Episode 8 with Arvid Kahl

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast. Today I am joined by a very special guest, Arvid Kahl. Welcome to the show, Arvid.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited for today.

Arvid, this is almost like a coffee conversation. This is like—

Pretty much.

Just you and I, you know, catching up on things. 'Cause I feel like there's an ongoing theme of topics we talk about. And it feels like we start off with an async conversation on Twitter, sometimes in DMs. And then, you know, sometimes on a Twitter Spaces, you know, when I last interviewed you, when you did the book launch and then this podcast, it feels like there's a string of all these things that are going on. Mm-hmm. But for the 7 people in the audience who may not have heard about you, first of all, what are you guys doing? But anyway, if they haven't heard about you, you're many things to many people. Like, how would you describe yourself?

Oh man. Yeah, I'm definitely a person that used to think that I was just a software engineer at some point. And then I became a writer, I became an entrepreneur, and then I just like shed all these categories and I'm just doing whatever I want. It's pretty much how I'd describe myself. I'm trying to teach people at the same time about my experiences and what I learned and the things that worked for me and didn't work for me. You know, it's just sharing both the wealth of knowledge and experience that I got in those couple of years that I've been doing this in public now. Um, that's kind of— yeah, I'm a teacher more than anything else. I think that's, that's the shift. I used to be a professional, and now I'm experienced enough to start teaching and sharing what I know. And it's a lot of fun, I could tell you that. But I don't need to tell you that because you've been doing the exact same thing as well. So, you know—

I'm glad that you— uh, you know, thanks for that intro. I'm glad that you brought up the word teacher because In many ways, a lot of people who are doing content creation, you know, either on Twitter, Clubhouse, or, you know, any of these— YouTube— any of these distribution channels, I feel like are, um, you know, having a tough time, you know, keeping up with this expectation, high standard of, oh, I have to be a content creator, which means I have to be like Gary Vee, or I have to be like a TikTok star like this. Anytime you think about a content creator, like up-and-coming content creators, I have a lot of people like in my DMs ask me the same thing. Like they're comparing themselves to the TikTok stars or like the performance. And I feel like there's a lot of pressure that comes from viewing that activity as performance, as opposed to an activity of service, teaching predominantly. Right. So I'm curious, like, let's unpack that. Like, why did you say teaching and why does it resonate with you?

Well, the thing is I'm only as successful as I've been in, in the last couple years with both the, the SaaS business that I built with my girlfriend and, and then sold, and the books that I wrote, and the people that I talked to, because I've learned all of this from people who freely and willingly shared everything they knew while they were doing what they were doing like 5 or 6 years back, right? I'm, I've been dabbling in bootstrapping businesses for almost a decade at this point, failed many, many times building stuff with friends and colleagues. But then at some point I built Feedback Panda with my girlfriend Danielle, and that succeeded. But it didn't succeed because I all of a sudden was a genius. I don't consider myself to be any more than average. I think many people out there probably are much better at what they're doing than I am. But I had all of these experiences prior of things that didn't work, and I learned about the successful experiences of other people because they were sharing in public, in the communities that they were part of about what they were doing, what worked, what didn't work, all these kinds of things. So I saw that teaching in a way that is not educational, like school kind of teaching, teaching to a test, right? This was not that it was supposed to be an exam at some point. And then I'm like a licensed entrepreneur that doesn't exist, but—

Right.

They taught what they knew to other people so they could help them on their journey. And the journey doesn't end at the exam. There is no end to entrepreneurship, right? It's like one of these infinite games, business itself. You cannot win business. You cannot win entrepreneurship.

Right.

You can't defeat the other players in the game. The only thing you can do with these infinite games is to keep playing. And the winning move is the move that keeps you playing. And while there are many finite games out there too, and, you know, like Even in business, there are many smaller things where you can cheat or you can do a couple of tricks, manipulate people into getting something that has an end, that has a finite kind of component to it. But business and entrepreneurship itself is infinite. And I learned that from those people because they didn't teach because it made them money. They taught because they wanted to empower other people. And once I understood that, I thought, this is something that I want to do when I am successful. And then I became successful after building and selling this business. And now I was at a way different stage financially in my life. So I could say, okay, now I don't need to think about next month's rent or mortgage payment. I can now consider what's going to happen in 10 years from now. And then I thought, what can I do in the meantime? Because I don't need to work really. I don't need to find a job. I just sold the business. And I thought, I thought, yeah, okay. Now it's my turn to help those people that are in the position that I was in a couple of years ago. And that's the whole reason why I'm doing what I'm doing. I enjoy it. Teaching is an act of humility. I get to understand what I don't yet know, right? Even in writing books about topics, like, it's— you run into something that you thought you understood and you try to explain it, and then you figure out, oh, I have a problem here. So you spend a couple of days researching it, talking to other people, making it more clear in your own mind so you can transport it onto the page for other people to understand. It's just a humbling experience to teach. If you are aware that no one possesses all knowledge, right? So, which most teachers do, like there's always somebody who's more experienced or more knowledgeable than you are, but it doesn't matter. Like if I know something, I can teach somebody who doesn't know it that thing, and that's good enough. So that's how I approach like my outreach to people to try to teach them the things I know and to give them the tools to understand the things that they need to understand.

So one specific aspect you touched on, which is really profound to me, was this metaphor that you used around business being an infinite game and you can't really win at business. I loved it. And I think, you know, there's this notion in public where a lot of people assume because they're first attempt or second attempt, didn't work the way it should have, they've lost at business. And so if the hypothesis that business is an infinite game and you can't win business, the corollary is, or the opposite is also true, which means you can't lose at business.

That's

right. You may be tired and you may give up. You may have self-burnout or you may have this self-doubt or whatever, all these internal issues, But really there's no losing, you know, when you're approaching business as an experiment, right? How do you expand on that? Like, what are your thoughts more on like, where did you arrive to the conclusion that, man, business is actually an infinite game and I kind of want to approach it that way?

Yeah. So finite games, they have rules that everybody follows. They have a clearly set amount and number of players that doesn't change and you have winners and losers, right? That's how finite games are categorized. Any sports activity pretty much is that, like a soccer game, minutes, 2 halves, 11 players each, a couple of rules around that. They try to kick the ball into the goal and that's it. Once those 90 minutes are over and overtime and the shootout, you know, once the rules are done and the game is over, you have a clear winner or a clear loser. Or like in soccer, which is confusing a lot of people in the United States, at least you may have a draw as well. But, you know, those games have like a finite amount of outcomes at least. And winning and losing usually is the dichotomy there. An infinite game has rules that change over time. It has new people joining the game and people leaving the game at the same time.

Yes.

And there is no clear winning or losing because of this, right? Because if you, if you can't tell, well, this person isn't even playing the game anymore, are they winning? Did they win or did they lose? It just doesn't make sense. So a business and even life in many ways, like a successful, healthy life— health is not a finite game, right? You can't win health. You can just stay healthy. Maybe that's the better metaphor even. Like if you want to win at health, you just live a healthy life. And that can change over time because depending on where you are, certain foods will be available, certain vitamins, or maybe even certain medical procedures may or not be needed. So it's a changing field. And I believe that's the same for business, for entrepreneurship. And nothing that you experience will make you lose unless you stop playing the game all by itself. Like, if you just retreat completely, if you say this isn't for me, well, that's the only time when you can actually lose. If you just look at it and say, okay, this didn't work, interesting, learned something today, let's try it again, let's try something else, let's make a little change here. As long as you take your learnings and experiment over and over again, there will be a moment in time where you just condense the— what's the phrase for this? Like the potential for error into something so small that you won't hit it anymore. You know, like you have this whole unexplored world of potential mistakes you can make in the beginning. Then you make one mistake. Okay, I get why this is a mistake. So you don't make it again the next time. And then you make another mistake. And at some point, this amount of potential mistakes will shrink and the amount of potential good things you can do will increase in size. It's just, yeah, it's just stay in the game and learn as much as you can. And I think every entrepreneur has this story somewhere, because nobody, nobody is an overnight success, right? That's, that's always this kind of phrase in SaaS in particular. Every overnight success has been years or decades in the making, just from all the little parts that you need to learn along the way to ever get to that point of success. You will never hit it at your first try. And even if you do, there have been things in your past that kind of got you to this. Right. If reverse that just means try as much as you can, learn as much as you can, and just stick with it. If you— particularly for people in the bootstrapping space, most of the projects start out as side projects. And that is a really good idea, because if you have a full-time job that pays for your rent, that pays for your food, pays for insurance, whatever you need, that's wonderful. You have the safety cushion, and now you can experiment with things on the side. And I highly recommend that to anybody that talks to me about starting a business. Don't jump into it not knowing how it works, but trying to make it happen within 6 months because you have savings for that. It's not a good idea. Even if your business idea is super validated and you already have people like prepaying or something, you have money coming in, still consider that you don't know what you don't know.

Hmm.

So whatever weird thing may come your way and completely destroy the basis of your business, like regulation that you haven't thought of before. You're not even allowed to do this without a license. And the license is like $20,000 that you don't have. These things can happen and they happen to quite a few people. Do it on the side, have something solid and build a side project and build it up from there. And that's how we built Feedback Panda too. That's like one of the things that I, and we consciously chose to do this. We said, we are both gonna keep our businesses or not our business, our jobs at that point. Mm-hmm. I was a software engineer working for a company somewhere in Germany. Danielle was an online English teacher, which is where the idea for Feedback Panda came from, because it was a tool for online English teachers like her. And she was teaching from home. And we both kept our jobs until our business made like somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 monthly recurring revenue. Like, we both had full-time jobs still and ran the business on the side because we knew if we jump into this, everything and anything could happen. And we would rather do this at a point where we know that it's going to be safe for us to do, because, you know, like this, building something like this is generating wealth that you want to keep, you know, and it's something meaningful. And we didn't want to risk anything there. And that's how it started out. So side projects are a wonderful idea to explore this space. And they allow for a lot of experimentation. Because if it doesn't work, great, you still have a job.

Right. So I like that methodical approach. And, you know, Since you brought up Feedback Panda, uh, I've been always meaning to ask you this. Um, so Feedback Panda, TL;DR, is basically, uh, almost a vertical SaaS meant for online educators, um, who were especially doing ESL, right? English as a Second Language. Uh, but I, I wonder if it was broader, like was it for all online educators?

It was even more narrow. It was people doing ESL for for Chinese kid English companies teaching through a web-based system.

Wow. Could not get narrower than that.

So, no, not really.

Niche to the— you know, that's the definition of the word niche. Yeah. So I'm curious about what are— like, what's the opportunity space like out there for other developers, other founders, other bootstrappers? When you take this particular slice and you're like, okay, so this is what I see, this tiny opening is what I— see from Feedback Panda's example, like now think about all these verticals there are, like there's dentists, there's real estate people, there's all kinds of like, you know, all kinds of verticals. If you think about like professions or careers, and then you think about markets like China as a market, right? Or like, oh, North America, or like locally, like, oh, I'm in Germany. There's no such thing for Germans.

Yes.

That's another one, geographical distinctions. And the third distinction, I guess, is about like, uh, for non-technical people or for developers or for advanced tech. I mean, there's so many variations of these and I'm curious, like, what, how would you, uh, what would you say about the space? Like how many micro SaaS or vertical, uh, SaaS verticals that are out there that are, you know, you're tracking?

Oh, I think that they must be in the thousands at this point because like whenever you look into a space, just an industry, right? Teaching. If you look into education, you find like brick-and-mortar teaching, like schools, regular teaching. You find universities, you find, I don't know, trade schools. And if you look into any of these, you already find specialized solutions per department.

Yeah.

It's not that that's just for universities as like there's, I don't know, like student enrollment tracking SaaS. There's just, getting feedback on certain teachers' assistants' work schedule SaaS. Like, it's incredible how deep people drill into this. Right. And it's almost exclusively like when you look this deep that somebody founded this company because they either had the problem or they were living with somebody who had the problem or they were on the receiving end of the problem and they needed to do something about it. And that to me is the most wonderful thing about this because everybody is in some unique way exposed to certain things that nobody else is. Right. Just in the combinations, like the skill sets that we have, they are also unique the moment we start overlapping them. Right. I'm just, I don't know, as an example, I'm a software engineer, I'm a writer, and I'm a founder. I'm an entrepreneur. I also really love gaming. So now you have 4 things that if you intersect them, probably not too many people have that particular intersection. And it may be a couple dozen or so that really care as much about this as I do, which makes this a wonderful thing because there is some competition, obviously, but it's also uniquely mine, whatever I do. And most people out of these 4 fields that I just mentioned will resonate with some kind of combination of them. And that's awesome because that means that if you have 4 different things, you can do your thing. I can do my thing. I build my audience, you build yours. There might be some intersection, but everybody gets their share. Everybody gets to do what they want to do and reach the people that care about it. And I feel if you look into this whole niching down or niching up or sideways, everybody can find a space depending on how much you know about the particular industry that you're interested in, the particular locality, the geographic situation, and the approach that people have to solving a problem, which is like how technical they are or how how many existing technical solutions exist that you either compete with or can integrate with. There's so much out there.

Yeah.

And I'm still only thinking about university education at this point, right? Because the moment you zoom out a little bit and then you look at the other field, the online education, which is such a big thing now with the pandemics and that have been changing countries, changing whole education sectors at this point, and the education, lifelong education, lifelong learning. And the concepts like, I don't know, MasterClass, this little app where people go to learn stuff, that also fits in there. So all of a sudden, you have a potential Netflix situation where learning as an entertainment streaming service comes into play. There's so much going on in just the education space.

Just education. Yeah. And then we didn't even include like cohort-based courses.

Yeah, the stuff that we do, right? That we're in. Yeah, there's— and even within court-based courses, you, you as a person that is currently heavily involved in one, you've probably experienced minute little problems.

Yeah.

That you will experience over and over again. And that will put you at an interesting position. Either you're going to solve them, or you can tell other people that there is a problem, and you can help them figure out a solution. And now they can build a business. It's a wonderfully empowering and enabling activity to be an expert in a field. You don't have to build a business out of it, but you can just really encourage other people to solve your problems for you. It's really cool.

It's, you know, I mean, talking to you always like feels like, you know, it's a boost to my energy system. Like, it's just, there's so something so energizing about knowing how much potential there is in, as, as in the business world, you know, Arvid, I can never get tired of it. Like, I talked, I shared this with my wife all the time. I'm like, she's She's like, what's your retirement plan? I don't want to retire. I can't imagine, like, I'm 72. Yes. I'm still probably gonna find some 14, 18-year-old, 20-year-old and say exactly the shit that you just told me. Like, hey, go build the thing. Like, look at those 4 or 5 Venn diagrams, like the intersections, and like, that's where your sweet spot is. Go build that, you know? So anyway, my, my follow-up question to you around the niching down and the, um, vertical-based SaaS is around founder-market fit. And I bring this up especially because I've noticed there's so many makers, no-code makers, no-code founders, and even like in the indie hacker community, which are usually developers, bootstrappers, I've noticed that there's a genuine like tendency to build something that is objectively interesting, you know, that may sound cool, look cool, you can share with your friends and like, wow, I'm building the next Netflix or whatever. than trying to build something where you have an unfair advantage in, which is your founder-market fit, where you clearly lived through the problem or you watched your partner/friend/coworker suffer and you're like, hey, I can totally build this thing and, you know, find success. Why is that happening? Like, what do you think is going on there? And what are your thoughts on founder-market fit?

People probably often forget that building a business isn't just building a product. Like the, what I often see, and that's kind of a product-first mindset where people have a really cool idea and then they build it and then they try to like put it into a market, like stuff it into our market, like product-market fit, like a child pushing one toy into another. 'Cause often feels like that to me because it's not, it does fit. It is made to fit, right?

Mm-hmm.

People force it in. That doesn't work. So I often, I think people just, they neglect the fact that a business is— how do I say this? Usually I say a business is a way to repeatedly sell a product. It's kind of the shortest definition of a business. There's more to it, obviously, but a business is a— it's a generator. It's a way to reliably sell the same product over and over again to more and more people, because that's just what a business is. So the product is part of this, but the product is not all of it, right? There's still this whole I need to reliably and repeatedly sell this to people. And the moment you need to do that, you have to actually engage with people. And if you need to engage with people, you better like them because there's nothing worse than selling to or being talked to by people that you don't like being talked to, that you don't enjoy. Like one of the first things that I talk about in my second book, The Embedded Entrepreneur, is for people to find their audience, their target future audience that they want to serve. Because that choice, who do I want to serve, is the foundation of everything else you do in a business. Because if you pick the wrong people for the next 5 or 10 years of building a business, you're not gonna have a good time. You, you might actually fail at business, or at least at trying to build this particular one, because it's just— there's no motivation in there, there's no energy flow in there. People siphon off energy from you instead of giving you energy by engaging with you. Yeah. If you, if you don't have what I, what I call affinity for this particular audience. So that I, I, in the book I go into this little guide on how to find your audience, and the first step is make a big list of everything you would potentially be able to help and then rank them. And the first thing you rank them by is affinity. I— there's also opportunity, like are there interesting problems in the space? There's, um, kind of, uh, appreciation. Are there budgets for things in the space? And then market size. the other 3. But the first thing, and probably one of the most important ones, is how much affinity do you have for any given market? And just do this in your mind as a little exercise, um, just right now. Think of the top 5 audiences that you could serve. In my case would be software engineers, writers, entrepreneurs, people who really like to have an aquarium because I like fish. And, um, I, I don't know what, what would the other one be? Twitter users, probably.

Or beekeeping. I think I've seen that in your hobbies.

Beekeeping is also an interest. Yeah, just anything like that, and then make a list of them and just start ranking them. How much do I really care? And I know I certainly care a lot about writers and I care a lot about bootstrappers, particularly as I am this, right? As a combination of those, but I know that bootstrappers, that founders need help. They really need help because there's a lot out there to learn and without guidance, you just run into walls. It's fine, right? You run into walls and at some point you just run through them. Like, like the— doesn't matter who runs the walls, but you know, like, it's an exercise. It's a discipline and willingness to fail and to learn, and you will get through there. But if I can help people see the walls and see the little cracks where running through them is easier, that's what I would like to do. And the same goes for writers. Publishing is hard. Writing a book is hard. If I can give you a couple hints on how to structure your outline so it doesn't make you go crazy, how to involve other people so your draft is better— if I can do this, I feel great. Now let's look at another audience. Look at software engineers. I have a lot of affinity for them, but not as much. And I'm sorry if you are a software engineer listening to this, I still love you, but I know that there are other people in the space who can help you better than I can. So if there was a ranking out of like 10 for highest affinity to 0, writers and bootstrappers would get a 10. Software engineers probably would get an 8. Still a lot, but not that much. And then I look at beekeepers. Good idea to put them in there. I really love honey and I love people like farming and animals and stuff, but I'm not one of them. I like them, but I'm not deeply involved in this community. So for affinity, probably would rank a 4 or 5. And, you know, that step alone should tell you, do I want to spend years in this space or do I not? And that's so important because if you just build something for people that you hate or that hate you, might be, you never know, it's not going to be a fun journey. And it's not going to be a rewarding journey either, both monetarily. You're not going to make as much money because you're not going to have the same energy level to put into your business. And it will exhaust you. It will literally make you not like your job. And most people who start businesses already hated the job they did before. So why would you do this again? Nobody teaches us these things. Nobody teaches us how to be an entrepreneur and how to pick your audience. Hence, I wrote the book trying to help people to figure this out. But I think one of the most important things to learn early is that whoever you choose to work for is one of the most important choices that you make in your whole career. And you can choose to work for different people at different times, which is interesting because you asked You asked me earlier about like how many opportunities are in the space. Over time, there's an infinite amount of opportunity because you evolve.

Right.

You evolve, the space evolves, regulation evolves, opportunities from other opportunities. Like people create new tools that allow you to new tools to use new tools to make new tools like the no-code space pretty much, right? That thing just did not exist 10 years ago.

Right.

I mean, we could argue about the fact that Adobe Dreamweaver and stuff were no-code tools back then. Right. not the same quality of tools. So whatever we have right now is a new thing. 10 years ago, nobody would have thought that would happen. So the opportunities that are now introduced by that, they didn't exist back then. Over time, new opportunities become possible. So I hope this answers your question. It does.

No, it does. I actually, I deeply resonate with the, with the point about just reflecting on the 4 or 5 types of you know, identities you have, like hobbies or identities, and then ranking them on affinity. I think that's— I— that's one thing I wish I knew like 4 or 5 years ago. And I'm wiser now because I didn't know that. I ran into a bunch of walls and I learned the hard way. But to your point, like, I wish that's something that a lot of, you know, people who are just getting started really spend time, um, because that, like, by default, that one choice will already put you in the top 20%, right, of people in that field.

That's right.

And like, for example, like I didn't, when I joined ODNC, when I joined On Deck, my pure existence already put me in the top 20%. I'm not saying top 1%, like, because I lived the life. I was a no-coder. I was a non-technical product person, was building a lot of things on the side in public or building public, whatever. And I built, racked up about 10 side projects, and I suffered through everything that currently we're trying to help the no-code community not suffer through. So by making me the program director, Aandek made a bang-on choice. And for me, every day I wake up and I'm like, I'm never exhausted. And you've seen, I mean, we've both had like multiple interactions. Yeah. I freaking love it, you know? And I'm sometimes shocked that they pay me for this shit, because I've done a lot of this and it has to feel that way. That's what I try to remember and like try to pass on as advice to founders is like, even if nobody paid you, you should have some kind of intrinsic motivation and satisfaction Helping that particular niche, you know. In your case, I'm sure it was like, you know, your wife's audience and your— so you were like in one way helping your wife or your partner and people like her have less headaches.

Yep, exactly. And that's really motivating. Yeah. And you saw it actually happen. Like she was using the tool, she was the first user of Feedback Panda, and her 2 hours of daily extra work turned into 10 minutes.

Yeah.

That was just— and I had her for the whole other hour and 50 minutes as a partner, right? Like, it was literally that I could feel the benefits of the business. And then I knew that anybody else who got to use the product would feel the exact same thing. And how could you not be motivated by people being able to spend 2 more days, 2 more hours a day with their kids? Like, that is just such an obvious gain that every additional customer that we got made it maybe even at a subconscious level, but it was clear to us that we were literally making people feel better about their lives because they had more opportunity to connect with other people. And if that is what the outcome of your business is, and not every business has that, right? If you have a little, I don't know, an API for file conversion to like turn a file from an image into a PDF or something, that may sound boring and on some level, and it doesn't really evoke this, oh, this person is now living a life. There's a file being converted, but hey, they have a job. And if they use your tool to do in 4 hours what they would have done in 8, you have the exact same consequence. You have a person that has more time to do the things that are meaningful to them and spend less time on the tedious stuff. And that's really what business is all about, like enabling people to make more money, make more, um, yeah, to spend less money or spend less time on something. One of these 3, it's really what it is. And if you can help them with one or all of them, you have a business. And that's really all there is to helping people with a business is to just helping them help themselves.

So now I have an interesting question that I know you've talked about many times. And I know you've sort of lived it with your recent book launch too. Um, co-creating with an audience. So let's talk about that. Like, why is that important to you? You know, what— and what do you see as advantages, you know, for an average person? What kind of advantages you've had, you know, applying that approach?

Well, one of the core tenets of my whole embedded entrepreneurship approach that I've figured out worked best for me and that I've tried to teach to people is that I know a lot about the things that I do. But the people who I serve know better still. Right? It's like when I write a book about a certain topic, it's— I'm the expert writing the book, but the people who know what they want to read are my readers. And the idea of a product like a book is not that I am the greatest writer, but that the reader is the most fulfilled after they put down the book. That's the purpose of a book. A book is just like any other product, any other item of business, any other thing that people create, it has a purpose. And the purpose is to teach them something that is actionable and helpful. And I was thinking about this because I, I wrote Zero to Sold, my first book, pretty much by myself. I wrote it on my blog. It was still in public, half, half in public, right? Because half of the chapters in the book were essentially blog posts that I wrote over time. And then somebody told me, hey, this looks really cool. Can you condense it? And then it turns into a guide. And then somebody told me, hey, this guide is cool. If I could print it out, I'd pay you $10. And then I knew, okay, this apparently is a book and I'm now a writer. But, you know, like the first book happened more kind of by random choice. Like it just happened. And the second one was more of an intentional product. But as it was intentional and it was about audience-centric businesses, I thought, hey, I need to write this book itself. As I built the book as an audience-centric product. So from the beginning, I tried to involve people because I knew these are going to be my future readers. My future readers know exactly what they don't know and what they know. I mean, they don't know what they don't know, but they know that they don't know certain things. So by exposing them to the outline from the first, I think it was somewhere in August 2020 when I tweeted about it and I had a little landing page about what's going to be in the book. People told me, this is really nice, but I still need to know about this because you don't have that in the outline. And I really need to know. I don't know. It was about like what to do when your audience, when you lose your audience, or when you shift to a different audience. I just didn't have it in the outline. So I added it to the outline. And now all of a sudden, my initial outline grew by twice the size, but it was better for it because people actually told me what they needed to know. And over time, I involved people with the process of writing the book. Like, I wrote the first draft on every single subject, and then I put it on helpthisbook.com, which is a really nice tool by Rob Fitzpatrick, who himself has been writing audience-centric books, right? The Mom Test, really a thin book, really dense, full of information, really practical and applicable. Then the Workshop Survival Guide, he wrote that with Devin Hunt, who co-built the tool with him. So a lot of cooperation in that space. And now he wrote a book called Write Useful Books, which is a book about writing books, which is hilarious, but super meta. It's one of these things. Yeah, we, I guess, consider him and myself, consider us to be like serial entrepreneurs in that we built something, we figured out a problem along the way by just falling into it. And then we solved that problem with our next business. And then we solved the problems that we encountered there with the next business. So I guess the logical conclusion is that every author eventually writes a book about writing books because we encounter problems. That's why it's funny, actually, like a lot of people have done this. Like Stephen King has wrote about writing fiction. A lot of science fiction people have been writing even like they wrote nonfiction books about writing fiction because like in sci-fi there's a lot of world building and technology, right? Like hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi. And there are a lot of books of which I own a couple because I'm interested in the space of sci-fi authors writing about how to write good sci-fi. And I find it interesting because apparently every craft leads to more knowledge of that craft or slight change of craft, or you add something to it, and then you can use that knowledge to teach even more. It's wonderful. But let me get back to the actual thing that I was talking about. I involved people with Help This Book because I wanted people to look into my draft at its rawest and tell me, here's something that I completely don't understand, fix this immediately. I invited hundreds of people into the process, which was a lot of fun, because a lot of people, they really want to help. They genuinely want to help. And if you have been building, like I have, a repertoire of blog posts and podcasts in public for over, yeah, it must have been 2 years by now, then people know that whatever you do is going to be helping them on some level. So they can already help you make it even better so it helps them and other people better. Which is why they joined. And I had like 500 people sign up to be an alpha reader, which was wonderful. Then I invited people in batches of 50 over a couple months into different stages of the manuscript. And a lot of people told me, hey, your introduction is great up until this point, and then it just like meanders off into nowhere. I was like, okay, thank you so much for completely dismembering my book.

Were they giving specific, like almost paragraph-level feedback?

Oh yeah, word-level feedback. Wow. Yeah, the tool was— it's made that you can like mark any part of the document. You import it from a Google Sheet or a Google Doc, and then anybody can highlight any part of the book, say, this is too slow, this is too fast, I have a comment, or I don't understand, this is weird. There's a different selection of potential message types, and then they can write something, free text to it, whatever they want. And I had hundreds of people tell me their very interesting and often quite opposite thoughts about Exactly.

That's what I'm concerned— I mean, that's what I'm curious about. It's like, what if all the advice cancels itself? Like if there's 750 people saying one thing about, let's say this paragraph, and then there's another 750 who say the other thing, and you're like, as an author, how do you break the tie?

Here's the thing about being an author or an entrepreneur or any kind of professional. You still need to have your unique voice. You still need to be your unique self. And you can only do that by making decisions. that are uniquely yours. So the decision you need to make is, I'm gonna listen to this, or I'm not gonna listen to this comment. I will take in what people tell me, and then my expertise decides, is this actually interesting to me, or can I ignore it? And that's, that's kind of how you retain your unique self in this audience-driven world, because there's always a risk. You know, you've probably been exposed to a lot of questions about building in public in the past, and by audience first, like, and all the risks and potential downfalls that can come with it. Anything you can do has potential side effects, potential risks, and audience building and audience-first methodology has some of their own. But the, the, the one of them is I can lose myself in this. I can build something that is so determined by my audience that I am not present in it anymore. It's like organized or designed by committee. Right? You have the risk that certain things just get cancelled out because everybody wants to say something about how it should be. And audience-first is not organized by committee. It's guided by the input of a committee, but you still make the choice. The people out there, your potential readers, your potential users, your potential, I don't know, customers, they give you as much as they can. And you need to filter it down into what is actionable, what should lead to a choice, what should lead to me just ignoring that. Always super important to just stay the expert in the field. That's great to involve people, but they don't determine what you do. You do.

That's a brilliant insight. And I think, I wonder if so many people actually catch that nuance there, right? Because ultimately, it's a decision-making paradigm, and you have to choose yourself, but you can encourage inputs. And so you can make a smarter choice than what you would've. Okay. So moving on to a couple audience questions, since this is a great segue.

Yeah, that's great.

We tweeted about this podcast and we've— seems like there's a few questions on Twitter who want to ask you Um, some questions. All right. Okay. So I'm gonna pick a couple. I'm gonna curate them and, and, and, um, um, ask them. All right. So the first question we have from Twitter is from Janet. Um, hey Janet. And she goes, for many people, writing books to impart knowledge and experience is an aspiration. Um, he's now written 2 great books. What's the next big thing for Arvid?

Oh, that's a wonderful opportunity. So yeah, obviously, um, I decided to, uh, to write more books after I wrote my first one because I felt it was just amazing. It was an amazing experience to write Zero to Sold. Like, the feedback that I got from that was beyond what I ever hoped. The fact that I sold, at this point, I think 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 books. I, I'm not even tracking it anymore. I would just see that every day a couple are getting sold and people are recommending them to each other, which is mind-blowing to me, but it happens. So it's great. After that happened, I decided to write a second book. Actually, I decided to write one book a year. That was actually the choice I made after I figured out how Zero to Sold came along. And that I was trying to— can I even replicate this? You know, like every founder's worst nightmare is to do a great thing and then never do anything meaningful again. Because we have this weird— I think it's hedonic adaptation where we think, oh, we need to reach this level or more the next time and then higher and higher. Not like, yeah, you know, it's just our minds playing tricks on us. But I thought I want to continue doing this because Writing books is a wonderful way of teaching at scale. Like really, that's what it is. Helping people wherever they are, instead of having them be at a certain stage where I could teach them like in a one-on-one situation, they can grab the book whenever they feel they're ready. So I wrote the second one because I wanted to zoom in into the one particular thing that people had the most trouble with in Zero to Sold. All the feedback that I got was, hey, this book is great, but Here's the one thing that I would like to see more of. And most of those were audience. I don't know how to find the right people. I don't know how to build an audience. Please help. So that's why I wrote The Embedded Entrepreneur. And then I noticed, um, I want to do this again. I want to write another book. And one of the things that I have figured out, um, is why my books are performing pretty well is that both books are kind of about The things that the— the things in the books also describe how the books came to be, right? Zero to Sold is essentially a bootstrap business about building Feedback Panda, but writing the book about it was pretty much the same. Figure out who I'm writing it for, figure out what problem they have, they need to understand how to build a business, figure out a solution, step-by-step guide, and then implement it in a product, write the book. That's really what they did for the book, and it's the same for Feedback Panda. Find the teachers. Their biggest problem is feedback. The solution is a templating system, and I implement it in a web application. Same steps, just different products. And then I thought, okay, The Embedded Entrepreneur is about building an audience-first product. Well, let's write it audience-first. So I wrote it with the audience and so on. So for my next project, which is going to be another book, which I can now finally announce, um, I'm going to write a book about building in public by building it in public. So the book is going to be called Build in Public. And what a coincidence that I announced this on a podcast that has the very same name. Probably—

Wait, Arvid, I have to double-check. Is this the first time you're sharing this with the world?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Oh my God, that's awesome. So that's why I was grinning, you know, side to side. Folks, I'm excited for this. Arvid had been— we have been, you know, DMing and chatting with you know, with each other about this book and, you know, this next project that he's about to take on. And it was at some point in the future, he said he was going to announce it. And I was like waiting when this would come out. And so I'm glad that he did it on the podcast. Thank you.

Sure. Well, I couldn't think of a better person to talk to about this. Like, obviously you've been highly inspirational for all of the things. Like your writing and your just your community outreach is that inspires me to write about this honestly because it's just so nice to see people teach building in public by teaching in public and like then building your, your own like the, the OD&C thing in public too like sharing what you know it's just wonderful and I want more people to, to be able to do this to understand how this works also what the risks are what the potential the barriers and the walls into which you will run, guaranteed, right? It's going to happen to everybody. But to know where they are and to know where the cracks are in those walls, that's kind of why I'm writing this or why I want to be writing this. At this point, when this comes out, there probably will be a landing page on buildinpublicbook.com. I'm prepared. And I'm going to do the exact same thing that I did with The Embedded Entrepreneur. I am going to involve people from the start. So the outline for the book will be on, on that page. It will be whatever any potential future reader tells me they want to have in the book, I will have in the book. I will write about. So I'm ready for that. I'm also already starting to have like beta readers sign up because again, the moment I write it, I involve people. So if somebody is interested in joining this as an alpha or beta reader, to me, that's the same. Doesn't really matter. But you know, like from the earliest draft, that comes fresh out of my brain, you'll be able to do all of that on, on, um, yeah, buildinpublicbook.com. But I'm super excited for this because again, this is going to be something where the, the instruction in the book is part of the process of making the book, right? Build a product in public means sharing every step along the way,

right?

It means doing reporting on it, sharing how far you've come, Where your problems are, where your wins, your losses, your failure, they are success. All of these things are part of it. And I'm extremely excited to do this again in public because I had so much fun last time. I'm just gonna do it again this time. I can't wait. Yeah, I'm super excited. I

can't wait. So I mean, the moment I heard about this, I felt like a huge boulder was lifted off my shoulders. I didn't mean to rhyme that, but like huge boulder was off my shoulders. I was like, huh, finally, for all the DMs I keep getting, for all the similar FAQ, like on Product Hunt or whatever, any podcast I go on, the same 7 or 8 questions I keep getting, I can just refer them to this book. Yeah. Hey, go check out this book. Arvid has written, probably covered every possible thing any human could have imagined because he's writing it. with an audience, like in front of them, co-creating with them. So I'm sure you're going to cover a lot of the ground, and I cannot wait. I'm probably going to buy, I don't know, like 30 copies and give it to a few of my followers too.

Oh, that's very sweet of you.

Excited.

Thanks so much.

Super excited. All right, so by the time this podcast is live, I'm hoping the landing page will be live so we can, you know, we can link to that as well. Now, um, I have one more question here from Andrew Lanahan. Shout out Andrew for Odysee too. When bootstrapping, how do you build a product prioritization framework that properly accounts for both customers and potential customers?

That's an interesting question because like any kind of prioritization framework is gonna be unique to your business because, you know, every business has different needs. But I really liked the distinction of this question because you have existing customers and usually they are easier to retain than adding more customers. It's one of the, in the SaaS world at least, right? It's not the same with e-commerce. It's not the same with info products where you, only have one purchase and then you need to find more people. And repeat purchases are rare, depending of course on what kind of ecommerce you have. If you have something that has like a periodical nature, like spices where people consume the product and then need more of it, you might actually be able to retain them better. But I don't know, ski equipment or something, that's something that people buy once every decade and then you sell it and then you need to find somebody else to buy it tomorrow so you can have a business, right? So that's ecommerce and info products the same. You write a book once, you sell it once, they read it once and they may recommend it. But they're not going to buy the same book again unless you have something to upsell or something. Not the same. But in a SaaS, in a software as a service business with a recurring revenue model, you want to keep people paying, and you have a much easier time to keep a person paying for their 5th month than to pay for the first. So the idea is, depending on your business model and how you generate revenue, you need to focus on either retaining customers because they are the bread and butter of your business on acquiring new customers. And depending on that, your feature prioritization model prioritizes the necessities of the group that if you retain them, those people, or if you need more customers over time, those people. So that is a choice you already need to make. I would assume since, you know, the no-code space, we're often looking at SaaS-type businesses, we would focus more on retaining customers. And that usually is also much easier because you get actual usage information from them. Like if you were to acquire information from people who have never used your product and you need to have them tell you what features you need to have in your product to get them as a customer, a lot of assumption, a lot of in-the-air kind of stuff because you don't have any meaningful data other than what they tell you. And if you read The Mom Test by Robert Patrick, let's turn this whole episode into a Robert Patrick I know, right? Yeah, he's a great guy.

I have to bring him on the podcast.

I

recommend it. I mean,

yeah, I highly recommend it because he's been building a lot of stuff in public too, both from his writing. He wrote Write Useful Books with help of this book and having like a lot of beta readers. And in the book itself, he's talking about like writing in public. It's wonderful. And I don't say this because I am featured on the back cover of the book with my quote, I'm saying this because I really, really enjoy him, his work, and to have been a little part of it was wonderful. But if you read The Mom Test, let's get back there, you will figure out that talking to people, it really depends on how you ask questions and how you position yourself to do anything with the responses. So if you talk to people who don't really know what you're building and you're just asking them, what would you need to use my product, you don't have any meaningful commitment. You just have a hypothetical, and then those people, they don't want to hurt your feelings, they will tell you anything, right? So it's kind of hard to get an even reasonable answer out of people who have never used your product. So it's much easier to have people that are actually actual customers using your product because, A, you'll have meaningful interaction data just really from how they use your product. You don't even need to talk to them to see how many reports they do or how many, how often in a week they use your product. If you are smart about this in building a business and monitoring it, you have that data already. And you should, because that is information that goes into your feature prioritization, right? If you only have people use your product once a month because it's a monthly report generator or something, well, you don't need to add features that are like daily or weekly based because people wouldn't be using it anyway. So it really depends on the data that you get, but you have this data and then you reach out to them. You ask them about, like, what are your biggest hurdles in the product, or how do you use this product for certain tasks? And then you try to map your understanding of how people should be using it to how they actually use it. And then you start prioritizing and optimizing for those little bottlenecks in there that make it easier for people to use. But on a more— I know I drilled into it a bit much at this point, so let's zoom out again. On the whole, You need to figure out who is more important for you to help, the people that are currently in your customer base or the people that are potential customers that you might need for certain growth patterns that you want to see in your business. I would always err on the side of the people in your base already, because not only are they paying users that are currently financing your life, they also are the potential evangelists. And doing something— we had that at Feedback Panda. People were talking to us, oh, I wish I could click this and then this happens. And me being a software engineer, quickly built it, deployed it, and then like 10 minutes later I said, refresh your page and try this. I didn't see their faces, but I imagined them to have like jaw-dropping and eyes open because the way they wrote back and how did this happen? Like, how did you so quickly build something? I've never had this before. Never did anybody do anything that I asked them to within 20 minutes. And those people turned into the loudest voices for Feedback Panda. They would go into Facebook groups and say, hey, this is the best tool in the space because I talked to the owners and they did something for me. And I asked them, I didn't want it even today. They could have done it next week, but they did it within 10 minutes. And the voices that these people, they just shared their love for being heard, for being understood, and for being helped. And that's just turned them into the loudest and most impactful evangelists that you could wish for. We didn't do much marketing with Feedback Panda because we had all these people that we helped by helping them be better at their job. And they noticed and they loved that and they talked about it online. They were doing our marketing.

As I said, the holy grail of marketing is word of mouth.

Yeah.

Right. So, I mean, nothing beats that. So one last question, um, for, for this round. And I, I have a feeling that I may have to bring you back for round 2. There's like so many interesting, um, aspects and topics that I haven't covered. And I'm like, wow, I just can't believe like we've, you know, we've gone over 60 minutes now. So I want to say, this is, uh, something I've— again, I've struggled with personally. And you've— I'm watching you has been super inspirational, um, which is the field of writing. So what, what is your routine like? How does Arvid Kahl create work, um, and edit, edit the work, set work, and publish it? Like, what does your writing, uh, routine look like?

It's funny, I, I saw a tweet the other day. It must— could have been today or yesterday, I forget. I see a lot of tweets. I follow 10,000 people. I see a lot of tweets. But it was a, it was a tweet about how to write today. It's like, write a tweet, and if it performs well, or if it engages with people well, then turn that into a little, like, a blog post or something. And then if that blog post performs well, turn that blog post into a series of blog posts. And if that performs well, turn it into chapters and turn the chapters into a book. And I really like this bottom-up mechanic because if something is, it's in itself as a tiny little thing, interesting to people, people, that anything that grows from it, like from a seed, really turns into something beautiful, hopefully, or at least something useful, like a carrot. You can eat it, you know, like either it's pragmatic or it's beautiful, doesn't matter what it is, it helps people in some capacity, it makes their lives better. So that's kind of how I see my writing too. Every week I want to write about one topic. And I have a little list of topics that I always wanted to write about. Some of them are just really one-liners, like competition is great for business. That's kind of what I wrote about Last week, I guess, from this, right? Came out yesterday.

So walk us through that process. You— so you pick the prompt, you pick a prompt from your list.

Actually, the prompt came because I was watching the 800 meters women's final race sprinting at the Olympics, because for the last couple weeks I've been quarantining because we've moved from Germany to Canada, and we spent the first couple days in an airport hotel in Toronto. So we were doing nothing because we couldn't do anything and we're just watching the Olympics. I mean, I watched those finals and it was an amazing race. Like really, the best sprinter, she won this thing by 5 seconds difference, which for the Olympics is a lot.

Yeah, but it's like a lifetime. Yeah,

anything leading up to this, it was super interesting because first off, she drew away from the field pretty quickly. And people got mesmerized by that. They saw, like, the other runners, right? They saw her running ahead of them and they sped up. They wanted to catch up because they saw what is potentially possible. They themselves were at the zenith of their skill at this point, and still somebody else was so much better. And that motivated them like crazy. And then they ran after her, and almost everybody in those, in those 8 runners scored a personal best or a record. Almost everybody, because there was this one runner in the front that was better than everybody else. And she pulled them all along. She encouraged them all to be better than they ever were before. And I saw this and I thought, hey, competition is amazing for business. That is where the thought came from. Because like we see other people competing with other businesses, like all, or as content creators, right? We have these gigantic content creators, like you mentioned a couple earlier that do so much better than everybody else. And we want to be like them. That when we put in the effort, we just try a little bit harder because we see how much better other people are than us and how we— if we can get there, we don't know, but we try. And that is what this race transported to me. And so I just wrote down 800 meters race, competition is great for business, put that in a Notion document or something. And then on Monday this week, I looked at it and I thought, okay, Now I need to actually write about this. So what does this evoke in me? And I put a couple more, just a couple bullet points in there. Competition is motivation. Competition is adaptation because we need to change to be better. And competition is validation because if we see somebody else doing it, it's possible, you know, like, and these led to 3 more little bullet points. And then I started like writing a couple paragraphs for each bullet point and over That exercise, the article grew into, I don't know, like 2,500 words. I'm somewhat verbose when I write, but, you know, like these little points just turn into sentences, they grow into paragraphs.

Right. Now, was that the first draft? And did you go back and edit that? Or how does it work?

My method is I write the first draft and then I'm done, usually. So I'm done until a point because I record every single of my articles as a podcast. Right? That's, that's what I do. I have this little flywheel going where my article is my podcast episode and my newsletter as well. I create one piece of content. I use it in 3 different formats so that people who like to read it in their email, they get to read it. People who don't have time to read it, they get to listen to it. And people who want to explore it on my website because they still have an RSS feed or something, they get to read it too. So 3 different ways of the exact same content. But the trick is, when I read it, when I narrate that piece of text into my microphone, I usually figure out if something sounds good or not because I speak it, I hear myself read it. And if there's something that doesn't make sense, I break, I take a break, and I fix it. And then I re-record that particular sentence and I go on until I'm done with the whole thing. So now I have a— essentially, I have a narrated and corrected version That I then use to put onto my blog and into my newsletter. So my editing is really just me reading it to myself and everybody who listens.

It's fascinating. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody do that. So it's very—

It just happened by random chance. Like, this is not intentional. The moment, the first time I did it, I noticed this is awesome. I'm going to do this forever, but I didn't intend—

Super smart, right? And there's definitely something to learn from there. One specific question around when you narrate it, Do you like sort of, of course, you have emotion added to it, you have all the passion and whatever, but do you also sometimes go beyond the lines, like beyond the script?

Occasionally, like it depends on how I'm feeling while I record it. Sometimes I have a couple thoughts that pop into my head because it's just an anecdote that I need to tell. I usually inject them, but often I do this already while writing, like I try to get my anecdotes in there already because I spend a day or two writing my weekly article. And that usually gives me a lot of space. I don't write all at the same time. I write the first draft kind of, and I add a couple of things later because then I have a shower and I think of something, or I have a conversation with Danielle. And she often, like, she like very reliably inspires me to either change or adjust or add to something because just from the conversations that we are having in our like regular You know, like couples conversations. There's something that comes in and I put it into the draft and then I, yeah, then I do the recording and that finalizes the text because I don't want to over-edit the recording either. And then once I record it, I put it into the newsletter and the website and then I'm done.

I love that. Awesome.

Yeah.

Well, this is great. Arvid, I don't know what to say. You know, there were like 4 or 5 epiphanies in this last hour. Really, really appreciate, you know, what you do for the community, you know, for, for so many bootstrappers out there. And I want— I don't care if it's code or no-code, you know, they're all builders. They're all trying to like go build businesses. Just your, your message, your insights, but I think much more importantly, your example is, um, what is so special about you, you know? So I appreciate you being on the podcast here today and sharing all your, uh, sharing all your knowledge. Folks, by now buildingpublicbook.com is live. So go check that out, become an alpha reader, and give Arvid some love on Twitter. Um, and with that said, Arvid, any, any final words?

Just thank you so much for both having me today, for doing this podcast, for being you and being such a great contributor to the community. I think that, that is just wonderful that you're doing this and still have a job. And all the other things, you know, it's just, it's just nice.

And a new dad. Oh my God.

Yeah, right, exactly. There's that. I'm just really grateful for you being you.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Thanks so much for having me today.

Of course. That was fun. Yeah. See you, Arvid.