Saas Companies that Anyone Can Start with Rob Walling

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