#276 – SaaS Trends, Crowdfunding a Book, and Life After Success with Rob Walling of TinySeed
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What's up, dude? Hey, man. What's going on? We are talking to the one and only Rob Walling today. I'm excited. I'm excited. I feel like I haven't seen him or talked to him in, what, like five years? When did we last go to MicroConf? Five years. Nah. Well, MicroConf, right? It's probably been like two or three years. I haven't gone to MicroConf since the pandemic started, but I'm pretty sure we went to every MicroConf before that. So 2019. 2019.

I mean, four years. Yeah. But he's also been on the podcast a couple times. I mean, he's doing everything, right? Since then, he started TinySeed, which is the first accelerator for bootstrap founders. He's still running MicroConf. He is writing a book, the SaaS playbook. We're going to talk about that today. He also started five or six bootstrapped companies in the past, including one that he sold for millions, presumably tens of millions of dollars, Drip.

It's interesting talking to Rob because I think he's just been around for so long that just like the thought of Rob makes me think of like all the different phases that like a tech founder has gone through, especially being an indie hacker. Like when he first started, he was writing Start Small, Stay Small, which is basically a book to be an indie hacker well before anybody else was like doing this.

So he's kind of seen the different trends. And I feel kind of like an old man because I was around then and doing this stuff back then. And the scene today is unrecognizable. Do you feel like this? It's hard to keep up with what all the changes are and how the landscape has evolved. I do feel that way. And I think it's the natural consequence of...

indie hackers and like kind of entering this community of bootstrappers where there's a bit of a who's who, right? You kind of know the people who have been successful, but if you keep playing in that arena for long enough, like the faces change, right? And like the sense of like,

not even just who's doing really well, but also like what kinds of products are the things that are going to play well. You just lose track of that. I mean, we've been through the crypto phase, right? We went through like the web three phase. We would now we're sort of in this no code phase, the no code phase, creator economy phase. And there's, uh,

And it's like the thing is none of these phases have gone away. They're still there. They're just getting layered on top of each other more and more. And each of them probably has like its own set of superstars, right? And it's hard for us to always be in the weeds about who those superstars are. Did you see Amy Hoy's post on Andy Hackers a couple days ago? Of course I did. I feel like I'm honored to be one of the first commenters. Oh yeah, you are on here. I saw a comment that had like 15 upvotes or something and I looked down and I was disappointed to see it was you.

Disappointed. But it was a good comment. But she's – I mean, I think she's feeling kind of similar. Like, she's been out of the saddle, so to speak, out of the game for a few years due to health issues. And now she's, like, feeling better. She's getting back into it. And, like, it's easy to feel like you've lost your mojo, especially in tech. Like, if you're, like, a woodworker and you take a break for five years and you come back, like, guess what? Like, woodworking is probably –

the exact same as it's been for like decades, if not hundreds of years. But if you are in the tech sphere and you take a break, like we haven't been actual indie hackers for like six years.

And now that we are again, it's like, okay, well, what do we do? What do we do about AI? What do we do about marketing channels? We haven't had to make money online in so long that it's like, I feel like a fish out of water to some degree. I understand that. But then I also feel like that's the secret sauce of what makes an entrepreneur really good. I mean, to draw it back to Rob Walling.

i remember he gave a speech and he was talking at the microconf one of the microcomps that we went to and look rob walling has done it all he's been there he's written books like he's this expert and i think that the outside looking in perspective on an expert on entrepreneurship is like this guy just has all the answers and like when he starts a new company he's just going to be nothing but like success after success and win after win and it's like okay but if you hear him tell the story of his of his path

It's like, well, here's the time that I was like, you know, sort of way overextended. Here's the time where I fell into a depression. Here's it's like really just error, like a series of error correcting out. And I think that that's what makes someone a really good entrepreneur, right? Because the whole point of it is that you're venturing into some new frontier and you're able to like find a way forward using just basic fundamentals.

finally a man sorry man i've been welcome growing around with my camera for the past 10 minutes it's like you gotta look good you have priority it's worth it it was just not i was gonna just be my voice with no camera at all i was like this will be real good radio at the at the end of our last episode we were talking about like hey should we do like youtube because now apparently like that you know the distribution is is better and we're like no it's always been better you

YouTube has always been better for distributing a podcast than just being pure audio. And yet it is so much more work. It's not like you just copy paste your video over to YouTube and it grows. It's a lot of work. That's what we found.

Yeah. Oh, you guys tried it? Yeah, we do. Yeah, we tried it with the podcast. I have a feed that is the podcast and it's just audio. It's not a video of it. And it has like a few hundred subscribers. And then we, you know, we even put the micro conference talks up, which are like, hey, this is good content. And they just get bullshit amounts of views, you know, get a thousand views for some amazing April Dunford talk. Yeah.

And then we hired a consultant who was like, you're doing it wrong. You need native YouTube content. If you tried, every time we try to repurpose a podcast, even when we edit it and make snips, it doesn't get anything. And the ones that take off, you know, we have videos now with, I don't know, I recorded one that has 100,000 views. And it's just me talking about, here are seven startup ideas you can consider, blah, blah, blah, right? So it's all, it's kind of clickbaity stuff, but it's also, it's really YouTube native, 10, 12 minutes. Yeah.

There's this concept of being some ancient human tribe where you kill the buffalo and you use every single part of the animal, the bones, to make your house. And you use the fur to make coats. And then you eat and you just waste nothing. I think every indie hacker wants to do that for their business. If I make content in one area, I can repurpose it for every other thing by just copy-pasting it. And it literally doesn't work. It's better to just be kind of wasteful and not even attempt to do that sometimes. Right. Yep.

Yeah, the only thing that we've found in terms of reuse is taking 90-second clips and putting them on Twitter, that video clips. Those get more, they get like five times the engagement-ish than an audiogram of the same thing. Anyway, Rob, welcome to the show. We sort of already introduced you in our preamble, and I'm sure anyone who's listened to the show for a while also knows who you are. How you been, man? It's been a while.

I've been good. I've been working on microcomps. I'm leaving tomorrow for Microconf Denver in the U.S. here, and then I got my book going. That's my big project I'm heading up right now. Channing and I were just talking about getting back in the game when you felt like you were kind of out of the game. And I know that we've been out of the game because we haven't been doing microconf in a couple years. Part of that is because of the pandemic, but part of that is just like, ah, I'm just out of the game. So next year, Channing, we should...

spend our company budget to come yeah i was gonna ask if you guys were gonna make it to microconf next week not next week but next year as soon as we know the city we'll be there because it's been a while and microconf has like so much energy that i miss it yeah also we're underwater like actually becoming a real business again right like i feel like i feel like next year will be well we'll actually like you know have the systems and the processes in place where we're

running it as opposed to like- It is nice to put everything on stripes tab. Yeah. Something I'll miss. To not burn 10 grand a month of your own money. When it's your business, it's like, yeah, I can pay this. This could be my salary. So you got to be way more judicious with business expenses, but Micah Conf, of all expenses, I think it's worth it. You are writing a book or have written a book. How far are you in your new book? It's called The SaaS Playbook. It's all done. I finished that months ago. It's all done. Four or five months. Yeah. I have a hard copy.

Got some digital copies. Yeah, it's a hardback, which is like, that's a gorgeous book. That's a beautiful book. I paid a lot for this. This is one. I mean, my first book, you know, Start Small, Stay Small is a black cover. I don't know if you've seen it. It's ugly as hell. I have it. Because I had no budget.

No money. Designed it myself. This one, I was like, all right, I'm going to go all out and hire a legit designer, legit layout person. Actually get an editor this time and not edit my own work. So you put that together yourself. I was curious about the publishing process. This sounds like independently published and you kind of put together a team of the editor and the...

That's right. Designer and all that stuff. Yeah. I didn't remember how much work it was, but I knew it was going to be a lot. So I went and found a book project manager who used to work for a publishing company. Book project manager. Isn't that crazy? It's very niche. But I was like, I want... I went out just seeking if I can find any type of project manager. I'm sure they can do this. And if they have publishing experience, great. And turns out she had worked for a publisher for three years. So she knew everything. She's like, oh, you can buy 10 ISBNs for the price of two. So you should... You know, just all the little...

Oh, and I already know like four different printers in Hong Kong and in the US. And I'm going to tell you, it was that type of stuff. So it really took a lot of load off of me. How much money does it cost to basically do a book right? Self-publishing, you're hiring a book project manager, you're hiring an editor, you're hiring someone to design the cover, to make a video for you on Kickstarter. How much all in does it cost to produce a book in 2023? At this point, I bet I'm in...

30 grand, 20 to 30 grand for all the labor. That's before printing costs and fulfillment. Yeah. It's a trip. So that's all mostly upfront, like to get the thing produced by the different people. That's right. And that doesn't include, obviously I spent a bunch of time writing it and I had a writing coach who was busting my chops. I haven't included her in that price because it's the first book where I've used a writing coach. What is a writing coach? So I want to write a book, not nonfiction, but I'm

curious about all these details. What does a writing coach say to you? Does she just say, write, write more? Yeah, so they can have a bunch of different roles. If you want to write every word yourself, then you get the writing coach. He or she will be almost a developmental editor. It's two things. Accountability.

And developmental editing is really what it is. Yep. So it's like weekly call. I know that I have to show up with, you know, X thousand words written. And if you don't, then she was like, so I guess we're going to ship late. And I'm like, oh no, I feel so guilty. Taking advantage of my guilt complex. Yeah.

So that was accountability was a big thing for me. The second thing was she would just read through and be like, not even like copy editing, but like, yeah, it's not hanging together. So she'd reorganize pieces. Right. And then the third thing for me that I needed was I didn't have time. It's 45,000 words in this book. I didn't have time to write every word, but I have time.

I had someone go through and scrape it for an AI project, like close to a million words spoken on my YouTube channel, on my individual podcast episode, you know, just incredible. So I would pick topics and be like, I recorded a whole solo episode around just this topic and I want that to be a section. So she would take that, transcribe it and turn it into a section. So she would write it, she would write the words, but they were my...

So you could say she's a ghostwriter, but I always struggle with that because it's all my thoughts. It's your ideas. Yes. And then I would come back and put my voice on it. So it cut a huge amount. In fact, I stalled. I got about halfway through the book. And then I had about a year where I didn't write a word. And that was when I realized I need someone else involved in this because I just can't push it through with the other stuff I'm doing. So there we go. Content reuse and action. It actually works for books. And I've seen this before too because –

Because I interviewed for my other podcast James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, which was literally the number one bestseller on Amazon for weeks. And Mark Manson, who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And they both did the same thing, where instead of repurposing their podcast, they repurposed their blog posts.

And then just sort of edit it and put it together in a book. And that actually works. And it doesn't make the book any worse. It makes the book better because you're picking the best ideas that you've already put out into the world, already tested on an audience. Now you're just putting them in print format where they'll just live forever. That's right. And I did that. So my second book, so I've written four books, right? Start Small, Stay Small. My second book is exactly that. It's a collection of blog posts and it's called Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding. I give that one away for free on my site.

Third one I co-wrote with Sherry, Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together, and then this one. But the second one is exactly that. It's like my favorite blog post because I had like almost 200 blog posts at one point, essays and such, and compiling that into like a best of was, you know, I still get positive feedback about it.

I just had a conversation actually with Josh Kaufman who wrote the personal MBA. He's sort of a regular at, at these, at these micro confidence. And he specifically mentioned that he's struggling. He's, he's working on a new book. It's going to be a followup to personal MBA. And he's like, well, you know, I've got a lot of other stuff, a lot of other balls in the air as well. He's like working on a website where he's going to like have courses and he wants to like keep in touch with his email list. And he's like, yeah, it's kind of hard to figure out.

a way to work on any of these individual projects. And that idea of like, well, why don't you, you know, figure out the topics? He's still brainstorming for his book. Why don't you figure out the topics that are going to go into your book by testing things out, going out to your email list and kind of getting information. So it's, it's not just a way to like save time. Once you decide you want to put the book together, but it's also a useful way to like figure out what goes in the book. Of course. What resonates. And that's something, big thing that I did. I mean, I, we really leaned into YouTube, uh,

about a year ago on, on microconf. And so I've been putting out a YouTube video every week of unique content and it's, it's a grind. It's a ton of work in addition to the podcast and all that. But the topics that resonated the most there, I was pulling those in to this book. And the other, the other book that I haven't mentioned to anyone yet that I accidentally wrote, that is also 40,000 words. And it's like a prequel to this. So I know I got to figure out, am I going to publish another book later this year? But it's, you know,

Before you came on, we were talking about your accolades and I was like, Cortland was just going down this long laundry list and I was like, it's easier just to start from the negative. What hasn't he done? And now we get to add to that list that you accidentally wrote a book? What does that even mean? So yeah, so I had this outline, right? And I'm like, I want to cover everything in this ass playbook. And it's like all the way from like, I don't even have an idea all the way to talking about exits and mindset, you know, the whole life cycle.

So I start at the beginning and I'm writing about ideas and how to come up with them and how to validate and how to evaluate and how to find your first customers and how to, you know, just all that pre-product market fit. And eventually the book, it was just too damn big. And I didn't want, and I realized the more amorphous part of it,

part of it where it's kind of hard to be super prescriptive is everything before product market fit. Because product market fit onward, that's what I do every day. That's TinySeed. That's a lot of the higher end microcom founders. And that's what this has Playbook focuses on is at least some weak product market fit, 1 to 5K, 1 to 10K MRR. And how do you then go from there? Rocket shipping. Everything before that, I had about 25,000 words. And I was like, this just doesn't belong here. So I just put it in a Google Doc somewhere.

And then when we got done, my writing coach and I got done writing the SAS playbook, she's like, do you want to circle back on this stuff? And I was like, yeah, we could flesh that out. Let's just add it. I think if we had a few thousand words, you know, it'll be, it'll be done. And now it's like 40, 45,000. And so it is, I mean, that's a 210 page book. That's, you know, right now that tentative title is idea to traction. And I don't know, I don't know what I'll do with it. Maybe I'll publish it later this year, early next year. Well, you did something with this book that I

I rarely see in sort of our niche, which is you launched a Kickstarter. Yeah. You're only the second Kickstarter that I've ever backed, like you and one other project in like the last 10 years. And it's crushing it. I mean, you've got like, I think another week to go on the Kickstarter and it's already at $80,000. So it's more than recouped your initial investment. It's basically like you've paid yourself an advance that, you know, an author would have to go beg a publisher for usually, but you've done it through Kickstarter, which is super cool. And I'm wondering like why you did that because like,

I had just never seen anyone do that. Usually people launch on their email list or they just like, you know, host their own sort of presale, but you've used like this platform that is super popular, but like, what's the advantage? Why launch on Kickstarter? Yeah, it's a good question because I really went back and forth on it all the way up until the week we launched because all the books I've launched prior have been exactly what you're saying. Set up a landing page, put a Stripe buy now link, you know, and have a few tiers, right? There's one with a video and one with a blog. It's more expensive. And that's how I've always done it.

This time around, there were a couple reasons. One, I really wanted to be able to offer a bunch of tiers, like seven different things. There's a live talk to Rob option. And that starts to feel weird on a landing page. But in Kickstarter, it's native. It was just really obvious that I could, because I don't do one-on-one consulting ever, right? One-on-one advising outside of TinySeed. But I was able to offer, I don't know, I remember five, six, seven slots of that.

Dude, you sold out. I know. Hundreds of dollars. You sold out immediately. You should have charged thousands. I think I should have just offered more slots. So I really did want to have that option of just doing it, of seeing what happened. The second thing was...

I like learning. I like doing new stuff that I've never done and doing yet another launch to my email list. That's fine. That's I've done that a lot, but actually trying to do a Kickstarter. I was like, I don't know. What does this entail? How hard is it? What goes into it? You know, and the learning that I've had from that, I think has been really cool. So there's a bit of personal satisfaction there. The other reason is I've never had a hardback book. It's always been

been soft cover because hardbacks, you got to order a thousand, 2000, 3000, ship them over. You know, it's like a bunch of work and oftentimes it's a four to six month delay. And so Kickstarter is kind of designed for that. It is a pre-order thing, right? I could have ordered two or 3000 books and paid for them, but I didn't want them sitting in my garage. So this is a way to, to do that. And lastly,

I view Kickstarter as a community slash, it's not quite a social network, but it's a kind of, and I really wanted, I have exposure on Twitter. I have exposure in podcasts. You know, I have exposure on YouTube. I've never, I've backed 275 Kickstarters, but I've never run one. Whoa. And I want, yeah, dude, go to my page. It's embarrassing. It is nerdy as hell though. It's all like,

not video games, it's like tabletop gaming and stuff I play with my kids. There are certain slider belts and watches that I back too, but it's a lot of nerdy stuff. What's your favorite thing you've bought on Kickstarter? There's a game...

I think it was a Kickstarter. It was a crowdfunding. I'm not sure it was on Kickstarter, but it's a game called Kingdom Rush Rift in Time that is based on... Kingdom Rush is like one of the best iPad games. And it is a tabletop version of that with these... It's like 125 bucks when I backed it. And it's these great minis and... Not messing around. Endless. Just endless.

My kid painted them. My 16-year-old painted them. And we've just had endless hours of fun playing with that one. You have kids that you can have an excuse for you to get those things. But I would just get them and just be a 36-year-old man. Totally. I know. I'm so glad. It's like having kids is tough. But this is the best time. It's an excuse. Exactly. It's an excuse to like, I'm going to learn to play Dungeons & Dragons again. I haven't played it since the 80s. I'm going to get into comic books and Star Wars stuff. I would never make time for that.

I wonder, thinking about Kickstarter, I wonder if there's, like, if you look at our niche, like, kind of, like, indie hackers, bootstrap founders, like, there's not that many places where we launch products. You know, it's, like, Hacker News, Twitter, our own email list, product times. There's, like, only, like, a few. And I feel like that number hasn't changed.

In years, it's kind of just the same. Especially if you want to launch to your customers, of course, there's lots of different channels. Some people are really good at SEO. Some are good on YouTube. Some are good on TikTok. But internally, we want people on our own needs to support us. There's those four places. I wonder if there's room for another one. Channing, maybe we should build this, like a Kickstarter for Bootstrap founders.

That's slightly different than Product Hunt. That is a different model, but something that people understand so we can kind of like support each other and invest in each other's launches. Yeah. And just have more surface area for like discovery for like the discovery function. Yeah. And I like this idea of like putting a credit card into it. Yeah.

Like one of the reasons why Kickstarter is good is because people like Rob who have already backed hundreds of Kickstarters when there's a new one, there isn't all this friction of like, okay, I got to sign up and create another account and yet another website, et cetera. It's just like, boom, click a button, click pledge, already in there, payment's gone, and it's like super simple.

Yep. I think that's a really intriguing idea. There's obviously all the logistics of like, well, what if they don't deliver and all the same crap Kickstarter has to deal with. But the idea of bringing it to our space, I think it's kind of a novel way of thinking about it. I have to say, Rob, also the idea of you going into Kickstarter is really smart, especially, so we just had Wes Cowell on, she runs Maven, the online course platform. And she had this idea where she's like, look, there's like a pyramid of

ways that you can deliver content to your audience and like the higher up the pyramid you go the more high touch and like Profitable you can get and obviously there's there's higher stakes and she placed a book sort of toward the top of the pyramid You know like the bottom is maybe like, you know sending a quick tweet where you don't have to defend the things that you say But above book, you know, it's like an online course or you know, you're actually live with your audience and

And with your Kickstarter, you actually get to segment out. You don't just have to have this book that's something you've already written. There's nothing you can really add. You get the ability to have those tiers. So I really like that idea as well. Yeah. There was a MicroConf talk by Ryan Delk years ago who used to work at Gumroad, and he had the whole...

The typical launch for a book like this is you price it at, you have a 1X, 2.2X, and 5X price points. So if your 1X is $40, 2.2 is what, about $90-ish or $100, and then 5X is going to be around $200 and maybe do $250.

And then you figure out what's worth 40 bucks, what's worth a hundred and what's worth 200. Right. And that is kind of how I approached it. But also I realized I don't, you know, I don't want to get on a one-on-one call for 200 bucks. Like my, I just can't justify that. So yeah, there's, so there's an $800 tier and then there, there is a $5,000 tier to come for two days to Minneapolis this summer. Right. And actually do an in-person thing, which I think in your pyramid would, would just stack on top of that, you know, just be up.

I've never done one of those aside from MicroConf. So it's certainly going to be an adventure. Are you open to sharing how many people have taken you up on those offers? Yeah. How are we doing so far? So I had five slots and I think three are booked for five grand a piece, which would be great. I mean, anywhere between three and five is like a good number. My fear was A, it would be zero or one. It's like, oh, me and this person are just staring at each other for three days in Minneapolis. Yeah.

Do you know who the backers are? Like who got those slots? No, I don't think we learn. Total mystery. I know it's a trip. And you know, what's funny is my brother who lives out in California sent me a text and he's like, Hey man, if I bought back one of these in-person retreats, does that include a trip to Parler Burger, which is like a famous Minneapolis place? And I was like, heck yes it does. So I honestly don't know if like one of them might be him. I have no idea. It could be us. It could be anyone. I'll know in nine days, I guess.

So let's talk about the book itself. You described it as kind of what to do once you have product market fit. And obviously, you have a pretty good perspective on this. You run TinySeed. You see dozens and dozens of companies that you work with personally every day to help them basically grow their startups. How do you figure out what goes into this book? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening, us included. Yeah.

We want to know, like, what do you do once you have a big audience and your product is like struck the market and you kind of have this elusive product market fit? What now? Yeah, no, that's it's a really good question. And it's one I'm you know, I had only been through once or twice before running Tiny Seed. And I had been in conversations and affiliated with folks at MicroConf. But you're right. I'm really inside a bunch of businesses now. And so I'm seeing the patterns. The book really starts off.

talking about, hey, even if you have weaker product market fit, like here's how to think about talking to customers and strengthening that. And, you know, it's some stuff people have heard before. And it's also some of kind of my unique thinking. But then I really...

I went through all the advice that I have emailed to founders posts. I, I, every time I would post to indie hackers, I would take that post. If it was a response to someone's question and I was throwing it all this all in, in a Google doc. And I realized there were patterns, right? There were talk about content reuse, but,

There were patterns to what people were asking, like, should I compete in a really competitive niche? Like, how do I compete with big competitors? That's a topic in the book, right? Pricing. That's like the number two chapter after market is pricing because most founders screw it up, right? We underprice our product. And I talked through my psychology of pricing, what I see people doing well, what I see them doing poorly,

And then, of course, marketing is a huge one. A little different for indie hackers because you're a community, much like MicroConf. Like I don't necessarily think about marketing beyond the content we produce. But if you're a SaaS app, a B2B SaaS app, like the hardest thing is like, what do I do? What do I try? What do I try in what order? Right. And that's I have a whole chapter on that is I have a three factor framework of like, what is it? It's speed, scalability, productivity.

And cost. It's a whole mental map that I've developed of like, hey, there are only about 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. These are the ones you should try in this order based on what you want to accomplish. Right. So it's it's and then I talk about hiring, building your team, tracking metrics. I mean, that's kind of a high level. So I have a friend who's an investor who was telling me is sort of theory that it's it's.

Basically becoming harder and harder to build a successful SaaS business. And his idea is – here's why. There's more competition than ever.

10 years ago, not that many people were building SaaS businesses. Not that many people knew how to code. Tech startups seemed like a difficult thing to bust into, especially if you're self-funded. Today, there are dozens of businesses for every product idea. The playbook for starting SaaS businesses is out, right? You literally wrote the playbook. Other people have written the playbooks. People have mapped this out, and they kind of know how to attack a different distribution channel, et cetera. But he argues, even as there's more and more competition and more people starting things,

the number of channels for marketing your product is not really growing as quickly as the number of people who are trying to do this thing. So everything's becoming more competitive. Ads are becoming more expensive. The bar is getting higher and higher to do good SEO. Every company is inundated with sales calls because there's so many people doing sales. And your experience, is this true, is it getting harder to start a SaaS company? I would say yes. But it's not

It's not hopeless. Is it slightly harder than a few years ago? Yeah. I honestly think everything that you're saying is accurate. The content bar, especially with AI now, but even before that, like 10, 15 years ago, I could hire someone to put out articles and just build links, like almost buy links from what were they? Blog networks or whatever. And you could rank on Google and you can't do that anymore. Right. So it is more challenging. Yeah.

I do think that's where raising a bit of funding has become more and more in my head. Like, I think if you get traction, it's probably something you want to think about. You know, even if you're a hardcore bootstrapper like myself, yet it just becomes hard to organically grow business in the ways that we used to. With that said, there's a flip side to this. We still see tons of companies apply to TinySeed that...

Are competing in spaces where they're, it's just the competition is much less, right? So like Builder Prime is a CRM for home improvement contractors. And when I first heard the idea, I was like, ooh, that's a tough market to sell into. How are you going to find them? And how are you going to close them? And, you know, customer pain, right? Ooh, non-technical and all this. And he's crushing it, just absolutely crushing it.

Because he's executing really well. So it's the people, there are a lot of people starting, a lot of people trying things, but I still see Ruben Gomez with Seinwell. I see Derek with Savvy Cal, you know, the, a lot of folks we know, and then a lot of folks you haven't heard of that are in tiny seed, like, uh, Iran is the founder of gym desk.com. And, uh,

That's another one where it's like, well, it's like booking scheduling software, management software for like a gym, martial arts studios, all that. Right. Wouldn't you think that's a solved problem? And yet the dude is growing like crazy. Right. But it comes down to, yeah, you have to execute probably at a higher level than you did 10 years ago, but it's still completely possible. A huge out of that challenge is finding a smaller niche and not just sticking with a market that

as it seems to declare itself to at first. There's a really good anecdote about Gary Vee, who had some conference, he gave a talk somewhere. And there were like 400 people at the conference. And he goes, Well, hey, listen, at the end of this conference, I'm going to give a one on one like

one-hour coaching session to somebody. And like, this is an auction for charity. The bid starts at $500. And at first, all 400 people in the room were like, okay, well, we're bidding it up, maybe $50 at a time. And then everyone started to fall off, except for two people at the end who were just like, really, really wanted it. And they just kept going up by $100 to the point where everyone was so restless that he was like, okay, well, you're both at $4,000.

Would you both just pay me $4,000 and then I'll make it... Each of you get that. Can we just settle this year? And so in a way, you could say, well, look, the market was everyone in the room, right? And the supply and demand placed his little coaching session at whatever, $800. But really, the market was two people, right? And...

At that price point. I kind of feel, you're right, at this new price point. And so I kind of feel like one easy way to miss out is to go, oh, well, you know, sort of we can't build a SaaS in this space because it's so overcrowded. Because you're just looking at the market as it's been designated by everyone who's come before. Yeah. And that's, I just recorded, or I think I released a podcast episode this week about positioning. And I was talking about like positioning really is figuring out where there's a gap in the market.

Where is the corner of the market between sometimes it's like, oh, there's tools out there, but they're too expensive and they're hard to use. Is there an opportunity for a drip or a convert kit to come in and kind of swoop in under, right? And we both got a lot of traction because of that. Or another electronic signature tool, isn't that a salt problem? And yet, Seinwell's crushing it, right? And there are reasons because he found out some unique angles, but

also because he positioned himself well against the incumbents and people are a little tired of him. So I think the other thing too is it is more competitive, but the markets are all growing. Like the market for email service providers compared to 10 years ago has got to be two or three times what it is. So there are more customers in these spaces, even though the marketing is more competitive, the channels are competitive. But I think that's where people need to have...

unique, some type of differentiation. The biggest mistake I see is someone trying to build the exact same thing as a bigger competitor. And they'd be like, well, the market's huge. I just need 1% of it. It's like, no, no one's going to sign up for you. You have to be opinionated and either have unique feature set or unique positioning and be like, we are really good for this subset and not good for everyone else. Right? Yeah.

I watched your video on Kickstarter where you're sort of marketing the book and you go through like a list of like different things that are included. I want to talk about a few of them. You know, you have mindset, you have product market fit, you have marketing, you have new ways to differentiate and compete. You just mentioned that last one, new ways to differentiate and compete. So how do you do that, right? You said have an opinion. You can't just be the same as the incumbent. What works in terms of differentiating yourself and what doesn't work?

Usually early on, everyone says, we're the simpler version of this. We're that with no features. It's kind of a cop-out. Exactly. We're the cheaper. Right. We're cheaper or simpler. And it's like, okay, maybe for now. But really, that's not a durable advantage anymore.

There's a couple angles, right? The one we most of us think of is to pick a vertical. I'm going to be scheduling software for these types of, for hair salons or for gyms instead of scheduling software for everyone. That's kind of the most obvious. If you're in a big space with kind of hated competitors,

What you're trying to look for is where are their Achilles heels or where are their weaknesses? Okay. So I'm going to use drip as an example, even though it's, it's older because I did exactly this. We were undifferentiated and we were plateaued. We did not have strong product market fit. And then when I found out was there, these marketing automation providers were pretty expensive and they were hard to use and

And their sales process sucked. They made you go through multiple calls. They made you pay a $2,000 onboarding upfront. A lot of them made you pay annually. And so I kept saying, is there a way to make not simpler software, but much easier to use software to remove that frustration? Is there a way to just have self signup if you want it? And is there a way to still be super profitable online?

but underpriced them, right? I'm not going to be Walmart, not the low price leader, but they were charging outrageous. I mean, the cheapest one was $400 a month and most of them were two grand a month and up. And so how can we, this is a way to do it, is right, how can we take something that enterprises are using now and paying a lot of money for and make it more accessible to the masses? So,

So I think those are two. And it sounds like if you reduce your operating expenses, so if you have like an option where you don't have to provide all of this onboarding, then that's a way where you can kind of build that into a lower price without cutting into your margins. That's right. It also becomes some of the company, if you're competing against big hated competition, oftentimes their cost basis for everything, including their software, like they were not on AWS because they launched 15 years ago. You know, there's just a lot of, I think a lot of opportunity there.

What about mindset? This is a big topic that I think a lot of people underestimate when they first become founders. What have you seen that helps people have the right mindset to basically succeed with their business? I mean, there's a lot to it, right? It depends on your own psychology. Like some people like me are naturally more stressed or anxious. Like when I was running my last startup, I was like, oh, I'm stressed. Everything's going to be a deal-ender. And I had to learn to like not make speed bumps into roadblocks. So some folks need to hear that, that like...

hey, it's not going to end your business. Most things are not going to end your business. Take a deep breath. We're almost trained in life to

to go to school and then get a job. And then, you know, well, you go to school and go to college and get a job. And you're not faced with crises on a daily basis. But as a founder, you kind of are. And it's sometimes I find it's hard to pick which of these crises are catastrophic and which are just not that big of a deal, right? And so I think that's a big thing that I help founders with these days is I will do a call with a tiny seed founder and just say, I know you're stressed and I can tell this is a big decision.

you'll figure it out. Like, just know that you're going to figure this out. It'll work out. You know, I think being able to roll with things that feel difficult, but actually realize that they're not business ending is a big one.

Where's your mindset at nowadays? I mean, you've been in the game for, you know, 15, 20 years. You've got a million things going on. Do you ever get disillusioned? Do you feel like you have more energy? Like, how are you feeling? I feel like I'm living my best life and it's because I'm working on what I want to do. So if you look at what, I mean, and I've, I do not take that lightly. Like I worked hard to get here. I got a little lucky to get here, but like,

The best decision I made was after selling my last company was to take six months off and say, what do I really want to do? Because I do see entrepreneurs sell their businesses and then start another one and do the same thing. And they don't really want to do that. You know, and that would have been a mistake. Like if I was running hardcore right now, pushing on a SaaS app, I would not be happy. It's just not what I want. I need to be doing at this stage and age and with the age of my kids. So

So for me, I looked back at like, what have I been doing for free forever? And it was writing about entrepreneurship and it was having a podcast about startups and it was writing books and it was starting a microconf, which made no money for several years. You know, it's like...

I almost walked away from all that at one point. We got a cash offer for MicroConf and I was like, oh, this is like 2018. I was like, oh, I could just walk away from all of it. And then I realized, what am I doing? That's like my legacy. That's what you love. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I'm doing. I mean, that was one of the reasons it was like, okay, well, what if I double, I did a what if, right? What if I double down on MicroConf? What if I double down on the podcast? What if I double down on all this stuff? And that's where TinySeed started.

percolating as I talk to people of like, yeah, could you run an accelerator for bootstrappers? And it's like, what would that look like? Right. So I feel, I feel great these days. You just, uh, you just quote tweeted someone. So we, someone mentioned, and, and no, no, uh, no hate on them. They were like, look, now that indie hackers is independent again, you know, if I were CS Allen and Channing Allen, I would list, you know, listen on microconf or microacquire microconf.

and sell it again to someone else this time for 10x could be a great success story right yeah like courtland courtland cheekily quote tweets this guy and goes uh the best success story is finding work you enjoy for a lifetime even if you sell and get a big big payday what's next you start experimenting and trying to build a life you enjoy of course right that's always the end goal money is a tool for that and not a destination there's this um this like

I would describe it as a scarcity mindset around coming up with ideas where a lot of founders, myself included, for the vast majority of the time I built stuff online, think that it's very hard to come up with an idea for something to work on that can both make money and that can align with things that you enjoy doing. And so you've got to choose one or the other. And if you're a broke-ass founder, your first time out of the gate, you choose the one that makes money. And so you see a lot of people starting companies that they would never want to do a second time after they sell the first time.

Do you think that that is kind of a true dichotomy? Do you think it's reasonable as a founder to think, okay, what am I going to enjoy running for the rest of my life and what will make money? Or do you think you kind of have to go out there, build something that's successful, and then once you've got your nest egg, then figure out what you want to do and build a company that aligns with what you want to do for the rest of your life? I think that you have to enjoy the process of building a business. And you probably want to like your customers. But

I don't like the mindset of I have to build something that I don't really like in order to make millions so that I can work on what I want, right? Because you got to enjoy the journey. But also the journey sometimes is not very fun. And so what are you going to hang on to during those not fun times when you're grinding it out or when Russian spammers get all your IPs blacklisted on a Sunday night as happened to us in 2014? And I wake up and I'm like, well...

guess we had a good run. We're done. This is, I literally was like, I think we're done. I think we're going to have to shut down. That's it. The company drip is no more, you know? Um,

So like, do I love dealing with email deliverability and IPs and blacklist? Is that your dream? No, don't. But I really love building businesses and thinking about them and solving hard problems creatively, right? Because that was what, it was constantly hard problems that we'd have to sit down and say, whether it's like, how do we get our IPs unblacklisted? Or it's,

how do we build, like we have these 50 feature requests and they're all kind of related, but they're all asking for different things. Like how do we turn this into a visual workflow that answers all of them, right? That was like a super hard, creative, almost engineering mindset problem to solve. Right. That's the part that I enjoyed the most. And so I think that's what I'll say is like,

I could have run a business for gyms, you know, or for hair salons or whatever. It's still creative problem solving. But I think the two things you want to love is like building a business, creative problem solving, and your customers. I think you want to, like, I do enjoy working with entrepreneurs, right? And it's like, if you don't want to deal with

hair salon owners, then don't start a business for them. Because Patrick McKenzie talks about this, right? With appointment reminder. And how Pelti- And bingo card creator. And bingo card creator, where it's like, he did it for the money and he learned a lot. But as he quickly learned, these are not the people I want to talk with every day. I think that's something that a lot of people make a mistake around. There's this book, Channing, remember you recommended to me, From Strength to Strength? And it

And it kind of starts off by saying, like, look, if you're reading this book, you have made it. You know, you are at the top of your field in some area. You've been a success. Congratulations. But what do you do now? This book is for people like you trying to find their second peak in life. And he studied all of these famous people from Charles Darwin to Johann Sebastian Bach.

and kind of recognize a certain pattern that when people are younger and they're sort of getting their first success, that's when they seem to have the most energy to sort of grind it out and to do this very hard, often creative or even mathematical work to sort of figure it out. You're trying to figure out how do I combat spammers? How do I push into this new market?

But once people get older, if they keep trying to do that same thing over and over, they tend to meet with less success. Like Charles Darwin, everybody knows him because he created the theory of evolution. But what people don't know is that he died tremendously unhappy because he kept trying to top that success when he came up with new theories. So just no one ever really knew anything about him. He sort of died alone and unhappy versus others, which is tragic. I don't know why you're laughing. Right.

But I think that's common. Because it's so tragic. But I think the more successful approach that he talks about is as we get older and we have gained all this knowledge from our earlier wins is to move into a much more social role, a much more teaching role, a role that aligns with our strengths, which as we get older is the fact that we have a ton of experience and wisdom and knowledge, much more than like

anyone younger has because they just haven't been out there whereas at the same time our brain power you know our horsepower is slowing down quite a little bit you know we're a little bit more resting on our laurels and so like it's not surprising to me to see this transition of a lot of people who like do this crazy sass startup at first and they're fighting through all these thorny problems that aren't really their life dream and then later on when they look back and see what they enjoy when they want to get started again it's

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm really honestly impressed or surprised by the people who do just keep starting and starting. Like David Cancel's on his fifth, I think, company. And even like ADPNR did WooThemes, which became WooCommerce. And they did Converseo and sold that to Campaign Monitor. And now is on like his third or fourth. And he had a couple that failed. Just keep going, yeah.

And I'm like, I respect that, but that's not me. But I'm also a lot older than 80, I think. So David Cancel is just an anomaly to me. I'm like, this guy's unbelievable. Or even like, I guess Jason Cohen had...

three and he had like a small success up front and then a bigger one and then WP Engine has been the last 12 years. So, but I couldn't see him doing another one after WP Engine, but maybe he would. But I see exactly to your point, I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing that. I mean, there's a reason the Tiny Seed mentors, the mentor list is a lot of founders who have exited because they want to participate and give back and still be in the game, so to speak. But they don't want to be the center. They know it's like...

It's a cliche, but I'm too old for this shit. That's how I feel of actually being in the heart of it. I've done it for too many years and it doesn't sound fun. Could I do it? Could I pull it off? Yeah. Do I want to do that? No. These days, I'm curious about you. What drives you? Are you driven by making more money a lot? Is it just sort of the process?

Yeah, because I think everyone has kind of their own formula for like what brings happiness, what motivates you, right? Like when I was younger, I wanted to be a success. I think now we're sort of talking about like the second peak in your life and it's like a lot more driven for most people by like what makes me happy, what's on your checklist for what makes you happy? Yeah, it's a really good question and it's one that like I grew up my whole life

wanting to be able to work on whatever i wanted i wanted freedom right i never the money never mattered but i needed money to be free and right it's like a constraint not a goal it is exactly yep and so my goal since i was like had my first job you know when i was a teenager was like i want enough money that i never have to work again that was it and no and i don't need more some people do need more and they've driven by the money and i i haven't been the money's nice i have a you

you know, house in a car and that's great. But I achieved that point in 2016, in essence, where it's like, okay, I literally never have to work at it, but I'm going to work. So what am I going to work on? Right. And that was the big kind of come to Jesus moment, so to speak of like, I went on a founder retreat and was like, I think I'm going to step away from all this. And I actually started talking to the number two

board game slash tabletop gaming website in the world in terms of traffic and reach and I was going to acquire it from him and I was like how much revenue do you have I was going to go all in on tabletop games and all this

And then I had that moment I talked about earlier where I was like, no, I mean, that's fine, but I'm going to regret this if I do this. Would you? Oh, yeah. I would get into tabletop gaming and be happy for a couple of years. And then the margins are terrible. You know what I mean? Money is still a scorecard. You know, it is. That's something I

I think is a pro and a con or a strength and a weakness of me is that I have a tough time doing things that don't involve money, even though the money doesn't motivate me per se, but just doing things, even like my hobbies, I collect, you know, collectibles, right? I have this Beatles gold record back here and I bought it and it's worth more than it used to be. And it's like, I'm never going to sell it. So that doesn't matter. But somehow the money, like it is a little, a little jolt. Yeah. It makes a little wiggly.

Yeah, I know on my checklist, one of the, I've got four or five like items on it that tell me like, I'm going to like working on this. And one of them is that there has to be some number that goes up.

I don't know why. I don't know where that comes from. It has to be – like if I was a writer, maybe it wouldn't be money. Maybe it would be like the number of readers or copies sold or something. But like if there is no like cumulatively growing thing, then I just get this weird feeling in the back of my head that like I'm not really building anything. Like what's the purpose? And so like money in a way, like when it ceases to become like the primary motivator, it's no longer like I need more money to be free.

It does become like this kind of scorecard, but there's healthy and unhealthy ways for that to happen, I think. If it's like you're this Scrooge McDuck character and you're just collecting more and more money, but you're unhappy because you have no idea what you want to do with it except put it in a room and swim through your vault of gold coins, then that's unhappy and that sucks. But if it's like, okay, well, this is a way for me to measure my progress and feel good like I'm accomplishing something, then I think it can be healthy. Yeah.

And you can always spend your money to do other things, right? Invest in other entrepreneurs, pay it forward, help out friends and family, et cetera, because it's not about spending it on yourself that matters. It's just sort of a motivational thing. Yeah. I think that's a big one. A number going up is something I think about a lot too. And this is going to sound...

maybe contrived or cheesy or whatever but like when I I realized at a certain point I really like making an impact I really like impacting people and the more people I can help or impact the happier I am and

that's not just bullshit talk. Like if you look at my history, I grow the podcast so that more people, every time I get an email, that's like, thank you. Like I get these emails. It's like, you changed my life. I had no idea what I was doing. I built an MVP. I just sold it. Like there was a guy in Romania or somewhere very low cost of living. Who's like, I just sold it for half a million dollars. I can almost live the rest of my life on that. And it was basically following your advice.

I made no money off of that. They've never come to a microconf. I don't care. I care that his life is better. And I, is that a bit of a luxury? Yeah, I have that. I don't need to make money off him. Right. But that's where the, the numbers that go up these days are, um, you know, YouTube subscribers or podcast subscribers. Like that's where I'm, if those are stagnant, I'm just like, who, so who am I helping then? Right. What good is this? How am I making a difference in the world? Right.

Yeah. I wanted to ask you guys about the whole Stripe thing. Is it a weird transition to do this? No, no, no. We can talk about whatever we want. Yeah. That's why I love interviewing another podcast host because you could just- Because we can just turn the tables. Yeah. Exactly. Well, I mean, so I listened to your last episode. I saw the announcement that IndieHackers is indie again. I listened to your last episode and-

I know you can't divulge details of the deal, which I'm not going to ask about, but I totally get why you guys would do this because I would feel the same way. No matter how good the parent company is, that's the question. I believe Stripe approached you about it. Is it a focus thing? I have my own theory of markets are going down. I know they took a haircut on valuation. Are they just trying to focus? What's the logic there? I think it's tricky to talk about.

You're right. But I think at the end of the day, like I know this also sounds cheesy, but like people at Stripe are just really good. They are not very miserly. They're not like penny-pinching trying to save every nickel and dime. And I think Patrick in particular is pretty wise about like the overall sort of concept of like branding and reputation compared to other like big unicorn startups.

of its size. Stripe has a remarkably small number of bad press stories, etc. And that's deliberate. It comes from the top because everyone at Stripe is conscious of making sure we have what's called the front page test. If what you're doing appeared on the front page of a magazine, how would you feel about it for the company? And that takes precedent over, okay, how much money do we save this quarter or this half or something? And so I think for Patrick, he's just looking at indie hackers and looking at who we are and what we're motivated by and how we feel.

And a large part of it is like, hey, are you guys happy?

Are you doing what you want to do? Do you still have the same fire? Do you still have the same drive? He's asked me that question every single year that we've been at Stripe. And I think we could have stayed, right? We could have just continued doing exactly what we were doing. And Channing and I had also go back and do some soul searching and be like, are we happy? Would it be better if we owned IndieHackers? That was never an option before. What would we do in that case? And what would we need to feel like it was even a fair deal or a good deal? Because IndieHackers burns through a lot of cash, right? I don't want to...

jump ship and then suddenly be like losing money every month. And so I think it was just like a hodgepodge of just, it was just convenient for both parties to figure out a good deal for that. And like, here we are in this crazy situation where like, we owned, you know, this time last month, 0% of indie hackers, right? And now we own way, way, way more than that. Another thing from Stripe's incentive perspective, just aligns with the

weird circumstances around them acquiring us in the first place, which is that we inspire a lot of new entrepreneurs and we help to educate a lot of entrepreneurs to be more successful. That's a common rising waterline that lifts all the boats, right? And so that's what we were doing at Stripe. We weren't making a lot of revenue and then, you know, it wasn't a financial acquisition where, you know, that we were raising their bottom line in that way. Like if we are

healthy and happy and like inspiring more entrepreneurs and like doing what we are really like designed to do better than that helps with what Stripe actually wants from us. So

Us being cut loose, us being independent and having the energy to go 100% on indie hackers is directly in Stripe's interest. Yeah, and that's a really mature way of thinking about it. And I would expect that Patrick or Stripe in general to think about it that way, right? It's a long-term way of thinking. It's, as you said, I know they talk about raising the GDP of the internet. And if you're able to do that better independently...

as I was going to say before you said it, I'm like, I know Stripe's not making buckets of money off IndieHackers. That was not the play. The play, as I saw it years ago, was, hey, we want IndieHackers to stay alive. And or, I think at the time you were running ads, and I think Patrick was like, ah, it'll grow faster without ads. That was my mental model of why they acquired you. It's like, they want MicroConf to exist. They want IndieHackers to exist. Of course. I don't know if you guys were there at the MicroConf where...

I was either talking to Patrick or John Collison on stage, and I said, raise your hand if, you know, SaaS companies all abounding, right? And raise your hand if you use Stripe. And it's like 90% of the attempt. Yeah, it was crazy, right? I totally get that it's good for them. It's just such a mature... Companies don't think that way. And that honestly is one of the reasons. Like, I have respect. Collison's, man. Tons. Just loads. Like, they run it. I have similar respect for, like, Ben Chestnut at MailChimp. Like, there's only a handful. Dharmesh at HubSpot. Like, there's a handful that I'm like...

you are super legit and you are very wise and you make decisions that are very mature. I have, I mean, a mental model, but it's just borrowed from other things. Like, you know, Jeff Bezos has like the regret minimization framework when you come to a decision, which am I going to regret? At least in my head, it's usually if I'm come to a hard decision, um,

If I pick the path that will let me either learn more or that's riskier within reason. Not risky like putting my house on the line, but that kind of scares the shit out of me. Those are the ones that I tend to lean towards. I wasn't able to do that in my 20s. I was too scared. And then as I matured, I was like, oh, risk actually brings fun. It brings a little bit of... Stakes in there. Yeah. So, I mean, the two of you as founders, as entrepreneurs...

I feel like you would have regretted not going independent. I just can't imagine not doing it. Even though it's scary and you have to work through it as an emotional process, it doesn't even seem like a decision to me. It's just a foregone conclusion that you would do this. Yeah. What would you do in our situation? What do you want to see us do? A lot of people have asked about indie hackers investing in other indie hackers. In fact, Eric Tornberg DMed me like,

Like three months ago, he started On Deck, which is sort of this like school for people in the tech industry to sort of help each other with these different topics. And he's like, hey, why isn't there a way for people who love these small indie projects to basically support each other financially and invest in each other? And, you know, I'm not sure how it would work, but like why haven't you figured that out? And it's been in the back of my mind for a long time, but I haven't just sat down and thought like how would that work?

And Rob, you're like the best person to talk to about this because like you actually invest in like quote unquote bootstrapped startups, right? Like you see like what are the returns like? How does it actually work? And I think no one's really cracked this nut because like generally speaking, people invest in tech companies hoping for a unicorn. And the average indie hacker is not trying to make a unicorn, right? They're trying to like pay their rent. And so it's something that I'm like noodling on is like is there some way to financially – because –

Like partly it's just like fun. If I could go to a giant directory of indie hackers and see all my favorite people building their stuff and I could throw money at them to help them be able to take off work and launch earlier, et cetera, and expect like not some huge return, but something that's like, it makes it somewhat worthwhile. That would be dope.

I'm not sure what the numbers are like for that though. Like, you know, realistically, is that even possible to get a return? There's two complexities that I'm going to introduce. I love this idea as well, because I would love to go to a directory of indie hacker projects or microconf projects and just be like a hundred bucks, 500 bucks, whatever. This is great. It's super fun. I think there's two things that are going to get in your way. We're going to make it complicated. Number one,

return drivers, making your money back will be very, very difficult. Even if you, if you go across all these indie hacker projects, as you said, people are trying to make their rent and maybe they make, you know, maybe they get to 20 K or 30 K the, the money that's thrown off from there. Just, it isn't a lot, right?

Right. So the valuations would have to be very, very, I'll say they'd have to be very reasonable compared, you know, it's like if you raise it a million dollar valuation and you put in a thousand dollars, you own one, one thousandth of that company. And so as you throw dividends off, like we can do quick math is nothing. Right. So then it's like, so you can't raise it a million.

So you got to raise at maybe 100,000 valuations. So then you put it, you know, and will people allow that, right? Will they say, I'll sell 20% of my IndieHacker project for 20 grand, right?

So that's one thing. To make the economics work, it will have to be different than, certainly than Silicon Valley, but even than the tiny seeds in the Indy.bcs, you would be at a level, I would say a level lower just in valuations in order to make the economics ever work. The other thing

is on the, my God, the laws in this country, the securities laws. We struggle so, we spend so much money on lawyers and we are literally lobbying Congress to try to get the 99 investor rule changed, right? We raised a fund. We can only have 99 investors. They all have to be accredited. They're already accredited. They're millionaires and yet I can't have more than 99 people in my fund. It's ridiculous, right? So we're working with a group to try to get that changed. But all that said, so,

in your case with IndieHackers, I think you'd want to go more the RegCF, the crowdfunding route. Right. Right? Because then you can just put in a few hundred bucks because...

If you were to try to raise from accredited investors, A, there's just only so many. And B, if you raise $1,000 from an accredited investor, the legal fees alone to just put that together are cost prohibitive, right? Yeah. So I think with crowdfunding, I would then logistically want to go out to one of the crowdfunding platforms and partner with them. Almost like you'd have a crowdfunding syndicate. Right.

You go on AngelList, right? And we run this. We get a SaaS deal and they're outside of TinySeed, but they're in the TinySeed syndicate. And we can raise 100 grand, 200, 300 grand to help them kind of raise a round from our investors. Now, in a syndicate, they all have to be accredited. And I don't know that's the best idea. I don't know that that's the best option for indie hackers. But I've never seen a crowdfunding syndicate. And I don't know if that could exist. Right.

Because you don't want to deal with the legal, trust me. Right, I know. It is mind-boggling how it's expensive and time-consuming. And talk about stuff we don't want to deal with. It's the worst, you know? It seems like crowdfunding sidesteps so many of those issues. Like you get to invest or you get... I mean, let's say you get to like...

let's call it invest, but you're not necessarily only just buying equity, right? You allow for, say, the founder of a company to innovate what they want to give people such that maybe there are way easier returns. Like, hey, if you...

if you invest this much money, like they can do like the tiers, right? Then you can be someone who has like a, you know, access to these features for my product, or you can, you know, you can, we'll always have you on this page. Who knows, right? But there's, it just allows for...

Right. It just allows for some innovation on the kinds of returns. And so we talk about markets and the personalities that go into markets. Well, it just so happens that if this happens on any hackers, you're dealing with people on the supply and the demand side who have a lot of initiative, have a lot of creativity, and have a lot of goodwill with one another. If you remove equity, it becomes a lot simpler. And if you go to the more... You talked about doing...

a crowdfunding model that is an equity, like more of a Kickstarter model built into the hackers, right? That's where you get back to. I could see people needing, it would be a brand like you're the most famous indie hackers, um,

who was like John Young Fook, right? He's big on the side. Is Peter Lovell a big in-deck ride? So if they came on and were raising, a bunch of us would throw in money. I think people who have done less work and who have less of a following might struggle a bit more, but that would kind of be the game, right? Yeah, that's the game. Can you discover the diamonds in the rough? Can you be there when no one else is? Anyway, Rob, thanks a ton. I appreciate your ideas and your feedback. Absolutely, sir.

I feel like we can work together in ways that we haven't been able to in the past, which is kind of cool. We're just in a whole different playing field now. And so excited to go to MicroConf next year. It's a whole new world. Excited to stay in touch. Excited to talk to you about being an investor, because I think I might be an investor going forward. Tripe just did their tender offer. And so... Ah.

My money is no longer just all on paper. I was going to say, yeah, now you're rolling it. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So life's exciting. I'm excited for your new book. I ordered, I think the option on Kickstarter to give me two hardcover copies so I can give one away. And then I think the audio book or the ebook, uh,

And then I'll probably buy whichever one I didn't get afterwards because I want every format possible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know how I can tell that we're beyond the Stripe Tinder offer? For once, you're not wearing your robe. You're wearing an actual shirt. I can afford clothes. Or it's either the money or you just have a lot of respect for Rob because you really dress up today. You have a whole t-shirt on.

I subjected Wes to my robe look the other day. Rob, you get to see me fully clothed. Thanks a ton for coming on, dude. What's your sort of parting advice for people listening who are trying to figure out what to do now that they've hit product market fit? This is sort of where your head's at nowadays. Besides just buying your book, which of course they should go out and do, what's something you want founders to take away from your learnings?

One thing I really regret is I didn't delegate more. I did hire more senior people. I hired a lot of junior people because I didn't have money. And I just, I was always the bottleneck, right? Managing junior people. And I think one thing that's on my mind these days is the luxury that I have. We talked about earlier being able to work on what I want is because we have very senior people. And so the moment you can,

hire someone who's really good even if they're expensive and uh that will allow you to 10x love it feels amazing hiring somebody who's good and then suddenly all this stuff is getting done and it's getting done better than you would have done it and you're just like it is it's crazy that's awesome advice um where can people go to to find more about you startups with the rest of us if they want to listen to podcasts or twitter at rob walling

Sarab Shrestha was highly recommended. One of the longest running podcasts in the space. Super good. Rob's silky voice coming through every episode. All right. Thanks, Rob. Great to be here.