a whole conversation around, well, can you? And is it repeatable? Blah blah, blah. Let’s just say some dollar amount, 20, 30, $40,000, it’s another hire. Do we think they can add 1K of monthly recurring revenue if you hire a marketing person or a sales person or another developer or whatever it is, and instead of taking that out, you invest into that. Well that 1K, again, is 60K to your net worth, but it takes a few years to get there and it takes an exit and it takes other things to happen.
Now, there’s a balance here, because you can also be too far on the side of I’m basically going to live in poverty. I’m going to make 30K a year trying to live in San Francisco because I want to reinvest everything. That’s not healthy either. And so I think paying yourself a salary where you are totally comfortable and where you can pay those bills and you feel fine about it. But having that balance of, again, I’ve had lifestyle businesses where I just maximized the cash I pulled out of them. I would pull out 80% of the revenue as net profit. And it was amazing. These businesses were great and they were great cashflow businesses. But I didn’t mistake them for the longterm play that was eventually going to have my goal, which was to have enough money in the bank that I could work on anything I wanted to anytime and beholden to no one, including Google rankings and all the things that even when you have a profitable startup can get in your way of maintaining its profitability.

Bhavesh:
Hey Rob, quick question regarding stair step approach. If part of the marketing strategy that I’ve got includes writing blogs, I’ve figured out that I could potentially use these content to create a course to my target audience. Would that be a stair step approach or product that I could start using while doing the marketing? Or would that be something well off tangent that I shouldn’t be looking at? Really appreciate it if you could answer this question. Thank you.

Rob Walling:
Thanks for the question, Bhavesh. This is a really good one. The answer is, absolutely. And in fact, in the original version of the stair step that I presented at the Dynamite Circle’s BKK event in Bangkok back in 2014, it was a live presentation, step one, it included eBooks, courses, it included software, like downloadable software and AppSource software and simple things that you could use to get a foothold and learn how to make money on the side and then stack that up for step two.
And then step three was recurring revenue. This was not SaaS focused because, see, the Dynamite Circle is a mix of folks doing eCommerce, there’s Amazon FBA, there’s content sites, there’s productized services, there’s consulting freelancing, and there’s software and SaaS as well. And so when I presented it, I generalized it to that audience and info courses, as you’re saying, were on step one.
And then if you go to look at kind of what’s the seminal blog post for this now, when I actually wrote it up, it does focus on software and then stepping up to SaaS, because that’s really how I think about the world. That’s my more specific view of it. But I have been noodling for a while on taking the stair step method of bootstrapping and basically translating it to the stair step method of entrepreneurship. And it’s a little different, entrepreneurship’s higher level, and that would include this type of thing. And I also think that would include freelancing, maybe productized services, kind of stepping up there. So it’s a great question and the answer in my experience is unequivocally yes. I’ve done this myself, where I had my first book, Start Small, Stay Small, I had a couple online courses, I had a membership website, that was all happening as I had these other step one software products. And then I used those to lever up into SaaS, and from there the rest is history, so to speak.
And I’ve seen other folks doing this, so I think it’s a good skillset, and I think it builds exactly what the stair step is intended to do, which it brings you some revenue, brings you some experience, it brings you some skills, it brings you some confidence, it brings you maybe a bit of an audience and a bit of a network. And all of these things make it so much easier to then launch that subsequent product. So thanks for the question, Bhavesh. I hope that was helpful.
Our next question is also from Bhavesh sent just a couple weeks later.

Bhavesh:
Hey, Rob. I’ve just got a question regarding your stair step approach. Looking at the current situation, do you think from your experience that I can sell a Zapier type connection between several products to produce my value proposition to my market? Because at the moment, the potential users, or future users, are connecting several products together manually using Excel, or without anything, or using Zapier, because that’s what we are currently doing in our business. And my MVP is going to be just an API integration between several applications such as Zero.

Rob Walling:
The recording had a bit of an issue towards the end of his voicemail, so we did have to chop it off, unfortunately, almost mid sentence. But I think we got the gist of the question.
This is a good question. And the idea is creating a Zapier type connection, which is really just integration. It’s integration points between several different tools. And his question really is, can he sell a Zapier type connection between multiple apps? And this is just selling an integration, and the answer is absolutely. How many apps in maybe the Shopify app store, the Zero app store, the Salesforce app store, the insert name of platform here app store are really just piping data from the app itself into other platforms? And maybe it’s only into one, or maybe it’s into multiple, they’re just connectors, and those things sell for either a monthly subscription, sometimes a one time fee.
I think this is an interesting idea if you’re building it specifically for a specific niche, perhaps one that you’re familiar with, or maybe you’re working in that space yourself and you’ve seen this need, because if I go to the same app store, I’m not going to see the need if I don’t have the day to day operational need for this type of thing. And so Bhavesh mentioned a couple tools that he’s trying to tie together, and it was… What was it? Like Zero, which is accounting software and then time tracking and something else I actually forgot already. But you can get the idea that maybe Zapier integrations don’t exist between those three. Or maybe Zapier integrations can be a little finicky and a little brittle, and having basically a first class integration that hits the APIs and is just a single click to enable in my Zero or my project management app, and would I pay $15, $50 a month for something like this if it was a desperate need and I needed it to be super reliable? I would.
And as a result, this becomes a pretty interesting step one business, that if you recall the stair step, the step one businesses are usually smaller. Usually you don’t need to do a ton of marketing, because they already have the traffic and the lead flow coming in from the app store rankings. And these are apps that have platform risk and they are pretty much impossible, virtually impossible, to scale into the millions in revenue. But that’s not what a step one business is for. A step one business is for you to learn that experience and get the skills and all that that I mentioned earlier.
So yeah, I think this is super interesting. And I think the neat part about something like this is you could feasibly try to wire it up in Zapier initially, and the MVP could almost be a no code MVP. But if you are a developer, tying a few APIs together isn’t that hard. It’s not having to build the UX and build all that in. Basically just being able to roll some code around and deploy it and test it out yourself and then start charging people is pretty intriguing. So, thanks again for the question. Bhavesh. I hope that was helpful.
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Justin:
Hey, Rob, this is Justin from Fort Worth, Texas. Longtime listener. I had a quick question regarding the tension that can sometimes arise between your founder mindset and your engineer mindset. As a technical founder, we’re both responsible for the business side and the product, but also for building the technical infrastructure that’s going to support that product and the future growth of that product.
I initially built my SaaS app in Python and Django and specifically did that for the productivity gains that I get out of a language like Python. But as we are moving from proof of concept and beta into the actual product release and we’re getting paying customers on board, my initial thoughts start turning from product to scalability. How do I make it faster? How do I make it more scalable? And I’m constantly having to weigh these thoughts on prioritizing product important features and things that are going to move the product forward versus tech debt that’s on the backend that needs to be fixed. I’ve even thought about rewriting the app in something more performant.
I tend to push those aside, but I’m curious if you ever dealt with that as you were building out your products and how you fought against that to make sure that you’re making the right decisions at the right time. Tech debt’s always going to stack up, we’re always going to deal with it, but oftentimes there’s product things that might be more important. So I’m curious if you ever had to deal with that and what the process was to work through what are the right decisions to make at the right time. Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time and hope you have a great week. See you.

Rob Walling:
All right, Justin, thanks for that. This is absolutely a question every SaaS founder, every software founder, has to answer, and it’s one that I dealt with many times over the years. And pretty much almost without exception, every SaaS founder I talk to, whether I’m investing, advising, or just giving one off advice to, one of the biggest pain points of their job as founder is not enough time. “I can’t do everything. How do I know what to spend time working on? Should I market, should I sell, should I develop?” And I do have this framework around leaning into uncertainty that is like, “What should I be working on in general across the business?” And it’s that you should work on the uncertain things as the founder until you figure them out, and then you should hire folks to do the things that are more certain.
I’ve talked about that on the podcast in the past, I actually wrote a section of my book that is actually getting, I don’t want to say close to being done, because let’s be honest, you finish a book and then like five months later you have all the stuff to actually print the book. You got to get layout and designs and all this other stuff.
But all that said, that’s not really the question that you’re asking. You’re not asking me, “Which parts of the business should I work on,” you’re just asking about playing engineering versus everything else, I think. There’s engineering, which is fixing technical debt, improving performance scalability, then there’s engineering that is building new features, and then there’s everything else. There’s doing sales and marketing and support and all that.
Usually support and customer success tend to be easier because you get a support email, you respond to it. And if you have someone to onboard, you do it. The harder ones are like, “Should I switch over to marketing today or should I work on the product or should I fix tech debt?” And it’s always a tough balance and that’s why being especially a solo founder is pretty tough. And that’s why especially being a solo founder without funding to hire your co-founder, in essence, or to hire someone who can do this other stuff, is even harder. And again, this is why the stair step is such a popular framework, because if you do that, you eliminate a huge piece of your decision making, because at that point you’re either building or supporting.
I mean, that’s kind of it. You build a Shopify plugin, you’re not out marketing that thing, not unless you want it to get past a certain point, but usually it’s in the app store and you’re just getting that traffic coming in. Same with wordpress.org, it’s much less of a going concern than once you have a full blown SaaS app. So a single founder, bootstrapped, first time SaaS founder, is really hard. Nights and weekends especially add to that really, really, really hard.
And this is why I would advise, again, Justin, I know you’re already working on something, so keep doing that, you’re in the middle of a product, but the idea of the stair step and of the step one and step two is to eliminate part of this really difficult time. And that’s also the idea behind raising some funding. And you know that I have not been anti-funding and I’ve not been pro-funding, I just view funding… It’s like saying, “Rob, are you anti-hammers?” And it’s like, “Well, no. When I need a hammer to do a job, I go grab my hammer and I pound in the nail. But I also don’t use it to screw in a screw, because it’s not made for that.”
Funding is a tool, that’s it, so why would I be anti or pro? Know what you’re getting into, use the right tool for the right job, know the trade offs that you have to make with it. But that is why indie funding, TinySeed type funding sources, have become so much more popular for bootstrappers, because you are at a point where it’s really hard and there’s just no two ways about that. And in that situation, it’s a lot of hard decisions with incomplete information, as I like to say.
But to answer your question more specifically, what I’ve seen as folks start to scale and they’re trying to balance, let’s just say, technical debt versus feature building, I will often see either if they’re using sprint models, then one out of every four, one out of every eight sprints is dedicated purely to technical debt and cleanup, or it’s 20%, or some number that you feel comfortable with, of the time is spent cleaning up technical debt as you go forward. So if you’re not doing sprints, it’s one day a week or if you have four developers, five developers, one of them rotates around and just does all technical debt stuff.
80/20 is a reasonable thing to think about. Some teams want to get rid of more technical debt and some don’t care as much about it. So that’s more on the engineering side. If, as a single founder, I was weighing engineering versus marketing, I mean, I think as engineers we want to lean into the stuff we’re comfortable with and we love doing, and of course that’s building product. That’s why we start startups is to build product, and so I think you need to really resist that urge. I think you need to be very mindful that marketing and sales are going to be something that your psyche naturally pulls you away from. Your lizard brain is going to constantly say more code, more code, more code, code works, code makes the business successful. And that’s not necessarily true. It can be, but for the most part, driving more leads, optimizing those funnels, talking to people, making sales and onboarding are what’s going to actually grow the business, and the code is the product that allows the business to exist.
Don’t get me wrong, it provides tons of value to your customer. Obviously, as a product person myself, I don’t minimize the value of the product itself or of the code, but it is just the common trope, and I see it over and over with folks who are just overbuilding and spending way too much perfecting, and they redesigned their homepage and they rewrite their copy and then they have another redesign, and then they redesign in the app because they didn’t like it. And you know what, I’m just going to scrap this in rewrite the whole code base, and then I’m a year and a half later it’s like, why haven’t you just sold? Why haven’t you just sold? Just marketed? Get more people into the app and start growing your MRR. I appreciate the question Justin, it’s a fun one to think through and I hope that was helpful.
So that’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed as I ran through these listener questions. We have a pretty decent backlog, although several of these, since they were video or audio, jumped straight to the top of the stack. It looks like there’s about a dozen text questions and about two or three video questions right now. If you want to ask a question, go to startupsfortherestofus.com and click the link at the top of the page that says ask a question and you could submit one in any format there. Or you can email straight to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 631. Thanks so much for joining me this week.

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling. This is the podcast for folks who want to build amazing startups, but they want to maintain their freedom, their purpose and their relationships as they do that.
You can describe these startups as bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped or non-venture track or indie SaaS. It’s a bunch of different ways, but we know that the gestalt of the movement is that people want to be in control of their destiny and not beholden to anyone else.
I really appreciate if you’ve left a review or a rating in Apple Podcasts. I’m on my drive for 1,000 ratings and as of a couple days ago, 998. The most recent review was from Val Sopi. He said, “Startups For the Rest of Us is everything you need in a podcast show about bootstrapping a SaaS business. From pricing strategies to marketing, all the way to real stories from the trenches, it has it all.” Thanks for that, Val.
You don’t even have to write a review. If you click that five star button in Apple Podcasts, we’re going to hit 1,000 in no time.
I really do appreciate everyone’s support. It helps us grow the podcast, and it helps keep me motivated to keep shipping episodes.
Today I talk with Jonathan Weinberg. He’s a single founder of an app called Builder Prime, which is CRM software for home improvement contractors.
Jonathan is approaching a million ARR as a niche SaaS founder. He’s serving home improvement contractors. Obviously, there are only so many of those in the country and only so many of those who don’t want to use paper and pencil or don’t want to use Excel, and actually do want to purchase a SaaS app to handle a lot of their client communication.
We touch on how he came up with the idea, how he got early traction. We of course, have our recurring Startups For the Rest of Us segment, when did you know you had product market fit and others. I hope you enjoy this story. Let’s dive in. Jonathan, thanks for joining me on Startups for the Rest of Us.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Rob, come to be here.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s good to have you, man. You’re a listener of the show. Right?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I am. I was a late starter, to discover the podcast, but since I did discover it, that’s basically every single week.
Rob Walling:
Oh, awesome. That’s cool. So we’re here to talk about Builder Prime, sir. This is a pretty incredible SaaS company that you’ve built.
I think a lot of folks listening to this, would love to build a company that has been mostly bootstrapped to this point and have the success that you’ve had.
Your H1 is the only does-it-all-contractor, CRM software suite. Builder Prime has every tool you need to scale your home improvement business. That’s how I usually describe it when I mention it, here and there, ’cause it’s such a good example of a niche piece. I’m always like, it’s CRM software for home improvement contractors. Is that how you describe it too?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, that’s the brief version of how I would describe it. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Talk about where you are, in terms of progress.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Absolutely. So we’re about to hit a pretty big milestone in the next month or two. We should be hitting a million in ARR. So, pretty excited about that.
We’ve got five people on the team, including myself, right now. Looking to grow that out a little bit further. Hopefully going to be hiring another couple of people here in the next few months, just going from there.
Rob Walling:
That’s cool, man. A million ARR with only five people, so you’re running it pretty profitably I’m guessing.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, I’m looking for places to spend money now, but yeah. The last two employees to the team was actually pretty recent, started just a couple of months ago.
So, we were three for a while. Now we’re five. Hopefully getting to seven in the next couple of months, but yeah.
Rob Walling:
Do you find it hard to decide on what the next role is to hire? Because this is something I hear from a lot of founders. It’s like the first hire, I can give a lot of guidance. It’s like, usually support’s pretty easy to outsource. Or you have to build features to keep up with the market, so you’re going to hire developer, or well, we need to do marketing set.
I would say the first one may be easier to figure out. But as you go, once you’re at five, it’s like, well, what is six? Aren’t there competing priorities for that? How do you think about that as a founder?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, it’s actually not that difficult. It’s one of two things. One is, well, what job do I want to fire myself from next? That certainly provides input into it.
The other thing that, for example, I find myself keep trying to get to, I keep trying and trying and trying to focus on marketing. I can never focus on marketing, so I need to hire somebody for that. So, it’s pretty straightforward.
I’ve gone back and forth, as to whether my next one should be that marketing person or another developer. But yeah, I’m going to do both of it at the same-ish time. So, it hasn’t been too difficult to figure out what’s next.
Rob Walling:
I want to take people back to the early days of Builder Prime, so they can hear how you came up with the idea, whether you validated it, whether you built it.
I’m chuckling because you are the reason that in the State of Independent SaaS survey, when we ask, how did you come up with your idea, and you are the reason that there is an option on there that says poor customer experience. Is that the origin of this?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It’s not, actually. No. It was actually a great customer experience, which is the odd thing. I had no experience in the home improvement, business prior to this.
We bought our first house in 2011. We went to get our bathroom remodeled. We went through the whole process of selecting a contractor and getting the job done. It was actually just an amazing experience.
Loved the transformation. Started thinking about, oh, this would be cool to have a business, my own home improvement business, where I can do work like this. But I was never really going to get away from the tech side of things.
So, the idea just started to sit in the back of my head as far as, well, if I were doing a business like this, what type of tech would I want? What type of systems would I want, to be able to manage this effectively?
There were inefficiencies, in terms of how our contractor operated. Yeah, if I were doing this, I would fix those things, for sure. I could do this much better, if I pictured myself in his shoes, with these types of tools. So, that’s really where it came from. But it was a great experience really, that drove it.
Yeah. I did not validate the idea. Not the most advisable thing, but it seems to have worked out. So, it really just from there, after I got the idea in my head, sat there for a while and finally started to tinker and all of that.
I called up a couple of contractors that I knew, including the one that did our bathroom and just asked, “Hey, is this something that you think is needed? Is this something you would use?”
Of course it was, “Oh yeah, that sounds really cool,” but nobody committed to anything. Nobody said, “Oh yeah, I want to pay you now and once it’s ready, let me know.” Nothing like that.
So, it was really just building stuff and building and building and building and hoping that it was going to work.
Rob Walling:
So playing with fire a little bit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Which is dangerous. You could’ve built for a long time and not got traction. Yeah.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, I was getting a lot of early feedback. As I was building, there were a few different people in the industry that I was getting feedback from. So, it wasn’t like I was completely building in a vacuum. So there was a lot of that.
But yeah, it was 2016 that I quit my job. It was really not until mid-2017, that I got my first paid customer.
So, I was just building the whole time. I wasn’t even sure if it was ready yet. I was getting feedback the whole way, as I was developing. But my first paid customer is not the one who was providing that feedback, actually.
Rob Walling:
Couple things that are interesting. One, for some reason I had it encoded in my mind, that you had a home improvement contractor who did work and you thought the work was good, but you didn’t like the experience. Therefore, you set out to build it.
It sounds like that’s a half truth. It’s human memory. You told me this story once, three years ago, probably, on TinySeed interview or at a 2- minute thing, where I’m doing six calls back to back. I think I encoded that in my head.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Part of the sales experience was not the greatest. For example, the part of getting the contract, it was a Word Doc. I had to print it out, sign it, scan it, send it back.
So, there were parts of the sales process and parts of the communication that were not the greatest. That’s where I set out to try and solve some of those issues. So, that could be where some of that’s coming from.
Rob Walling:
Right. So you didn’t do much validation. You had a few phone conversations. You quit your job without a product. So, did you have money in the bank? You have a trust fund?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I did pretty well in my career. For the first 12 years I was in corporate America, worked my way up the ladder into middle management. Middle management was not for me.
For me, I either got to be all the way at the top or all the way at the bottom. I think I can be happy in either of those spots, but I don’t like being in the middle. But yeah, that just wasn’t the right thing.
I saved up money. I’m a conservative spender, so I saved up a good bit of money. I knew I wanted to do this. I was saving up for that purpose. I wanted to have some runway to be able to basically not make any money for a little while.
Rob Walling:
Were you married at the time?
Jonathan Weinberg:
I was married. No, I had both of my kids, so they were five and two.
Rob Walling:
How did you get your wife on board with that decision to quit the day job with no income?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. She was always very supportive. Part of it, we were living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the time. She wanted to move back to New York City, where we had lived prior.
I’m originally from New York. I really liked living in Pittsburgh. So part of her idea was, hey, let’s move back to New York. We’ll be closer to your parents. We’ll get more help with the kids. You can quit your job and do what you want to do. So, that was part of it.
So we moved back and to a much more expensive place to live. I still quit my job.
Rob Walling:
Was that scary for you? Because that would feel very stressful to me, to quit the job. Or did you just say, worst case, I go back and get a job?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Oh, man. The first six months, I would say, at least of making no money, was a shocker for me. It was so stressful. I’ve never been in that position before. That part, it was an adjustment. It was definitely an adjustment and a roller coaster.
Rob Walling:
I can imagine. So you quit the job. You have two young kids. You’re building a startup, which I’ve been in pretty much the identical situation. Not where I quit the job though. I had other income coming in from products.
So you built for a year before you got your first customer, it sounds like, 12 to 18 months.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, about six months. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Oh, only six months? Okay.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, there were nights and weekends before [inaudible 00:10:51] all that, but yeah.
Rob Walling:
Sure. Sure. In process, yeah. How did you get your early traction? How did you get your first whatever, five or 10, 15 customers?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It was just iterating, listening to feedback. There was one really interesting and helpful thing that happened. I believe he was my third customer. I met him at a local home improvement contractor association meeting here, that I joined up.
He became my third customer, was really into it, lots of great feedback. He was helping me to understand some of the things from the industry and what kinds of things were important. A lot of it was really great.
I tried to use my filter as far as, okay, yeah, that makes sense. This, I’m not so sure this fits with the vision. But he was giving me a lot of really good feedback.
At the end of 2018, start of 2019, he was already a customer for a while, but he called me up. He’s like, “I had to fire my office manager.” He’s a window and door company.
He’s like, “I had to fire my office manager and I really need some help. I need somebody in the office. Why don’t you come and work for me? I’ll pay you to be my office manager.”
Nah, I can’t do that. I’m working on the business. I got to keep growing this thing. I got to keep working on it. I got to focus on it.
He kept coming back, “Why don’t you come? Why don’t you come work for me? Why don’t you come work for me?”
I thought about it a little bit more. Honestly, my runway was running out. At that point, I don’t think I had started paying myself yet. So, it was like two years in and I still hadn’t paid myself. The runway was starting to get less than I was comfortable with.
You know what? He said I can do demos. I can work on it half the time. I just got to be in the office, do about half… basically work four hours, half the time each day.
It’s like, all right, you know what, let’s try it. Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could’ve happened.
I got to use my own product as a user, every day. I got real time, amazing feedback, as far as what’s needed and what this industry really needs. That was the time that I did a bit of a pivot.
Prior to that, to be honest with you, I didn’t know I was building a CRM. If you would’ve told me when I was first starting it that, hey, you’re going to pivot this into a CRM, I was like, I’m not going to build a tool for sales. I’m not the sales guy.
But based on where the need was and the feedback from him and from other customers, it’s just kind of where things naturally went. That’s where the gap was. That’s where the need was. That’s where we started getting a lot of really good feedback about those types of things that we were building.
So, it was during that time of being a user of my own product and working directly in the industry at the same time and learning a lot more about the industry, that I didn’t know, that actually helped to shape what it is now.
Rob Walling:
What was it before?
Jonathan Weinberg:
It was more of a project management tool.
Rob Walling:
For during the project?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I mean, it did the contract process, like I was saying earlier, about how the process around signing the contract wasn’t great. So, we built the e-signatures and all of that type of… and the ability to create the estimate, get it signed and do all of that early on.
And then it was about scheduling the job and scheduling your employees and your subcontractors and having a Gantt chart, with dependencies between this task and that task.
All of that stuff is actually still there. It’s still in the product. That’s one of the things that that’s made us a little bit unique compared to our competitors, is because other CRMs in this space, there are other CRMs for home improvement companies and they don’t have either that production project management at all or some of them don’t even have the estimating. The ones that do, it’s much lighter.
So, like you were reading the H-1 earlier, the does-it-all CRM software suite, it does more than the CRM because that’s kind of how we started. We started with the estimate and the production management side, and then the CRM pivot came later. But that’s really been the focus of the product development for the last three years.
Rob Walling:
In terms of finding early customers, a lot of folks find that’s very difficult because it’s the cold start problem, where you basically have no brand name. No one knows who you are. No one knows how to find you, no one knows that they should be looking for you.
So was it cold outreach in the early days? Did you make it to the top of Hacker News and the r/construction subreddit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
One of the things, so with that pivot and repositioning as a CRM, that’s what people search for. That’s why we always say, hey, what do you do? Oh, we’re a CRM for home improvement companies, because people are searching. The people know the term CRM. They know they’re supposed to have one. They know it’s a big part of what their businesses are, especially the ones that are growing and scaling and have a significant volume of leads that they need to track and manage. So, people searched for that.
We built out a couple of… I’ll say maybe five or so different copies of the landing page, with different H-1s on it. It was best CRM for painting contractors. It was a different header image. It was best CRM for window and door companies, with a different header image.
It was basically just a copy of the landing page, but it seems to have worked reasonably well for people that were looking for us in those real specific niches.
Rob Walling:
Right. So it was an SEO play then?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. And then there’s some word of mouth as well.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, I would imagine that. Construction is a small industry. My brother runs an electrical contractor. There are not a kajillion of these contractors.
Even if you talk in California alone or in the country, they talk a lot. The owners talk to each other. So, I can imagine if you get a reputation that that brand… Once you get past the cold start and you are now known as a solid product, I would imagine people would be passing that around.
All right, Jonathan. We’re going to do the Startups For the Rest of Us segment, when did you know had product market fit?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Like most people will say, it’s a sliding scale of product market fit. I think in the early days or the earlier days, I’ll say, started to realize that we’re getting there, based on just customer feedback.
Even though we didn’t have a lot of customers just yet, the ones that we did have, we’re talking to them all the time. It’s very hard for us to get any kind of customer without talking to them, at least for one or two meetings, if not a good bit more. So, we get a lot of feedback.
We would have people come and say, “I’ve been searching for something like this for so long, I can’t believe I finally found it.” They would say different things where it’s like, they were fans. They were actual fans. It’s not often that somebody says, I love my CRM, but we were getting people saying, “I love this CRM.”
It was like, all right, we’re on the right direction. We’re finding a need. There’s a need here. We’re filling it, at least for some of them. We got to do it for more, but at least for some of them, we’re filling it. So, that was the first part of it.
A little bit later on, this is a little over a year ago, we had a really bad outage. I did a database upgrade over the weekend. Monday morning came.
During the week is when we have much higher traffic than on the weekend. Monday morning came. About 10:00 AM, everything started to crap out.
There was just, people couldn’t use it. The database was just obviously not able to keep up with the load. We just upgraded the database. Why is it now having all of these problems? We’re out for probably at least a good four hours. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
But the thing is, we’re getting calls from customers saying, “What’s going on? I can’t access it. Keep us posted.” They’re saying, “I don’t know what to do without the system. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know how to do anything.”
So, it was clear that, people are using this software. It’s helping them. With it not being there, it’s a big problem. So, that was another little clue I guess, as to, yeah, it sounds like we’ve got some product market fit.
People are really using it. They’re getting a lot of value out of it. Being down for any period of time is a big problem. So, that was another part of it.
Then as we continued on from there, net negative churn. So that’s a pretty good indicator that people are not churning out. That’s another really good indicator.
Even just yesterday, we got a phone call from a manufacturer for concrete coatings. We have a lot of customers that are dealers for this particular product. They do concrete coating jobs. We happen to work really, really well with them.
They called us yesterday and they said, “We’re having a national dealer meeting in December. We are going to kick out your competitor that’s been sponsoring for the last however many years. We’d really like you to be there, because we keep getting such great feedback from all of our dealers, about the product.”
That’s just the next level. It’s like, all right. I mean, they’re not just telling us they like the product. They’re telling everybody they like the product. Obviously, the revenue and the metrics tend to speak for themselves as well.
So yeah, it’s been a sliding scale. I think it’s something that you’re always trying to get better, in terms of the product market fit.
We’re continuing to do that. There’s still a lot of things that we’re continuing to do, to evolve the product and keep up with a changing market.
I mean, markets aren’t static. Markets change. So, you also have to keep the product up with a changing market. It’s never ending, trying to keep up with it.
Rob Walling:
I’m glad you called that out because I always say on this show, product market fit is a continuum. It’s not a one or a zero. It’s more like a one to a hundred.
At different times, with different audiences, you have more or less product market fit, stronger and weaker, as we like to say.
In addition, you just said markets are not static and they change. I have absolutely seen products get pretty strong product market fit, and then the needs of the market change.
An open source tool comes out, for example, that suddenly a lot of people start using and is almost the equivalent of what you’ve built. And suddenly it’s like, now I have strong product market fit again, not have people canceling, have people really, really want what I’ve built. I have to pivot. I have to add more features. I have to give more value. There’s something there.
So there aren’t that many software companies that last 10, 20 years. There are some. We can call them out. But even those that last, they don’t do it with one product. Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit, whoever we could throw out who’s been…
Even, I guess MailChimp’s one. But man, there’s some exceptions around there. Their product is now several products, just under one subscription. It’s not just email marketing anymore. It’s landing pages. It’s Facebook ads, I think you can build directly, MailChimp. So, they’ve added a bunch of stuff.
These are good problems to have because you don’t run into these until you have the kind of traction that you do, until you start getting bigger and you do have product market fit. Then you get the competitors coming in.
The other thing I want to call out is this idea that folks are such advocates for you. They’re such fans of your product that they’re telling everyone they know, it sounds like.
That is what Jason Lemkin calls a mini-brand. He says, when you hit about… once you get north of one million ARR….
I distinctly remember this happening with Drip. It was a little before that because of the circles we ran in, where everybody talks online. So, it was somewhere between half a million and 750, if I recall.
But you’re seeing that now, where you’re not Pepsi, you’re not Disney, you’re not Marvel. But a mini-brand is that, you have a brand within your circle, that a lot of people have heard about you.
In fact these days, I bet if a group of contractors are sitting around the campfire, I bet they’ll be surprised if a person there hasn’t at least heard of Builder Prime.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. I think that the market is also a lot bigger than people might expect. We’re still such a small player in this space. There’s so many people that are using other CRMs and estimating tools and all that kind of stuff. There’s so many people that are not using anything or don’t even know that this is something that they need, or maybe it’s something they don’t need yet.
So, I think there’s still a lot more opportunity to break in, in terms of name recognition. People really, even if they’re not customers, at least hearing of us, a lot more have these days.
It’s funny. There was a story… this was about a year ago or so, where one of our vendors got an Uber. Somehow, they got to talking about what they do. The vendor that got the Uber, the person driving actually also worked at a home improvement company that was a customer of ours.
They got to say, “Oh yeah, I use Builder Prime every day.” The vendor’s like, “Oh yeah, we work closely with them,” which was kind of crazy to hear.
There’s still so much room to grow, in terms of this industry and then that name recognition, but we’re definitely starting to make a dent.
Rob Walling:
I’m looking at your MRR graph. There was a point, it was maybe late last year, early this year, where you hit what I call the bootstrapper hockey stick. Because venture says the hockey stick, and you see Facebook and Google. That’s just next level stuff. But for bootstrappers, your growth really started accelerating at a certain point.
You and I had had a conversation last year, where you said, “Right now I’m growing at,” whatever you were growing at. You’re like, “I want to double or triple that by the end of the year. How do I do it?”
Came up with a bunch of strategies. You obviously executed pretty well. So my question on this is, how did that happen?
Every bootstrapper wants to achieve the bootstrapper hockey stick. What do you think you did that worked?
Jonathan Weinberg:
The flat part of that hockey stick is actually where we screwed up. We made two big changes at the same time, right around Memorial Day last year.
We changed our pricing, which essentially resulted in an increase in price. We also started moving away from emphasizing, book a call with us. Book a call with us. Let us help you. Let us help you.
So, we tried to push people more to self-service. They weren’t looking for self-service. They wanted that hand holding, those calls, those Zoom sessions. So, we did both of those things at the same time.
We weren’t quite sure what the problem was, but basically, we flattened out for a few months. And then it’s like, well, people aren’t complaining about the price. That doesn’t seem to be where we’re having the resistance.
Let’s reverse course. Let’s go completely the opposite on the phone calls and the onboardings and all those Zoom meetings. Let’s get meetings on the calendar. That’s our new focus. Let’s get meetings on the calendar.
So, we did that and things turned around. Not only that, they turned around with higher pricing. So, we had that little blip, but the higher pricing definitely was a driver.
Besides that, it was also just continuing to iterate, add some key features. For example, we added automated text messaging and SMS-based marketing and all of that kind of stuff.
That was actually a big driver for people to upgrade their subscriptions. It a completely different revenue stream, because we charged separately for text messaging, in addition to being on a higher tier subscription.
So, some different things like that. But definitely the price increase, continued seeking of that product market fit and some key new features and revenue streams, I think altogether, is what really helped to accelerate that growth from that point.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Often, when we see an acceleration in growth, pricing has something to do with it, pricing and/or the sales model. It’s both things you were trying to change.
Obviously, your recommendation at this point would be, don’t change both of them at once. That would be mine as well. Right?
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rob Walling:
You do one. You let it settle because you know all your metrics, you know your numbers. When you change two things, you’re like, uh-oh, I don’t really know. I don’t know which of these impacted it.
But what’s funny is, you quickly reversed course. You were A, willing to make pretty drastic changes, like raising prices and changing your sales model, which is scary and risky, but you were willing to take that risk and maybe make a mistake.
B, you did them relatively quickly and you undid the mistake relatively quickly and you pushed forward.
That’s what I see great founders doing is that, A, willingness to make mistake, B, the willingness to do things quickly and C, the willingness to make potentially scary, strategic high-level changes because those are often the ones that move the needle a lot.
You can make a bunch of little tactical things like, well, let’s do a little more SEO, or let’s do a little more cold outbound. Or you can say, well, let’s double our pricing. Let’s go demo only or no demos anymore. These are drastic changes, and they can be scary.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Definitely don’t do both at the same time. One big thing at a time. But yeah, at least we figured out what the… We let it go for a couple of months. It was the summer. Everyone was saying, oh, the summer is slow.
So, it was like, oh, it was probably just slow summer. We just happened to make these changes right before that kicked in.
But that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t because of the slow summer. We screwed that up, and we didn’t know which one it was. But we took an educated guess, reversed as quickly as possible, and everything started coming back stronger than before.
Rob Walling:
Before we wrap up, I want to ask you maybe one or two more questions. With permission I want to talk about this topic that you raised to, I think it was Anar and I, via email a few weeks back.
You were saying, “I’m working a lot and there’s a chance I might want to… What’s next? Should I sell the business? Should I think about selling the business?”
You had a big decision. Where are you today? Where did you wind up? What was that decision process like for you? Because I know that there are a lot of folks who build a great business and who get to this point, whether it’s half a million, two million, five million ARR, where you have a lot of options on the table, to get liquidity. You also have, not enough diversification is what it mines to. ‘Cause you have literally millions of dollars in net worth, tied up in a software company. So, talk us through what you were thinking and where you wound up today.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So we’re reaching that stage where there are more options on the table. I work a lot. I work too much. I am seeking more balance.
I think the idea of selling is a bit of an overreaction to that. I would go from working too hard to not working at all.
I love doing this. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for six years now, and I’m not tired of it.
I don’t want to work quite as much as I’m working now. I’d like to get that down to normal levels, be more present for other areas of my life and my family and everything like that, but I don’t want to go to not… I don’t know what I would do next. I like doing this.
So I started thinking more about, well, maybe take some chips off the table and see if I get some investment, take on additional equity partners or something like that.
Honestly, I could do that, but it’s going to take time and effort away from what I want to do. That’s continue to build and continue to just…
I can hire more people. I can grow the team, I can do all that stuff. I don’t need the money for that. It would just be really for me, personally.
You had mentioned something on the podcast just recently, about how every additional, let’s say thousand dollars in MRR that you add, well, that’s times 12 for ARR and times whatever multiple you want to go with. Let’s say a 5X multiple. Every month, you’re adding 60,000… for every thousand dollars of MMR, that’s $60,000 in equity that you’re adding to the value of the company.
You start thinking about that even in higher amounts that you’re adding each month. And it’s like, wow, that’s pretty powerful.
So I’m going to keep trying to fire myself from as many things as I can and grow the team and just work towards working less, but there’s no need to do anything different.
I love what I do, and I really want to keep building this. See how big we can make it. Keep helping more people. Keep getting more of those fans. That’s really what I’ve always sought out to do, is to build something that people use on a large scale and get a lot of value out of.
So, if I can continue doing that and just not stressing myself out quite as much as I am now, that’s really where I want to be at.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Given all that, for you, where you’re at, selling would be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because you’re going to be able to figure out how to get around the overwork and the stress. I believe in you to do that.
I do think a lot of founders come to that point where they feel the stress and an exit just becomes… it’s one possible solution, but there are many others. It’s to be less stressed. It’s to figure out how to do that, whether through hiring, whether through… I mean, there’s tons of options.
I’ve done therapy. There’s a lot that you can do. You can take a sabbatical. I know a founder who took a sabbatical just a couple months ago. He’d been working on a company like 10 years now. He’s kind of burning out. He took three months off because they’re bigger. He could actually do that.
So, there’s a lot of ways to think about that. I think if you’re listening to this and you’re at a point where you’re thinking about selling, A, now’s not the best time to sell because the economy. But B, just make sure that there are permanent reasons why you want to sell. It’s not just temporary roadblock stuff.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah, no, very well said.
Rob Walling:
Thank you so much for joining me, sir. If folks want to see what you’re up to, BuilderPrime.com. I appreciate it.
Jonathan Weinberg:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Rob.
Rob Walling:
Thanks so much to Jonathan, for joining me on the show. It’s always great to have longtime listeners on the show. It’s great for a couple reasons, because they know the format of the show, they know how we tell stories here.
But also, it makes me feel incredible to have folks who may have not had a business at all and decided to start a side hustle, and then they go full time. And then, eventually they’re approaching a million ARR. They’ve built an amazing company, that has changed their life and provided them with the freedom and the purpose and allowed them to maintain incredible relationships, while they remain in control of their company and of their destiny.
Very meaningful to me, to have folks like Jonathan on the show, who have followed my journey, have followed this podcast, have followed MicroConf, TinySeed, whatever it is. That’s the mission of all of those things, to multiply the number of independent SaaS founders in the world. So, thanks for joining me again this week and every week. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 630.

Rob Walling:
This week I’d like to make the announcement of our early lineup for MicroConf US 2023. This is in Denver, Colorado next April. It will be co-hosted by Lianna Patch of Punchline Copy. We’ll have talks from Dev Basu, the CEO of Powered by Search, Patrick Campbell, founder of ProfitWell, currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Paddle.

And we will have our special guest, Syed Balkhi, the CEO of Awesome Motive, in addition to myself co-hosting with Lianna, and I’ll be doing a talk. If you want to hang out with a couple hundred non-venture track, indie SaaS founders in Denver, Colorado, next April, head to microconf.com/growth. It’s going to be an amazing time. I hope to see you there.

Welcome back to Startups For The Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This is the podcast for bootstrap and mostly bootstrapped SaaS companies that want to build incredible businesses without sacrificing their freedom, their purpose, or their relationships along the way.

I have, what I consider, an interesting episode today. I’m going to dive in to an idea validation framework I’m calling 5 P.M., because it is, after all, five o’clock somewhere. So this is not about happy hour, nor is it about drinking mezcal and bourbon. As much as I like to do those things, it’s a framework that looks at startup ideas and uses different criteria and different lenses through which to view them.

So, I’ll get in to what 5 P.M. stands for in just a minute. I did want to thank everyone who has left a rating in Apple Podcast. Since I started my drive to 1000 ratings, we have jumped a substantial number and I don’t remember the exact number, but I think we were in the mid eight hundreds approaching 900.

We’re now at 995 ratings, which is just incredible. We’re about to cross that four figure mark. Ratings are different than reviews. Ratings are when you log into Apple Podcast and you just click five stars. And if you could do that, that’d be amazing. But we also got a bunch of new reviews this week. Bjorn Brinjar from Iceland. I was just in Iceland a couple weeks ago, would’ve been cool to hang out. Bjorn says, “The best resource on launching a SaaS app. Discovered the show six years ago, went back and listened to all episodes and never missed a new release. Following Rob’s playbook, currently stair stepping a SaaS product towards 1000 MRR. Highly recommended.”

That’s awesome. Thanks, Bjorn. Steve at Devia Software says, “Not just for pure startups. In a world filled with fluff content, this podcast really delivers. I’ve been running a software company for over 15 years. It’s devia.com, and every episode sparks at least one talking point with our team.”
Solist from Denmark says, “Great inspiration for me as a bootstrap SaaS founders. And SkiBikeSkiClimb from the US says, “Rob W., The person behind your success.”

SkiBikeSki wrote me a letter in their review. “Hey Rob, recently sold most of my business with an option to sell the rest in all caps. I could not have done it without your guidance through your podcast. Worked on it about 20 hours a week since 2014. I live in Montana, close to a ski resort. Backcountry skiing, rock climbing, and mountain biking. And thanks to you one of those things got done five days a week for the past eight years. I’ve created a great lifestyle business for sure. I started the business in my fifties with no knowledge on how to run a SaaS biz and everything I thought at the start was wrong. 300 episodes later. Here I am.”

This is awesome. Thank you again, so much, if you’ve left a rating or a review. And since we’re five away from a thousand, it’d be great if you could log in and click that five star button. And with that, let’s dive in to my idea validation framework I’m calling the 5 P.M. Framework.

So, the reason I’m calling it that is there are five Ps and one M in the framework. Yes, it’s that clever. So in relative order of importance, the letters that make up the acronym are problem, purchaser, pricing model, market, that’s the M, product founder fit, and pain to validate. And below each of those, of course, there are sub bullets, right? So under problem, some things to think through and answer about the problem are, is this an important problem? And is this an urgent problem? Vitamin versus aspirin.

So if you’ve ever seen those matrices where it’s tasks that are on your plate and it’s how important and how urgent, and there’s four boxes. In essence, is this an urgent and an important problem? Is this a not urgent and an important problem? Not urgent, not important? It’s interesting to think about that, not as a two different binaries, but actually as a four-boxed matrix.

In addition, I have a note that I’ve started saying to founders when they want to tell me about their idea and I say, “Don’t tell me what your idea is, tell me what problem it solves.” Start with the problem, and then you can tell me what you want to build to solve it, because I actually care way more about the problem you’re solving, than your idea. Because your idea is one solution to that problem. Think about that. Think about when a customer emails you and says, “I would love to be able to send an email whenever I click something in your app, so can we add a ‘send email’ button to this particular space in your workflow?”

And you think to yourself, that would be a really weird place for that button and no one else will want to do that. But is there a way to generalize this? Is there a way to add an automation that happens every time someone does a certain thing and one of those automations is sending an email, but there are 10 other options. This is where a customer brings a solution to you that’s not a good one, but they do have a problem they need solved and you can figure out a bunch of different ways to solve that. That’s what I’m saying here. Don’t tell me your idea, tell me what problem it solves. And then from there we can think through, well is your idea the best way to solve that problem or are there other ways? Is software even the best way to do this? Or is a productized service or is consulting or is a two-sided marketplace? There are so many different ways that you can solve the same problem.

I’m going to run through the other letters and then I want to do at least one, maybe two examples depending on how much time we have, and run them through this 5 P.M. filter. This is very much a work in progress by the way. It’s something that has obviously taken shape over 10 plus years of thinking about it. And I had a bunch of notes, and at the encouragement of some folks on my team at MicroConf and Tiny Seed, I’ve been trying to codify and refine it and sharpen it a bit.

So, I want to go through the letters and then do at least one, two examples depending on how much time we have. The first one was problem. The second P is purchaser. And so this is obviously about your buyer, right? Does this buyer tend to adopt new technology? So we can compare medical devices, we can compare attorneys with developers and maybe web designers, right?

So, attorneys, a lot of them tend to be pretty tech resistant. Medical devices, of course there’s new tech coming out, but it’s a very hard sale to make, right? Versus web designers, web developers, they’ll try a lot of different things. People on product hunt are going to be more likely to adopt new technology.

Is the purchaser willing, and do they have the ability, to pay? And so, this really falls in line with price sensitivity, right? It’s an IT department at a Fortune 500 company, of course, has massive budget, versus a musician or a hobbyist. Someone wants to record a podcast about their Dungeons and Dragons game. The willingness and ability to pair much lower than a lot of other markets in with particular buyers.

And lastly, on purchaser, I have this phrase and I’m going to try to figure out a better word for it, but right now I have sophistication is what it is. And really it’s, are they a consumer? So it’s B2C sale. Are they aspirational or hobbyists? So it’s like B2A, B to Aspirational. I think of photographers. It’s kind of pro-sumer almost, B2P. One of these B2P, B2A, such as photographers or bloggers. I want to make money online folks who are more likely to try something and then churn out. Maybe one level above a consumer. It’s not like a Netflix subscription, but they are paying to try to make money.

Again, photographers. Maybe they do weddings here and there, but they are more likely to kind of churn out of their hobby or churn out of this kind of money making endeavor, because it is such a small business.

And then we have B2B, which obviously is a business, and B2E, which is enterprise. Going to take longer sales cycles, fewer deals, large deals. Now, is there a B2SMB and a B to larger B? Of course there is, but let’s, for now, I like these four categories. Consumer, aspirational, business, and enterprise.

So, that was the second P. The third one is pricing model. Can this work as a subscription? I do talk to some folks who bring an idea and I’m like, that’s kind of a one time use thing. I just don’t think a subscription makes sense here. So, that’s just a simple off-the-cuff check, that estimate of the average revenue per account. And this is one that really comes with experience, I think, in knowing different industries and their willingness to pay. And then is it going to be monthly fee, mostly annual? Is it a share of revenue? Dot, dot, dot.

There are a lot of different options. I think we have six different options, maybe seven that we ask about in the state of independent SaaS survey about different pricing models. So those are the first three Ps. And again, I’m kind of putting these in order of importance, in the way that I would evaluate these. And as we go lower, each of these is still important but less important than the one above it.

So, we had the three Ps. Now we have the M and this is the market. How big is the market? The total reachable market, not the total addressable market. Obviously, the difference is every veterinarian in the country versus every veterinarian that you can reasonably reach without spending a gajillion dollars. Size matters a lot to venture-backed companies, because they want to be billion or 10 billion companies.

It matters a heck of a lot less to our types of startups. If you want to get to a million ARR, five million of annual recurring revenue, the market does not have to be that large as long as people do have that willingness to pay, that we talked about in the purchaser P.
And this is actually a good time for me to interject and say I see this 5 P.M. Framework as evaluating business ideas that can at least get to seven figures of ARR. Maybe they can do eight and maybe they can do 50 million or a 100 million and get to nine figure. But this is not for a tiny little lifestyle business. Let’s say you want to do 10K, 20K, MRR. Those are amazing businesses, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had a few in my day and they were great. If you want to think about building a business like that, go read, Start Small, Stay Small. It’s $10 on Kindle.
And basically, I walk through how I was building businesses like that, that are truly these amazing lifestyle businesses that just throw off cash. The valuation criteria is much less relevant with the start small, stay small lifestyle SaaS. That’s more about finding a traffic source and getting in front of it, right? It’s finding existing demand, whether it’s organic search in one of the top 10, 20 search engines. It’s getting in an app store or an add-on store where there’s existing traffic and just channeling that and building this great little business.
But this is that next step. These are the kinds of companies that come to Microconf Growth. These are the kinds of companies we fund with Tiny Seed. These are the kinds of companies I’m writing my next book for. It’s that spiritual successor to Start Small, Stay Small where it’s like, well I want to build a five million ARR company. How should we think about that? And so, that’s where that total reachable market can be a lot smaller than you might think. So again, we are in market, which is the M in the 5 P.M. Framework and that was size.
The next is ease of reaching customers. Are they online? What marketing channels do I need to use? What are the cost of these going to be? What stage is the market in? Is it early? Is it mid? Is it mature? Is it growing or flat? Is it declining? These are all types of things to think about. When I think about Josh Pigford launching Baremetrics, 10 years ago-ish. Early market, because Stripe was still pretty new. It was early market, it was growing quickly, amazing time to get into it. When I think of 80 PNR, launching what became WooCommerce, although it was called WooThemes back in the day.
Was WordPress early? Was it growing fast? Yes and yes, so if you can get into a market like that, very hard to do and very hard to do multiple times especially. But if you can do that, that can give you some tailwinds. Not the CSS framework. Actual winds that are… And not even actual winds, just a hypothetical, metaphorical tailwinds that are blown. You get the picture. I think I’ve taken this one a little too far.
And lastly in the market is competition. How much competition is there? Are they big companies? Are they other startups? So, that’s 3P.M.. So if I only had these, this would be the 3P.M. Framework and unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to have an adult beverage. And I realize as I’m talking through these, there’s a lot here. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this Google doc that is currently just a list of indented bullets. I’m going to send it to producer Ron. And we’re going to, in some form or fashion, make it accessible such that if you opt into the startupsfortherestofus.com email list. This will come to you in the first email.
And so, it may be something as simple as an undesigned pdf or if we can put Startups For the Rest of Us branding on it in time, we will do that. But either way, you will get the information I am talking through here. And, of course, we’ll have a high level summary of the top level 5 P.M. bullets in the show notes.
Our fourth P is product founder fit. So, the questions to think about here are what about your background and access to this market makes you think you should build this? If the product is highly technical, do you have the tech chops? If it’s a crowded space, do you have marketing chops? If you have an audience or a network in this space? These are unique advantages that you have. And do you like this problem or are you just doing it opportunistically? You don’t have to love it. That’s the thing. None of these things I’m bringing up are absolute deal breakers. Each one is just another data point to gather when evaluating the idea.
And the fifth P is the pain to validate it. And I’m still figuring out if this is pain to validate or pain to actually build it, but I think since it’s idea phase, I like the idea of things that are easier to build an MVP for, that are easier to validate. Should get some credit for that if you can have a few conversations and validate this versus having to spend months building software. I think that’s important. I don’t think this one is nearly as important as the other four Ps and the M, to be honest. And that is why it’s fifth, and I’ve considered making it the 4P.M. Framework, but I think this deserves some consideration.
I also like the idea that, of course, it’s five o’clock somewhere, as I’ve said. And so now, I’m going to walk through two ideas and run them quickly through this 5 P.M. filter and kind of talk through how I view them. And there’s no conclusion, there’s no score out of a hundred. Not yet anyways. But the idea is to see some of the pros and cons and think through whether an idea is better than another or whether we think an idea will fly. So, I’m going to talk through an idea that Jon Yongfook tweeted about on September 12th. We’ll include a link to the tweet in the show notes. And this business idea actually appears in my most recent YouTube video that I recorded. If you’re not subscribed to the Microconf YouTube channel and should check it out.
But we have a video called ‘Seven SaaS Ideas I’m surprised No One Has Built Yet.’ And that’s the working title, so might change by the time this episode goes live. And frankly, the YouTube video may go live just a few days after this episode, but if you go to microconf.com/youtube, you can subscribe to the channel and then you can get notifications when new videos go live. But our ‘SaaS Ideas No One Has Built Yet’ or ‘SaaS Ideas You Should Steal Now’ have been a really popular series.
And I’ve started crowdsourcing some ideas when people want to basically give them away or have I… Things they want to see in the world, they aren’t going to build themselves, in essence. And so, this one just happened to be in my Twitter feed because I follow Jon Yongfook, as should you. And he says, “Opportunity for an indie hacker.”
My sister works in recruitment and she says there is no decent NPS tool, that’s net promoter score, that integrates with their ATS, which is an applicant tracking system so HR folks use that to track incoming job applicants. So, no NPS tool that integrates with their ATS, which is JobAdder, which has an open API. She’s only found one tool so far and it’s $800 a month, a bit too steep for small recruitment firms. Interesting idea, so let’s walk it through the 5 P.M..
So, the problem. What’s the problem? The problem is we want to get NPS scores from people who apply to our job, who wind up in our ATS, to use the nerdy three-letter acronym. So we want to get NPS from them and there’s no easy or cheap way to do it. That’s the problem. Is it an important problem? I think so. I think HR departments and people ops folks are probably graded.
Assuming that that’s a KPI. Assuming that that is something that their managers look at, then it’s an important problem. But if you were to talk to 10 HR professionals and they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t care about NPS of our applicants,” then I don’t know. Then it’s not important. So, I would start with conversations. I probably know myself, five HR or people ops people. And so I would email each of them and I would say, Do you run NPS? How important is it? Do you look at it? And if there’s mixed results, you got to keep doing the research.
And then there’s an urgency, which is a vitamin versus aspirin. So in this case, if it is important, then it’s probably urgent, as well. If it’s important then they can’t wait a year to do it, because they need that KPI, right? So, in this case the importance maybe pushes some emergency.
So, so far, let’s assume that it is important and urgent. This is intriguing. I’m intrigued by this idea. So the purchaser, does this market adopt new technology? So HR professionals, people ops folks. Yeah, there’s a lot of really big people ops tech, HR tech, so I would give this a yes, as good as any. Maybe not as much as web developers and entrepreneurs and all of us who hang out on Product Hunt Hacker News.
But I think there’s a lot of value here. Willingness to pay? Price sensitivity? Nah, they have budgets. And sophistication. These are solidly in the B2B. There’s not aspirational people doing a hobby, right? HR is not a hobby, so B2B or B2E sales. The pricing model subscription, well sure, because they need to run NPS constantly. I think that’s great. The ARPA estimate, right here we have the only one is $800 a month, so let’s just say our average revenue per account is half that, 400 a month, 200 a month.
These are good numbers. You can build a decent business on this, as long as the sales cycles are not brutal. And then is it monthly, annual or other? In this case, I would guess you’d want to go annual, because I think the sales cycle is going to be a little involvement in doing it. It kind of depends on the specifics of, is it just an add-on in their little app store or are you doing a one, two, three call closes and we want to do annual?
So, those were the first three Ps, now we do the market. The size, total reachable market, is the HR space big? It’s huge, right? It’s massive. There’s a lot of buyers out there. Ease of reaching them? Are the online? Well, of course. They’re on LinkedIn. Pay per click ads are going to work. They’re probably in a bunch of Facebook groups and Slack groups. There are a lot of places that you can reach them online, so I would say in general, not terribly hard to reach.
Is the market early or mature? Growing flat or declining? I would say it’s growing and it’s definitely not early, because there is a lot of HR tech, people ops tech. But I would say I don’t know what’s in between early and mature. I’m wondering if there’s maybe an in between moniker I need for that. But personally, I think it’s at a pretty good spot to enter because there is an ecosystem, money’s being spent, and you’re basically just attaching to an existing system.
Product founder fit. Well, we’d need a theoretical founder in this case, so let’s say me. What about my background and access to this market makes you think you should build this? So for me, I actually don’t have much access and I don’t think I should build this because I don’t really have… I don’t know many HR people and I’m not an expert in it. And then there was… Do you have tech chops and marketing chops? Unique advantage audience network in the space? Do you love the problem? So, these would be questions you ask yourself for almost all those. For me, it’s mostly not. I do not have a unique advantage.
And then pain to validate. How much time to market build an MVP, is an interesting one. So I do think early validation, for me, the next steps would be to talk to as many HR professionals as I could. The nice part is I’d start with JobAdder per what Jon Yongfook said. And I would try to find as many JobAdder customers as I could and have conversations. I would be in the other JobAdder forums. Is there a JobAdder Slack group? Anyone using that?
Can I go to BuiltWith and Datanyze and figure out who’s using using JobAdder and reach out with, “I’m not selling anything. I don’t have anything to sell you. I’m a developer. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m thinking about building something. Do you have this need?” That’d be a pretty good way to start validating that. And if people are clamoring for it and you get that urgency and importance, then that’s where I start thinking about, what’s the minimum code that I can write to validate this?
And maybe it’s no code, maybe it’s low code. I don’t know what their API’s like or whatever. But I think building a super manual… Imagine it sends an email that’s hard coded into a JSON file or a text file that you have. And imagine that to make a change to it, even to the wording, you have to go commit a change to the trunk and deploy it. That’s fine. That’s an MVP. This is a definition and you can build that out and make it better over time.
And then there are some things I didn’t include here that I probably need to add the framework of platform risk. How much platform risk if you just build on JobAdder? There’s definitely some, but in this case, how many ATSs are there? There are a lot, and there’s some leading ones and you could start building NPS tools for them. Although they may exist, this requires more research on your part. So overall, I like this idea. Do I think it could be a seven figure idea just doing NPS for JobAdder? Absolutely not. The market’s just not big enough.
But do I think that this could be a really interesting foothold or a wedge into a market, because doing things in public creates opportunity, right? It’s those who are shipping things that suddenly realize, oh, what if I pivot this into that? Or what if I add this extra piece to it? And suddenly, you build and build and you can find yourself expanding and building a pretty incredible business, even starting with small aspirations.
And the other idea I’m going to run through quickly was actually suggested by a Microconf Connect member named Jeff Gates. Jeff is an involved member of that community. And Jeff, I appreciate the suggestion that you posted. The idea software for independently owned airport hotels to rent out extra parking spaces for air travelers. And again, this appears in the YouTube videos of ‘SaaS Ideas I’m Surprised No One Has Built Yet.’.
And so, let’s talk about this. Software for independently owned airport hotels to rent out extra parking spaces for air travelers. So, the problem is we’re assuming, and we haven’t validated this, that independently owned airport hotels have parking spaces that they want to monetize. That’s the problem you’re trying to solve. I don’t know if it’s a problem. We need to figure that out. This would be part of the validation step of starting to talk to them. I also wonder, do not independently owned airport hotels need to rent out parking spaces and do they have a system? Because I like making one sale to Marriott, even if it takes a long time, and getting a whole bunch of seats. A whole bunch of hotels that have to pay rather than doing the one offs. Now, the one-offs will be easier upfront, but the big money will be with the chains.
So our two questions, is it important? And is it urgent? Is it an important problem? I don’t know. This is a tough one and this is where I need to have conversations with them. It sounds great. You’re going to make them more money, but if they’re not aware of this problem and you’re going to have to tell them you can do this and you should think about this… Imagine going up to the front desk and talking to a middle manager checking people in. You have to convince them that it’s important enough that then they bring their boss or then they talk to the owner of the hotel.
So unless hotels are already thinking about this, I don’t know if it’s important. The other thing is urgency. Well, it’s always urgent to make more money, but is solving this particular problem urgent or is remodeling their rooms or hiring the next waiter in the restaurant, are those urgent? Those are very urgent problems, because the hotel can’t function without them.
This one feels perhaps less urgent than what it takes to continue running the hotel, but the draw of money can sometimes provide urgency. I don’t know. I’m going to give this one a mid-grade. It certainly is not high on the urgency scale, I think. In terms of the purchaser, do independent hotel owners adopt new tech? A bit. I don’t think they’re jumping on it. They’re certainly not like web developers, designers, and all that. The example I keep using. I think they probably adopt it. It’s going to really depend, right? It’s going to depend on the owner, which I think is more in the brick and mortar. If you’re a lawyer or you’re a realtor or you’re someone who owns a hotel, you don’t necessarily care about the tech, you care about the problem they solve. So, I would say this is lower on the adopting new technology scale.
Are they willing to pay? Do they have the ability to pay? I would say usually they probably aren’t willing to, they probably have the ability. But in this case, I think I would structure the pricing in a way where I made a certain amount per spot that was rented or something to make it a no brainer, at least to start with, such that this became less of a concern.
And lastly, sophistication. Are they a consumer? Are they aspirational? Business or enterprise? I would certainly say they’re a business. Now some of these, if they’re sole proprietors, they can think a little, it can be a little cheap. I don’t know how big these hotels are. Certainly at airport hotels, I’m thinking, they’re probably big enough that most are owned by some type of corporation rather than an individual. It’s not a B&B with six rooms in it, right? These are going to be businesses run more like businesses, so that’s the sophistication I would put them at.
Now the pricing model is the subscription. Well, of course, because they’re going to be doing this on an ongoing basis. And so, if you can charge a monthly fee, great. This one I do think, especially early on, I would probably make it that no brainer pricing of, as you rent spaces out, we take a cut or a dollar per space. Not a dollar, but a dollar amount per space. Average avenue per account estimate. I don’t know, but I do know that to make this sale worthwhile, you’re going to want, I would say, at least… I don’t know. Four or 500 a month per account. And maybe it’s a thousand. You’re not going to know how many calls to close until you get into it. So, this is not something you’re going to charge 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a month for. Yeah, it’s just not going to be worth the effort.
And then in terms of the market, the size, I don’t know how big this market is actually, if we just look at independently own airport hotels, because most of the airport hotels that I see are the big name brands. They’re the Marriotts, the Hyatts and everything, so I don’t know. And I do have a question about that in my head that I would want to do more research.
How easy are they to reach? I think this is a tough one. Certainly not as easy to reach as HR professionals that we just talked to, right? It’s like where do people who own these hotels hang out? And you only want airport hotels, too, so that actually makes it tougher. So, I can imagine in-person events, the trade events where all the hotel owners go and there’s probably a trade magazine and trade websites and maybe some trade groups. That’s great. But are there airport hotel trade groups? Because it makes it harder to justify the spend if you go to this big event, but only 10% of the customers are airport hotels. That does pose a challenge.
Bouncing to product founder fit. This again is, what about your background in marketing and tech chops? It’s going to come down to you as the founder. I can’t imagine most founders would have a unique advantage in this space. And do you love this problem? I don’t know. I don’t know how many founders are going to love this problem. You also have to figure that out for your own. And then pain to validate, This one’s interesting because I think a conversations would certainly be 10, 20, 30 conversations. I need to have a lot to understand more about this. And then the second thing I’d be thinking is how can I build this with a minimum amount of effort for a pilot with one or two of these hotels?
And realistically, I think there’s going to be a lot of effort on the hotels part to block off certain spots, put numbers, put signs, say no one park here unless you have booked it through the XYZ system, right? That’s probably going to be more effort than anything. I think that you can do a responsive web app or maybe a mobile app. I would try to do it with one of these no code builders. This seems really like a CRUD app. You do CRUD plus payment, right? Create, read, update, delete. And then add Stripe payments in.
And so, the minimum amount could be a responsive web app. A lot of people are going to want to do it on their phone, not to administer it, but the consumer side, right, of people actually booking it. So, responsive web app or a mobile app would be great. And then some type of web admin that basically…
But I’m talking MVP. Do you even need a web admin or, I don’t think you do, because really it’s a matter of the hotel providing you with a Google sheet or a spreadsheet of these are the numbers of the spots and these are the prices or whatever it is. And then this is where you just stuff it into your database using, using SQL and you just go from there. You don’t have an admin console. You do everything manually from the start. And so now that it’s in that database, then the customer facing mobile web app says this is available on this date for this price. And when they click to buy it now, there’s a Stripe payments link. I forget the technical term for it, but it’s a pretty easy checkout process.

And that’s what I’d be thinking about in terms of this idea, is how can I validate it? So I’m less certain that there’s a desperate need for this one compared to the HR NPS idea. And so, how do we get around that? Well, we try to validate as much as possible and that’s through the conversations I said. And then that’s through not writing a bunch of code, but writing the minimum amount of code to get the hotel to try it out. You’re going to have to convince the hotel to, as I said, put up signage for parking spots, but also to promote it, right?

Because otherwise, I guess you’re going to be promoting. I haven’t thought through this part actually. Are you going to be promoting as the founder? I guess you’re going to want a two-sided marketplace, because you’re going to want interest coming to your site. Or is this something they’re promoting?

So that’s a whole… In the interest of time, I won’t go down that thread right now, in terms of how I think about it. But I hope that today’s episode, diving into the 5 P.M. Framework has been enlightening. I know that I got into some nitty gritty there and I appreciate you sticking with me. As I said, if you go to startupsfortherestofus.com and enter your email address, we will make sure that the full 5 P.M. Framework is sent to you via email.

And as always, I appreciate you showing up and listening as I nerd out on all things SaaS and startups. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 628, and I’ll be back in your ears again next week.