Episode 737 | Key Takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2024 (With Derrick Reimer)
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It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I sit down with Derek Reimer as we review the key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2024, which happened just two or three weeks back in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

You'll hear us discuss in this episode several of the most notable talks as well as some takeaways that we received from the speakers. In addition, I give an overview of the event and I talk about how it sold out in only seven weeks. And there were many folks who wanted to attend the event that weren't able to get a ticket. So if you'd like to attend the next MicroConf, it's going to be in New Orleans next March.

♪♪

Eric Reimer, thanks for joining me on the show to talk through MicroConf Europe. Yeah, it's my pleasure to be back. Just sinking back into central time, having left Europe yesterday. So you woke up at 5, 5 a.m. all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I get glimpses of what it's like to be a true morning person. Indeed. I love flying west. It's so nice. And then flying east is like, oh, no, I need to take gobs of melatonin and still wake up. Actually, the first night I was there,

You know, because I got two or three hours sleep on the flight to Dubrovnik. And then first night I was there, I stayed up just till 8, which is like a victory. I'm so tired. Oh, my gosh. So I take melatonin. And I figure if I can, usually if I can make it to like 4 or 5, I'm super happy, right? So I wake up and it's all dark outside. And it's like I got to go to the bathroom. And I look at my clock and

It's 10.30 p.m. And I was kind of awake. And I was like, no, I just took a nap. And I was like, I need to take more melatonin now to get down. So I took again and then I was out until 3.30. And I was like, no, that's not enough. So I hate flying east. Yeah, it's tough. I don't have a ton of experience with it. And it's funny, I was chatting with Einar on the opening night and

regaling with my story of the 12 hour layover that I had on my way out to Europe because we came a little bit early to do a little vacation ahead of time. And then he was just laughing at me like, oh, you sweet summer child, you don't know the tricks. Here's how I would not do that. Someone who's gone to Europe a bunch. Yeah, you do start to get a little travel hacky with it on the same way.

So this was your first time to MicroConf Europe, and you've been to many of the U.S. events, almost all of them, if I recall, right? All but the first one, because I didn't know you then. Very first one. Yeah, yeah, what a trip. I guess to kick it off, let me give folks a...

like an overview of the European event, maybe compared to the US event. Because the US event pre-COVID was 300 people and post-COVID has been about 225, 250. And the Europe event is the biggest event we've ever done in Europe. Like this year, I think it was 150-ish.

maybe a little more, 155 attendees. And that's the biggest it's ever been. We sold it out in seven weeks. And that's been the new thing, right? Since COVID is, obviously there was a huge drop off. And then we feel the momentum has come back to the event. So I expect Atlanta sold out, this sold out, and I expect MicroConf, New Orleans. This is the announcement. Like no one's heard that before now. Yeah. Aside from, unless you were in Dubrovnik, New Orleans, which is going to be next March. I expect that to sell out as well in the next couple of months. So-

150-ish, 150 to 160 attendees. The room was packed, great energy. There were 30 countries represented. And interesting tidbit, we had 30 better half tickets. The guest passes where people can, you know, your spouse or significant other can join you at an evening event. 30 of those. So it was like, that's 20% of the attendees brought a spouse or significant other, which I believe you yourself did. I did, yeah. Yeah.

And that was really awesome because I feel like I got to meet a lot of people's plus ones and that gives you a different sense of the person. For sure when my wife's with me, she's hyper-social and very good at

at getting conversations steered towards like, I want to talk about you as a person and not just the startup you're working on. Whereas a lot of times for me, a microconf conversation will just be like, oh, what are you building? Here's what I'm building. What are you struggling with? And those are all interesting, but when you start to get a better sense of who the person is, that's where real connections start to form. Yeah, big time. I like that about

I don't know of other events that do it. I'm sure there might be some, but one of the important things that we've always emphasized is family, relationships, you know, kids if you have them, spouse if you have one. It's like, this is all part of your life. And we're doing this to better our life, not to make a dent in the universe. Like we're doing it because we want our lives to be better. And your lives are not better if you torture relationships.

And so that is something I enjoyed about this event was that a lot of folks brought, you know, as you said, significant others. That hotel though. So we, Dubrovnik, we've done it there four times. We've done Europe, Micrograph Europe, I believe 11 or 12 times and four of them have been in Dubrovnik. So no matter how much I say on this podcast, it's the Dubrovnik Palace Hotel, I believe it's called.

And I say it is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in. The rooms are nice, but the view, every room has a full slider view of the Adriatic. You have a deck and all this stuff.

I say it and then people don't believe me. So when you got there, was it like one of the best views you've ever had in your entire life out of a hotel? Oh, hands down. Yeah. I mean, it's that place is just, yeah, it's all about the scenery. And I didn't fully know what to expect having never been to Croatia before. I've never been to Dubrovnik, of course. But like you get there and you just feel like you're in another land.

The landscape is just different than anything I've seen in the US. It's just kind of its own thing and you feel like you're transported into another world and there's not a bad sight line to be seen in that place. It's pretty magical and that's why we keep coming back to it. And I don't know...

I mean, basically, I asked the attendees at the end, like, let us know, do you want to come back here again? Because it is a hotel that it's hard to get to. I mean, for me, for us, right, coming from the US, it's just a little few more hops than I would like. But aside from that, there's just no drawback to it. You know, it's such an amazing venue.

So with that preamble, I mean, I'd like to get into the talks and, you know, hear your thoughts and stuff, talk about the excursions, because that's something we've started to do over the past few years is we've reshaped and reprogrammed the event, right? Because it used to be nine talks in two days, and now it's like five or six talks. And we fill in the rest of that, sometimes with workshops and all the time with excursions where you get out. There was what, kayaking this year? There was wine tasting, which I believe you did. There was like a boat ride to a

island and a kind of scavenger hunt. There was some other stuff. I actually don't remember what all of them were, but let's kick off with excursions before we get into the talks. Like tell us, you know, why, like you picked wine tasting. What was the logic there? And then I guess generally, do you feel like the excursions are a benefit to the event or that you prefer to still watch two or three more talks?

Yeah, I think the excursions are definitely a benefit. I remember the first few years of going to MicroConf just feeling like almost I'd been sitting in a classroom all day long. Not in a bad way. It's good information coming from the stage, but sometimes it's like information overload and then you're trying to fit hallway track type conversations in between the cracks and you're just completely exhausted at the end of the day. Maybe more so if you're introverted like me and a lot of people in that room are, I think. Yeah.

So yeah, the excursions are nice because we go to lunch and then it's like, all right, you break after lunch for whatever activity you chose. I chose the wine tasting partially because I figured it would just be like a good chill environment to sit around and have kind of those ad hoc conversations with folks.

Sometimes I think it's a little more difficult when there's a big activity. And for me, I was like, I don't know if I want to pack hiking boots and whatever else would be necessary for the more rigorous activities. But yeah, so my excursion, I can say we went into Old Town, tried some olive oil and some wine, and it was fun. It's fun to just kind of walk around. And honestly, every time I've been on one of these excursions, there's always at least a small...

bus ride or something. And then you sit on the bus next to someone else and you, you have a, you know, conversation there and then it kind of continues or you kind of cycle around a bit as the excursion goes on. And yeah, it's, I think it's just a good way to put an activity around the hallway track. Cause I think sometimes just like literally standing in a hallway and having these conversations can feel a little bit stilted. So it's good to have something to, something to do while you're having those conversations. Yeah.

That's a good perspective on it. And that's really why we started it was like, how do we facilitate more relationships in a way that is fun? And

And we've done, you know, there was a hike. That's right. That was the other one I forgot. But yeah, we've done, what is it? It's kind of called beer tasting. What is it? It's just like a brewery tour is really what we've done. And we've done, gosh, all types of boating. And anytime there's water around, it's like, hey, you want to kayak? Hey, you want to get on a boat? So it's neat to be axe throwing. I think there was a trapeze even here in Minneapolis. Like Sherry took people to trapeze, which is kind of crazy to think about. But

Yeah, so those have been fun. And generally, we've never gotten complaints of like, oh, I wish there were more talks. No one has said that. So that was a change we were going to make in 2020. And then obviously didn't have the event for a couple years. And when we came back, we were like, yeah, let's really do that. Kind of change it up. So it has been fun. All right. So curious to get your take on this.

So yeah, I would say first and foremost, the location is just completely unique compared to, well, Las Vegas, where the US event used to be, and then even kind of being in more major US cities. It just is a completely different place.

It feels like it has a different vibe. Maybe a chiller vibe, I would say, being in this amazing old city on the Adriatic Sea. And I think that's a good thing. I think there's a certain energy that comes from the U.S. events, and I think that's partially due to the attendee size, too. So there's

There's more people, there's more connections to make. The rooms are a little bit louder just because there's more voices. And at the ERP event, it just felt, it felt around me a little bit of MicroConf US maybe six, seven years ago, right? Where a little bit earlier stages of the conference where there's fewer attendees and you can feel like you can make the rounds a little easier through the room. I honestly felt...

At US, I've been coming so long and there's an increasingly large cohort of people that I've just seen over and over again. So it's like now going to the US events, it's like, okay, there's like 30 people that I've definitely met before and would love to reconnect with. And that's almost a little daunting. So being a person based in the US going to Europe, there's a lot fewer people that I've met before at the event. So it feels kind of like an open, clean slate to go make new connections, which was cool.

Well, with that, let's dive into the talk. So we're not going to talk about every talk, obviously, but I'd like to touch on some key takeaways. I know you astutely took notes because you always take notes, but I was like, hey, you want to record a podcast with me after? And I'm sure that that's inspired you to be a little more...

A little more notey on this one. So the event kicked off with MicroConf's fan favorite, Peldy Gilzoni, who has done, I don't even know, man. This is his fourth MicroConf talk, maybe? He's come to the U.S. a couple times, then some Europe. And he doesn't really do conference talks anymore. But I emailed him and he's like, you know what, man? It's MicroConf. Like, I haven't done it in a while. Like, I'm going to come out and...

and do it. So I really appreciated it. And his topic was, what it was moving from like developer to entrepreneur to founder to manager. I don't remember the exact details of it, but yeah. Maker to founder to entrepreneur. Maker to founder to entrepreneur. Yeah, that's right. So what, yeah, what were, I don't know, one or more takeaways that you had from Pelti's talk? Yeah.

Yeah, he came right out of the gate. I feel like this was a very strong first talk to kind of set the stage. I mean, he, in my mind, is sort of a mainstay of the community. It's like, he's almost like at the base camp level of like, he's been there, he's been executing and just doing his thing and obviously doing really well as a company. I think he said there are millions in ARR, 29 employees. And yeah, he's obviously been kind of maturing in his

the way he thinks about business and that's what came out in this talk. So I think a lot of us are kind of absorbed in the

the ex-Twitter sphere of people who are trying to often reinvent the way they run their business or trying to just come up with all of the solutions from first principles, thinking of their business as a product. So that's something that Pelti talked about right out of the gate. This was a big mistake I made early on, was thinking about my business as my second product and thinking, you know what? I'm not going to do what the MBAs do and what people go to business school. That's for

big companies. I'm a small indie company and I'm just going to do stuff my own way. And I think he has learned over time that often you should just kind of follow the best practices. I mean, management theory is there for a reason. So employees like

standardized job titles actually because they want something to look reasonable on their resume should they decide to go work somewhere else and be able to have this transferable experience that's not just like a happiness engineer or something but an actual job title. People want to know if they're getting paid fairly. What are the salary bands for this role? How do you actually define whether someone fits in a role? It was very interesting to hear him talk about how he made that progression because I think even if your earlier stage

Well, the earlier you are, the easier it is, I think, to fall in this trap of like, no, we're just going to do things differently. We're just going to come up with our own rule book. So I love to hear this kind of wisdom, this hard-earned wisdom from a founder who's been at it a long time.

who's been at it. And it's not just the number of employees, but he's been doing it now 15 years. I believe he launched in 08 or 09. And this is the conclusion that pretty much everybody I know eventually comes to, is you think you're going to invent job titles or not have them or be a, whenever I hear I'm going to do a completely flat org or a democratic org, I'm always like, nope,

Yeah.

Because your product, you have to make a bunch of judgment calls and you're making stuff up basically as you go along. But your company, there is standards for that or at least frameworks for it. Now, I will say that I've never run an entire company of 30 people. That's bigger than any company I've run.

But even at 30, I don't know that I would have as much process as he does. Now, maybe that would be a mistake on my part. Maybe that's hubris, but I don't, I really don't like process. You know this, I'm not telling you anything, but you know, listeners, I tend to shy away from it. So I need someone who does bring process. Cause even at like a 10 person company, you need some process. And we had like no process at drip because I was just like, eh, this is whatever. We'll just do the things. And it worked. But then it was like, it wouldn't have scaled very well, you know? So there's this balance.

I think Peldy has gotten into the frameworks and used them well. I would almost dial it down a little bit from what he's done, but maybe, hey, maybe at 30 people that is what you need.

And his learnings are the reason there's a, I almost wasn't going to have a big section in the SAS playbook about job titles and salaries and management and when to hire managers and how management versus leadership, you know, just all that stuff. And the shock of after we got acquired and seeing a bigger 170 person company, how they operated and how differently it was from us. I was like, oh, there are some really helpful things that smart MBAs know. I'll discount half of what they know, but the other half is actually quite helpful. And the hard part is knowing, you know, which half,

Which half do you take?

Yeah, I think there certainly is the risk of overcorrecting on this, especially at different scale. I came away from this thinking, oh man, I need to be thinking how I could be maybe a little more rigorous about stuff and not just trying to make it up. But I'm also realizing for me, I'm a three-person company, so it can still look a lot different. But there's one overarching principle that he stated that I starred and underlined on my notes. He said the job of the CEO is to provide clarity

And that takes many different forms, right? So if you're talking about a job title or something, it's like, well, how can you make this as clear as possible so that the employee understands what's expected of them and you've made your expectations clear? Like you've communicated this appropriately and how do you communicate a product roadmap to your team and how do you communicate to your support people how they ought to respond to feature requests and bug reports and all this stuff. Like, it's like,

It's going to look lighter when you're smaller, but you still ultimately have to provide as much clarity as possible so that no matter how small, organization can function well.

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Our next talk was from Andrew Davies. He's the CMO at Paddle. I assume most people have heard of Paddle. And he brought in, it was data-driven approaches to growing your company, right? What were your thoughts on his talk? Yeah, I think he just sort of brought a little bit of his own story into the talk, talking about his experience from being kind of in the earlier stage startup land to now being the CMO of Paddle, of

big payment processing company. So he had some various tidbits. One thing that he talked about was the kind of general advice in the microconf community is raise your prices, like always be raising your prices. And he had some

some nuanced take on that to say, at least in the current climate, he's finding in the data that just blunt price increases are not working great. And so it's better to think a little bit more strategically, maybe especially in this current season, about how to segment your pricing, how to maybe play with packaging or add-ons or some ways to say, people who are getting the most value out of these features, you can put them in a different bucket and charge a higher price.

but just blanket raising your prices across the board. He's seeing some pushback against that in the data of not being super effective. And he also talked about

pricing localization as a growth driver. Even just this example of expressing your prices in euros if someone in Europe is viewing your pricing page. And I thought that was really interesting because it doesn't necessarily change under the covers. I don't think how your Stripe checkout flow works, but on your pricing page, if you express it in the localized currency, he has seen a nice conversion rate lift. So I thought that was an interesting one too. Yeah, it's always neat to have speakers who have

A large swath of data and Paddle certainly has a lot, a lot of subscription in SaaS companies. So I enjoyed Andrew's talk. One thing I forgot to say at the top when I was kind of giving the overview was this stat about the attendees in the room that I was shocked by. I was so shocked.

I asked producer Sonia to verify it. And then I said, can you please show me who responded yes to this? And it's that 24% of the companies in the room had at least 100K MRR. Wow. At least 1.2, 24%. Shocker. I was like, nah, I think they misread that. I think they meant ARR. And I started looking and I was seeing the guy and I was like, oh no, I know. I know them. I know them. I know them. So really impressive results.

to be in, to be honest. And you know there's a huge swath that are in the mid to high six figures in terms of

of ARR. So it's a side jag, but I just kind of wanted to mention that of like the quality level of the, you know, the accomplishment of the attendees was, and that was evident in the conversations. I have no qualms with someone coming who doesn't have, who's pre-revenue and there were, I don't know, 20% of the audience or something was pre-revenue, which is fine. That's great. Come and learn and hang out. But if all of the audience or 80% of the audience is pre-revenue, the conversations get a little old because everybody's looking for an idea. But when people have a business and you can

either learn from them, you can hear their war stories, you can maybe give them advice from your learnings like that. That's the fun of being at a microconf. Yeah, totally. Yeah. At risk of this sounding like it's, it's, you know, was all positive or something. That is one thing that I noticed about this microconf in particular. And there are ones in the past, I think, you know, in the US, I think you guys experimented pre COVID with like starter and growth tracks to try to kind of address the, the

The issue of people being at different stages. And I think whether it was by happenstance or just the way that the Europe event has grown over time, it did feel like a pretty good spectrum where there were people ahead of me and people behind me. And those are both interesting conversations to have.

Yeah, and I like to, in this podcast, kind of recap of the event, I like to call out things that went wrong because I don't want it to be a big puff piece of like, ooh, wasn't it great and everything was great? It was one of the best micro-confure apps we've run. It was in the top two for me personally. And someone asked me, well, what makes it great? And I was like...

The attendees, the energy, the vibe, the positivity, and then the talks were all good or better. Usually we do. I mean, usually. I spend so much time curating and trying to get. I want everything to be exceptional. That never happens. It just isn't the way it goes. You know, even a great speaker has an off talk or an off day or you're betting on new speakers and you coach them and you do everything you can. But when they get up there, sometimes it doesn't work. So there's always some mishaps. There's often logistical mishaps sometimes.

sprinklers going off in the middle of a room or small things like the audio popping or the audio qualities. The room's too hot. There's just all things, Wi-Fi goes out, there's all things that can go wrong. And I just kept waiting through the event. I was like, don't say to producer Sonia, wow, everything's going right and I'm so surprised. Don't say that, don't say that. Because the moment you say that, something's going to go wrong. But I just kept waiting. And then we got to the end and I was like...

That was one of the least stressful events I've run in a long time. And it was just a really positive event. I'm guessing that's how it felt on your end too as an attendee, I'm hoping. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It was honestly kind of hard to find anything to complain about, you know? It was pretty windy down by the ocean, I'll say that. Good point, yeah. Yeah. You guys couldn't have turned the wind down, but... The sun was in my eyes when we were at the evening event. Oh, you know, probably the way... Here's one thing that I would do differently, is the opening night reception was in a lobby and it was loud. Yeah. And I don't like loud stuff. So that's...

So that was probably like the one. But I mean, come on, that's like such a rounding error, you know, compared to the thing. Totally. Yep. Anyways, let's, yeah, let's talk about the next talk. It was actually because we did excursions that afternoon. And then the next talk was Mr. Omar Zenholm. Talk about 10 things he had learned starting and selling Webinar Ninja. What were your thoughts there? Yeah, I thought that was, it was interesting to kind of contrast that.

Omar with Peldy, because I think they're both successful in their own right. Obviously Peldy has gone the path of the more traditional organic bootstrapping, keep running your company until maybe you want to retire kind of mode. And Omar was definitely more from the lens of like, all right, I set out to build something really valuable and I went after it and I hustled.

So he started out the gate saying, I intentionally stayed poor while doing this, and here are the ways that I kind of structured the sacrifices I was going to make in my life so that we could... It was him and his wife, I think they were both part of the business. How they could make this run at building something really valuable and eventually exiting, and he did exit. So it was kind of cool to see a couple of the speakers having this long arc of like...

all right, I started, I built, and then I sold. And here are the lessons that I have. So he obviously had 10 of them. I won't go through all of them. But he talked about making it personal, having your like, why are you doing this? What is your motivation when things get hard? And that was a good reminder. He talked about hiring. He said, hire slowly, fire quickly. Just

something that I think is pretty common wisdom at this point, but always helps to hear it because this just keeps getting reinforced over and over again by people who have been in the trenches for a long time. You talked about evolving your product over time, holding loosely to your product, and this is something that

A lot of us hold very strong onto our product and we love it and we love what we curated, but sometimes that's not what the market needs long-term and you have to be willing to adapt. And so it was just fun to hear these kind of, these hard-earned insights from someone who made it out to the other side and sold his business.

Yeah, I really enjoyed his talk. If folks want to see the talks, we do package them up and sell them. I believe it's $100 or $150 for all the talks. And those obviously get on MicroConf email list, microconf.com, if you want to get notified when those are available.

And with that, let's jump to our next talk, which was Marie Martens from Tally. She's the co-founder of Tally. And she was on this podcast just, I don't know, two, three months ago talking through her journey. But she told that story with more depth and more details and slides and all that. So what were your takeaways from hers? Yeah, I mean, what a fascinating success story, right? Like I remember listening to her on the podcast and thinking, wow,

how did they do this? So it was fun to hear her talk even more about it. I still don't know if I fully understand all of the ingredients of the success that went into Tally. For those who don't know, it's this form builder product that competes with Typeform and they're managing to make freemium work at really high cost.

Good scale. What do they have, like 400,000 free users? 400,000 free users and they're built in public. So the ARR is what, 1.8 million, I believe. And they are fully bootstrapped and it's just her and her husband, co-founders, and then one support person. So freemium is the driver for them. Yeah, obviously she talked about this on the podcast episode as well, but about their early cold outreach strategy to just...

to just hustle and seed the pool of free users. And I'm sure within that got a lot of micro-influencers who had audiences or communities they were a part of where this could just take hold and spread. She talked about how they latched on to the Notion community in particular. I think their product...

She talked about being very aesthetically similar to Notion, so people who are in that ecosystem would feel like, "Oh, this fits naturally with the rest of my tool set." So I think there's some kind of dynamic there around positioning yourself next to a product that is beloved by a lot of people and feeling like, "Oh, of course, if I use Notion, then of course I'll just use Tally."

And obviously, she is a very, very talented marketer, knows how to put her finger on the pulse of what this, at least the initial seed was.

of people who would latch onto this free product, what these people wanted to see and cause them to jump over. So it was inspiring to hear her talk about that. I definitely would love to replicate some of that if I can find ways to do it. Easier said than done because there's a lot there. There's a lot happening that's going right for them that I have a lot of respect for what they're doing, but man, making that work is one in a hundred or something, you know what I mean? Yeah.

And I have a lot of respect for her husband, who I got to meet, Philippe, I believe he pronounces. But everyone just kept saying, that product is so amazing and so simple and so gorgeous and so this and that. And so I'm like, obviously he's a damn good dev. He's a full set because he's the only dev on it. So that's cool too, right? It's like to meet, did you look him in the eye and be like...

All right, which of us is better, sir? Which of us is a better full stack? That would have been a heck of a... I think if the two of your hands touched, does the universe implode? Because it's like the two amazing full stack devs. Is that how that works? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I think he actually does, she mentioned this in her talk, I wasn't sure what their division of labor was around design. A lot of times it's a back-end, front-end developer and then someone who does design separate. And it sounds like Philippe does...

does a lot of their design work as well. Were you all alphaing him and you're like, bro, I don't come from my title. Everyone thinks I'm the best full stack. Don't even bring it. Yeah, who's the fuller stack? I don't know why I think there has to be some big rivalry. You both are like super chill and super respectful and somehow I want there to be a beef. Fist fight in the parking lot. So...

Anyways, yeah, no, thanks. I appreciate your sentiments about her talk. It was great to hear the deeper story, right? Because in the podcast, we can only cover 30 minutes with no visuals, and she crafted it in a way that I really appreciated. Our next talk was an attendee talk, actually. We only had one attendee talk this year, and it was Tim VanderCasteel, who...

submitted a talk about things he had learned building his business. And I hadn't heard of Tim. And so Tim gets up and starts talking and I'm kind of like, all right, I'm getting tired. It's the afternoon and I'm sitting there zoning out a little bit. And he's like, yeah. And then we got our ARR to 35 million. And I was like, whoa. And they bootstrapped. And I was like, that's a thing. And they said, then we sold for, and there was an asterisk. It was like, according to public records, because I am under NDA, but I can quote a public thing. Then we sold for $300 million. And I was like, what just happened?

Like, how have I not heard of this guy? So I was below, just that was like the second slide. I was like, well, now I'm super interested because I just need to hear this story. So with that intro, like what was your takeaway from Tim's talk? Yeah, what a...

What a humble guy to be having those numbers attributed to you. I had a chance to talk to him in passing and my wife actually sat near him at dinner one night and talked to him a bunch more than I had the opportunity to. And he's just such a normal guy for having sold your business for allegedly $300 million. Allegedly. We're pretty confident it was at least that sentiment. Yeah.

He had obviously just a 10-minute talk, so three takeaways. But it's interesting how these sort of dovetailed nicely with both what Omar had touched on and what Peldy had sort of touched on. He talked about the mistake of being a benevolent dictator for too long. Early on, you kind of have to control everything that's happening in your company. But once you start building a team of hopefully people who are smarter than you and better than you at

at their individual discipline, you start to loosen the grip a little bit and trust your team. So he talked about what he would have done differently is empower people earlier and remove himself as a bottleneck more aggressively. And boy, do I definitely feel that. Even with a small team, I think I have the tendency to want to micromanage too much of the business. And even if it's working on the surface, there's a cost to it, right? Like,

He also talked about not thinking enough about culture. And this is something that Peldy talked about a lot. He talked about kind of defining your values and your mission, which again, those sound like

very MBA-esque concepts that us bootstrappers wouldn't want to spend time on. But I thought Peldy talked about the benefits of those in a really pragmatic way. You know, like...

Like even if your mission is just to stay alive at an early stage, like you should state that and everyone on the team should understand that like this is what we're trying to do. And so the way we operate needs to be in service of that. And so Tim talked about, especially as you get bigger, being more thoughtful about the culture you want to craft. Like that's one of the few decisions that you do get to make and the rest, a lot of other decisions should just kind of fall in line with best practices, but you get to choose your culture.

So yeah, those are two of my takeaways from Tim's talk. And the last talk of the event was yours truly. I like to talk on the first day to get it over with. And I can't remember the last time I've talked on the second day actually, but due to scheduling and reasons, I talked last. And I talked about breaking through the seven SaaS plateaus. And I finally took that doc that I've referenced on this podcast where I have three pre-product market fit and seven SaaS.

Wait, did my talk have eight in it? It had eight. That's right, I added an extra one. Because this was the interesting part. Yeah, so I have this document, right, with three pre-product market fit plateaus and I had seven kind of pros, once you have strong product market fit, ways you could plateau. And then those were mostly out of my head and experience and stories and such, like stories from other founders as well as my own.

Then I asked a bunch of tiny seed founders because I have easy access to revenue graphs, right? So I'd look to see where there were plateaus and I was asking founders and an eighth one came up and that's why I added it. So I guess the talk title was eight, breaking through them. And so I wanted to have, you know, I've never like presented that material. It's kind of been sitting in a Google Doc. And one reason I never presented it is kind of challenging because you can say like, well, this is why you plateau because you don't have enough traffic or leads.

So the solution is drive more traffic or leads. It's not actually that helpful to know. So the talk really was to name a framework or at least have to be able to identify. I find that it's helpful for people for me to say there are only 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. That's it. Because otherwise you think there are thousands. And it's just like, no, here's the list, pick one. Now maybe I missed one, maybe there's 21, but it's pretty much all of them. So if I say there are eight, is there a chance there are nine? Yeah. Is there a chance there are 23? No.

There's no chance. I know that I'm not off by that level of magnitude. So trying to codify and get your arms around the thing is really the goal there. And then I had a story for, I guess, six or seven of them, like a real life story with a graph that showed someone breaking through the plateau. All that said, that's the precursor. Did you have any takeaways from the talk? Yeah, I think just, I know that plateaus are top of mind for a lot of people. Like in conversations that I've had,

that I have at, honestly, the last couple of MicroConf's in particular, I just feel like this is something that a lot of people are coming up against or at least seeing on the horizon. So I think it was really good to get some knowledge out there, at least defining the parameters around the types of plateaus and how to think about fixing them. Because I know for myself, as I've kind of seen plateaus coming in my own business, it's like, okay,

I feel like I could probably be working on many different things. So then the challenge becomes, well, how do you narrow your focus? Because obviously, for example, getting more customers through the door will theoretically solve any plateau if you can just get more customers. But that's not always the most rational thing to do, just to try to increase top of funnel. So I think this is, yeah, it was just some helpful nuance to think about like,

Okay, let's see. If you look at your churn, is your churn too high? And you kind of compare that against maybe bands for your industry or whatever at your price point. Go to ProfitWell, they have a bunch of industry data that you can compare against.

And so you can start to use these to hone in and then start thinking about it in a narrower sense of like, all right, yes, maybe the answer is get more customers, but also before you try to do that, it's most rational to think about how to improve retention or how to move out of the churn mindset

percentage range that you're in. I'm in a range at a relatively low price point where my churn is higher than I want it to be and that's probably just going to be the case because of my price point. So perhaps the solution is think about how do you attract customers who will pay more and that will move you towards a lower churn average, for example. So,

Just some good frameworks, I think, to think about this stuff. Yeah, I appreciate that. That was part of the reason that I decided to do this talk was I see this on Twitter where someone's like, I'm plateaued, what should I do? And then there's all this random

random advice. And it's like, you can't give advice unless you know the cause, you know, it's like trying to prescribe a medication when all you see is a symptom, you're not treating the actual source, right? The actual cause of it. And that was when I realized like, all right, somebody needs to get this info out because the thing that I'm going to ask now on Twitter, I'm plateaued. What should I do? I'm going to say, what's the cause? Which of these eight is it?

And if they say, I don't know, then I'm going to say, you go figure it out and then come back to us and say, I'm plateaued because of this, right? So probably next there needs to be a diagnosis criteria of like, well, how do you know which of these eight it is, right? And I can tell because I see a bunch of businesses, right? I have the rules of them in my head if I can look at your turn or your funnel or whatever. But how do we get those codified in a way that is actually helpful? Here's the other thing. And I said this, the bleak information or the bleak business

The conclusion is most companies that I see that do hit a plateau don't make it out. And I think the number of the graphs that I looked through, it was like 80, between 80 and 90%. Once they plateaued, they just, they haven't yet made it out. Now, maybe they all will, question mark. But it's like, no, it's kind of brutal. Yeah, I didn't know that. I suspect that's because I think in reality, a lot of the solutions to...

involves a pretty significant re-engineering of the business in some way. Whether it's tap a new market, add on to the product or add a second product to

to your product line to expand your value or going up market. It's easy to say and very hard to do because you have to rejigger your go-to-market strategy and potentially learn new skills or hire new people to do those things. All this stuff is easier said than done, but it's helpful to have some foundational frameworks to begin strategizing around it.

I think so. So if you're listening to this and you regret that you did not go to MicroConf Europe, you should come to MicroConf in New Orleans. MicroConf.com slash US tickets are now on sale and they are the cheapest they will ever be. The price will only, it goes up every month or two. So if you're thinking about going, it's next March 16th through the 18th. That is 2025 in New Orleans. And I hope to see you there. Do you think I'll see you there, Derek? Oh, for sure.

Have you been in New Orleans yet? I've never been in New Orleans. Oh, that's a good excuse to go down there. Yeah, I would be going to MicroConf regardless, most likely, but it's also a nice little thing to have a new location to check out. That's an extra incentive.

It is. Like going back to Vegas again, it's like, well, I'm definitely not going for the town. I'm going for the event, right? But yeah, we've hopped around. Like Atlanta, it was neat to pop in there. It was neat to see Denver. I've been there several times. I've only been to New Orleans once, so I agree. I'll do a little sightseeing. I was trying to think of some other places that we could host it that are interesting. Like Austin, Texas would probably be high on my list, you know? But I like the idea of continuing to bounce it around for exactly that reason. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

All right, man. Well, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. Folks want to keep up with you. You are at Derek Reimer on X Twitter and of course, SavvyCal.com if folks want to use the best scheduling link on the internet. Indeed. Well, thanks for having me.

Thanks so much to Derek for jumping on the mic with me and helping refresh your memory if you went to MicroConf Europe or to drop some new thoughtful takeaways to you in case you missed the event. Obviously, we're going to have videos available, as I said, during the episode. MicroConf.com if you're interested in signing up for the mailing list such that you hear about the video package once that's around.

Thanks so much for joining me this week and every week. I'm Rob Walling, signing off from episode 737.