Saas Companies that Anyone Can Start with Rob Walling

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en there’s a lot of online communities anyone can start one you get a few hundred people together there are so few people who not only run in person events but who do them well and if you can do that it is an incredible competitive advantage [Music] okay uh sean’s not here what are we gonna talk about uh a few things oh let me tell you something sorry i asked you a question that i interrupted you but let me tell you something so i’m doing something cool in 10 days so on the pod and on twitter i talked about how i’m buying a piece of property and i’m turning it into like a thing like a like a hotel airbnb fitness thing i had this guy i’m not gonna say who it is yet because i haven’t asked his permission but basically he bought uh like five 000 acres in the south in a state in the south let’s say georgia and he is turning it in to an airline hotel or an airline neighborhood soon with hotels so basically they’re putting an airstrip in the middle of this piece of property and then they’re lining up houses along it so you could buy a house and then soon it’s going to be a hotel and then they’re going to have an airplane hangar there so for all airplane enthusiasts you can keep your plane there and take off and land on this you know right outside your home so it’s basically like having a uh a house on a golf course except instead of a golf course it’s an airplane runway and hangar but here’s the kicker he asked me if i wanted to come check it out and i said yeah sure he goes all right meet me at the teterboro airport in the like outside of new york on you know january 25th and we’ll fly my jet down so i’m flying private down i’m going to go up to new york just to fly back down just like it creates it but nice isn’t that that sick so is this um is it like super rural or is it uh kind of just outside of a major metropolitan area it’s an hour and a half outside of a major area got it so and most of these people most of these houses is this gonna be these people’s like full-time residents you think no no probably not it’s a lot of like older people you don’t have to be you don’t have to be like rich rich to do this i think you have to like be able to afford a 200 000 plane or something like that that could be your hobby so you have to have some money but it’s not like gonna be necessarily like incredibly wealthy people yeah so enough to afford like a cessna or something like that and you just fly in and it’s just somewhere to fly and then you stay by your airport and just hang out and chill yeah that’s kind of neat right yeah it is kind of cool how much do you think he’s in on this project um uh i’ll i’ll say it and then if he says i can’t but uh nearly eight figures is the money that he’s had to use his own money to do that and then he’ll uh raise some more money and then how many houses and he was like he was like oh it’s just like a side project and i was like what that is huge that is uh how rich is your friend what does this represent for him i don’t know i just met him um like wealthy enough to be able to afford that but not wealthy enough to like i i like if he loses that it’s not it’s like will be really bad do you own any uh like vacation homes or secondary homes or anything like that well no no i own um my house that i live in i own and then i own some uh uh like rentals and like a uh now a vacant lot that i’m building a house on to sell but nothing like this no plain vacation home no no i don’t i don’t i think that vacation homes only make sense for me personally only makes sense to me if i buy them and rent them out and so if i can find a place in new york or california that i like and i could rent it out and make a profit then i would do it so i met this guy the other day who was a billionaire or close to a billionaire and this person has an apartment they don’t live in new york but they have an apartment there and it’s really fancy and then they have a place in park city and they rent it out when when they’re not there and it pays for itself and they’re still like it’s like a wealthy person i think that’s the way to go as you but not everyone’s comfortable doing that it’s interesting to me because this idea that you’re describing sounds like the inverse of what i would want like i want to be able to fly places so that i could stay there like i want to fly to new york so i can go to new york but this is the opposite they’re setting up somewhere to stay so that they can fly does that make sense well it’s not just that just imagine you’re like 65 years old and like you want to like spend the weekend at this area and you want to fly there and stay there and hang out and then go on trips throughout the day and just hang out with a bunch of other airplane nerds that are like you yeah sure so it’s like if you’re like 65 and this is your passion i think i think that people who are into this [  ] are so into it that they just want to be around other people who are into it yeah i think there are a lot of opportunities like this as people as more and more people because it sounds like this is mostly retirees but i think you could also do it towards remote workers of just like people have lived places for no particular reason in the past and i think as people can now choose where they want to live they’re going to start congregating more in groups of like i don’t know group around their hobbies or like vegans how they want to eat i don’t know like random niches i agree i think that will happen too the the day that new york allows short-term rentals so in new york you’re not allowed to rent for under 30 days um or you got to like jump through crazy hoops but the data that’s allowed i’ll be buying a place there but not not until that’s allowed oh okay you want to talk about this uh elizabeth holmes thing yes i do uh so you see you sent this to me you want to give the back story well let’s see what happened yesterday so uh yesterday you sent a post to me and sean that you were on the front page of hacker news yes they had go ahead i meant like what happened to holmes yesterday oh so elizabeth holmes uh convicted of like three or four crimes um i don’t know if she’s been sentenced yet but she could serve she will serve years of hard time potentially up to 20 years yes well there’s 20 is three three counts that were carry sentences up to 20 years and one that carries up to five so i don’t know if those are additive or if it’s only up to 20 i don’t know how that works but yeah so yeah and what happened yesterday it actually happened on sunday night i got a text from a friend who goes hey you’re on the front page of hacker news if you don’t go to hacker news it’s basically like reddit but like if i said reddit for nerds you would be shocked because reddit is for nerds but this is like really for nerds like nerd nerds and it’s all like computer nerds and of which i am one of them and i uh i got a text saying that my article that i wrote in 2015 was on the front page of reddit or on hacker news and it was getting which means you’ll get millions of visitors and the headline to my article was the coverage of theranos is utter [  ] and i wrote this article defending theranos theronos and defending elizabeth holmes and it did not age well that article but let me explain what the article do you have the article in front of you i just want to talk about my favorite uh like sub headline which is you called it a minor pr hiccup yeah so i call this a minor pr hiccup so i wrote this into so i was uh like 24 i think or 25 when i wrote this so whatever you know i’ve grown and i read my writing i was like oh my god i i wasn’t bad then but i’m way better now and so i was a little embarrassed but um the article basically was written after people accused holmes of at first doing something wrong and they were hating on her but previously in the in the previous month in the previous few years she was on the cover of all these same magazines and the point of my article was on the on the on the surface it looked like i was defending her and i was defending her but what i really was also doing and i say this in an article is i was defending this idea that like it’s i think it’s nonsense and crazy that we build these people up and say that they’re like the next you know the next steve jobs or whatever it is and we like want small businesses to win and someone starts a business and we want them to win but then once they get really successful or potentially like uh they’re considered like a winner we turn on them and we just hate them just because they’re doing something like that seems really weird and they talk funny or they look funny and i thought that’s [  ] so i stand by that second half because now that’s even the whole anti takazi thing is even bigger but yeah i was wrong i i was so wrong about her yeah it’s just you see so many cases of a lot of these hit pieces that are totally not fair to founders that like your guard was up enough that you didn’t see that this was the time that they were actually right she fooled me man she fooled me she she took you in with her deep voice and those big eyes dude she got me i was so important here’s why i was on board with it and the reason why i was on board with it is really a i can’t decide if it’s a good reason or a bad reason and you tell me so their biggest backer was tim draper i don’t know tim but i used to be friends with his son and his friend’s son billy is an awesome dude and from what i’ve read about tim tim seems amazing i know that he’s like this like high integrity very honest person he seems like a great guy he don’t party on drink and he’s known for like being one of the first investors in spacex i believe first investor in hotmail so a bunch of these like really amazing companies that helped found the internet and create the internet and everything and he was super on board with the theranos for a long time and so i was thinking well there’s no way that tim draper would do something um or like would be tricked by this because he obviously didn’t know but he’s like there’s no way that tim would be tricked by this and that’s why i was like on board and just to back you up uh just reading from the article it’s expected that a young company that’s attempting to change a massive and archaic industry will mess up it appears that theranos made a bunch of mistakes and i’m not defending their actions i’m also not saying that the media shouldn’t point out the truths about theranos’s mistakes either you just go on to say uh talk about how the the cycle kind of flipped on him so yeah i mean it is true what you’re saying but it is still funny to have an article up with that headline and i didn’t delete it on purpose so brown three years ago someone made fun of me for that article and i was like i’m not deleting that well keep it up it’s all right i got it wrong if i’m gonna if i’m gonna take swings i gotta let people see the misses too yeah absolutely all right wanna go one more topic yeah we got four minutes so all right so you tweeted out something that was pretty cool what was it okay so it was essentially we started a new family tradition in my family this year which is well and it was just my wife and i doing it because we we started we’re going to try and roll out to my siblings and my parents didn’t she make a presentation yes so what it is is that i decided it was kind of my idea that at the end of the year we’re going to make presentations about how the past year went and essentially what our goals are for the coming year in our resolutions and that type of stuff and we’re going to present it at like a family board meeting it could be a slide deck it could be like a memo but it’s essentially called the board meeting the family board is sitting there and you have to present on your ear it looked like she was presenting to a bunch of people yeah it was just you it was yeah it’s just me oh my god but okay so and i should say we’re not totally crazy like we did it kind of funny all right i dressed up as steve jobs gold glasses uh i’m not criticizing you i think it’s cool i don’t know the wrong idea that we were like getting hardcore going over our numbers like a lot of it was was kind of funny it was played for chuckles but it was a good opportunity to just reflect on what we’ve done and uh and what we hope to do this year and and uh and go over so what was the uh did is that effective yeah i mean some of the stuff so let me read some of this stuff actually because i do the same i do the same thing my wife actually collects the stats and your wife’s pretty alpha right yeah she graduated from uh a top law school in the country and then for georgetown yeah it’s good it’s good law school and then she works for a big law firm now so she took stats she like tracks all her mother stuff because we had a baby last november and so i couldn’t believe some of the stuff so like gallons of milk that her body produced in 2021 350. gross isn’t that crazy how does that make you see your body do that that is crazy i know that’s that blew my mind 350. my god so much there’s so much so you’re trying that’s all there is you track how much milk your wife made yeah she also kept track of how many nights she slept on the floor in our daughter’s room because like sometimes she wouldn’t sleep and so 104 nights almost a third of the year yeah she slept on the floor in claire’s room the number of hours she spent nursing her was 1800 um and then we wait 1800 in one year wow man being a woman is so much harder i know that that did help me realize like wow that’s just like that’s another job in addition to your job like holy moly that’s crazy what else uh any others yeah um she counted the number of times my daughter was obsessed with this book monsters come out tonight which is halloween book she read it 62 times why does she do all this your wife just because she wants to show your kids i don’t know she’s just compulsive actually she is she’s the type of person where in the morning she’ll go do you know what today is and i never know because she always knows weird anniversaries in her head she’s like oh it’s it’s ten months since this happened and i’m like how do you know that um but she like compulsively tracks little numbers in her head so she apparently tracks him on her phone too dude your wife’s rain man that’s sick she’s like like a lactating rain man that’s love i might have to delete that i don’t know i’ll have to think hard before i decide whether to publish an episode in which we call her a lactating rain man um that’s cool so what do you mean it’s a compliment though right you mean as a couple yeah well it’s neither a compliment well the rayman is the lactating thing is just fact um the rayman thing is definitely a compliment um do you uh do do you is she care is she earning more than you as you start your business that’s pretty sick right it’s nice i don’t mind it you uh is she paying for everything um no so she’s actually still net negative because she just graduated in whatever in the summer and didn’t start school until october i my goal is for us to never have a year where she earns more than me not for any like sexist reasons i just you know it’s a gold mine so i got to make more money than her this year but yeah in the last quarter of last year she made more money than me so all right and that’s actually like i think there’s a lot of guys who are self-conscious about that i uh feel the opposite i’m like i want you like i want to be the lazier of like i want her to earn more and just maybe like not have to work i am self-conscious about it i i do like i’m happy for her to have a career but like it’s not so much like uh self-conscious about her making money but it is like a little bit of like a step it up you got to get your business into a place where you’re out earning me like look what i’m out here doing you know that’s sick though it’s pretty sick i think you know how like there’s articles that talk about like your best financial decision my opinion is the best financial decision you can make of course this is a good decision for a lot of other reasons but the best financial decision is marrying the right woman amen or picking the right spouse rather or just staying married right did you have you had the millionaire next door where they’re like no what did they say it they look at all these factors that like most millionaires have and this is not silicon valley millionaires it’s like auctioneers and construction com you know company owners and they say like here are all these factors like most have never purchased a suit for more than i think it’s like 800 most have never paid more than 200 for a watch most in the vast vast majority of them never got divorced don’t get divorced then that’s great crazy and i think even if you get a prenup i don’t think that that like it it doesn’t does a prenup only work for the earnings that you made before you got married yes so then who cares in most cases exactly because you get married i got married at 25 i was worth jack [  ] right and all the money that i’ve made in my life has been since i’ve got i’ve been married 21 years so does a prenup cover if you start a business and it’s worth nothing and then you get married and 10 years later it’s worth a lot does that do is this which one does that count as that i do not know what i do know is a friend of mine got married got a prenup and he had crypto and he specified like this my hundreds of bitcoin are excluded and they’ve gone up in values and they’re still excluded but i don’t know if company shares act the same way i would guess they would but you know we’d have to get a lawyer on here why are we streaming it’s like the worst sad topic no here’s why we’re covering it because um ben’s ben quit his job to start a podcast a popular a podcast that’s going pretty well and he works for us part time as a producer and he his wife is a very successful lawyer and i asked him i said you know like a lot of men might be self-conscious about that about your wife earning significantly more than you how does it make you feel and uh i was just curious has your wife ever earned more than you rob well that’s a good question um well your businesses are like family businesses kind of right yeah i mean she runs her own thing dude i actually think i mean yeah so when i left drip two years ago i sold a company and then i left it in 2018 i didn’t work for six months but it’s like so i wasn’t hurting anything but then even after that like starting tiny seed i didn’t take a paycheck for a year and she was making several hundred grand at her business so yes she has but it’s also like yeah but i sold a comp i i think i’m excused at this point you know i uh my wife became a millionaire a liquid millionaire before i did that’s awesome because it did by two months was it like stock or what would you she worked at airbnb for a long time and then it went public in december and i sold my company in february so she beat me by two months you didn’t feel you didn’t feel bad about that at all did you dude i was pumped for her i was so i mean the way that everything is ours so it was like frankly when she got paid i was like oh i just got paid too i mean i thought it was awesome um we’re live now by the way rob uh great are you okay with that absolutely sir i’m always i’m always i was born ready yeah so uh this is rob walling rob you uh you i was just on your pod like uh two weeks ago did it go well yeah i got a lot of positive feedback actually what was interesting is someone said a couple people said you guys have real great rapport and i said which is funny because we’ve never met it’s not like we’re best friends but they said you sounded like you were friends you’re naturals you know and i said i think it’s it’s easy to have a podcaster on a show because they’re just entertaining naturally and i’ve been reading your work for like 10 years um and so or i forget how long but basically ben we so this is ben ben works with us um he’s filling in for sean today we uh i sent rob like an email like in 2000 and i forget he like pulled it up but i sent like my first email to him like years ago saying how much i loved his content and then i was finally on his podcast like eight years later so it worked out yeah and that helps that familiarity certainly helps i know that people who listen to my podcast and then appear on it know what to expect and they’re able to to roll with it which is why before coming on here i i i’ve listened to your show on and off over the years but like i listened to like the last four episodes just so i would have some familiarity what did you think i think they’re great you gotta get a show here i think you should change the name of the show is what i think you should i think the names off the name is horrible i know it’s tough and man i have you know my podcast is startups for the rest of us which i still like but it feels long now and i’ve debated whether to to change it have you guys actually considered it because i’m curious what would go what would need to go into a name change the problem is is we considered it like a year ago when we were smaller but then we were like back then we were like uh we’re too big back when we were did that we we were at like three or four hundred thousand units a month and or a visitor or um listeners a month and we were like oh but we’re too big it already is stuck now we just in december we crossed two million uh lessons a month and we’re like now we’re definitely like we’re definitely too big and darmesh who is the founder of hubspot who now owns a podcast he was like you gotta change the name and i’m like darmash it’s way too late and he’s like no it’s not and so he thinks we should do it i think it’s too late in the game frankly i think a bad name sometimes is a good is a good thing but the name is quite horrible and i feel embarrassed to tell my barber and stuff and they’re like well what’s it about i’m like i’m not sure but not much but yeah it’s not about making your first million that’s for sure yeah it’s not get rich quick it’s like a real business podcast and that’s that’s the thing is since you have subscribers because what i’ve thought about is like let’s say we change the name of you know of startups for the rest of us i think i just changed it in the rss feed i change it with apple and spotify and then it just propagates i think people i need new line you know liner art or whatever i think people be confused for a few weeks and i guess all the incoming links would say sort of the rest of us are my first million but aside from that i just don’t know the backlash it’s it’s it’s less of like changing the name of a company is really hard right because of the brand you’ve built but changing them a podcast i think is so i i’d like to think it’s simpler but i’ve never done it our friend nathan uh started this company called convertkit which is amazing and i’m an investor in and it was crushing and he changed the name to something i forget what he changed the name yeah which apparently does that mean something offensive in hindi it wasn’t offensive but it was it it it has like a spiritual meaning and so the back he had backlash right and it was about cultural appropriation was the kind of phrase that was used yeah it’s like a it’s a word in a different language and people were like you can’t name your company that and i he’s not a he’s like at the time was probably like a 50 company they probably did some research but they mostly like just probably read the definition in a dictionary thought it sounded cool and then like a week later they changed it back to convertkit which i think is a great idea convertkit’s a good name yeah it’s that’s that’s the other thing with the name change is okay so you’re going to change my first million what are you going to change it to because naming is really hard right are you very hard i know some people who are really good at it most people are not including myself i struggle with naming i always go too literal we would hire i would hire one of those like naming firms i actually think that i think a naming firm is actually a great idea yeah at this level and at the at the the kind of reach that you have and the stakes and the race i guess the resources you have it would be a no-brainer yeah really good i don’t i don’t know do you listen to tropical nba podcasts by chance yeah i like those guys yeah they had a really good kind of lower budget naming person i say lower budget let’s say five grand 10 grand versus you know you can pay a hundred grand or more um she was super sharp it was such a good episode and she had like an ebook on how she does it and i was intrigued by that just because look you and i are going to be putting out new whether we rename things or putting out new stuff for the rest of our lives so how do we get better at this right that’s something i want to do yeah what were you saying ben i i you actually answered the question i was gonna ask which is how much is a naming service but there you go but i mean you know i i think like the thing about my first million like you said sometimes a bad name is a good name because the thing is it forces someone to react like someone has to have an opinion about my first million they might not like it but they’re not gonna just like forget about it they’re like oh what’s that but dude my companies are called the hustle horrible name hustle con horrible name once i’m at a conference on content i call the con con no a meetup series called pizza and 40s uh our subscription service called trends like i’m not good at like i i like i’ve done trends is good the hustle has been bad the rest of them are tough because the hustle hustle now has this negative it has for several years this hustle culture right has a negative connotation so i guess if you’re leaning into that at least it gets attention but it’s a tough one to do so rob how do you describe your your who you are in a professional sense how do because i was going to introduce you but you’re you’re pretty eclectic that i don’t even know how to the proper way to do it yeah i mean bottom line man i used to be a software developer and then i didn’t want to work for other people so i started startups and first it was i mean in 2006 it was downloadable software there really wasn’t sas and then it it became sas right that’s what you do now if you’re in software um so i became a founder serial entrepreneur launched a few acquired a few and along the way started blogging about it as you know as you were saying i wrote a couple i’ve written three books about bootstrapping startups i bootstrapped everything i never raised funding i’m not anti-funding i’m not i think funding has a time and a place but i am anti the narrative that in order to start a startup you have to raise funding because i that is just not the case i think one percent of companies one percent of tech companies need funding and the other 99 really shouldn’t shouldn’t do it so around 2011 then started a podcast and then uh no that’s 2010 and then 2011 started my events called microconf and um and then just a couple years ago launched an accelerator for sas bootstrappers so you um i wanted to go to microconf years ago i remember that and i didn’t have enough money to to go so i’m gonna have to go soon but how what were the name of some of your software companies i know drip and can you reveal like how big some of these grew to drip crew into well i mean drip is tens of millions now but i sold it in in 20 what year was that 2016. grew it to a few million bucks before i sold it you grew to three three three million dollars a year in revenue and then it uh now does tens of millions of dollars oh yeah absolutely i mean this is email email service providers or really any type of sas if you double down on it like and you stick around for a long time this stuff just it compiles it it goes up every month if you’re doing it right do you regret selling it no never never a day have i woken up and thought i really wish i was still working on that like i learned we were a team of 10 when we sold it i learned what i needed to learn and it was enough money that i never had to work again and that had been a goal i was 41 maybe when i sold it and that was a lifelong goal you know to have enough money to not work again yep and i knew i would i knew i would work well what was your number well i don’t want to tell you how much no but you don’t tell me what you sold for but like in like when you said my goal is to earn this much like what was the threshold of not having to work oh that’s interesting you know when i was 25 i just thought it was millions i never actually calculated it and then as i got into my 30s i started saying well what’s this four percent rule thing that you hear about in personal finance right and i actually think the four percent rule is [  ] um i think you need to be you need to be a little more cautious so it’s about three three and a half percent so then the rule is if you need if you want a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to live on and you have five million dollars in the bank then the idea is that if you do the four percent roll you can take out 200 grand a year and never um touch the principal because stocks and bonds and other investments or are do and inflation are working there so a three percent rule would give you about 150 grand so i’m not using my numbers but you get the idea so it quickly became apparent to me that when i was in my 30s of like i think somewhere it’s somewhere between 5 and 10 million i think is most people’s number depends on where you live depends on how you live um but i think anything north of 10 is like it is excess i’ll say that i i’m north of 10. and i and i feel like i my life didn’t change there was some point in between five and ten where it was like yeah that’s enough you know i still like having the money and i do things with it but um definitely it’s not like i would have had to work again even with a major stock market downturn or something that’s pretty cool three million with ten employees is a pretty sick business when it’s software it was very efficient we were also really i mean i was bootstrapped i should have raised a round i should have raised a seed round because it was way stressful and i was uh i burned out pretty hard on it and that was part of there were several factors into selling for me and i’m curious if you you know have talked about why you sold as well but for me it was like number one if i can never if i can have enough money that i control my own destiny for the rest of my life that was a big win it was the only way i would sell that was the only reason why i sold is it’s just like take the cash off now you can do anything i mean i started a damn startup accelerator right so i we fund uh bootstrap sas founders i’m not gonna make money from that and that’s a five to ten year play to make real money right to actually get the carry back i take a salary but it’s like a token what i could be making somewhere else um and so i can now do play long ball with it because i’m not thinking oh how am i gonna you know how am i gonna do my big score i never wanted to be worth my goal was never i need 100 million or i need a billion it would be i’d be fine with that but that’s not that wasn’t the goal it was to have that freedom i sold to have that but i wish the thing about my company is that i loved it i mean i still i’m still here and i love it um like i hate it and i hated uh like there was days where i’m like this sucks i hate media i hate dealing with people of course i had like those normal things but like the thing is is that like i started my company because i was just blogging for fun when it didn’t make money and i didn’t actually think it was going to make money and now that i have something i still do this because i just am a compulsive and i love it and so i love my company i just wish i wish i was wealthy that i didn’t have to sell it do you know what i mean yep and so because now i know i’m gonna go and start it again one day you’re gonna have to start something and that one you won’t have to sell right you’ll be in a position where you can decide to to do it or not and you can make bigger bets because if it goes to zero it’s not like you’re sitting where i was in 2015 where it’s like i am literally worth millions and millions of dollars on paper and i have actual liquid net worth about 400 grand in retirement savings between my wife and i and i have about 50 000 in the bank and our house which had no equity because it was you know it had gone down or whatever so that was it so i was like i felt way overexposed to something tragic happening when you are doing three million in recurring revenue um i’m not sure if how you do like if people pay up front or what what not but like i’ve seen convertkit’s numbers like all the public stuff that they reveal and they’re they didn’t have a significant amount of cash in the bank was your was your thing the same way where absolutely wait wait because like tenant you think 10 employees making 10 uh make it 3 million like oh you should have like plenty of money but what was the truth the truth is that growth choose just destroys cash like no matter how much cash we made i’ve i was spending on aws bills i was spending it with send grid i would hire another contractor i would hire another employee the moment we would grow by 10 grand in a month let’s say of a monthly recurring and i’m like great now i can hire another engineer because oh my god we are understaffed so at 10 people we were way understaffed um yeah i’m trying to think uh and that’s where like my decision at that point was i’m either going to raise an angel round like a seed round or we should sell it and that was that was the decision of do we double down on this business for another two to four years or am i ready to to you know make make that choice of letting it go and that so that i was a drip user who owns it um well what’s interesting so leadpages bought it leadpages had raised um 38 million in venture and they it’s actually a parent company right called avenue 81 incorporated that owned leadpages and then acquired drip so there’s two products under one umbrella well pretty soon within the avenue 81 you know ceo realized the opportunity here is drip like drip is a multi-billion dollar opportunity whereas landing pages are you know the whole market at the time was 80 million maybe 100 million and that’s that sounds like a lot to us but they’re venture backed so they need to get to billions in valuation so they actually sold off lead pages and the company is now trip so drip owns drip now you know what i mean like it’s it was a turnaround i don’t know if you i don’t know if you ever heard that this happened with best buy where they acquired a greek squad and now like best buy would not exist without geek squad because that was like all their net profit through the you know last 15 years that essentially that essentially happened with drip they just refocused the whole team they had 170 employees and i got to start hand picking people from the leadpages team and pulling them over to help grow the team so when i left there were 100 and some people working on trip do you feel like see remember like when you’re a kid and used to date someone and then you see her with another guy and you like feel just like that that jealous you feel like anger and jealousy and you’re sad do you do you still have that do you have that emotion when you see drip i don’t but but i will say that there have been some things that have happened that have that i haven’t been happy with so they like raised prices and they didn’t do it very well right after i left like a few months after and i was like you guys are better than like i would have done that so differently and if i was in the room i would have said don’t do they just did it really fast they didn’t grandfather you know they just made kind of all the 101 mistakes and that sucked and i and then there was a huge backlash against drip which is part of my legacy like drip drip is you know what it’s like the hustle will always you will always be the founder of the hustle right and i will always be the co-founder of drip they’ve messed with the ui they’ve reshaped it and stuff so when i go in now i’m a little bit like ugh i liked it the old way but but i don’t feel it’s not the ex-girlfriend thing it’s more of a i did have to let it go you know and just and just let it go i still use it i i mean i’m in it every day it’s such a good tool do that that’s a good sign do you um and then microconf was that a big business because i when when i started hustlecon i like research you guys to steal ideas but like also like to make sure it’s a good business and i was like well rob’s pretty savvy and he’s doing it so like yeah i could probably make a profit off this yeah yeah it was definitely you know it was a side project like a hobby all this time right until about two years ago where when i left drip i had this big decision of i have this podcast at the time i had a co-host with the podcast i’m solo now um had microconf do i sell all of that i literally thought of just leaving the whole entrepreneur like blogging podcasting thing and going and like i was going to acquire a tabletop gaming the second biggest tabletop gaming website all right what’s the tabletop yeah you know like settlers of catan or like dungeons and dragons so it’s like not like a board game is monopoly right but then there’s like the levels above that of complexity and stuff and so which are booming right now huge well covet helped but also they’re just they’re super popular and so i was like that’s a hobby of mine and i was like i really want to do it and then i started talking to the owner of this site who’s great great dude and i’m like what are your numbers and he started giving me the numbers and i was like this makes no money this may and he’s like yeah dude tabletop games make no money like that you know there’s the few there’s the katan and there’s d there’s like 10 or 20. everything else kind of is i mean i’m over generalizing here because certainly there’s other but it’s not like startup like we are so spoiled with startups where we don’t manufacture physical things and and you don’t have returns and you don’t have excess inventory and you don’t have a warehousing and all that stuff and the profit margins are thin and etc etc so that’s when i double down on all of that and so yes your initial question was is micro company good business yes will we sell let’s see we’ll sell seven feet like low seven figures like a million million and a half dollars i think in top line this year maybe somewhere in that range i need to look at the budget you can tell that i have someone running it because i should know that i would know that number if i was actually like will you be able to and could if you do 1.5 i would i would hope that you probably do like 300 or 400 in profit i think so although here’s what we do see we are not running it as a profit machine we are running it almost it’s become like a service to the community um and so we run a bunch of the events at break even or lost like our local events are where we go to san jose or atlanta or austin texas we do a one-day event those tend to break even or lose money and we’re doing it to try to just expand like the mission is to increase the number of independent startups in the world right that’s what we want to do bootstrap startups used to be the term but it’s like it’s not solely bootstrapped some people raise small amounts of money and to do that we got to get the word out and so we run it at a you know 10 to 20 profit net profit margin and we could make more money we used to make more money um five years ago or whatever but there’s just no need to at this point that’s a pretty sick uh side like a good hobby it was good it wasn’t bef when i still had drip we weren’t doing a million because we were you know we’re going to do 15 events this year when we were when i was running drip we were doing three but they were big they were big events we would have trying to think of what our top line revenue was even and i was happy you know let’s say half a million 600 grand across three events so it was good but it’s a brand right man it’s like the first year we in 2011 we went to sell tickets and we were like we’re gonna sell 200 tickets at 800 a piece or 500 a piece and we sold like 70 at like five years terrible and second year everyone’s like you’re going to make money off sponsors and yes you will it’s going to take you two or three years though to trust you yeah and we almost what i didn’t realize with events was they buy like a year in advance so like our first sponsorships were like 2k a piece then we started getting the 50k and 100k but they booked a year in advance and i was like what so like it’s a it’s a crazy business yeah i personally wouldn’t i kept saying to my i had a co-founder with that and then our event producer and i kept saying i don’t want to be in the events business right we we had one event and then we expanded it to two because we wanted to do one in europe and then we expanded to three because we went at an earlier stage event and i kept saying i don’t want to be in the events business and they kept telling me that’s the business this is an events business you’ve started one you know but i did it more as a community i wanna i always thought of it as a community because that’s like microconf has an online community and youtube channel and all that stuff look ben you look like you’re about to say something no no i was oh you’re laughing uh yeah i was just laughing who who starts a a business an event business and doesn’t know it’s an event business but uh dude that was the same way i started when i started high school i was like this is this is stupid this is just a means to an end we’re getting out of this immediately and then it’s like uh it’s it’s kind of like when you see all your friends starting software companies you’re like dude events are embarrassing why would i want this like this is stupid it doesn’t it’s too hard but then once you get a little more confident in yourself and you’re like well if i accept it for like for what it is it’s actually pretty neat um yeah and there’s nothing like it like in this even let’s say pre-covered from 2011 until until this year over the last 10 11 years advantage and not even that we have that much competition but it is it’s not just like i’m gonna run a business and make money it’s like the community of microcomp is so tightly knit and it’s because we meet in person you know what i mean you just you have i mean you you’ve experienced this where you go to an event you meet someone in person and we the retention rate was 60 or 70 so you come back to the next year and everybody kind of knows each other and then you get new blood and you know so there was it built a way better community than if we did not have in-person events so because your job this is your career you see a lot of like crazy software companies some of which maybe aren’t necessarily huge but they are could be surprising because you’re like i cannot believe someone’s making this work and you probably are able to spot lots of opportunities we asked you if you knew of we asked you ahead of time and i’m curious if you ever think of any any software companies where you see and you’re shocked at that this is like a problem that needed to be solved yeah i see a bunch so i have some i have some both ideas that i haven’t seen implemented that maybe we can dig into later yeah we’ll do both of those yep but there so i’ll talk about a couple so tiny seed is a startup accelerator i run and so as a result you know we’ve had across what four batches set right four batches we’ve had two or three thousand applicants so i’ve seen a lot of sas companies come through wow and what i’ve uh i’ve been surprised by a ton of them let me just look at one right here crm or kind of customer interactions applied to any niche and the smallest niche you can imagine so like home improvement contractors the founder of builder prime is the size sas we funded it with tinyseed and he had a home improvement project and he said the experience dealing with the contractor the contractor was fine but the communication was like text and then email and it was anytime there’s a bunch of text and email that can be a product what was the name bill the what builder prime builder prime builder prime yep and so it’s in essence i think he might call it crm for yeah he calls it best crm but really it’s not only the sales process but then it’s the communication during a home improvement project and so like shouldn’t you i would say well shouldn’t couldn’t use base camp is it like project management or could i use microsoft project like online right because you could but it’s like no this is a strongly typed version of that that is completely built for their needs how’s this going it’s going really well i can’t disclose revenue but um i’ll say anyone in who’s in batch two any of those companies are gonna be you know mid six figures into seven figures right the um founder of hubspot brian halligan came on the pod and he told us that when they i i’m gonna paraphrase the story i might get a little bit wrong he said that when they first started hubspot they were like at a fork in the road and not sure which way they were gonna go and for a minute i think they even created it and even had some sales but they were like well let’s like hubspot is a crm but then let’s create like lost spot so it’s like uh hubspot just for lawyers so instead of like making it one for everyone we’re going to make an individual one for different industries and so let’s create law spot and just get lawyers to use it and that’s kind of basically what this company builder prime is because you would say like why can’t you just use hubspot why can’t you just use assa whatever you wanted whatever it is i understand and so all right this is a cool company how big is a team on this what what ben my other question is um like do you have any companies rob that you work with that are building apps on top of salesforce or hubspot that are like building in those ecosystems or do you they should always go the direction of builder prime and just build their entire own ecosys ecosystem we have one who is built on heroku one who’s kind of built he has a wordpress plug-in kind of built on wordpress they’re actually doing really well it’s castos it’s podcast hosting they’re they’re into seven figures but there’s no you know so the thing is is with building on hubspot or salesforce there’s this platform risk right because i had an angel investment that was doing really well was built on shopify was a shopify app and they started killing it and then shopify came and knocking and said you got to start paying us big chunk your revenue or we shut you down i mean really you know i i would say it’s shady [  ] but it is what it is it’s platform risk right um so that’s where we have to be aware like if you go to sell a sas company and you’re solely built on top of a platform sell for a lower multiple than if you were on your own so as a result what we say when folks come in and apply and say hey i’m only on heroku or if we see shopify apps come through we had to have seen salesforce apps come through i don’t remember hubspot one to be honest but what we say is cool it’s not a non-starter but how are you thinking about this are you building for what other platforms are you building for how do you escape that because by the you know when you’re 500 grand a year no one cares when you’re 5 million a year on a platform they notice and that there’s there’s a danger there that’s that’s pretty cool that’s interesting i i mean i knew that was true but i didn’t know that shopify could change the prices that they charged seen it happen firsthand yeah what else is just go ahead yeah there’s another one um this one’s interesting it’s called scraping b and the cool part about them is they are public with their revenue so i can actually at least give an idea so they crossed a million dollars in annual recurring uh just two three months ago and if you look at what it is is it’s they allow you if you want to scrape the web right if it’s like well i want to get all you know the products off of this particular e-commerce site you can go in and it’s not a gui like you need to write a little bit of code but then they have all the servers that allow you to get around being blocked by apis or whatever and when you think about this idea it’s it’s like well that sounds like a nice little 510k a month idea right they’re doing north of uh you know probably a hundred hundred grand a month right now i haven’t looked at their revenue recently like it says it’s two employees it’s the two founders they’re doing it’s crazy we’re encouraging them to hire actually because here’s the problem let’s say they wanted to sell i’m not saying they do but if they wanted to that’s a problem like they would they would be worth more if they or a team of five or ten than if they’re only two because they’re making a bunch of profit but it’s there’s risk there right do they is this like uh one of those uh public revenue things on like the bare metrics or whatever you know i think they just disclose it on twitter pierre to wolves yeah and it’s like every couple months he’ll say when they hit a milestone he’ll be like we hit this and um the co-founder i mean co-founders pierre and kevin are really cool and transparent and they talk a lot about its content and seo and they have grown crazy fast i believe and my memory serves me correctly that when they joined tiny seed they were at 4k a month and this was two years ago tops 18 months two years i’d you know so it’s like to go from 4k to ostensibly what 90k 100k they’re in that range a month um pretty cool these guys should raise money maybe yeah they should they could if they wanted to it’s up to them right but the valuations right now for a company that’s growing quick that has a million in revenue is like 50 to 100 million dollars yeah it’s nuts i know so like if you could raise five million dollars and just do five i mean that’s kind of interest that’d be that’d be easy to justify right but it depends on the founder right it’s like that’s one of the things that a lot of bootstrappers they don’t want to get on that once you raise that money now you’re on the venture track right and it’s like i gotta raise every month yeah but we’re different tiny seeds for bootstrappers and so with tinyseed folks can run their business and take profits out we actually fund llc’s and they can take profits out if they want or they get paid we get paid if they take profits out because we we you know buy a percentage of their equity basically if they take dividends out we pros you know serve pro rata in those or if they were to sell the company again we own stock so or units and llc’s so we get that percentage uh when they sell but is that actually going to be profitable for you you think more so than um trying to get trying to do the traditional model where you throw [  ] at the wall in 10 maybe works right well we we are still in the traditional model of we’ve funded six 59 60 companies to date and we will fund another 100 and we have enough money right now to fund another 120 150 in the next three years so we are still in that model of making a lot of bets what we’re what we see is that our bets like i don’t think we will have a billion dollar outcome i just don’t see that being reasonable i think we have a lot of 10 to 50 10 to 100 million outcomes and the num we’ve run a bunch of models and in fact if you go to tinycity.com thesis you will see my co-founder is a data was a data scientist phd computer science and we ran a bunch of back testing on anonymous sas data uh i think it was several thousand companies and looked at our our funding approach versus you know what it would return and it will return venture-like returns with i believe lower downside risk because we invested we invested the early stage at low valuations in essence wow what else is interesting to you um yeah you want another another company no tell me what ideas do you think there’s opportunities in yes all right so here’s so i always when i start with ideas i’m i’m such a b2b sass founder right so i start with the problem right and so first any time i see someone doing something in excel or or a google sheet i think to myself that could that’s an idea right if you take it or if there’s a bunch of email you know or text back and forth um those are because it’s communication or it’s just storage there’s a couple things that um i’m pretty fascinated by so one is podcast apps are doing quite well like we’re in riverside now we’ve funded i’m invested in squad cast which is a competitor of riverside um both of them we’re using riverside now we use squad cast we use zencaster i was with them before yeah with squadcast and then of course podcast hosting right there’s castos and lib liz libsyn and and others i think even podcast editing like alex we use i use audacity and then my editor uses adobe something or other but like ali2 ali to use podcast editing in the browser so like the stack starting to get there we have disparate tools to do things but when hubspot launched so i so i know darmash right darmesh and i were bloggers and speakers we met at bos in 2008 or something so i remember when hubspot launched and i remember thinking but all of these things exist like in the early days hubspot was like it was like a a blog i think plus a marketing website plus google analytics plus i don’t remember what something email capture form or something like that it was very simple but i was like i could but i remember saying darmesh but i could build that you know with mailchimp plus wordpress you know and he’s like yeah but business owners don’t want to do that they want a bundle and he was i think and he was right i said they’re public and where you guys are an amazing company i think of the same thing with podcast production where i right now i mean i’ve been running a podcast for 11 years and i have you know people helping with it and i literally am in notion dragging this thing over here and then sending an e that sends an email to my producer to do something that we then log into castos to upload you know what i mean it’s like where’s the hub spot for that where’s the bundling of the podcast stack i have a strong opinion i have two strong opinions the first is i’m almost certain no i’m partially certain that for the most part podcasting software and podcasting tools is a horrible business because a few reasons very few podcasts are successful and most all of them are broke here’s my here’s the counterpoint to this right because i would like to because i am an investor so i see the numbers all right squad casts doing several million a year in revenue and they’re not doing it on the fly fishing podcast think of the three avatars for a podcast there there’s the hobbyist my dungeons and dragons podcast my fly fishing and they’re gonna they’re broke and they’re gonna pay nine bucks a month right and they’re gonna churn like crazy because they’re gonna start it’s too much work all right then there’s the next tier up which is startups for the rest of us i’d say my first million is in that where it’s like a single show but if i go to pay a hundred dollars a month for squad cast riverside 100 a month for coasting it’s not a big deal to me right and i don’t think it is to you there so it’s not nine dollars but for you it’s like a hundred i think if i were to say oh my first movie should pay 500 a month for each of these you start to feel like i’m not sure that’s worth it but there’s a number there okay so there’s a and they and we don’t churn i mean i’ve been doing it for 12 years you guys have been doing it for several it’s like the the the s b of of podcast it’s the smb that actually sticks around there’s hobbyists there’s smb then there’s one level up so there’s i heart radio there’s espn’s podcast there’s the kevin smith podcasts smodcast right there is kara swisher has a whole network gimlet media npr like once they especially once they went remote that’s the enterprise but how many of those are there because for example like vox i think vox was trying to sell their cm like it’s all media companies are like oh we built this proprietary technology to like get our articles shared better and like things like that and like cool i would love that technology but they want to go out like washington post is doing this they want to go out and sell their software and i’m like how many [  ] media companies could pay 100 grand a year for software most media companies are broke and so that’s my same thing to podcasters but all right i agree those exist i want to be i need to be convinced that there’s like enough of them ben was going to say something we should let him say i was blown away so we got a pitch from one of these recording companies one of the ones that rob mentioned i won’t say which but i assumed that the pro tier that rob was talking about would be like 10x what a normal plan was and it was like 100x it it was like plus a month for um a month a month a month for some of these features yeah and um the squad i was blown away i could not believe it i was blown away but anyways you know it’s worth it for for a lot of people so anyway for that type of company you don’t need that many customers i think is is maybe the point really do you get crazy amounts of features with dollars a month i mean they’re cool they are cool features they’re cool features wow that is crazy that does sound high i will admit that’s crazy that’s where you don’t need that you don’t need that many okay so podcasting is you’re saying it’s a good business because there’s actually enough customers to to make it work right yeah yeah and podcasting has this other thing that that is i think undervalued or just not talked about enough it’s this concept of a dual funnel or a split funnel where you have you know who else has this is electronic signature e-signature has this where you have this super wide funnel there’s either free users or very inexpensive users on the low end and so a lot of people use it thus you build a brand and you just have five thousand ten thousand customers whatever uh some are just users summer customers you also if you have any type of viral loop that’s amazing right you send the link to squad caster riverside you send a link to get a document signed oh a little bit of virality but then on the top end with the signature similarly you have realty mortgage brokers who i need 8 000 documents a month signed and suddenly that’s at 10 20 30 grand a month that dual funnel is incredible because when if you’re just enterprise then you’re enterprise right and it’s like oracle in the old days it’s like all right so we need to close 500 deals this whole year but each deal is a million or two million bucks right i mean that’s it’s like these massive deals and it’s just this grind of enterprise sales but when you have the low end funnel and the high end funnel it’s um it feeds on itself and it helps you have a more stable business the companies that are able to charge uh six figures a year in software do you think that a lot of times their software is actually better than the five dollar a month tools that are in the same category but for different people like is it is it you know if a coup if it’s five dollars a month versus five hundred thousand dollars a year is it actually a thousand times better no it’s not and i would it’s not um five dollars a month i would say or whatever a more accurate one is like you know is if i’m paying 250 250 a month versus 25 000 a month let’s say that’s it’s a 100x difference those are probably relatively similar and in fact a lot of the pricing advice we give to our founders um or i give on the podcast as well is the moments someone approaches you a potential customer and says cool we like your software we need to redline your terms of service or we need uh to invoice with pos or we need single sign-on or we need a salesforce integration or we need there’s there’s this whole list of things that instantly should trigger you should pay about a hundred times more that your price should go because the sheer headache of dealing with procurement and going through that process and the maintenance and all the you know the interaction it’s not that the software is better it’s that the the time and the headache and the pain of making that sale and maintaining that customer is um that’s where it’s at right that’s where the money spent but is it that hard to uh do the single sign-on or like isn’t there is there not like an 80 20 thing that you can do whereas like it works for most high-end customers well there’s two things right it’s are we pricing on value because i price on value right there’s price you can price on cost you can price on value what’s a third i forget what the other one is anyways certainly i’m not pricing my sas on cost because i would have no margin right so i’m going to try to price based on the value and i could build single sign on it’s like hey let’s let everyone have it but it’s a trigger that that company has the ability to pay and frankly are going to get a lot more value out of it than a one-person team using it right you know it’s like gimlet media versus rob walling comes to you know sign up for your podcast recording it’s like gimlet media should pay a lot more than me not because they they need that many more features but they just should their whole business is built on it and they’re making millions it matters more to them yeah any other ideas that interest you at the moment oh yeah um so i gotta be honest man i mean this is not even a sas idea i’m just gonna throw it out you know you do you know the website examine.com my favorite website out there yeah i would put it in top ten i’m a pain i’m a paying member there’s a new one that i’m looking at called uh consumer it’s like examine.com but for uh brands for vitamin brands anyway examine his nutrition information you can trust so i interviewed the founder uh on my i love soul self he’s great i interviewed him on the podcast sherry my wife’s been friends with him for several years since i met at an event so had him on the show and i was fascinated by it because i’m like it’s nutrition information you can trust right and you know that but i’m saying it for the audience where is the examine.com for crypto and nft like for web3 stuff because i feel like there’s so much crazy info out there and there’s so many opinions and religious you know not truly religious but like religious fervor and the and the bitcoin maximalist and [  ] and it’s someone can do this in the business so let’s talk about that examine i’ve talked about examine on the pod a ton because i think it’s one of those sites that i see i don’t think i know how big they are i mean like i would imagine like not big like two or three million a year in revenue but i have no idea that’s just a guess but i know it’s not big because they don’t hire a ton of people and i was like this is one of the most under monetized sites i’ve i know well i actually think that their examine could be significantly examined could be a hundred million dollar a year business i how how do you think so there’s a bunch of so i would i think that they for one they don’t do any affiliates so something like wire cutter you know wire cutter uh so in um in new york times you know they’re a publicly traded company their the wire cutter revenue got classified now as uh like other revenue so i’ve been trying to like decipher it and figure it out and they do something like close to nine figures in sales from affiliate affiliates examine doesn’t want to do that but i think they i think they could i think they could do it a tasteful way and it could work wonderfully because what examine doesn’t do is they don’t tell you which brands to buy but i think they should because that’s what i want and that’s what a lot of people want additionally i think you could sell to doctors so there’s actually another company out there that does like four or five hundred million dollars a year in sales and they sell to doctors and when you go to the doctor and you have like a rash they just like it’s like wikipedia for doctors they like look it up and like the latest studies are there on interesting and examine you know i didn’t talk to us all about that but they don’t want to do it because they don’t do they not want it to taint the they want to become a review site i mean that’s why we don’t trust review sites right is that but i trust some i trust wirecutter yeah i mean i think i think there’s this way to solve for that like like dude like if casey neistat is a youtuber who i like if he tells me a cool product and then there’s an affiliate link there i don’t care that it’s an affiliate link but anyway uh exam i also think examine.com could work for injuries oh like medical like hey my knee because to get the definitive yeah this is that or just illnesses in general right you google symptoms and like rehab are you sick or injured enough to make that a thing that you would pay monthly subscription for not me well i don’t know i i don’t know if you could make money through subscriptions with that but i do think that like when you have like an achilles injury and you’re like i’m desperate i’ll do anything i just need to learn like because i remember when i was researching for my like i had a pain in my leg i was like i like i went to all the studies and i just read all the studies i’m like i’m just going to figure this out i’m not going to read like a how article and how to do this i’m just going gonna go to source and like what’s the what’s the thing that i’m reading about the studies but how does uh rob do you know how does examine.com operate like how does that literally work because all they do is they like pour through all the studies and find the ones that have a good sample size that have definitive proof and they make a list of like these work for sure and then they have another list that says these seem like they might be able to work but we can’t say for certain and then these are [  ] don’t trust pretty much yep and they their big hit early on he said all this on the podcast it was it was all seo right it was organic and then they took a google dive at some point i don’t know when it was but um they had already implemented their subscription revenue i don’t even think that they had ads at one point i don’t know that they do anymore i’m actually on the site looking around but yeah that’s it that’s how they write the topic and their what is their value it’s the brand it’s the trust you know what i mean that’s why everyone goes to it because they have built that brand that you you trusted and i trust it but but how do they do that though do they literally just have one hey go uh all right editorial team this week you steve your writer your writing topic is um building muscles so go and research everything that helps you go research creatine protein so if i were them i would be looking they’ve been around for a decade now all the topics have been covered i’m only looking for new information right i’d be monitoring all the journals all the whatevers and have subscriptions to all that i don’t know exactly how to do it but that that would be it right it’s having having a google alerts essentially for all the new medical stuff to just update you just want to keep it updated that’s crazy i can’t imagine there’s a new topic they haven’t already covered in their thousands of pages and this would actually make way more money in crypto totally i mean there’s several there’s several niches where this this would be interesting the hardest part is there’s a bunch of crypto news sites and when i go to them i just don’t know i don’t trust them yeah i don’t know like are these guys like these like hardcore libertarian the world’s gonna end [  ] money like [  ] uh cash because it’s just stupid or it are that you know a great way to explain it is like basically do you remember like the mac versus pc ads where there was like uh like a cool looking mac guy versus a nerdy pc guy and you remember that animosity created between mac and pc guys now imagine if each person who owned a mac or a pc had a million dollars of apple stock that’s like that’s like the the that’s like the vibe that you’re gonna get that’s right and it’s religious fervor with money behind it and so it’s very hard for me to hear a cryptic guy even sean shawn’s one of my best friends and he but i know he’s got a lot of crypto so i’m like but is this because you are you telling me what you want to happen or what you think will happen right so it’s actually really interesting what would you do to build that i would start so first thing you have to do is build credibility you have to start there so i’d probably start a podcast so that people could hear my thinking week to week um i would definitely be attending all of the crypto events anywhere to get into the network to build trust because if people don’t if you’re anonymous like if you try to build this anonymously no one’s no one’s going to believe it so i would get into the network and then follow the model i would look at what did exam and do we know anyone who has done this model what did they do in terms of of uh content and then obviously just hire writers and look at the white papers and give our opinions and this is actually a cool business because this business could last a hundred years so like if you look at like um consumer reports consumer reports has been around for a decade decades they still do well into the nine figures of revenue so consumer reports is a you know review site that people pay money for they’re a non-profit so all of their expenses are public all their revenue is public and everything and they’re still growing and so like if you do a good job of building a brand like on this topic and you start reviewing stuff and you do a good job you can review many other things and last for a very long time it’s kind of a cool company yeah they are still kicking anything else interests you i am interested in i mean this you know normally i’m boring bit boring businesses are my favorite right because it’s like b2b sas is is the way to go um i think anytime you can take a concept like we’ve said with builder prime um you know where it was just like crm for customers we have another company we funded called client hub which is basically project management crm for accountants and then we have another one that’s called gymdesk which is basically run your gym business on that it’s like kind of crm and communication so it’s like where how many niches are there where that works some of these are going to be seven or eight for your businesses some of the niches are going to be very very small um but that’s where you just have to pick it’s like hey am i a lifestyle bootstrapper because i want a 10 20 000 a month business um but i like these ideas of you know it it depends on your ambition but if you want to stay small and just build an incredibly profitable business with two people working on a you know 100 grand a month i mean you can enter a less competitive space if you want to grow big and grow faster then you enter a space like electronic signature or like calendar scheduling links which we’ve funded companies in both like calendly competitor and you know and hello sign competitor or whatever they’re a lot of competition you have to move faster but the market opportunity there is just tremendous do you what do you how do you decide if it’s going to be a eight figure idea or much smaller is there a metric that you look for that’s an interesting question i usually so with tiny seed companies when they apply we say if your ambition is to build a seven-figure annual recurring revenue company then you’re in the right place we get some people who say i really want just a half million dollar business it’s like great that’s going to be a great business for you but that’s not really fundable for us it just doesn’t make sense i think a big piece of can it get into the you know and we’d love to see mid seven figures and up right but a big question of can it get there a lot of it it’s less about market size because most markets are big enough there are few markets that are too small most of it is uh the metrics of the business is where we look at the churn and we look at the pricing and so if you’re if everybody’s too price sensitive to your point earlier if everyone’s a fly fisherman podcast and everyone’s paying you in you know 10 to 20 bucks a month and that’s kind of where most people are and then your churn is 10 like i you just can’t you know almost impossible to build a million two million dollar business but when you get to the point where hey my average revenue per user is 100 or 500 a month and your churn is two or three percent you would have to own the whole market like there’s almost any market is big enough that that can be a 5 million business all right my last question um how many of these folks building software companies that you see yourself included are non-technical that’s a great question and if they are non-technical what do they do yep um so i’m a developer or it was i haven’t written code in years but we actually at so we do a state of independent sas survey and we put out a report and it like an industry report we asked the question do you have at least one technical founder right or you know and yes or no right and the number of sas companies kind of bootstrap dish sas companies with zero with no technical founders is like 20 i believe it’s 20 percent 25 it’s very possible it is and usually what the expertise they have they’re either the subject matter expert like we’re gonna build software for accountants i was an accountant for 20 years right we’re going to software for ux designers i was a designer for 10 years they’re either that or they’re sales or marketing that’s what they should have now we’ve seen where there’s a developer and then there’s like the business person the business guy or what just means it’s like anything yeah it usually winds up meaning you’re not actually that helpful and you probably shouldn’t be a co-founder you know if you can’t sell or market or like have input on the product yeah or or develop it like those are really the four roles um you probably shouldn’t be so if i’m if i like i’m not tech i’m not technical but i um i can like i stuff together and use zapier and i’m super creative how do i start a start a software company without hiring or i would if maybe hiring zip but without having a co-founder right so for you since you have money you would either acquire something because there’s always stuff for sale that you may want to acquire and then just grow if you have a content marketing expertise or you would hire you know a developer or an agency or something to build it if you don’t have the money uh a lot of people non-technical will work a day job and actually funnel money to the side to basically pay for a developer to do it the other two approaches i’ve seen are exactly what you said which is i’m going to build my minimum viable product using zapier and notion and chewing gum right and i’m just going to cobble it together to the point where hey if i get a few grand a month in revenue this proves it and i’m going to use that to get it built it’s a harder way to go but it’s possible the last one i’ve seen which is genius and this is what the founder castos did because he’s not he’s a single founder not a developer he worked a day job he started a productized service podcast editing and he hi he got it up to i forgot what the number was 30 or 40 grand a month in productized podcast he was one of the earlier ones it was called podcast motor he was working a day job the whole time so then while he was actually doing the editing or he would he did it first and then and then got someone overseas exactly yep yeah yep or even even has folks in u.s and canada doing it um and there was enough profit margin that he then started reinvesting you know and said well now i want to build now that i’m doing podcast hosting he actually was in the podcast space someone says i have this wordpress podcast plugin for podcast hosting on wordpress and i want someone to kind of adopt it type thing since he was doing something in public they approached him he bought it for not very much money and then he built the entire you know what again is a seven-figure business he’s raised you know three aside from us he’s raised three quarters of a million dollars and it’s grown fast so that’s the other way to do it is like i even i was a developer and i had to do it nights and weekends too you know when i was pulling money away from the day job for the agency and hiring a developer what what’s the best way to do that do a lot of these folks like a lot like when i was starting everyone said like oh just go on odesk and hire someone in india to do it and i’m like i don’t know man that doesn’t sound like i can like yeah so like what are you what what are there any agencies that you like or for hiring devs are you hiring someone by the hour in america what’s what do you typically see yeah i typically see i see a lot of people going either through referrals like you get into a community um microcom connect or indie hackers or whatever dynamite circle and you ask and you say who has used someone whom you trust right so you try to get that referral it’s not just a flat look because going to upwork which used to be odesk is kind of a [ __ ] show these days the other thing is there are now these referral services aggregators there’s one called trust shoring which is run by a guy who attends microconf but he basically knows a bunch of eastern european dev agencies and if you come to him and say i want to build an ios app he’ll say cool i have these three agencies that i that i refer to he’s almost like a broker in a way but like he’s a good dude and he knows them you know and so he and he’s vetted them and then there’s one called clouddevs.com and they do this similar thing for latin america do you like cocktail or anything like top towels good it’s expensive um right because i think it’s under 15 hours so it depends on budget and all that if you’re if you’re scraping by i haven’t used top towel but i’ve had friends use it and i heard quality was really good in the early days and of course like anything it gets you know less and less but um that’s certainly something you could try too how much would you budget to create an mvp it depends on what it is you’re talking like a sass app here’s the other thing man if you’re if you are non-technical and you’ve never started a startup before i would say don’t build a sas app it’s too hard like go i have this thing called the stair-step approach to bootstrapping which is like start small with like a wordpress plugin a hubspot add-on a salesforce add-on a heroku add-on and go build that cut your teeth at it’s way less expensive way harder to maintain and way easier to maintain you get the experience you get some revenue then grow it to enough that you can buy out just buy out your day job eight grand eight grand a month maybe ten grand a month then now you have experience you can double down and um and do it that’s awesome to your question of building an mvp of a sas app 10 to 30 grand power to throw it out but and you think a non-technical person could actually maintain that and understand what’s going on well no then you’d need to have that agency sticker that’s what i’m saying if you’re non-technical um you either need some money i mean this is why folks you build it and you’re you pre-sell it you get to the point where there’s enough revenue that you can then justify you know raising funding right if you’re if you’re not technical or you have a side job that’s uh putting money into it well thanks for coming and talking about this i you have a good view of what’s going on in in this space i think it’s badass ben what do you yeah that’s great thanks so much for coming on rob appreciate it absolutely thank you guys i really appreciate so good this is awesome um do you want to give a pitch where do people follow you most so i’m on twitter at rob walling and frankly they listen to this podcast they would probably like start up to the rest of us it’s more focused on you know sas and startups but 35 minutes every week for 590 episodes that’s badass i’m a fan i’ve been listening to you for a long time almost 10 years it feels like thank you this is awesome thanks for coming thanks so much sam boom that’s it