The Wisdom Wall

“don't grow an audience if you want to build a SaaS. Grow an audience if you want to do books and courses and sell events and do all the stuff I do. But if you're going to do a SaaS, there's so many better ways to spend your time, so many better marketing approaches than audience building.”

“Like, the real SaaS-pocalypse is the big companies, the big incumbents. They're the ones who have raised their prices so much, maybe a little too much, Because they have to grow every quarter for Wall Street, right? So they have bloat, they have legacy, they have a customer base that's probably quietly resentful about…”

“The secret of SAS, per seat SAS particularly, is that 20% of those seats shouldn't be paying for anything because they're not even using the tool, right?”

“if you just send it off to do the artifacts for you, if you have it make a product that you don't understand how that product is or what it works, if you don't talk to the customers, but you have the machine talk to customers for you, it will not actually accelerate what you're trying to do. It will actually slow you…”

“it's not unusual that I hear about situations where I'm like, okay, well, yeah, but you left like you left like 60 or 70 or 80% of the value of the company on the table because you didn't know what was going on here. Like you didn't understand like the universe of buyers, what market pricing is like and like what…”

“the only kind of M&A that I am interested in as an adventure capitalist is if a strategic comes to you and begs to buy it and is gaga for it and will pay a crazy price. That is the only kind of M&A a venture capitalist will care about”

“So it's much more valuable to you as an acquirer if those two founders have sat down and actually put like a team in place and like made themselves a little bit of a less of a key person risk for, for the acquirer. And, and that's why like it's, yeah, you might've been a lot more profitable when you were just the two…”

“you're almost never gonna get, like, a hundred percent security, because it's not helpful, unless it sees what I see. And if it doesn't see what I see, then it's just like, yeah, ok, like, can you do some web research for me? I'm like, yeah, that's, So can chat GPT. Like, who cares? That's not interesting.”

“If you're profitable, you're not investing in growth. You're putting cash in the bank, and so you're not going to be growing as fast, almost inevitably. And so to take two businesses at the same ARR and say they're going to be growing the same amount, while one is more profitable, the one that's more profitable could…”

“if I'm very specific about what I am, then my ideal customer will definitely buy, which is already a reason to do it, but like a hundred times larger market than that. We'll see that specificity as a reason to buy your set of trade-offs, even though they're not quote unquote ideal and they buy anyway.”

“So the fact that we had great human support is something like no VC wants you to have that because that's expensive and it comes out of your gross margin. Maybe it means you're not, you're not, you're quote unquote, not a software company because your gross margin is less than 70%. So an emphasis on service is…”

“it is an exception that I'm seeing when a horizontal, mostly bootstrapped company is able to continue growth and not plateau in that, the ranges depend on the size of the market and all this, but it's half a million, a 1,000,002 million, and they plateau hard, and then they, they just can't, they can't get through it.”

“Yep, like that a hundred percent exists and I built that and it works about 80% of the time. And so it's that 20% that is still, you know, the human in the loop or the human augmented or amplified experience with AI. That's where we are today. And that applies to everything. That applies to voice and video and code and…”

“as you make a, like another step in capability, like the amount of compute, compute that you need to, to add, to make it smarter, as it were, just grows exponentially. So you get like a linear increase in capability with an exponential growth in compute. And that just, that just doesn't work.”

“if it becomes so expensive that, you know, your model doesn't work, well then, then given the specialization you're in, and particularly if it's something like a very specialized vertical SaaS thing that you're doing, okay, you can probably get as good, if not good enough models by getting your own model, open source…”

“Yes, it does, without a doubt, and I think that this is the one thing that me and my co-founders hummed and hawed on the most. As I sat them down, because I deal with all the fundraising and talking with investors as the CEO, and I told them, guys, This changes our floor of success has to be so much higher. Our ceiling…”

“Like, we wanted to do what most people wouldn't, So we could get a result that most people don't get because like everyone wants work life balance. We all want to be happy all the time, but like, that's why so few companies probably succeed.”

“If you're happy, more money will make you happier. If you're poor, more money is likely to make you happier. If you're not poor or you're not happy, more money is not going to do a thing.”

“this is a trap that a lot of times people fall into where you look at a successful incumbent and you say their UX is terrible. I can do better UX. And you ignore the fact that, like, the actual person buying it, maybe the actual person buying it doesn't even use the product, but they're charged with buying it because…”

“all software for B to B is workflow software. And so the most important way to segment a market is by segmenting it by actual workflows that are being done by real people in the business.”

“Like if you're popular in your community, you do courses, you do coaching, right? Like that's how you capitalize on, on popularity. And we were trying to build a SaaS and popularity doesn't matter when you build a SaaS.”

“because I think everything in AI will be very good. And so the things that aren't that good right now are actually the best things to build in because everyone just assumes, oh, who's, is it a voice? Is it really going to replace a person? Yes, actually it is. But if you start now, people laugh at you and then you kind…”

“voice and AI is really, really powerful, and when something's really powerful, you're tempted to bring all that power to the user, and that's what creates onboarding friction.”

“I call that false demand the curse of the audience. And if there's two curses to it, one, you tweet it out or you email your list and everyone's like, oh, I kind of want to check out what they're doing and everybody's really interested. And then they're not actually that interested to solve a problem, but they just,…”

“That era ended and the new era is basically Google being like, okay, we're not going to spend nearly as much time figuring out what pages are good. We're just going to trust really, really major brands, really massive sites. And I think there's a lot of nuance to how Google defines a brand, but basically if you're a…”

“if you're B to B SaaS and as an investor, you can put money in that a couple of million and then they sell for 50 to a hundred million dollars. That's as good. Like, it doesn't matter to you. If you get 40 X your money, what do you care? Whether it, 40 exit means seventy five million as an exit, or 40 x means a billion…”

“I talk about my one nine 90 rule where I say around one percent of startups should go after venture, about 90% should bootstrap, and I think about nine percent should raise probably some type of funding. Maybe that's tiny seed, maybe it's angels, but it's like not venture track.”

“But at this point in my life, after seven years, I've really given up on trying to teach people as they get started. There is definitely a segment of bright folks who are willing to learn. It's not impossible, but a typical busy person is not willing to absorb your information to make like really qualified setup. It's…”

“I would not want to build a ten-year business on any of these platforms, because they do not give a about you, and they will sooner cut off your API access accidentally, say oops, Killed your business. They will build the feature directly into their platform.”

“Not only, should not everyone raise it, but I only think about one percent of venture-eligible tech startups should raise venture. I think one percent, approximately, should consider raising venture. I think nine percent should consider raising some type of funding, whether that's angel investment, something…”

“There's very few companies, like, I've interviewed hundreds of Productled founders, where I'm like, one out of maybe 300 has a situation where their product does market itself really, really well”

“So the reason I have this as number six is that if bubble 10 X their pricing or had a big outage, you could rebuild that. And if you're hosted on AWS or using SendGrid or using WordPress, you can rebuild it. The risks are there, but they're lower than if you lose Google where there is no replacement and you lose all…”

“Ruben Gomez has these four markers that I often quote, I actually put them in my book, of when freemium can work, and if you don't have all four of them, you probably shouldn't try freemium.”

“maybe it's like an 80% don't do is don't start a SaaS without a technical co-founder. And the reason that I say that is Most of the companies that I see, the bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap companies... The vast majority of folks I see trying to do this without a technical co-founder really struggle.”

“The higher price, typically the lower the churn, the faster the growth. Like we see this in the state of independent SaaS when we ask about churn and lifetime value and ticket price, and, and then we compare it to growth. It's obvious that the higher lifetime value, lower the churn, higher the ticket price. The math…”

“The way it works is net profit up to about a million and a half ARR. And above that, if you're dealing with the right buyers, so it'd be strategics or The big, bigger private equity who are not value buyers, they're gonna look at you at a revenue multiple based on growth, and if you're looking at value buyers or you're…”

“what matters is the job to be done right for the customer. And because the job to be done is training, then like you fall into that industry. Having a different product is fantastic from like a branding, finding a niche perspective. But the business model, right, is, is kind of fundamentally locked into the industry or…”

“Who hires a dev or has kind of a minority technical co-founder and they drive them and push them to write code faster and faster and faster and the code is and then they get to a 1,000,003 1,000,005 million in ARR and they, they stop. They lock up. You can't build features because nothing is maintainable. You, you…”

“So tip, it's not unusual for a pretty well-run profitable scale, you know, at scale SaaS business to be doing thirty-ish percent free cash flow that could be kicked out of dividends. Now, if you do the math on that, if that same business is growing well enough and is at a size, it, you know, it probably is going to…”

“if you're, if you truly want a lifestyle bootstrap, go do that, but know that your co-founder should be on the same page and don't take investment. If you're going to do that, just don't take it. There is no, the numbers don't work.”

“Private equity and strategic acquirers, they don't care very much at all about profitability. Now, if you lose, if you're losing buckets of money, of course, but if you're running at break even and you're doubling every year and you're in the millions, people will take a look like you will have buyers champing at the…”

“So I talk a lot about how managers should really be reserving all of their energy, not for just communicating metrics from one person to the next, which asynchronous organizations do automatically because the platform is really the manager. Instead, focus on the EQ issues.”

“That's simply the Google to me, and I always tell everyone is like extra. Never, ever, ever, ever rely on it. That's what it is. It's just free bonus. It's bonus traffic.”

“like you can raise with just an idea or a deck or just a It's a team or whatever, but then the vision has to be big, and that does usually exclude you or preclude you from actually doing the kind of exit where like at 20 or fifty million bucks, because just the mechanics of the way that investments are being made in…”

“I think a lot of the time, I think just think as early stage investors, it's despite what some investors will tell you, I think it's almost impossible to really, really have a good sense of like, what's going to really Work. There's just a lot of randomness and luck and things in there that accounts for a lot of it.”

“Given how early we invest, and so Indy usually invested later than us, given how early we invest, you just kind of need to be an equity investor, and you need to, to sort of allow, basically to, to not allow founders to buy back equity. And, you know, we get, as you guys know, we sometimes get pushback on this, like,…”

“don't, don't sell lifetime deals if you're in SAS. I mean, AppSumo is probably the one exception I would say. And if you're gonna sell, then you disclose when you exit that, Hey, we do have these users and you can, Give reports of this is how much they, they use on a whatever basis. So, and also know that if you do an…”

“I think A-B testing and, and conversion rate testing in general is great when you have between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands or more visitors to a page and, and enough of them are converting that you can basically test in 12 to 36 hours. Anything under that and the testing itself will get in the way of…”

“if you have an audience and you've been selling them books and courses and stuff, and you think that you can sell them software in the same way, almost without exception, it doesn't work out that way. It is much, much, much, much harder to sell a SaaS or software of any kind, but especially a recurring subscription,…”

“SAS net margins kind of at scale are, let's say 30, they're 20 to 50%, 30 to 50%. I mean, if you build a SAS company that's doing ten million bucks a year and it has a 50% net margin, like you are doing very, very, very well in terms of profitability. And if you're giving away 30% or 30 plus percent of your MRR to your…”

“Don't take business advice from people who have crappy personal lives, and my addition is, or who treat people in a way you don't want to treat people. And the reason I've added that is because, from what I've seen, you can be successful in business and treat people right, Or you can be successful in business and treat…”

“It doesn't matter if I look at their resume and they used to work for Apple or Postmates or, you know, one of these darlings where I'm like, Ooh, they worked at Airbnb. They must be good. That is not an indicator of success.”

“I haven't seen a company be started by a founder and then part-time focused and just have it magically find product market fit. Team members, employees are not founders unless they are founder level, right? They're, if they're founder level thinker and they are willing, they need the motivation. This is just, it's…”

“well then go get a day job. Like, don't make the excuse that you haven't gone and put in the work to get some industry experience, and to get some exposure to problems day to day so that you know how a company works, and that you will inevitably see problems that you run into at the day job, and you will inevitably see…”

“don't try to build 10 things and see what sticks, because none of them are going to stick. Surprise! None of them are going to magically take off, and you're not going to learn anything if one of them does.”

“I don't know of any successful founders who are on their second, third, fourth Effort that build 10 things and see what sticks. I know literally zero. That is an approach for someone who I would say just doesn't know any better.”

“The challenges with these startup programs, Is they want companies that have, ultimately have a lot of money to spend, and it is giving away the razor to sell the blades type thing, or giving, you know, the first piece of candy is free, and they want you to start using GCP, but they want to know that you have money to…”

“What I've noticed is that I believe, mostly without exception, every second or third time entrepreneur that I've seen that's doing it, Does some validation, has some conversations, does that research, and, and digs in”

“I think there's the myth of the coach is not supposed to give guidance. They're supposed to only ask questions. I believe that for founders at this stage, it's actually very important to be able to wear both hats, to be able to be really asking questions, getting them to clarity and to their own understanding of the…”

“there are only two legitimate reasons to build your own versions of an app, like to vibe code it. One is to save money, And that's only if it's really expensive. Like, let's say something is 10,000 dollars a year, 20 grand a year, and you think you can cut that by 90% or 95%. The second one is customization, right? No…”

“Building to save money is a rounding error. It's a bad decision next to just building your actual business.”

“A clone with little or no distribution is a folder on someone's laptop. It always was. The moat was never the code. It was everything you added to the code.”

“my rule of thumb is about 300 a month is the minimum for a one call close, and somewhere around, what is it, about It's about 800 a month. It's about 10 K ACV is my minimum for thinking about cold and warm outreach.”

“I actually don't think Google traffic is too expensive. I think if Facebook or Instagram traffic isn't converting, I would probably spend more time trying to optimize those. I don't need to make money on the Google traffic. Even if I'm overpaying, I mean, unless it's some outrageous amount of paying a thousand dollars…”

“The seven, and only seven ways, that a SaaS app can plateau.”

“pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS. And I think positioning is number two.”

“Development, sales, and marketing, if you want to learn them, like, I think there's curriculum out there, there's people, there's, you just go and dive in, you, whatever. I think they, In my opinion, are a little, there's intuition in all of them, but there's certainly more, a lot more intuition and gut feel in…”

“if you give a developer who's not a product person a feature, and you say, build content snippets that people can insert into their emails, you know, if your, if your app sends emails for people, they will build it very literally, and it will not be very elegant nor intuitive. And you will need tool tips, And…”

“if you're very bearish on SaaS companies, then you're sort of saying that, like, The companies that are the best in the world at deploying software are gonna be bad at deploying this particular kind of software”

“integrations in and of themselves are not no longer a moat just because like, It's so much easier to build them, but to your point, like, if they're harder to get, maybe because everyone is protecting themselves from AI, then it could definitely be a moat, for sure.”

“if you have a hardware component that, like, is tightly integrated into your thing, and it's a key part of what you deliver, trying to think off the top of my head of what examples of this might be, but like, you know, a custom piece for some custom sensor, or something like that, that's a key, key part of what you're…”

“Now apply that to a business doing millions in revenue and have employees and to pay and all this stuff. Like it just, why would I want a vibe coded thing, you know, to save like an inconsequential, the downside risk is just way, way too high.”

“The thing, the key, key thing to understand here is that founders are sometimes a little frustrated with private equity because they think of them more like venture capitalists, and like venture capitalists typically will take, very gung-ho, will take extremely high risks because they're expecting a vast majority of…”

“yeah, by all means, go have Claude Vibecode your whole product, and it's gonna be the generic AI slot that people are used to, but it comes with a curation and taste, and actually sitting on top of having an expert drive it, it's like basically giving somebody a Lamborghini, like if somebody is brand new, like you put…”

“Every time I have it go through and do it, it's a really good enabler tool on the backend. I could talk about operationally being able to go do the research, compile the stuff to get it to a point where then you can see the nuance, the details of whatever it is. So market research. Or persona research. Like, it could…”

“AI is the average of the internet. It's the average of everything, and so if you're not a good copywriter, if you're a two out of 10, And you have AI write copy, it's gonna write a five out of 10, let's just say. And you're gonna be like, man, AI is so great. Guess what? If you're a six out of 10, seven, eight, nine,…”

“Once they hit the 20, 30, 40,000 MRR, Life's good. They don't have to worry about the day to day as much, and you don't have that kind of like broke fire burning under them as much. So they kind of just limit themselves naturally for that, or they'll like naturally get to the temperature of the room around them. So if…”

“scaling operations is about 10 times harder than scaling the marketing.”

“I actually think we've been misled by a whole package of what are today called best practices about how companies are to be built, structured, and governed. That are frankly value destroying.”

“So someone who works 10% harder than you do does not produce 10% more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add, it multiplies, and it compounds silently for years before anyone notices.”

“if you set up an LLC, it reduces your liability, but loose guidance, you don't need one when you have a landing page. You don't really even need one when you have some revenue.”

“So actually in this case, I think either a network or an audience would work, but I think it's easier and quicker to build a network. It's a lot less work than building an audience.”

“my default is always to charge something. Even if you give them a significant discount, you want them to have some skin in the game, and you want to know that this is something that they are willing to pay for.”

“if I were building a SaaS today, I would try to avoid it. I would want a full-time person dedicated to, you know, whether that's me or whether that is someone that I hire. There's a certain amount of ownership of the code base And technical debt will screw you.”

“the big trap I see some other people falling into is it's like, cool, I'm going to be all freelancers because I don't want any employees. Or I'm going to have like five or 10 different freelancers all doing different things. And it's like, now you're a project manager. And you are a traffic cop, and your entire job is…”

“If you want to build a three million dollar SaaS company, That's growing fast and could sell for 20 or 30 or more million dollars. You don't need to be so worried about timing.”

“If you need to do a demo, like at least one call to close, probably need to charge about 300 dollars a month for it to make it worth, worth it. But if it's no demo, you can charge less than that. 50 or a hundred dollars if people, you know, even the B to B side is able to, ah, basically self-serve.”

“tuck-ins often outcompete, like, strategic bids, because it's so valuable to them.”

“It is really tailored for being put alongside an equity raise. That's where it really makes a lot of sense. If you're at three million in ARR and you want to get to five before you fundraise, you can pull a million bucks and you're kind of going for broke anyway. And then you use the money and you push and you try to…”

“convince them to stop selling into the UK is, that would be my advice, which is, is really tough.”

“But if you're building some line of business application for a niche, the odds that like there's a bunch of vibe coded competitors moving faster or whatever is, uh, it's probably pretty low.”

“Starting from zero might actually be the easiest path to reaching the niche specific audience you're trying to reach. As painful as it is, I think it's actually going to be net faster for you.”

“if you're pulled towards it, if you're intrinsically interested in doing it, do it. If you're not, don't. And I would say for SaaS founders, if you're not, absolutely don't, because you have to be so ingrained, engulfed, just like in it, in the culture of your people, in the culture of the platform, even. To do it…”

“I'm not big on hiring agencies most of the time, because I think the incentives of the business model are misaligned longterm. But if you hire like the best and they're going to be expensive, you're basically hiring them to download a lot of knowledge to you and your team very quickly. You don't even have to hire them…”

“The idea, I don't really weigh it that much. I don't think any idea is really worth equity, but what if someone brings a significant audience, or they bring significant financial assets, some cash, or they have an amazing network, or they have, you know, something else that they, they've pre-sold it”

“So if the feeling is, man, I'm not growing as fast as I want, or I'm not as profitable as I want, or I'm not getting this or that goal that I want. Usually the answer is not, oh, I gotta go raise a bunch of money, right? Like almost always we, even if you have raised money, that's usually not the answer, right? Usually…”

“I find that the people who have only written code, have never worked on a team, have never had to get into a code base that they've never seen before. It's like they're code blind, and they've only experienced the way they do it, and they have these really strong opinions about How it should be done. And this code base…”

“there are a lot of people making excuses for being distracted and for engaging and feeding their entrepreneurial ADHD or their shiny object syndrome or their I need to be diversified or it's all a matter of luck so I need to make a hundred bets because one might pay off, et cetera, et cetera. I don't believe that. I…”

“the fun work is launching 20 projects. The fun work is building a bunch of projects. I love building, creating, that's what we are, we're makers. The hard work is focusing on one, And focusing on it long enough to see it through, and to put in the marketing and, and the sales, and doing the stuff you don't want to do,…”

“firing is actually really tough. It's tough to make that decision because it's always muddier than you think it's going to be. It's never as clear as you want it to be, and usually it's the really nice, but less than, slightly less than competent person, who you're like, well, I keep them around because they're really…”

“I think bootstrappers think more like, okay, if it's not working, if you need a pivot, let me try just like running a few ads to this market. Let me try just changing the marketing and not too much with the product and let's see if it gets traction there. Whereas I think there's this other kind of thinking that's like,…”

“And it's okay to use AI to code as long as a, like an engineer is supervising slash running that process, because we know That you can have AI build you something, and we know that in six, 1218 months it will become very, very hard to maintain. Feature velocity will shut down. You'll have regression, massive regression…”

“horizontal B to B SaaS is very hard. And at a certain point, a lot of competitors are in your space, and It becomes hard to grow. And so vertical and orthogonal SaaS, we've seen stronger exits, we've seen folks able to get further and have lower churn and all kinds of things in terms of, you know, niching down”

“The earliest I've seen any of them really bring someone in to collaborate on strategy, and I'll say they didn't hand it off completely, but it's probably about, certainly above a million ARR. I would lean towards 1.5 to maybe two million ARR, and this depends on a lot of things, but I'm giving you loose ranges.”

“I think you're probably, it's definitely one to two million is the earliest. I would consider bringing someone else in to start making product decisions, what you build, in what order, getting customer feedback, understanding your space, deciding how things are built, you know, really having product management or, or…”

“selling a 20 dollar a month thing is super hard. It's a hundred bucks a month. Absolute entry point for anything that I do these days. And I think for most people, like, if you can't come up with an idea to sell a hundred dollar a month thing, I would probably think, I think harder.”

“autopilot doesn't actually exist. If you put something on autopilot in any space that we deal in, it will decline over six to 18 months tops. Even if you have all this automated SEO, blah, blah, blah, like you'll just slide, and it will, you, the business will just slowly melt like an iceberg, or an ice cube in this…”

“if you really execute on the core four, product, dev, sales, and marketing, you can still build an incredible business with, unfortunately, it's not a path I would take, but with crappy support, with crappy customer success, with crappy internal operations, and messy finances, and blah blah blah.”

“You don't have to tell them upfront that you are the solo co-founder and the solo decision maker. You can be vague about it when you get into these deals and you can play the same game of like, well, my, no, my co-founder didn't agree.”

“We've been told that ideas are worthless and it's all about execution. And we know that's not true. We know there are some ideas that are just better than others.”

“My thing is, if you don't have millions of dollars and three to five years, To, to build a category, to start one, don't do it, right? And that's why most of us say it, because we have seen more, a lot more folks fail at it than not.”

“There are spaces that are eight percent, eight to 10% churn, and it's consumers, prosumers, indie hackers, hobbyists, And other folks who think like consumers, and those are not great SaaS businesses. They can be okay SaaS businesses, but they will plateau. Those are step one and step two businesses if your churn is…”

“Don't build a media company if you're building a SaaS unless you're HubSpot or Zapier. Or one of these massive, massive, when you're doing nine figures of ARR or you've raised nine figures of, of funding, go ahead and build a media business. Until then, don't.”

“Anytime you repurpose A single piece of content into a bunch of pieces, most of them do not work. We have tried this over and over and over in different iterations, and what I have found in my fifth, well, I've been blogging since oh five, so in my 20 years of content creation, but realistically, let's say 15 years of,…”

“there really needs to be a balance because I think if you're not looking at all or paying at all attention, any attention to your customers, like you are doing yourself a disservice in the long run. You cannot pay attention to customers for a few months, But if you try to do that for a few years, you, you need to know…”

“when pivoting first came out, they would say, like, Slack was a, it was like a video game company, right? And it's like, they pivoted the video game into Slack and said, that's not a pivot. That's just a, you just started a new product. Let's not, let's be real about that, right? Pivot was overused. To me, a pivot is…”

“What I mean is, you are decreasing your chance of success By bootstrapping, B to C, a two-sided marketplace, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Anytime you hear someone talk about product market fit as I've hit it, or I haven't, or do you have it, it's helpful to think of it with nuance, to think of it as a spectrum instead of a binary.”

“Number one is don't bootstrap a two-sided marketplace unless you already have one side.”

“Number four is don't try to define a new category of software from scratch.”

“Commandment number five is that marketing beats product. I know it's a tough sell to talk to a bunch of builders and let them know that your skill set is actually less important in entrepreneurial success than learning how to market and sell.”

“Bottom line is if you don't know how to market beyond Social media, tweeting about your launch and putting it on Product Hunt, you're damn near doomed.”

“if you really want to build a seven or eight figure SaaS company with net negative churn, you want to think about having higher pricing, and you want to think about having a few hundred high value happy customers that you can build into a multi-million dollar business.”

“I've often said that funded startups fail when they run out of money, and bootstrap startups fail when the founder runs out of motivation.”

“The people who tell you only what you want to hear are usually doing it because they want to sell you something, and that's the easiest way to do it. It's not because they want to help you succeed.”

“developers don't have money to buy products at a company. I mean, maybe some do, but at an enterprise, it's not the developer that makes a purchasing decision.”

“It, it's a big distraction, honestly. I mean, certainly in the early days when none of them really had any traction, maybe it's fine. But once StatusGator started gaining some traction, so around twenty-twenty, I would say, honestly, during the pandemic is when things kind of clicked for us. We, everything was going…”

“The first part developers do over and over and over and over and I say, I don't know, maybe 49 out of 50 times it just doesn't work. They're not very good. Zero to one marketing is really, is also really hard, you know, and it often takes founder activation energy.”

“it's very hard to deliver a aha moment in a 14 day free trial with a service that is dependent on other providers going down.”

“don't bootstrap the two-sided marketplace unless you already have one side.”

“SaaS is one of the best business models, but it is one of the hardest company types to start. Because just building a SaaS and maintaining And hosting it, making it secure, making it performant, making it mostly bug-free, building something that people want and are willing to pay for, all of that is five or 10 times…”

“I believe that my journey is an example of what an otherworldly event you need to happen to actually help you win in that space as a bootstrapped founder.”

“You can get to, I would say, 1,000,002 1,000,003 million of ARR, somewhere in there, for a lot of vertical SaaS businesses with that sort of self-serve model. Like, you can differentiate the pricing, and like, you know, you gotta figure out, there's a lot of stuff, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff you gotta…”

“So, like, it's funny, but some say, oh, you're too small to do it right now. But because we're small, I look at these things, and I'm like, these are actually kind of, like, viability of the business. If we can resolve these, It actually kind of helps me sleep a little bit better at night, which is kind of funny.”

“I think the common problem is not enough structure and process, which is a funny thing to say, right? Because, but if you think about it, there are two pathways that a founder has gone through. Either, like you say, they've worked at a really big company. They see all the process and all the cruft and the, yeah, the…”

“every person who has had that idea of, oh, I don't need managers, we can have a flat structure, learns that they were wrong. You know, it might seem that, again, management gets a bad name from big companies where you've got, you know, pointy haired bosses just wasting space, but good management is essential to a…”

“You know what I've never heard in my career is I regret letting that person go. You know what I hear all the time is we should have done it sooner. And so by the time you're wondering whether you should let that person go, my, my advice is you, you probably already waited too long.”

“most of these tools today that help you build, like, a V-one of a product are kind of effective because they're able to hold most of the product in the context window of the, of the LLM... But as soon as your code base gets Sufficiently large, where it doesn't all fit in the context window, that's when, you know,…”

“every venture investor is like, take more and go try to get this thing. And you know what? I don't think that's venture investors trying to be evil. They're actually right. They've seen pattern recognition that you're gonna need more capital. This is AI and you're up against people who are raising, you know, hundreds…”

“Lifetime values got to be up there in the tens of hundreds of thousands to, to really spend that.”

“I think where you really start to think about it is, is my side hustle paying me more than what I'm making from my full-time job. And I don't think it has to happen right at that moment, but I think a better way is saying, okay, cumulatively, since I've started this job and started the side hustle, have I earned more…”

“If you have a tech startup, and like, tech is mostly the US economy now, you're kind of, if you own US stocks, you're kind of doubling down on your, what you're already doing, which is your income, right? So I actually could make an argument for why you might need to own some fixed income”

“funded companies Fail when they run out of money and a bootstrap companies fail when the founders run out of motivation.”

“I don't put a lot behind having an audience per se, right, to build SaaS, because it's like, you can only sell to a very small portion of that, and it doesn't, doesn't actually, uh, Get you very far”

“So first we started looking for developers who wanted to write and not for writers who knew a bit how to code. So with that in mind, we're able to have writers who were really in terms of Technology, like technologically very top notch, you know, they knew everything there is to know about their language framework or…”

“I think it's just, I mean, for us, it was completely wrong. I mean, you cannot just ignore it, especially in our market, we're, yeah, commodity products. So you need to be, you need to have a sexy pricing table if you want people to at least give you a chance.”

“It failed because the economics of B to C businesses, especially SaaS, are not good.”

“For a SaaS company, I don't think you should build an audience.”

“I realize that funding is far from the goal, and in fact, a lot of folks who take funding do it because they don't know any better, not because they actually should.”

“That's where it is, and if I was really good at building a personal brand, and building audiences, and going on podcasts, I wouldn't start a SaaS. I would start an info product and course business.”

“I've worked at dozens of teams at this stage, and the founders, they're the best marketers. They know the company. They know the client. They know the customer. They know how everything works. They know what messages land broadly. Maybe it's not totally dialed in, but they're, like, They're incredible marketers who…”

“The reason that I think that you shouldn't think too much about your marketing team at this point is because you're gonna make the wrong hires. You're gonna lose touch with your customer. You're gonna slow yourself down. You're gonna burn a lot of money. Let's say you hire a VP of marketing at one million. Firstly,…”

“The goal is not to keep subscribers and build a subscriber base. The goal is to get more customers and sending more email allows you to do that.”

“Stop doing B to C. Stop doing two-sided marketplaces and stop staying in your comfort zone when it comes to marketing and sales. Your customers don't care. Your customers don't care what you're comfortable with. They care how with how they buy and how they want to be spoken to.”

“You'll go faster by adding a sales model and you'll go faster by closing more deals and putting things that you learn back into the marketing, back into that self-serve motion.”

“Dollar for dollar, hour for hour, building an audience is not anywhere near the best marketing approach that you can use to build a SaaS. I have seen so many people with large audiences fail miserably at SaaS and plateau and build that no one wants.”

“Even though entrepreneurs sort of had the reputation of being great risk takers, the best entrepreneurs, according to this study and a lot of this research are shown to be the ones that are very good risk mitigators, because it was the companies that were most likely to succeed were the ones that were run by…”

“What I loved about them was they were a newer, younger private equity firm that wanted to prove themselves. And when, when they are that way, they're going to show up and be invested in your business succeeding because their name and reputation relies on it. The bigger the fund, sometimes they just start playing the…”

“probably most software? Doesn't matter. If I think of most B to B SaaS software, I, I shouldn't say doesn't matter at all, because you can have catastrophic US and then every UX and then everyone hates it, but it doesn't matter nearly as much as I think.”

“I think for, I guess I wouldn't say a hundred percent of us, but for 99.9% of the rest of us, like this is not a good decision. With platform as a service, you're effectively getting all of those site reliability engineers and DevOps people at your platform of choice. You're getting all of them as a functional…”

“Sometimes, if you have a low touch, no touch funnel, you don't have sales at all. You don't do any outbound, and you don't do demos, and so it's purely a marketing driven SaaS. And that is kind of the, you know, the bootstrapper indie hacker dream. It's pretty rare, and in fact, those tend to need lower price points,…”

“I think typically the more sales-driven approach is something where you can kind of Brute force it a little easier, I guess, than the marketing-driven approach, which is like, you just have to get really good at generating a ton of traffic in the right places, and that is a bit of a dark art for many of us.”

“I'll say it's impossible to outrun, you know, the churn of a 15 dollar a month business if you want to become, let's say, a ten million or twenty million dollar business.”

“With single non-technical founders or founding teams that don't have a technical founder, this is the biggest headwind consistently, you know, and we see it with tiny seed founders as well.”

“The first customers are not that difficult. These are usually people who come from your phone book or some sort of social media early adopters group. So that's like not that much of a rocket science.”

“a lot of times when people work with positioning experts, they're like, you have to niche down, you ought to choose an industry. And it's like, well, I can think of 50 companies that didn't do that. And so the definitions of all these words were very loose, which left a lot of ambiguity in the way that we talk about…”

“being a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. And people who think they can get all the data and a hundred percent data driven, that's bull, you know, and, and even data can be twisted, even at big companies where they have a lot of data. It's all, there's always some gut feel. There's always…”

“I think there's a point between 15 and 20 where if we are not communicating that, if we have If the people at the top, let's say Anar and myself and, you know, Tracy and Alex on the accelerator side, if we are not directly doing the hiring and training, and it's people that we've hired that are doing the hiring and…”

“when does it make sense to rebrand? And usually, that's further down the line. It's if you basically get an MVP brand out, and you're doing 20 or 30 K a month, or your brand is hurting your efforts. It's not helping you close sales, it's actually driving prospects away because your design looks cheap, It isn't…”

“And I think that's the big lesson I learned from there is to get your brand or exact company or product domain name, and then the TLD, the top level domain, I think is less important.”

“Don't think affiliation or affiliate marketing will fix your acquisition issues. It'll just create another acquisition problem. Acquiring affiliate partners. 100% true. And I don't know if Pierre found this on his own, or I've, I've been saying this for 1012 years, that affiliate marketing is enterprise sales.”

“if you're going to be a SaaS founder, don't build your audience, build your network. Because if you build a network of folks who have audiences, that's the killer play right there.”

“And then if you get to about a million and a half, two million ARR, and you're growing, and you're selling not just the technology, but kind of the, the team, like the whole company, the product, everything you've built, that's more than two to five X ARR, usually.”

“after a certain point, and that certain point comes pretty soon, There's just severely diminishing returns to spending your time categorizing feedback, and what I mean by diminishing returns is your prioritization decisions, they don't tend to get more accurate for all of the work that it takes”

“what the best roadmaps are, are lagging indicators or like outputs of alignment. With the team, no matter how small that team is or, or how big the team is. So they're not connections to your user feedback.”

“Because it's not replacing a human. It replaces voicemail. So it just has to beat voicemail, and you get ROI.”

“And the reason MVPs in AI and SaaS are like very, very different things is because in AI, you don't build nearly as much as you do in SaaS. So if you want to build a CRM, you kind of can't launch an MVP. You know, if you want an email, for example, Look, you can't compete with an MVP. You're not going to really going…”

“those are the four skills, and those are the order I have in marketing and sales, then product, then engineering, then hiring and managing.”

“Honestly, I think it just seems that the products are so good and it seems like every niche that you've, you can think of, that's what it feels like to me. Has five or six products. Like there's no world of like, oh, there's one competitor and they have a crappy product. The, like people are just building better stuff…”

“chat with your database is not in any way unique. Everyone's doing that. And a lot of the companies doing it are trying to position it as the data analyst for your company. I don't think that's right. Cause I think that is still too vague. People are still like the whole point of hiring a real data analyst is they tell…”

“If you're building SaaS, build your network, not your audience.”

“if you're going to sell info products, build an audience, not for SaaS, not worth it. There's other things you should do”

“when can you afford to, to pay an employee A 120, a 130,000 a year. Now I'm, I'm assuming USD, and it kind of depends on where in the world you're hiring, but like, when can you afford, and that's not the only question, but it's a pretty good indicator. Like if you're not at that point, then you don't need someone else…”

“is that you don't need a product person before a million ARR, and usually I see it between one and two million, somewhere in there, and it depends a lot on the product.”

“Similarly, my rule of thumb for when do you need kind of a head of marketing or someone to run marketing that's not the founder? Usually it's between one and two million.”

“The reason that people come to us is because we're unlimited all that stuff. And that's why that's why I have customers. So I can't stop doing that. And I'm like, you are building a terrible business. You are not increasing, you know, they're getting more value and they're not paying you. This is, this is a, you're…”

“This is why freemium, it's not a never for bootstrappers. It's a by default, don't do it. What do you do if there are many free signups and not many paid conversions? Don't do freemium. Listen to this podcast and in general, don't do freemium.”

“Think of AI as an accelerant. It gets you there faster. If you don't use it, you will be slower than your competition. It doesn't differentiate you because your competition can and will use it.”

“developers, generally speaking, they aren't in the mindset that they go and they license, like they pay for a Ruby gem and license that. That's not their workflow. Their workflow is they want an open source package, and then maybe you can upcharge them for support.”

“I am not a big believer in the open source to paid model for a small team. I mean, I think if we had raised a lot of money, it might be a great path, but What we're trying to build, like that, that just isn't a model that was really working.”

“The big loophole with Google used to be links. Like if you built enough links to the right page, you could basically rank for whatever you wanted. Uh, and that, that's how we got going, to be honest. Uh, we built a bunch of links to a very few key pages, and it was working really, really well, and that was true for…”

“AI is really good at giving you kind of like that core, like Middle of the bell curve answer. Right. And if they're giving you something, they're going to give the other thousand people in your space, something pretty similar. Cause that's what AI does. And so if you're using it, you're just going to be the middle of…”

“am I getting 10 to 20% that are complaining about my price? Good. Then I'm probably priced accurately. If no one's complaining about my price, I'm probably underpriced. And if people are saying, oh, you're so cheap, or I'm way less than competitors, I'm probably underpriced”

“don't market on blue sky. It just launched. You know, like, hang out there for fun if you want to. Like, mark it on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Reddit if that's where people are, YouTube, lots of people on YouTube. Like, just don't overthink it. Go for the most obvious ones where your customers obviously are.”

“It is impossible to get a thousand X in a venture fund or a hundred, even a hundred X. If you're wanting to do that, then you should put all your money into single bets. Like you should be investing in individual companies and, and, and like concentrate your position as much as you can into your extreme high conviction…”

“niching down, as far as I see the market at the moment, is the only way to move forward.”

“If there was a market opportunity that had zero uncertainty about it, how to do it, or whether it was worth doing, then someone with more better resource than you would have already done it.”

“During the course of running your business, you've learned how to build, how to sell your product, how to market, how to lead your team, how to build a profitable company. None of those skills apply to what you're about to do. In fact, the main drivers that got you to this point, your passion for your product, your…”

“I get emails to this podcast about, you know, I have a good day job, and I'm making good money, but I really want to be an entrepreneur, but I just have a tough time getting motivated. And I think to myself, then you don't really want to be an entrepreneur.”

“the free model you choose actually doesn't matter. So if you look at like billion dollar plus product companies, you'll find every company with like, whether it's a free trial, free main model, usage based trial, they're, they're all out there. What does matter though, is deciding what is the main outcome of your free…”

“enterprise would pay a higher price per user, not a lower price. And that's because they need things like custom terms of service. They need to be able to redline everything. They need to be able to have invoices and POs, which are probably already doing at 75,000 a year. They might need single sign-on, which I know…”

“your company's not your product, because your product, you have to make a bunch of judgment calls, and you're making, you're making stuff up, basically, as you go along, but your company, there, there is, you know, standards for that, or at least frameworks for it.”

“social media is a distraction that masquerades itself as productivity, and people justify it by saying, well, I'm working, well, I'm marketing. No, you're not. You're not marketing. You're, you're getting on social media, and you're feeding, frankly, feeding an addiction that these apps are really good at feeding, and…”

“I believe that code is usually a certainty. Code is something you can hire someone to do because building that next feature does not have any risk. Versus marketing and sales usually have a ton of the risk, as well as product, like deciding what to build, How to take feedback in, how to find product market fit, all…”

“Now with a portfolio of products, never try to grow more than one at a time. You focus on one, you get it to grow, and you get the, basically that recurring traffic that then builds hopefully recurring revenue, and then get it to the point where it's stable, and maybe you autopilot that one too.”

“Usually actually branching into other platforms is a lot harder than you think. We've seen tiny, I've seen tiny companies and non-tiny companies try to do it, and it can work, but in the majority of cases I've seen it hasn't worked.”

“everybody's on subscription and it is annual subscription, which is another thing I think founders don't think enough about is just only having, I've only ever had annual. Um, and I think it's served me pretty well.”

“You can't run, I say can't in quotes, you can't run a million dollar, two million dollar air or SaaS company with just you. At some point you have to let some stuff go.”

“This is why I say build your network, not your audience, because that network is so much more valuable than 10,000 people on, on x Twitter following you. Having five people that you can integrate with or co-promote or get in front of their audience is worth five times, 10 times the value of a social media following.”

“Part of our biggest strength is that we are so nimble and can move so quickly, and frankly, 90 days in the life of a startup is like a year in the life of a big company. So trying to think, I don't know, I'm going to be responding to customer inquiries and, and, and things in the, as the market shifting, how can I move…”

“I think that if someone's at six months and they don't have traction, it's probably time to start really evaluating. Do you need to quit?”

“B to B SaaS in general, once you get a little bit of traction, it doesn't fail very often.”

“Initially, I kind of tried avoiding going into the vertical we ended up going in, which is business management software, because there's some very entrenched players in this space. Now I know that that's, that's actually an advantage. Uh, they do a lot of the customer education for us. There's obviously a lot of…”

“Literally, what they do is they build a tiny SaaS product, and they give it a couple months, and then they sell it for peanuts on microacquire.com, I think it's just acquire.com now, and just move on to the next, and they keep hoping that one of those will blow up, but that's not how it works. If you're gonna only stay…”

“it did seem to really funnel around a few million in ARR. That's where a lot of the bigger players that can actually pay the big multiples, uh, start getting interested. Uh, at the lower ARR, it's, there's definitely interest, but people will try, uh, for bargain. The, the multiples are lower. The terms are not as…”

“And I think the biggest mindset change that I've observed repeatedly is people, once they get past about a million in ARR two or three, they get to the stage. They're like, oh, like my growth is stalling out now. Like what I was working, like my market saturated, my niche is saturated and the mindset change becomes…”

“I talk about it in three phases and there are more than this, but like the first phase is building a product. Second phase is building a business. Third phase is building a company. And usually I think of product as being zero up to Usually about 10 K, MRR, to be honest. It's like, I have a product, I'm trying to…”

“The main problem isn't trying to figure out what's working. It's doing enough experiments so that something is working. And like, look, if they make a bunch of, if they do. 25 things and then two or three of them are working, but they're not totally sure which ones are working, but they're just kind of doing it. That's…”

“The approach is where it's like, build an audience. Yeah, great. That's fun. But it's not, not for your SaaS company. Build your network, not your audience.”

“if you're bootstrapping and you're hiring your first 10, 15, 20 people, And this person doesn't already know how to do the job and you're going to train them up from scratch, unless you really, really need to save on budget, that is a case where you are going to spend a lot, a lot of time training them unless you have…”

“If you're gonna build a SaaS company, don't build an audience, right? Build your network and build marketing channels, not a brand.”

“Cause most, I'll just say most free offerings don't work. Like most people don't know how to do it and they kind of backfire and you like devalue your product and then you have a bunch of on and on and on.”

“People think software, building software is hard. Pricing is, is, uh, is the hardest part of, of, it was extremely, extremely difficult.”

“Like, there are venture capitalists who will say, if you've raised less than a million dollars, you are effectively bootstrapped. Like, that's how they view it. And for me, usually the number is in the two 50 to 500 K. I think that's when you start to transition and like, oh, you're pretty well, you know, you're like…”

“once you get to like, 10, 20, 50 paying customers, I think that you can take the credit card requirement off and create more of a pipeline for yourself.”

“paying someone who has actually done the thing is way more valuable than pretty much any other peer group. Because that is then the answer, and you have a relatively high confidence that that's right.”

“If you're at a few million, maybe you can allocate 20% of your marketing budget to, to brand marketing, but, but until then, like you gotta be like hand to hand.”

“Same, same thing with, oh, you should build an audience in order to build your, it's like, oh, that's a real long way to do it. I built an audience. I built multiple audiences over You know, several years, and it's, you know, 15 years or whatever, and it's, um, way more time than sales you will make if it's for SaaS,…”

“And then those customers, if you go to try to sell this app, now they are a liability because you have to service them and there is no ongoing revenue.”

“Like, you can't, you can't make money on a product doing cold outreach at 29.”

“And so for us, it seemed easier to go in a very competitive market. You know, you know, there's demand, um, but where we can just grab that small percentage of the market. Uh, and if we can manage to do that, that's already huge for us because, you know, we're so small, we don't have to earn as much as, as the big…”

“for you to have 300,000 free users, There are tens of millions of users worldwide, right? If not hundreds of millions, and like how many, there's a rhetorical question, but how many software markets have that many users? There's probably electronic signature there, you know, we can think of a few, but there aren't,…”

“All things being equal, I would lean towards naming them, if you want to know the truth. But you do have to weigh the pros and cons of potential liability, which again, I think is low, but it's not legal advice. But I found the more specific you can be about positioning against specific incumbents, I think is, is…”

“HIPAA compliance is not out of the realm of bootstrappers. Now, if you want SOC II compliance, that becomes pretty pricey, pretty quick. HIPAA compliance is different. And of course, this is not legal nor HIPAA advice that I'm giving you, but I have known many bootstrappers, even folks who were on tight budgets, who…”

“TAM, total addressable market, is top down. It's coming from the MBA at Harvard saying, well, we could capture 30, 50, 80% of an entire market and then it's worth decabillion dollars. That's top down. When you are bootstrapping or mostly bootstrapping, I think in terms of bottom up. So I call that term, total reachable…”

“The thing is, is most developers don't know how to build products, they know how to write code.”

“They're going to churn way higher than businesses. They'll churn similar To consumers. I don't know if it's exactly, I mean, I'm sure it depends on the space, but no, you're going to have a high churn, low price point, high price sensitivity. Therefore you are going to need a very wide funnel, a lot of incoming…”

“it's great to watch it grow in your index funds, but it is not a major driver of wealth. It's more of a way to maintain wealth or to grow wealth, but not to actually make wealth.”

“Basically, the way that I think about it, it's, it's basically, like, you're basically, like, building in a hundred percent monthly churn, which, like, I spent so much time thinking about how to reduce churn, like, the fact that you would design your software business model in a way that, like, hey, let's have a…”

“two exceptional people who are on the same page with a similar shared vision can build incredible things. But the moment you get to three, four, five, it can often derail that vision.”

“I often say, look, if you have an audience, great. That is a great advantage. But if you don't, don't go build one for SaaS. You know, if you're going to do info products or courses or books, of course, but for SaaS, I think it's more trouble than it's worth, and the time would be better spent doing SEO or product…”

“it gave us a great zero to one, but it is not going to be the thing that gets you like one to 10 or anything like that. I, I agree that it shouldn't be a main priority for SaaS founders.”

“And that's the thing that, that I see with a lot of folks who do launch that second product is they're launching it to escape. Usually it's to escape something that's not working or, and they're not putting in the hard work on the first thing. And then they take four months, five months, six months to build it and…”

“that's why I don't like it when people use Basecamp as an example, because usually it's to justify an opinion or justify an approach to business that I just don't see working for anyone else.”

“thinking that any developer can build a SaaS app is incorrect. In fact, the vast majority cannot.”

“Sure, because these numbers, this is the thing with vanity metrics, and I'm gonna say YouTube subscribers are vanity metrics, more so, like, email subscribers are, like, not vanity metrics, right? Unless you're, if your open rate's really low, whatever, certain people beat their lists up. But, like, email subscribers…”

“if I was growing a company looking to exit in the next few years, I would not be worried about profit. I would be pumping every dollar I had back into the engine to get it to grow faster and grow bigger.”

“Their biggest weaknesses are they don't listen to customers. They don't move fast enough. Usually they don't have the best developers, designers, because they don't want to work there. So their software is usually pretty crappy. There's a lot of politics, and usually their customers don't like their software, don't…”

“there are actually times to not listen to your current customers. And I say current under underlying current, because those customers are not the ones that are going to get you to your dreams or where you're trying to go. Forget dreams, the next milestone. It's like, oh shoot, we've got to change customer base.”

“you hire enough people, you've basically created this complex system of scaling that back is super hard. Like imagine you have 10 or 15 people and you're like, I don't even know if we can reduce this to two or three people at this point, because I don't know how to do seven of the things that are being done by other…”

“starting a software company and then being that attached to it, I think is, see the, the talk from Dr. Sherri Walling a few years ago where she talks about how founders look at their logo and it stimulates the same part of their brain as when they look at pictures of their kids. So kind of literally lending credence to…”

“Don't go to me. Go to the person whose audience is, like, hyper engaged on a really tight subject, And even if you want to be even more creative, go to different languages. So we have people crushing it in Spanish, crushing it in Portuguese. And it's like when we want to do things now, we have like a hundred and then…”

“I think really experienced founders who know what they're doing are probably in the 80 plus, 85, 90 plus, you know, like it's like eight or nine out of 10 are at least in the ballpark.”

“you'll hear this sometimes, if, if you come across a really good person, then just hire them, but when you're a small company, you do tend to have very specific needs, and there is less room for that.”

“Where I get on an interview with anybody, developer, designer, support person, and I'm looking at their resume saying, oh, they worked at Google. They worked at Facebook. They must be really good at that. No, don't do that. Or they had, they were there for seven years and they became a senior, blah, blah, blah. It's…”

“Unless there is a, a network effect where getting free users actually increases the value of your business. In almost every case, almost every case I see of an early stage or a new entrepreneur trying this, it's a mistake.”

“You have proven so very little until someone gives you money, specifically with B to B SaaS. You've proven almost nothing until someone gives you their credit card.”

“If I was bootstrapping this and actually trying to make money on it, freemium pushes out your revenue, right? It pushes out that revenue line. And if you have a bunch of funding, that's okay. And you can play the long game like Dropbox did and the other freemium players that we could mention off top of our head, Figma,…”

“And usually the buyout is a little less, it's usually less than market rate for that, that app if you're buying them out in cash, because it just should be, right? Because you're left with the business and you now have to slash get to run it.”

“literally going after two verticals at the start, it's not a hard pass for me. Just because we talk about niching down or focusing our product doesn't mean that we can't have a couple highly related verticals, especially if both of them onboard and use the product in the same way, even if the sales process is slightly…”

“Like, you can't grow three SaaS companies at once. No one does this, right? It's an anti-pattern. You can grow one and then have a couple that are flailing around, and so if people see you tweeting about one, two, three, four, five different projects at once, it's pretty obvious that you're not giving any one of those…”

“I think about one percent of tech startups should consider raising venture, I think about nine percent should consider raising what I call indie funding, which is Tiny Seed, Indie.VC, Upeka, and the other Alt-VC funds that you might hear about, and then 90% should probably bootstrap.”

“Don't bootstrap a two-sided marketplace. Unless you already have one of the sides. That's, this is Rob's rule of two-sided marketplaces, we'll call it.”

“So the third thing that you should, for the most part, never do, is build a second product because your first one has stopped growing.”

“The fifth thing you should probably maybe never do if you're bootstrapping is translate your application into multiple languages, and I mean spoken or written languages, not coding type languages.”

“Realistically, if you're not losing deals to competitors, and your churn is low, stop building.”

“The problem is, if you just listen to your customers and build what they tell you, A, you're gonna build a bunch of crappy features that are disparate and all over the place, and B, they're pretty much gonna have you replicate whatever competitor they switched over from, because that's the tool they, they used.”

“I'm usually less worried about competitors replicating, you know, my features and, and trying to, uh, I guess, out, out innovate me because if you're the one innovating, then, you know, they can never get ahead of you.”

“My thoughts on pausing are that I wouldn't start a business that allowed pausing. That just means it's really a high churn business. It is a business that probably shouldn't be a subscription in reality, and you're forcing it into the subscription model, and to adopt a pausing feature really does dilute the Benefit of…”

“I feel this way about launching a second product. Usually, you probably shouldn't. The odds are good. It's gonna take away your focus and be a distraction.”

“You launch, everyone's gonna approach you about white labeling. Almost always a waste of time. Not always, but most of the time.”

“when somebody asks me, usually to me it's, I'm leaning towards you probably shouldn't do it. Most of the time it's a bad idea, and what I noticed, I don't, I don't know, This is what you've noticed, too. It's usually more of a reactive thing. They're reacting to something. They're reacting to, like, slow growth”

“I always say like two sided marketplaces. Here's my advice. Don't. That's because you're kind of, it's like starting two SaaS apps at once. It's just, you're fighting things on two fronts.”

“Now there is this flip side, the indie hacker lifestyle dream, right, that you're talking about where you get the portfolio and you're, you know, perpetually traveling or you're just working the four hour work week. That's not a bad thing, but it, to your point, it hampers momentum. You will rarely, if ever, get to…”

“your customers are not going to have the product sense to be able to design your product. They don't have the vision, For what it needs to look like. They don't have the vision for what the UX needs to be to keep the elegance in. They see a problem they have and the shortest path to a solution, and they're not worried…”

“if you take someone who does product management at a large company or a mature product that's been around for 10 years, and you put them in the spot of, we don't have product market fit, or we have like five customers, get us there, to where we've built something that people want and are willing to pay for. Usually…”

“if you let customers guide you, most of the time, they'll just have you rebuild MailChimp, or Basecamp, or HubSpot. They'll just, they'll just have you replicate that, because that's what they've used, and that's what they know, and they'll just keep suggesting those features, and pretty soon you will have a, just a…”

“it doesn't work when you're building software for a hundred dollars a month or when you're selling to the end user. But if you are selling to some corporate procurement person, AB is 100% correct. I've seen it myself. Ridiculous checklist requirements are very common.”

“I think a big mistake that you're making is if you're going to sell to accountants, self-serve is 99% not going to work. Pretty much it's not going to work. I never say never and always and these kinds of things, but I cannot imagine trying to sell to non-technical folks, especially folks who are busy and bill by the…”

“bootstrappers don't make that work. The only time they make it work is when they have one side of the marketplace already, right? They have an audience, like the tropical MBA guys did when they started Dynamite Jobs.”

“If you are in the zero to 300 K, the only things you should be outsourcing are tasks that don't have to do with sales. This is you doing bookkeeping, automation stuff, like you should be doing all of the selling if you're at that level.”

“being anti-funding is like being anti-Hammer. Hammer is just a tool, and it's right sometimes, and it's not other times”

“But if I were running a SaaS aimed at a niche, community would be far down on the list of things that I wanted to start. Unless I felt like there was an extreme vacuum in the space and I already had an audience. Where I could kickstart that community.”

“You don't have to be lucky to get rich. You don't have to be lucky to build an audience. You don't have to be lucky to build a SaaS company to 10 K a month that can change your life. You don't have to be lucky to build an incredible network. You don't have to be lucky to be a successful entrepreneur.”

“I see the companies who don't have a technical co-founder where it's just a subject matter expert or a subject matter expert and a salesperson, for example, the number one issue for them constantly ongoing, sometimes for years is the product.”

“We are pretty, uh, bullish about Marketing's role post acquisition. So through product activation, getting to value within the product, product retention, uh, continued engagement, you know, customer education, expansion, customer marketing, right? Like really even post solving the customer's problem. So we think of…”

“The other actually thing I would say about funnels is that they have this like sort of beginning and an end and we're in recurring revenue business here. Like we're all trying to, you know, build a product that serves customers over the long term, builds a relationship with them, you know, high LTV sort of…”

“Churned customers would probably not be the right fit for this type of research. And the, the reason being that we want to learn from the customers who have been successful with your product. I'm not saying there's no place for win loss analysis or exit interviews. There absolutely is. And, you know, we should be…”

“it comes back to my rule. Don't bootstrap a two-sided marketplace. That's exactly what this is, unless you have access to one of the sides.”

“If it's an obvious idea and a huge competitive market with large incumbents, you know what? Those guys are going to take that. That's they're going to own that piece. And so like building your startups around that and thinking like, oh, I'm smarter. I'm more nimble. I'm doing whatever. I'm like, you know what? Like…”

“Usually when you get to about a million ARR, sometimes 1.5 million, if you are growing quickly, and growth is a big key to this, and your churn is not super high, there's a bunch of factors, but if it's a really strong business, that's when you can start asking for revenue multiples.”

“if you want to make money from something, then know that you're gonna have to Do away with your technical preferences, and there's a decent chance you're going to build stuff that's going to be too simple for you, or you acquire something and it has a shitty code base that you don't want to work on.”

“The reality is, is most of the people making these technology decisions are developers, and developers don't care about the licensing, as long as it allows them to do what they want to do.”

“if I take myself out of the trenches, the technical trenches, so to speak, then I lose that sense of pain that customers might be feeling that would then go into the next version of the product.”

“When you hire a bunch of contractors, you typically get a bunch of task level thinkers. And that's not bad as long as you have a project and or an owner level thinker at the top able to manage that.”

“The content bar, especially with AI now, but even before, even before that, like, 1015 years ago, I could hire someone to put out articles and just build links, like almost buy links from, what were they, blog networks or whatever, and you could rank in Google, and you can't do that anymore, right? So it is more…”

“The biggest mistake I see is someone building, trying to build the exact same thing as a bigger competitor, and they'll be like, well, the market's huge. I just need one percent of it. It's like, no, no one's going to stand up. You have to be opinionated and either have unique feature set or unique positioning and be…”

“every single time I've seen someone have that transition, they then Have to stop and say, okay, but what do I want for myself besides money? And it's like this self realization that I feel like you can't ever have good clarity around that until you reach that goal.”

“is to make the economics work, it will have to be different than, certainly than Silicon Valley, but even than, like, the tiny seeds in the indie.vcs, you would be at a level, I would say a level lower, just in valuations, in order to make the economics ever work.”

“I think that you really don't need to worry about this, particularly on your way to 10 K in MRR. I think it's much like all other aspects of building a startup. You need to sort of create good problems. And I would turn my attention to this personally, probably somewhere between 500 K and a million dollars a year in…”

“the cost of remitting these taxes doesn't scale up dramatically, and that's why I'm uncomfortable saying I'm going to pay seven or 10% or whatever it might be in perpetuity on every single recurring transaction.”

“I don't know that if you've worked at a job for five or 10 years in the same technology, same code base, I don't know that you have that malleability. And so I think maybe that was an advantage that I had, having worked in so many code bases.”

“In, in SaaS, people try freemium, and it usually doesn't work. Like, if you're funded, you have buckets of money, you can do it”

“classically the most challenging thing for developers is breaking out of the assumption that the hardest part is writing the code that truly the easiest part is writing the code.”

“I'm a little more cautious about taking core parts of my application and shelling them out to, to a no code platform. I think, you know, cause there's always going to be platform risk, right?”

“And pretty much the blanket advice I give is like, it's almost not worth doing if you're not going to raise, let's say, a hundred grand. Maybe for like, 75, you know, I mean, because it's, it's time consuming, it's distraction, it is legal fees, and again, how you structure it, it can be more or less expensive.”

“If you're growing quickly enough, the marketing almost doesn't matter, especially if you've got that expansion revenue.”

“people will just buy this on their own, which like is not the case. Never is the case. Unless you're talking about like a very, very thin kind of like PLG use case.”

“one of the things that drives me nuts is how people will tell folks like, oh yeah, there's born sellers. And, and I, I think that's, that's BS, right? I think it's just practice.”

“in the cases of a lot of these smaller products that you're trying to get into the marketplaces, I think that building it first without doing a ton of validation is probably the way to go.”

“You can lose product market fit. You can have it and you can lose it because the market will drift if you don't chase it, but either with features or with, uh, you know, I say chase, constantly work on refining it, right? Keeping it. You can lose it as fast as you found it.”

“The plural of anecdote is not data. I think Sherry heard that when she was getting her PhD in psychology and they did a bunch of research. They said, yeah, a bunch of stories does not mean data. It doesn't mean qualitative and quantitative are not both important, but this is similar to the startup founder who has one…”

“If you're 18 and you've built a business to the point where someone offers you nine million dollars, you take that money. That changes your life.”

“And the truth is, and this is the big one, Rob, as you know, it's like your team wants more opportunity. So if you decide that you want to stall, you're inadvertently slowly dying.”

“Like start by just freeing up your calendar and do the work that a COO would do and get the business to a place where it can actually absorb that type of talent and that cost structure. Because that's not a very efficient way to, to spend money.”

“where I think a lot of people make the mistake is the outcome goals you have to delegate is a hundred percent of your inbox and a hundred percent of your calendar.”

“Level four is sales. Now I actually think most founders should keep those conversations. If you're buying companies, that should be you. If you're selling, that should be until it becomes 50% of your calendar. If you're spending 50% of your calendar on sales or biz dev or whatever type activities, like that's when it…”

“If your experience today with hiring people is that they don't do it right, then I know the problem. He's staring at you in the mirror and you have to confront that.”

“if you put your heads together and kind of hashed out things and got on the same page in front of a whiteboard, you'd save a lot of time over trying to do that overriding. Like the alternative is go asynchronous and just write, write a lot and provide a lot of context, which I know teams like Basecamp are a big fan of…”

“funded startups fail when they run out of money. Bootstrap startups fail when the founder runs out of motivation.”

“Like the best example of this is all these like copywriting AI companies, you know, basically like you could do whatever it is that they do. Uh, using Open GPT and it'll be much cheaper than their interface. But the fact is their customers don't care that much. They just want the value from it. And so if it's. 25 times…”

“If you have high performers on your team, in no way are they going to do that, because high performers, they want to perform. I mean, they want to take pride in the craft of their work, and they want to do great stuff”

“hours as a proxy for, for getting work done is totally meaningless.”

“A trustful approach is you share all of that with your employees. So they feel like they are partners in the business. I mean, you tell your employees the same thing you would tell your co-founders.”

“if you are not transparent with your, with your employees and telling them what's really going on, they will write their own stories and you'll, you'll lose far more people who just sort of imagine that things are terrible than just telling the answer.”

“Competition doesn't matter. In my opinion, when you're talking about the beginning of seeding something, I mean, look at you and drip. I mean, you went into a space that had an insane amount of competition and you just executed and executed and all of a sudden you built a mountain just as big as the other people's…”

“Because essentially, if you want to make money and you want to guarantee to make money, go into a huge market, Compete with other people and just build something that people are already using and that's definitely makes money, like a CRM. Just take your own, you know, niche version of it.”

“money in your personal life saves you hours. Money in your business saves you years.”

“when I say don't bootstrap a two-sided marketplace, the end of that sentence is unless you already have access to one or both sides of that marketplace.”

“those enterprise customers, like you can charge thousands of dollars, right? Five, six figure in ARR average contract value deals, and they are easy to work with. They provide great feedback to your product and they pay back really well and they have solid ROI. So I always encourage user, um, fellow founders to there's…”

“better to be like the really amazing player in that calculator space than to invent a new thing, which everybody then has to invest so much mental energy in placing it in their brain.”

“don't bootstrap two-sided marketplaces unless you already have one of the sides, right?”

“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.”

“the biggest misunderstanding of that is that people that work in these organizations that are extroverts have to necessarily interact with coworkers to actually get that energy out. The vast majority of time I go to a co-working space because I need to get that energy out, but I actually just interact with people that…”

“One thing that I'll say is, if you're starting a company, never tell people that you're never going to sell or go public. I'm not saying they did that. Other people have said, employees said they were under the impression they would never sell or go public. My guess is they didn't say that, but that would be a mistake…”

“A lot of people don't understand, especially when you're young and you're being employed, that the courage and the agency it takes to be able to say, yes, you may have funded this company, but I've, I'm building it. So I, I deserve to be a co-founder. I deserve to own a large enough share of the company.”

“I think over time you realize that if you take entrepreneurship like a profession, then your job really is to come up with the original idea, the funding, the vision, but a lot of the execution you're actually better off handing off to other people.”

“A lot of successful bootstrap startups are unfortunately because they cannot invest and their growth is slowed down. When they do want to exit, they only can exit at like one X or 1.5 X of their ARR.”

“You should never hire a C-level person in the first, you know, in the first, you need to get to a lot of millions. I'll put in ARR before someone has a C in front of their title, unless they're a founder, in my opinion.”

“That's the pattern that we've seen in bootstrappers who get it done. Usually it's one or two-person teams.”

“it is a certain level of privilege to be able to bootstrap a lot of the time. It means that you have Either it's a bunch of savings, you made a ton of money doing something else, or a lot of the time your spouse makes enough money so that they can cover the whole, you know, household.”

“So, if anything, I actually think it's easier to raise money when you have no revenue, if you have a good story.”

“If you don't have a strong network or some type of in and you'd want to build a B to B SaaS company, 10, 20, thirty million. I have not seen someone be able to raise around at that point pre-revenue.”

“because they don't scale like SaaS, because they're often reliant on a single individual, not all the time, but often reliant on a personality or a personal brand. And the exit multiples aren't there, right? I mean, that's a part of why this works is that SaaS sells for such a crazy high multiple.”

“If you're going to take funding to be like, Hey, I would sell if I got an offer for twenty million, right? To be upfront about that, and if the investor doesn't want to invest, then I don't think you should take the money, because you're going to have this conflict now. When you get that offer for twenty million,…”

“Is I actually going against the, I think, traditional wisdom is I try to keep as little cash in my home as possible. Some people want to pay their home off, but I view, I view cash in a home as money that's tied up and money that I can't be using for all these other things.”

“languages, computer languages don't last 50 years, right? They last, I don't know, 1015 years, especially in the web”

“Sometimes when you overly optimized for revenue early on, you damage your chances for creating something much bigger later on.”

“And you can absolutely hire contractors to do task level stuff. It's harder to find folks who do project stuff, but you can find project level, but I don't know contractors who are like that owner level strategic thinkers, but I do know folks who will come on full time with you and be on that journey with you.”

“I think the one other thing is two-sided marketplaces are possible to bootstrap, but I think you need an audience. Not need is not the right word. I think you're almost destined to fail if you do not already have an audience with one side of that network, right? That you're not trying to build bootstrap a two-sided…”

“no one should ever sell their company. And you know what? That's just not realistic. Because people don't want to run the same company for 40 years. A, it gets boring. B, there's a lot of risk. You can have all of it, you can have tens of millions of dollars of net worth tied up in an asset that you have no liquidity…”

“And that's why I always say you can have an autopilot business for about 12 to 18 months has been my rule of thumb.”

“oftentimes when I see bootstrapped or mostly bootstrap companies with three or four co-founders, usually they're too many. Usually there's at least one too many and there's like a weak link. There's someone who's not Maybe holding up there”

“until someone has, I don't know, 10% equity. It depends on the person, but until someone has 10% equity, they don't really feel like an owner to your point of, Giving someone half a percent or one percent, it doesn't tend to mean that much.”

“Most SaaS apps have almost zero product risk, and that's why you'll hear me say, don't go build the product because there's no risk there. The risk usually is in the market, or in the execution.”

“I mean, and that's the, probably the most common mistake that I see with early founders is, especially developers and designers who think that the product is everything, where in fact it's like, 25% of the things, and, and really all the other things, the marketing, and making sure you, you hit the market right, is the…”

“someone who's that price conscious, that they're like, I'm gonna save 20 bucks so that I can remove the branding, probably isn't going to send you anything anyways. Like, they're too small or too early in business or whatever, for whatever, wherever they're including a link, like, nobody's gonna see it.”

“The folks I've seen who try to transition from working in an office to working from home usually have a pretty rough transition. And that would be a, I would say at least a yellow flag for me if they didn't have You know, pre-COVID work from home experience.”

“there's this terrible quote, but like move fast, break things from Mark Zuckerberg. And you kind of lose that over time as you gain customer trust, as you are more and more relied upon as the industry standard to really throw something against the wall like that could really rock the boat and disrupt, you know, what is…”

“if you're a product person, you never take customer suggestions and build what they want because you wind up with crap software. You wind up with a million settings. You wind up with terrible UX. You wind up with terrible UI because customers are not product people. They're not experts for the most part in general.”

“using the thought of what would I do if I sold my company as a reason not to do it in my mind is a mistake.”

“I would even posit that a hundred grand in the bank is enough for most people to take a year off over multiple years.”

“I think it's very, very hard to build something into the seven figure run rate without some type of, of brand and community.”

“if you're adding features, then just don't add it to these guys' plan, and just be like, eventually, some of those people will be like, hey, I want this feature, in which case you're like, great, now you need to upgrade. Out of your lifetime plan or whatever.”

“if we propose this idea of work-life balance. We're essentially saying that work and life are two kind of opposite things that can balance each other out, i.e. the two kind of nodes on the same spectrum, and for you to have balance, there needs to be some interplay between those two things. And the reason I don't think…”

“you can be a bootstrap founder and run yourself into the ground and, and work 90 hour weeks. I've seen folks raise 20, thirty million dollars of venture capital and work eight hour days. It, it happens, like, and, and be happy with their business.”

“there's nothing faster that will take you from a multiple of EBITDA to a multiple of revenue when you go to sell your company than to have recurring revenue”

“Instead of trying to figure out how to do it yourself, I would, in all cases, Hire an M&A professional. Look, that's not like, that's not what I do for a living. So I say that without trying to sound, you know, like you can't hire me to do that. So I'm not trying to make it a commercial for me, but I think they're…”

“I contest that it's, it's great for info products and that it's a lot less useful for SaaS.”

“I don't think you can grow multiple businesses at once because of the focus that it takes, unless you are in that Richard Branson situation where you have a bunch of budget and you truly have GMs or CEOs or someone who's just, has the owner mindset.”

“It's near impossible to grow that many businesses, certainly even two or three all simultaneously. But I do, I do think back to that time and think I didn't know the podcast host was going to take off. It wasn't at a living level at that point. The other ones did look promising and they could have, Potentially worked,…”

“And I don't think most developers have this, the product skill. It's a totally different skill set. You know, writing code and architecting and building a feature is a skill set and scaling and all that stuff is a skill set.”

“there's almost always a way that more money gets you there faster.”

“There's all, it's not binary anymore. Bootstrap versus venture. It's I can bootstrap. I can do one round. I can take money from tiny seed. I can take money from Indie.bc. I can do revenue based financing if I get to the point where that makes sense, or I can take venture, you know, it's like this whole buffet of…”

“the way you split your equity should be based less on equality and everybody getting the same and more on contribution.”

“I do think a lot of people make the mistake of wanting to build a SaaS app, which is awesome, and we all aspire to do that, but trying to do that as your first step is a real challenge.”

“Now, once you get, I mean, once you get to product market fit and you have customers and you start having channels at work, it kind of is, it's extremely repeatable. And usually there is a pretty solid blueprint of how to go from there up, how to go from there to a million to ten million or whatever.”

“what I've truly learned is that ideas are both the most important thing and also the least important thing. And it's very, very interesting. So it's like at that beginning part, when you haven't started the business yet, they are the least important thing. And that's when people place too much importance on an idea.…”

“ultimately what I realized was founders didn't really need ideas. They needed education.”

“This is where you start to validate and sell a more complex product like a membership site or a SaaS. Like, just don't even go there until you've mastered the early level stuff.”

“We don't need a business plan if we're not raising capital or it's not super complex thing, or there's not 10 of us working on it.”

“for my bet, for my money, I'm probably gonna write a little bit of code and get it out there, and the learning starts with every bit of validation, and frankly, getting something out there quickly in this, if, if it's a small, small niche is not the right word, but if it is a micro idea, I would lean towards action…”

“It's even better if you get really big competitors, because these are way easier to compete against.”

“Word of mouth is usually the wrong answer.”

“It's not a software product. But you learn a lot. It's probably 70, 80% the same as building a SaaS.”

“And I think from a compatibility with, like, the user behavior perspective, not asking for credit card up front is definitely the way to go.”

“And I think the value in a software tool is incremental. You know, we were talking, uh, in a previous episode about like incremental steps versus like big major steps that would, you know, double or triple the size of the business. You know, building software to help people edit their podcast is cool, but not that…”

“One thing I would stay away from personally is using, uh, performance evaluations as some type of, Of thing that affects profit sharing. I think that that can be dangerous as different managers across a company might rate people differently. I also think, you know, if, if the performance evaluation, basically you…”

“Most of the successful founders I know don't have a lot of patience when it comes to their business. I might go so far as to say that for a bootstrapper, patience can be dangerous. It can lead to complacency and comfort with the status quo. There's something about impatience that can drive you to push things forward in…”

“And while that is totally possible, it is not actually the optimal way that I, you know, in my experience to build a big business quickly. Really, if you look at more of the SASTR model, which is, it's going after the big ticket, the fortune 1000 or the fortune 5000, and it's the high touch sales and it's Big contract…”

“Not that there's never a reason, you know, I mean, you can have code that is so bad that you can't add features and it takes you a month to do a days worth of work or whatever. Of course that happens, but it's, it's a lot less frequent than I think developers tend to make it out to be.”

“is this app complicated and is going to need 24 seven support and it has a lot of moving parts and it's going to be hard to scale and there's going to be performance stuff and there's a lot of things moving around. I think of like an analytics app or like, you know, drip, which sucked in a bunch of analytics. It was…”

“I feel like for a lot of folks that if you have something that's working and you have the confidence to go with it and keep it going, just because the media out there in the startup world says, oh, you need to have a technical founder with a non-technical founder. You don't have to believe that if you have enough…”

“So as a rough guide, I would say that the revenue multiple starts to kick in as an approach or a valuation approach at, like you said, a million dollars in ARR. And that's not like an absolute hard and fast number, but the reason it's chosen there is typically because the business has started to achieve a level of…”

“it's anywhere between two at the bottom, where it's something that's really, really flat, stretching up to eight, eight times I've seen, kind of, private exe guys comfortably go to, they sort of tend to tap out a bit after that, and then north of that is very much the realm of strategics that's very, very specific and…”

“There was also just like a stress shift. Like we just became a lot less stressed out. I still worked extremely hard. We still all worked extremely hard, but there was a lot less pressure of like, Hey, you have to hit this one tiny home run of convincing one out of a thousand VCs to give you a million dollars, give you…”

“You take on investors, you have bosses. You take on certain clients, you know, in professional service work, you have bosses.”

“the first year to two years of spend with a VC money is so wildly inefficient, by definition, because you're experimenting like crazy, right? So you have this massive amount of inefficiency between validating the idea, getting the right team, trying all these different marketing channels, figuring out what works, et…”

“the fastest way to stop making and testing new ideas is to have your time taken up by a full-time, full-time company really.”

“Because oftentimes, like, the founder isn't the best person to run a hundred million dollar company. Because a hundred million dollar company with xt thousand employees Is very different skill set than what you and I have talked about today.”