Million Dollar Exits Ep.4 with Arvid Kahl: How to Succeed in Bootstrapping a Business

Hello everybody. I'm KP and welcome to Million Dollar Exits, a special segment on my main show, the Build in Public podcast. In this interview series, I sit down with founders who went from an idea to building a business and then eventually selling it for over $1 million. Hence the name Million Dollar Exits. This is something I'm very passionate about and curious about at this point in my career. I wanna learn and share all the insights, mindset shifts, lessons, and non-obvious tips that are part of this unique journey journey with the next wave of founders who wanna take this path as well. So buckle up and get ready to be inspired and informed. Here's a special shout out to our episode sponsor, paralect.com. Billion-dollar ideas come from every possible niche. If you're a busy domain expert in marketing, sales, finances, or healthcare, and don't wanna spend 6 months just to build an MVP, you'll find Paralect super valuable. Paralect is a venture studio built to design, build, and launch a product for you that is ready to sell in under 2 months. Start with no-code or go full-stack right away. Simply focus on growing your early adopter community and build in public, and they'll take care of the rest. Build your million-dollar startup with paralect.com. P-A-R-A-L-E-C-T.com. Hello everybody, I'm KP and welcome to the Building Public podcast. I'm super, super thrilled to invite a great friend and a fellow founder who's been through the path probably more than once now, but definitely has documented that journey and like spoken about that journey and has given so much to the bootstrapper and founder community at large. Welcome to the show, Arvid Kahl.

Hello. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about this. This is really cool. And you're right, it is one of the most important things that I think that ever happened to me. So I'm glad to share that story in the hopes that it will help other people have that happen to them as well.

So talking to you today in 2023, right, as we're recording today is March 2nd, 2023, and Feedback Panda, which is the SaaS company that you exited, you know, theme of this episode, theme of this episode, it's been 2019, is it? When did the exit happen?

We exited in July 2019.

Right, almost 4 years. I'm trying to picture, like, you know how you read an old book again and the second time you read it or third time you read it, it hits you differently, right? Hopefully my questions and like your reflection on this episode will hit you differently. You know, you'll hopefully look at it from a different perspective than what you did, you know, because I remember you did a bunch of interviews at the wake of the exit. So hopefully this will be different. So for folks who are not privy to the background story, I'll read out a couple of lines about Feedback Panda. Arvind Kaul co-founded and bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda.com which was an online teacher productivity SaaS company with his partner Danielle Simpson, whose room where he's joining us from today. He was— we were just joking about that. But he did all of this. They grew the company from $0 to $55K MRR, which is monthly recurring revenue, in 2 years and went from an idea to exit, a life-changing exit. So that's the background story. You know, Arvid, the opening question that I have is something that I've been thinking about, and you may have seen my tweets about this, is that Why are there not enough founders bootstrapping? How can we grow this market? What are your thoughts on this?

The problem is that I think it's an educational problem. And it's also almost a celebrity problem that we have. Like the educational problem is that if you look at most colleges and universities and the kinds of business education that you have there, not that there's anything wrong with it, right? It's still accurate and probably useful to the people who go through these programs. But rarely is there a focus on entrepreneurship. And if there is, it's usually on venture Right.

Trying to build the next Airbnb.

Yeah, exactly. The big things like the big companies that everybody knows, they want to understand how can I work for that company? Or how can I found a company like this and have other people work for me? Nothing wrong with that at all. But obviously, we need them. Not sure if we need Airbnb or we need Uber, you know, like they are replacing something that existed before. And now people find, hmm, maybe that wasn't that bad. But that is just what entrepreneurship is. It's an experiment to see if an alternative approach to something is better. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Universities focus more on the kind of corporate enterprisey stuff. And you get taught the important things to succeed in that world, which is great. But you don't really get ever taught how to build a small business by yourself. Right. How to build a business just by yourself. Lifestyle businesses, in a sense, if you think about university as the educational part of the economy, you want big businesses because they employ a lot of people. I'm generalizing here, obviously. But if you have the choice in educating one very bright person, Do you want them to build their own software as a service lifestyle business where they just built the thing by themselves, exit it, and then sit on a beach all day for the next couple of years? Or do you want them to lead a company that employs like thousands of people? You know, that's the kind of choice you have to make as an educational institution. And I would guess that they will go towards the let's empower them to empower more people to find work in the societal sense. So the educational systems are aligned with creating more people that will found gigantic venture capital financed businesses. I guess they are also financed by these venture capital So there's this whole thing going on there. That's the educational arm. And then there's just like who we look up to. If you look at the Peter Thiels of the world, or the Elon Musks, or founders of these gigantic businesses, all these VC businesses, we don't really have like big— we are not big fans of indie founders because we never hear about them. If you go to TechCrunch, like when does TechCrunch ever report about any bootstrapping activities? Even if— and I think the rarest thing that I saw was when 1Password had a kind of— They raised? It was a bootstrap company that was wildly profitable. And the only time they really made it on TechCrunch was when they raised some money. Right. It really doesn't seem to matter even if there's an exit of a super profitable bootstrap company. If there is no investment involved, they don't really care. And since they don't care, they don't communicate what happens in the bootstrap world. People don't see that it's possible. It's like you need your, you know, the examples in the world out there to start things like this yourself. And if you don't see them, you don't do it. So I guess it's both educational and just, yeah, representational. Influential.

Yeah, representation. So I mean, that's a great answer and it kind of makes sense as I think about what's around me as well, you know? And so last 40 years, right? For, you know what I've been up to, right? I was in venture-backed companies, both at On Deck, which was at one point one of the fastest growing edtech companies, education company, not really a tech company, but was venture-backed. And then Day One, so which is also in front of Bhagat EV, you know, I was on the venture path and the market's so different now. Right. And I think the valuation numbers have plummeted dramatically. And as— but like a lot of my friends, a lot of my circle, a lot of my network have been in these companies. And so, I mean, I have— I feel like I'm one of the weird unicorn, like, you know, cross-match, whatever kind of people where I have friends like you who are in the indie world. And I also have friends who are in the VC world. So I have friends in both circles. Yeah. But what I'm seeing is, you know, a tremendous amount of stress in the VC-backed friend circles because the valuations have plummeted and nobody wants to to fund the next round given in this climate. And suddenly all of the narrative of growth, growth, growth, growth, growth has shifted to profitability.

Yep.

It's kind of like, you know, it's like, it's just like, and so a lot of my founder friends are in amazing stress because it's like somebody's stolen oxygen from them. Like they just like switched up what matters more. Yeah. So they're asking for unbelievable, ungodly, and unprecedented metrics at Series A level. It's crazy from an indie perspective 'cause those metrics should matter. you know, like what they're asking for profitability should have been thought about from day one. But like generally the narrative that they've been fed for the last 4 or 5 years in the bull market was it's all about growth. Just show us the month-over-month growth. You know, profitability doesn't matter. Bottom line doesn't matter. Yeah. So now there's a big conundrum in that world. A lot of founders who are incredibly ambitious and talented and bright are having to really take a hard look of what should I do next, right? Should I shut my company down, return the rest of the money back to the founders, and then build a small bootstrap company? So I had like a DM this morning from a very prominent an investor at Hustle Fund who reacted to my tweet about saying, KP, congratulations, you're on the right path. Because my tweet was that I'm reassessing what I want to do and I want to build a bootstrap company. And he's congratulating me saying, this is so great. You know, as an investor, this is my best advice. Do this. Don't get into this, you know, 10-year journey because a lot of folks don't understand. I think this is— Arvid, that was my biggest lesson spending time at the venture-backed companies is a lot of people don't understand that raising a round is not be-all do-all. Like, that's not the Holy Grail, although that's what's celebrated. You're raising a round, it's almost like you're kind of like buying a ticket to a 10-year journey with it on a train you just can't get off. So unless you really are passionate about a particular problem, want to spend 10 years on it, you know, you shouldn't get on that train. And I wish a lot more founders really understood this dynamic early on before they went and pitched some VC.

Yeah.

So I'll pause there. Any thoughts? Anything you want to add? Anything? Any other question you want to throw in there?

I like the whole 10-year thing because Like, in a way, entrepreneurship is always commitment over a rather long time to something. But the question is, who controls the train? That's always— that's what I find very interesting, right? Like a 10-year train ride. Sure, if you tell the train how fast it goes and where it stops, you know, or where it goes and what vista you will see from outside the window, that's a totally different story than this is somebody else's train and you have to shovel coals for it to keep going. So

you have more folks in the engine room who are dictating which destination we should go, Than if you had just a calm train.

Yes.

Right.

I mean, it might be slower, and you may not be able to reach those destinations, right? Because they're too far away, or in places where you need— there's a super high slope, and you need a high energy train to get there, or whatever we need for this metaphor. But the idea is that at least you have control over this train. And if you direct it, you will still get to interesting places, right? So entrepreneurship is always going to be a long-term effort. The question is like, how long is it? And who controls it? And commitment is always important. But the question is, what do you commit Do you commit to the idea that you have? Do you commit to the team that you're coming in with or the market that you want to be in? Because there are many ways to do this, right? You can even commit to the investors that give you the money and then just figure out something with them that kind of uses your talent and their capital and kind of combines it into a business. In the world of VC, a lot is possible. And a lot has been made possible and kind of also expected from people in this world. Growth, you just talked about it, was the metric. Right. the only metric. Profitability was not. And now we see this shift towards profitability being something that people would like to see because it, you know, it kind of does a bottom line. It's not all completely speculative. The benefit of profitability obviously is that you have money. Like you don't need to add more money to keep the thing going. That's kind of the train, you know, that kind of has solar panels on it that for some magical reason produce enough energy to keep the train going. But we should stop with this train analogy at this point.

Well, I have another analogy coming up for you.

I'm looking forward to that. But what I'm trying to say is like bootstrapping Bootstrapping or self-funding, I think the more general term for this, it has to be profitable because we have extremely limited capital as individuals. So whatever we build, it might still have hypergrowth, right? It might still like tap into something in the market and then explode. I've seen bootstrap businesses, look at 1Password. That's a good example. Yeah, I mean, it can work everywhere, right? They have a gigantic market. And they are a small, small company. I think they're actually from somewhere here in Ontario. Like there's a couple towns over from where I live, there's, I think, a 1Password park or something like a tiny sponsored park because that's the town that the business was founded in or the founders live in. So like, these are local small companies, you know, if you think about it, that serve everybody. Like, that's just crazy. Like, we literally used 1Password in exiting our business to hand over the credentials to our business to the people who bought our business so we could get those millions that you are talking about. It's like, that is an integral tool in so many toolchains. And it's just a bootstrap Or it was until they raised and did some kind of financial magic to keep growing the business. But they were bootstrapped for the longest time. Right. And so they weren't beholden to anybody, which is the thing I want to hammer back on here is that in times where nobody is sure what's gonna happen, as an entrepreneur, I would rather be beholden just to myself and all the mistakes that I might make than somebody else's view of the future that may or may not be true and have their money dictate what I have to do. Which is why I'm talking about bootstrapping all the time. Why I recommend it for everybody at least to try because it's nice to know when you don't have a boss how that feels, right? And you still have a boss as a VC-funded founder. It's just an investor, not a CEO.

Right. And especially when the climate is like how it is right now in the macro climate, you know, and you're seeing like in the last 3, 4 months, I've been a full-time founder. And I was sharing that with you at the beginning of this this, you know, conversation. I had my own share of ups and downs. I had my own share of like self-doubt and struggles. I was like, oh, where's my next clients coming from? Where's the next source of revenue coming from? But man, oh man, I wouldn't trade that for being in the pressure cooker that my friends have been in the last 3 months. And I know they're shutting down shop in the next 2, 3 months with the VC-backed companies, and they're unbelievable. And they're all envious of my lifestyle. And actually, I'm not that happy. I'm not that like crushing Like I'm making, you know, decent salary, I'm making decent money, but I call my shots. If there is a day that I want to take day off, I can take day off. If there's a day that I want to write 15 tweets, I can write. No one's like— the other benefit that I want to like, we should highlight about what we both do is I could do whatever the heck I want that week. Like in a random week I have a new idea. And so like the other day somebody called me and they're like, KP, how are you doing all these things in parallel? And I'm like, because nobody— I don't need anyone's permission. That's the answer. Why am I doing the Million Dollar Exit podcast? Because I'm curious, that's the answer. That's it. There's no other blessing I need. But to pull off any of these things that I'm doing right now, both, you know, at any of my companies that I worked before, I would've needed their permission. I would've needed to make sure that it fit with the KPIs of the quarter. And I would've needed to make sure that the CEO is happy. Like, you know, there's so many levels of permission and like, oh, are you all aligned in one strategy? No. You know? So I think not having too many people in the cockpit, you know, or in the engine room is so much more peaceful. Yeah. I'm dealing with my own shit myself. I have friends like you I can ask advice on, and they've been very helpful, but I don't have any noise around me. No, like, I don't have any more critics or people who are calling shots on my destiny. You know, as crazy it sounds, like, I am the creator of my own destiny. You know, it sounds crazy, but it's insanely empowering. Yeah. You know, that means some months I just want to do a $3,000 month and I'm fine. And some months I'm doing $15K and that's fine, right?

Yeah. And that is not for the faint of heart, right? The instability of this at any level, like, even when we were In the last couple months before we sold the business, let's just kind of bring this into the conversation a little bit. There still was a lot of pressure on us because the bus factor, the what happens if one of us gets hit by a bus in a team of 2 is incredibly high. Like it felt it was almost a team of one because either of us did things that the other person couldn't do. So, you know, like I couldn't do the design and the product work that Daniel was doing and Daniel couldn't do the programming and the whole system administration. stuff that I was doing. So either way, if one of us was not available, that was a problem. And it was a problem that we felt extremely strongly, like just prior to even having the conversations with potential acquirers. Because I've noticed ever since that I was in a very, very dark spot, like from my mental health perspective, at least. Back in the day, it wasn't very clear to me. I thought, oh yeah, this kind of feels like burnout that I had before, but not the same. So it's probably something else. Now that I look back at it, I was mid-burnout when I thought about this already. I know that. Like I had heart— I still have my heart rate readings from my Apple Watch back then. And they were like, they were in the 90 to 120 on like on a normal day. Wow. Yes. And even talking about it gets me flustered. So there's some very visceral physical reality to these kinds of pressure that even a bootstrap business with at that point 5,500 customers, it was a lot of people that 2 people were responsible for. That put a lot of pressure on us as So the pressure is never really off just because it doesn't come from somebody else. It kind of comes from yourself if you need to. And one of the problems that we had at the time was that the business itself was our most valuable asset, like no questions asked. Like that was the thing that we had. We didn't have much savings. We didn't own a building, had no real estate or anything like it. What came in in a month went out, this kind of paycheck to paycheck situation. And the business all of a sudden was worth millions of dollars. So the pressure to keep the business alive was on, right? So you have this thing, which is awesome. But you kind of, you think about, oh, what happens if it goes away, right? Right. And full disclosure, I guess Feedback Panda itself has closed at this point. Like the company that bought us kept us running, then the Chinese government made some crazy changes in terms of what is allowed on their internet in terms of online education and what is not. And all of a sudden, And then all of a sudden, the business model of the companies that we supported fell apart. So those people fell apart, the people we were supporting didn't need our product anymore. And it just whittled down ever since. I guess you could say we sold at the right time. You know.

This could have happened to you too, right? That's what you were worried about the last few months.

Yeah, exactly what it is. I'm glad it didn't happen to me. And in a way, it happened to a company that could live through it. Because SureSwift Capital, the people who bought the product or the, yeah, the business essentially, it was one of 30 things that they were running. Right. And, you know, like they had other things that could compensate for it. Nobody had to leave their team because our product wasn't working anymore. So I guess it's a win-win situation, even though it's less of a win for them. But that's just the reality of acquiring other products, right? You never know.

And also the just reality of bootstrapping anything, right? Like, I mean, like we just talked about earlier, the advertising revenue, like sponsorships on your podcast, my newsletter, your newsletter. I mean, the biggest lesson I have, and I'm sure You have a version of this in early days and even like probably towards the end of Feedback Panda is you can never take anything for granted in business, in entrepreneurship. Everything is earned daily. The rent is paid daily, right? And so you can't rest on the laurels. Like for a week or two, I was a little illusioned that, oh yeah, I'm KP, like I'm getting into full-time mode. Like, yeah, that's like I'm KP, like it's okay, right? And then like reality punched me in the face and I started opening up my Calendly spots and like sharing that with some of my potential clients and say, yeah, I will talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. I will do sales all day. I'm like, I was super humbled and I'm like, okay, you know, every sale matters. And as I was sharing earlier, the first $200 that came in through advertising revenue, I almost wanted to like give a hug and a smooch to that guy. I'm like, you just don't know how much this means, you know, because it's a domino effect. Now after 17 clients in ads, the 18th client is easier, but the first person to take a shot on you just really, really means a lot, you know?

And you're right, you have to earn it every single day, every single week. I have a little anecdote here 'cause you were talking, You were telling me who else is going to be on the show. And you mentioned Andrew Kozdecki. Yeah. The MicroAcquire team or now acquire.com. They have been sponsoring my podcast and my newsletter, or I think many versions of my podcast, the interviews and my regular Friday show for over a year. And I thought this is going to go on forever until it didn't, until they decided to rebrand. And then all of a sudden, priorities shifted for them. And they said, we're not going to continue our sponsorship. And maybe later, but right now we just can't. Right. And I was like, no, the great sponsor of 50+ episodes does not want to sponsor anymore. My world is falling apart. Obviously, it didn't. Obviously, I found other people who wanted to jump in and take that spot as well. But it felt like I took this for granted. Like I thought this was gonna go on forever. But it didn't. I'm glad it wasn't because it allowed me to reframe my own perspective on this. And I had a conversation with Danielle about it. And she also said like, this is probably better better for you than keeping them as a sponsor. Because that is— that could lead to complacency or to, you know, delusions of grandeur or whatever it could be, right? It would not be as helpful as having to go out there and acquiring new sponsors because that also allowed me to increase my price. And all of a sudden I'm making more, right? Like all of this has positive consequences if you take them, but you still have to work through it every week. And I do the same still, like I'm in episode 195. Like that's gonna be out tomorrow as of the time we record this. And I'm still trying to fill my slots of sponsors every single week. I see the hustle.

I love it. I love it, actually. So every time you put something out there, it inspires me to do it too. I'm like, okay, Arvid's doing it. And I think that's the thing that I was trying to get across to someone who's listening. It's easy to think, oh, you have an audience. Oh, you already have like some credibility or brand, you know? So in that example of MicroAcquire, like ending that contract for whatever business reasons, like, you know, I'm sure a lot of people would think, what? No way. Arvid Kahl doesn't have to struggle. But my favorite My favorite part is that even freaking Arvid Kaal has to struggle. Like, everyone has to struggle. Everyone has to persevere. And I mean, the only difference is from 5 years ago to me now is that these kind of punches, you know, that reality gets me, punches me in the face or whatever, my recovery rate and my recovery time has gone down, right? Like, I just get back up in a day or half a day and like dust off and I'm like, all right, what's next?

That's really what it is.

Yeah, that's really what it is. I'm sure you feel the same, right? Like, back in the day, this would have hurt me like for a week.

Yeah, probably might have stopped altogether, right? Who knows? No, it's not for me. I will never make money. And then you stop. But you just have to kind of try other things and figure it out. You develop a sense for it too. I think recovery rate, the speed of recovery, that is a great way of phrasing this. Because whenever I run into something like this, like, look at it tomorrow, there'll be a way, right? That's just your experience with how to deal with these little failures that are Just tiny bumps in the road along the way. If you look at them retroactively, you know, it's just what it is. That's what business is. We're all competing in a way, right?

That's what business is.

Yeah.

And like, it never gets easy. You just get stronger, I think. And you just— I feel like the other thing too, Arvid, like, I am, as a full-time founder, I'm way more humble than I was when I was running like the leading teams and like being under the brand of On Deck and Day One because I was not— I didn't have to be that hungry because my paycheck was covered.

Yeah.

be me and people would pay me. I was like, yeah, you know, I don't like— yeah, I don't need to do that much of customer service because I was like, you know, now I'm like, you know, the level of hustle and the hunger. Like my wife even the other day told me, she came to me and she said, I'm so proud of you now, you know. And it meant a lot because my wife doesn't give a shit about my business and things. Yeah, it's like she's like, you could be a hotshot, I don't give a shit,

right? Why did you say that to me?

Is Daniel like that too?

semi-famous in the community.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The same thing. She was like, she even made an account just to troll me and roast me. And she's lost interest in that too. But she said, and I asked her why, and she goes, like, you relied on your skills and your talents and all your other things when you were at, you know, all these companies. Now I see that you're just so hungry. You just, I can tell that you're so humble and hungry and like you want every dollar to make. And I think this is the message for anyone who's listening and who's tuning in. Maybe they're wondering, why does this feel like an uphill battle? It will feel like an uphill no matter what, where you are, you know, no amount of prior success. Like the net new customer who's coming into your pipeline, who's trying to decide if they should put the $200 or $300 into you or your brand or in your SaaS is evaluating that based on their priorities, not because it's our with Carl or it's because KP is at the— it doesn't give a— it doesn't matter in that scenario. So that was my takeaway. And I'm so— I'm hungrier, I'm sharper, I'm more alert. And so I'm like loving it, man. You know, it's keeping me in good shape.

I'm also really happy for you that you have a partner That is a no bullshit partner. Keeps you grounded because I have the great, great, wonderful benefit of such a partner myself. And it really helps me not to, you know, lose my perspective. Because honestly, if you have like— I just recently got to 100K now.

Yeah.

On Twitter, which is a mind-blowing number. It makes no sense at all. But it really makes no difference in our household or in my life, really, because I'm still just a person among so many others trying to get stuff done every single day. And it's nice to have somebody who tells you that from time to time, because in our echo chambers, it's easy to, you know, to lose sight of where you're actually at.

You know, let's talk about the 100K for one sec. I think it's great. I wanted to ask you when you hit— I think I DM'd you that day you hit 100K. And I wanted to ask you this on air, which is what has changed for you now that you have a 101K audience? And I remember when we first met, you probably had like 10 or 15K. It was early days, 2018, 2019. Maybe not even 10K. Maybe—

No, probably not. Like 2019, I was like, I started I started November 2019 with like 400 people. That's when we— Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So tell me what has changed about how you communicate, how you express yourself. That first question, and then I have a follow-up. But yeah, what has changed?

So like Twitter DMs are almost completely unusable. So unless I follow you, I probably won't see what you have to say. It's really unfortunate, but it's just a technical problem. I occasionally take the time to go through my backlog of, you know, messages.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, don't expect me to respond immediately unless I follow you, then I'll see it. But it's like communication at that scale is horrible. And even the existing tools out there, they make it only so marginally easier that it's still a chore. It's just that the amount of it is crazy. And interesting enough, I find myself reflecting more on what people might understand what I say to be about, not in a sense of self-censorship, but I reflect more before I just post stuff out there. Because I have a rather large platform now. And anything I say will be read by an extremely diverse group of people. Right. And as a white male from a, you know, first world country, I lack a lot of perspective in almost everything that I talk about. Probably exactly everything I talk about. So more often than not, I get corrective DMs from people from minorities or interest groups that I completely neglected. And in many ways, I really, really benefit from that. Because it's— I don't want to put that burden on them to have to teach me. But some people choose to, which I'm grateful for. But I'm trying to be more inclusive in how I communicate because I just have a large audience like this. Yeah. But the opportunity scape that has opened up for this is crazy. Like just yesterday, I was looking for somebody to sponsor this week's episode of my podcast because didn't have a sponsor yet. And like within a couple minutes, somebody had just booked the slot and paid me. That's just how quickly this is. I just need to ask a question. I always lose a couple followers who think I'm a sellout, which is fine. Because, you know, people have their right to their opinions, but I find a sponsor, which is also fine. It's always a balancing act. And that's maybe the core of all I'm trying to say. Everything becomes a balancing act once you have a platform like this. Everything you say will be used against you in some way, hopefully not in a shitstorm or something, but people will make up their minds and have their opinions. So, it becomes more of an intentional communicative act. I'm still trying to be myself, but, you know—

Which I agree with. I feel like I admire that about you. You know, I feel like at the at that scale where you are, I don't see any difference from what I know about you from back then to now.

I don't have the energy to act. Like honestly, yeah, yeah.

You just don't pretend you are who you are.

Yeah.

I mean, even on the podcast, your podcast, it feels like you just you. You know, I mean, the Arvid that I know in my DMs or in my chats with you is who shows up there, which I love. And I try to do the same, right? It's actually so you know it's so tiring to pretend. In like, like a performer. So I think it might take sweet time for me to get to the big numbers, which I think I'm already, you know, amazed at how far I've come. But I'm just thinking, it may just take like, you know, sweet time to get to big numbers on podcasts or on whatever. But I will just be me so that whoever ends up being in the audience, I don't have to act for them. I can just be me, you know.

Honestly, and that's something that plays really well into consistency, because if you show up, you attract people who like you. So you don't have to keep acting if you're Just yourself, right? They will expect you to be yourself. And if you just are yourself, it's gonna make it much easier. And that will increase the resilience that your relationship has. And the churn that your community has goes down and all of that. Yeah, authenticity is easiest at scale because it's just the least tiring version of yourself. You don't need to be a persona if you can just be a person.

I love it. That's the clip right there. So I got a couple of questions on bootstrapping. I'm gonna run through them. So 5 years ago, bootstrapping back then, was this now? With no-code tools that are so easy and cheap to test your MVP, right? Have you seen Peter Levels testing with Stripe payment links? Yeah. I'm loving it. And I did the Sponsor Soup, I don't know, like a month ago. I wrote a Twitter thread about the sales pitch, like what I think the product would do. And then I put a Stripe link at the bottom, which is an MRR link, like a recurring link. I got 3 paying customers from a tweet thread. I was like, what? That's crazy. $90 MRR. I mean, it's not a lot of money, but it's like great validation, right? I immediately sent—

That's unreal. A tweet? Come on. Like who makes money off a tweet? I

know, but like, I had to double-check. I sent them Calendly invites to do one-on-ones with me. Yeah. And in my DM, I was saying, are you like, I'm just trying to make sure that you're not crazy, right? Like, why would you? And that just, they just told me, you know, what validated there was that there was so much of a need that they didn't even need to see the MVP. They understood what was being built and the problem resonated and they were like, yeah, we were in. So, and Peter Levels is doing that now. Now, you know, with payment links. I mean, it's— I feel like the evolution of validation has come a long way from 5 years ago. And now with the AI tools and like, you know, with Twitter, the podcast we have and the Product Hunt launches, you know, I feel like as a bootstrap founder today, you're in a way better space than 5 years ago. Tell me a sense of what it was like for you 5 years ago.

Well, it was very technical. So I was coming from a software engineering background that has been and kind of still is my I mean, how could it not be? It doesn't change retroactively. But I'm still, I'm more of a media, like writer kind of person at this point than I'm a developer, even though I occasionally still code. But back then it was all coding. I had a software engineering job back in 2017 when we started the business. I actually had started to work full-time as a regular employee back in 2015 after working as a consultant and freelancer for many, many years. So that was my first real job after little stint that I did in San Francisco working for a San Francisco business, a VC-funded business too. So I was all over the place in many different ways. And that job that I found back then in Germany in 2015 was great. I was learning the Elixir programming language, which was something new to me that I wasn't experienced in. But the job allowed me to work on it and people were cool, project was cool. And then in just 2017, Danielle was working from home. She needed this tool. I built it for her and we turned it into a business. It's like the shortest version of the Feedback Panda story. I used the exact same tech I used from my day job in that and built it there because that was the easiest way for me to cross-transfer my skills. And everything was just built by myself. I had to code everything up by myself. I did a lot of integrations because I, from almost a decade at that point of working as a SaaS developer, I understood that I didn't want to build many things myself, didn't want to build payment, didn't want to build authentication, all that somebody else was doing We just paid for it, which is something I highly recommend if you're starting out, right? Particularly now with no-code, you can almost integrate everything just by plugging and playing it all together. That was not necessarily the case back in 2017. No-code kind of existed, but not particularly— Yeah, not that well. Not in the education— with the educational field around it that exists, right? There were no no-code accelerators or kind of boot camps or anything like it. You kind of had You had to figure it all out by yourself or nobody would help you. That is very different now. But it was highly technical. I still enjoy it. Coding is fun. And if you know how to do it right, which I fortunately knew, I could quickly get the prototype out. Maybe not as fast as, you know, clicking it together in a Webflow or in a combination of Airtable or some kind of Bubble app. That would have been much faster than what I built in a couple of weeks. But it was still a prototype and we iterated on it over time. So that was back then. And now it's very different. Now I would not start a business the same way, obviously, because why would I?

What would be like your playbook now, hypothetically?

Well, I would probably try to build it as dynamically on somebody else's platform as possible. You know, like integrating Airtable as your database into a Webflow system that just kind of CRMs or like content management system on top of it and try to to write little code snippets that do the heavy lifting, but connecting all of the things together. That was probably what— how I would approach it, even though that kind of depends on the project because— Right. Yeah, of course. I do run another software as a service business, Permanent Link. This is a little link forwarding tool, and that needed to be a technical implementation because it works with custom domains and like HTTP connection forwarding stuff that is kind of hard to leverage existing platforms that don't have the kind of infrastructure underpinning that need for that. So that itself is a technical solution as well. But anything that is content related or facilitating data exchange that doesn't dive into the protocols underneath it, you don't need to build your own thing for this. Like you can quite literally build a Bubble app or a Webflow system and just set it on top. And then over time, if you need to be technical, you build your technical subsystem and you kind of switch it out under it. But you definitely wouldn't start with it. Yeah. I also— validation would be very different. Like, I'm glad you mentioned the payment links and stuff. You can You can sell the idea to people much more easily with even the simplest of prototypes, if at all. So that I would approach the whole business journey slightly differently depending again on the kind of project.

Right. I was gonna allude to the same thing, which is like the validation phase of the, you know, of a new business idea now. It just looks dramatically different even from like 2 years ago when I was validating using no-code products. I mean, no-code tools. Like I used to build an MVP using Bubble You know, I built a combination of like Softr, like Airtable and Softr, and like how like I have a very like compelling, deeply like, you know, 5, 6 pages like Webflow page, landing page to pitch. And I've learned that, you know, all of that's just the dressing, you know, I'm trying to like over— it's coming from a sense of insecurity that I'm trying to like overpitch something where now you can just test the core mechanism of is this a problem today?

You can send people a really shitty link to some internal subdomain of some platform and they don't care because they don't care.

And if they see that their problem is being first described in a way that they would understand, resonate with, and second, if they resonate with the solution, they will not care, you know? And so I think that's like, for me, that was a big upgrade I had to make about validation, you know, going forward in everything that I do. I'm not going to spend 4 days building a Webflow, pretty Webflow site or getting a logo or, you know, I used to do all that. Like even for all my side projects, I have— I would have a logo, I would have a font. All that's bullshit, you know? feel like it's either me getting old and not caring about a lot of things, or it's just saying like, you know, I don't

think that's it. But you— the first question you asked me was why people don't bootstrap. And I think it's the same reason here why people build software as if they were enterprise businesses. Because that's what we see. That's what we are surrounded by. We don't really see these scrappy little projects just in the beginning when they're working with their first like 10 test customers, their first like prospective users, like the early adopters, right? That's what we call Like early adopters for Airbnb. If you look at the old websites, the really, really crappy one, that is comparable to what we do currently as a founder. But we don't see those anymore. We see the polished like apps that have been built by teams of thousands of engineers and by like marketing teams that have this whole ABCD testing of their website and all these components. Like that's what we see. That's what we imitate. It's the same thing. Like we imitate Elon Musk even though we should should probably imitate Pieter Levels. Like, Pieter Levels, not Peter Thiel. We should have a shirt like that. You know, that's kind of what the Indie Hacker credo should be because we should take our own people that do the things that we want to do and see how they build software. And if there's any founder that you should imitate, Pieter is a great example because the thing that he's doing, like he's working on AI products before other companies have jumped into the market. And even though there are competitors doing the same things he does with much more money, grabbing his market share away from him. That's just how it works. You experiment, you see what the market does, and then you either stay or you pick something else. And playing with new technologies like the Stripe payment links, that is something that he just does naturally, comes to him. Yeah, this is cool. I can use it. Doesn't matter if it looks good or not. It's gonna make me money. And that mindset alone is something you should imitate, right? Right. Not rich people doing rich people stuff. You don't need to do that. You don't need to act like this or you don't need to imitate their business approach. Do what people who you think are cool in your community do. And you're probably up to a much better start, off to a much better start and have a much more enjoyable process of doing it because you can actually see how and what people do, how well it works. And if you can apply it to your own business instead of having to follow these nebulous concepts built by businesses that are 50,000 times as big as you with your little business.

Right. I mean, I feel like it was Danny Vassallo or someone who said who routinely says that you should study more from the folks who are 2 or 3 steps ahead of you than from Jeff Bezos. That's true.

Because you keep studying. That's the thing. And that maybe, maybe that's the core message here. You keep studying people who are 2 or 3 steps ahead of you while you take the steps, right? You just— they also take more steps. So if you just keep studying what they do, you see your path laid out before you. Because Bezos and stuff, like, you probably should have studied him in the '90s. That would have been That would be interesting. And I would love to have a time machine just to see like what his priorities were back then. Now I don't care. The whole space stuff he does and the worker exploitation, I don't need to study that, right? But I would like

to. Same thing with Elon. Like, you know, he's like so out of touch. I'm like, I don't need to study this guy.

I'd like to see the past, but not necessarily the present.

Right. Okay. So if you have to say, if you have to like sort of reflect on one piece of advice on how to find great SaaS We're talking about bootstrap SaaS ideas. What would be your approach?

100% an embedded entrepreneurial approach. Like, that's all I've been doing over the last couple of years is to be part of communities, listen to what people need, and do the thing that they would like to see more of. Solve the problems that they are most critically complaining about, figure out where things are lacking because they are talking about it, listen, and then use it to create things that they need. That is always for a writer, for a SaaS founder, for an architect, For artists, for anybody who wants to create things that people find useful or beautiful or just practical, that's the way to do it. Go to where they are, listen to what they talk about, listen to what they are celebrating, listen to what they are condemning, and figure out how you can use each of these to build more of the one of the things they celebrate and other things than the ones that they are condemning. That's what embedded entrepreneurship is. Yeah. You go in there, you listen, you shut up, you listen, and And then you slowly start talking to them about the things they need. And over time, you find ideas, you validate while you talk to people instead of building, building, building, and then throwing it in the market and hoping. You do it with the people and for the people that are surrounding you. You become a peer, you contribute to their world. And from that comes business. That's how I make money too. That's what my Permanently Lean SaaS business is. That's why people sponsor my work because they want to also empower the people in the community that I'm part of. And that they're part of. That is how I make money at this point, is by being part of the community and listening and building.

Right. I love that. Okay, so $0 to $55K MRR, you've seen that journey, man. So many people would love to be on that journey today, you know, who are listening to this pod. What can you remember about going from $0 to $1K MRR, which I think is a significant milestone, right? A lot of indie hackers that, you know, both of us have in our I feel like they're overplanning for stuff that happens at $10K, $20K, $30K, $50K MRR. And I don't think they are as obsessed about going from $0 to $1K first. Let's get there first, you know. So what tips do you have from your experience of going from $0 to $1K?

So with the first users we had, not paying users, but just like trial users, from the start we had a trial, a 30-day trial for the software, because we figured in our market, 30 days of using the software Which meant like putting your data in that it can be reused automatically through the system. It was a kind of a browser integration there too that would pull the data from our system into their online classrooms. It was a data-driven business really, or a data-centric business. We knew that within 30 days, people would either have put enough data in for it to be valuable to them to have an automation or not. So a 30-day trial. Right. That's kind of the first step. And within those 30 days, I talked to every single customer. I could. Through— we had Intercom at the time, but you can use so many different competitors, just a little chat bubble in the tool. So whenever people had a problem or a question or didn't know how to do it, it was right there, easy to use. People expect the bubble to be present. So if they click on it, they start typing, and the person actually responds, that blows their mind. Blows their mind, yeah. They only get bots or whatever. So I was there and I responded within sometimes 15 seconds of them asking the question. So blows their mind again, because they usually have to wait for half an an hour. All of that was focused on getting into a conversation with these people as quickly as I could, then learning what they need, learning what they don't have, learning what they have enough of. All of this just from these first initial dozens of users that we had. Maybe quickest side note here, Danielle was an online teacher at that point. So she was part of the community. Right. So that was kind of where this came from. She knew who these people were that we were Solving the problems for. So she had access to Facebook groups where those people hung out. So we could kind of plant links there to the business. So people would come from these groups, use it, and then communicate about it back on social media with their peers. And we jumped into these conversations and we tried to amplify them as kindly as we could. Somebody asked a question, I don't know, is this a good tool? We would say, well, it might be a good tool for you. Here's what we want to do. If you don't like it, that's perfectly fine. Can we help you in any the way, just be present, be friendly, be kind. And from the beginning, we created this— it wasn't just a semblance of us being present. We were present for everybody, every user, every prospect that might use the tool. We were so present that they thought, wow, this is something very different from how we see businesses interact with us. This is something we might want to check out. So the biggest thing we did from the start was to have a community presence in the community that we were serving outside of just talking about our business. We just try to help people. That is what we wanted. And that was really what we wanted because they were online teachers. They need all the help they can get. And the—

And did the 30-day trial, did that naturally lead to some paid customers?

Yeah. Like one of my most favorite anecdotes of Feedback Panda is that I hadn't even changed out the Stripe test key to the production key when the first person tried to subscribe. Like they literally couldn't pay us because we were still using the the test configuration for Stripe. I quickly changed that and allowed them, like, I think within 6 or 5 days after starting their 30-day trial, they wanted to pay. That's how quickly we had the loop, which also meant we could have probably condensed it to 7 days trial. But why would we, right? Like, if people need more time, why not? Wow. We even had a trial extension. Like, we had a 14-day trial extension if people didn't have enough value perceived in the 30 days because margin costs were zero essentially for that little data that they had in the database. Didn't really matter. But yeah, we quickly found that people really wanted to pay for the product. And of course, we encouraged that. But we didn't push it. Like we never pushed people into it because we knew the people we were serving had really low budget. Right. Like the price was $10 a month and that was already a lot for them. So we tried to accommodate the specific sensibility and the price elasticity of that niche from the beginning.

So you know what's crazy to me as I hear this story is that all MRR is not equal, right? Like for example, if you're ConvertKit and you're charging you and me, you know, we have business revenue. So, you know, that's different, right? As opposed to charging teachers, because my wife's a teacher and I know very well about sort of the budgetary constraints and how like they don't have business cards and shit like that.

They don't think of themselves as a business either, right? You have to tell them, hey, this is actually tax deductible if you want Right.

But they don't, they don't think of it that way. So their gut goes to like, this is my personal expense. And so getting people who are price sensitive like that to pay $10, I think roughly, right, monthly to build a behemoth of $55K MRR, it was

a lot

of people.

Easy.

Yeah, a lot of it. Like you said, 5,000+ people, man. Congrats once again. Because not every MRR is equal. Like, you know, if you got 40 mid-level Series B companies paying like $499 per month, you may be the same number, but like, it's not the same. You had earn a lot of respect, a lot of— you had to get a lot of social capital first.

Yeah, with this particular— yeah, yeah. But with these people, these teachers, we had to build a reputation for being trustworthy. We didn't have anything to like, just couldn't like lure them in, right? There was no— it had to be person to person. And the community helped. Like being present in the community allowed the community to talk about it in a positive way about us to involve us in things, bring more people onto the radar or us onto their radar. It was a community effort and I'm really fortunate it was because it was a really enjoyable thing. Like ever since then, I've been seeking community for that reason because this was the best group of people I ever hung out with, our customers at that point. It was cool.

That's awesome. So if one was building a brand new bootstrap SaaS company in one of the niches, one of the How should they think about time as a factor? Like, how long will it take? How many months and years should one dedicate to that pursuit? Because I feel like a lot of people put themselves on pressure.

Yeah.

Because they don't know what it— how long it may take. So they're like, it's taking too long for me, or it's taking not too long for me. Like, what would be a reasonable guidance for them?

That's an unanswerable question, and I will answer it right now. Now, problem is you never know if you're there with the right idea at the wrong time, With the wrong idea at the wrong time, the wrong idea at the right time, but different idea would have been good, right? It's like—

So many things have to come together.

It also needs you to have the right perspective on what a bootstrap business is. Because if you think that, wow, once this takes off, I'm gonna do this, well, then you approach your way to the takeoff point very differently than if you say, I'm gonna keep this a side project. This is one of my many small bets that I'm making. And if it works, cool, I'm gonna dedicate more If that makes it work even better, I'm going to dedicate even more time, maybe hire somebody to just help me with that so I can still have my other bets in the running. Your perspective on how you want to build your entrepreneurial portfolio, that might be one thing or multiple things, depends on how you approach it. Daniel Vassallo, you mentioned it, many small bets is his approach. Then you would have people like Andrew Kasteki who might say, well, if you have one good idea, you really go at it like you are in business. Between these 2 perspectives. And you can take any point on the continuum. But you have to figure out how you want to approach your entrepreneurial journey. This may be the important first choice. And then you have to see which of these ideas can even be validated. To me, validation, we talked about it a couple minutes ago, the term itself is complicated. Because like, if you look at the theory of theory, you will understand that you can't even validate a theory, you can only invalidate it. And you can try to find invalidation methods for a long time. And if you don't find anything, it's likely that it's a valid theory. But you're only one unfound counterexample away from invalidating any theory, right? That's kind of the idea behind this. I think it's— what is it— Niklas Luhmann or something like that. In sociology, you have the whole logic of theory and that stuff. The idea is that validation itself is almost impossible. You can only try to invalidate To get to the thing that is hard to invalidate. So it might just be valid. That is an approach that helps every single founder. Try to find why this won't work instead of hoping that you will find a way for this to work. And the more you don't find ways that it won't work, the better it likely is for you to keep going. So it's more framework approach really than it's really about knowing how many months this might take. Right. Because your market decides. decides if it's ready or not. You can't influence that. The only thing you can do is to modify, first off, how you look at this. Like, is this a side project that I can just sustain for a year or 2 if I have to? Or do I have a runway of 6 months and I need to make this happen? And if you're in that camp, like, if you need to do this in 6 months, it's likely not gonna work. Because I think the more pressure you put on yourself to make this happen, the less likely it becomes that it organically—

Isn't that one of the trickier things What's so tricky about entrepreneurship though? Because I think in other pursuits, like if I, for example, if I gave myself 6 months of time and want to be jacked, I feel like I could do that. I mean, not me, but like someone could do that. Or if someone like, oh, I want to give myself 6 months of time and want to be a better filmmaker, you could do that. If I want to give myself 6 months of time and then I want to be a better, I don't know, opera singer, I guess you could do that. Like if you like dedicate 8 hours a day. Yeah. I think entrepreneurship is so tricky that it's not linear like that. It's not predictable. simple that way where you can just say, I'm gonna spend 6 months. There's no proof that you're gonna come off with Peter Levels, like, Nomad List kind of idea, you know, with that kind of attraction.

You may learn a lot. Very good point. With the examples you gave for opera singers, I think if you have these discrete points of measurement where people can tell you if you're good or not, like, if you can sing, I don't know, La Bohème or some particular opera in a good way, like, people will notice that and they can tell you if it's good or not. But with Business, right? Business is so unclear just as a term itself, and it can be anything. If you sing opera and you sing an opera that nobody has ever heard before, they don't even know what it is. Like, is did the person just make this up on the spot? Right? Like, there that's that's not the same. Or cooking, right? You can become a real good chef, and then somebody tells you, "Make me a good steak." Well, they will eat the steak, and they will tell you if you're a good chef or not. Right? That will be very clear. clear if you are or if you're not. So with entrepreneurship—

I mean, this is, yeah, no, this is a great one. 'Cause the reason I'm even bringing this up is if you go to IndieHackers forums and like just general conversation around this, people say like, oh, I spent 2 years on an idea. I'm like, that, it just, it's like, it doesn't matter. Yeah. You could spend 2 days or 2 years.

Yeah.

If the market doesn't want your solution, that's the truth.

Yeah.

So there's the, people assume the sunk cost fallacy or like they're, like they just think that, oh, I spent 8 years on this, or I mean not 8 years, but like 2 years on this or 8 months on this, hence I should keep going. And I think it's— business is more brutal than that. Like, you know, it's more ruthless. People don't like, you know, what Permanent Link is doing, they will not buy. It doesn't matter if you, you know, crafted this thing for 4 years in your garage. It doesn't matter.

That is true. I think, yeah, that's again, even within our community, we only celebrate the hero stories. Yeah, we talked about the Thiels and the Musks earlier. Now we're talking about the Levels, right? And Peter Levels is just one of hundreds of thousands of founders who are trying to make it. And he has success. And we take his example instead of taking the example of the other 20,000 people just like us at the same level that we're at, trying to figure things out and not knowing what they're doing, right? Those are the people we should look at and say, okay, I guess everybody's struggling. That's normal here, right? That's really what we look at and what we compare ourselves to. And one rule I have found that makes me more serene in how I approach my life is never comparing myself to anybody but myself yesterday. That's really what it is. Because there are lots of people who have way more listeners on their podcast than I have, way more viewers on their YouTube channel, way more Twitter followers, way more— does it matter? Probably, but not to me. I don't need this in my life. I don't need this comparison.

And also, it's like, you know, somebody once said, This, and I thought it was brilliant. They said, like, if you're envious of someone's one particular aspect, you should be like, you don't get to pick and choose. It's like a onesie.

Yeah.

If I want Arvid Kaal's MRR or Twitter followers, then I have to get everything else along with his life, along with trauma, whatever he had going on.

You get all of that. You get my burnout as well. Enjoy.

Yeah, it's everything. So you don't get to pick and choose, you know. So All right, so I got 2 questions and we can wrap it up.

Sure.

What's one startup you would start today if you aren't doing what you're doing right now? I know you're into content and media. You have a little bit of bandwidth that you're working on the SaaS tool, the perfect thing.

I would probably go into podcasting automation tooling. I just, just a couple days ago of this recording, or yesterday I guess of this recording, ChatGPT and Whisper, like OpenAI, opened up APIs for their big AI tools. AI tools. And I think like if I had the time and willingness, I would build tools for podcasters just like myself because dogfooding is the way to go about it. That would help me record podcasts, like do interviews better, automate things like do automatic analysis of the conversation as it's happening, telling me what questions to ask next or what things to kind of pull on more, what things not to talk about. There is so much AI-based interesting opportunity out there. I would definitely use these APIs at this point to integrate it into just things that were not possible before that would go into that world.

Arvid, last one is reflecting on 3 big mistakes or any number of mistakes you made in the 0 to 55 km/h journey, like basically bootstrapping that company. What do you remember as some mistakes Like,

one was fairly formal. I founded the business, like the entity around the company in my name only, even though I co-founded it with Danielle, but she was still doing her job. And we kind of had to pull her in as a co-founder shareholder later. That was stupid, cost a lot of money, and was just me trying to do things quickly. Even though when it comes to like formal things like this, you should do them right the first time. Otherwise, it just comes back to bite you. So get the legal setup right from the start that you want in that business. You can always adjust it later. later, which we did. But if you do it right from the start, it just reduces the amount of time you have to talk to lawyers or the tax authorities, all that kind of stuff, just makes life easier. Yeah, that's just like a formal mistake I made. One of the biggest ones was not to hire people to help. That was a great mistake that I made then.

Contractors, you mean, right?

Yeah, anybody like contractors for part-time work, for just project-based work, or for just to be on a retainer if there is any Could have hired many people in many capacities in that way. I hired zero because I thought, hey, if it's not worth a full 40 hours of work a week, I'm not going to hire anybody. For some reason, that was my perspective. And that caused a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety because everything was kind of falling back on my shoulders. Yeah. That contributed to the burnout, which essentially, yeah, caused us to sell the business, which is not a bad thing, but probably could have run it a little bit longer and sold it for a little bit more. And it's always that kind of story you tell yourself. But should have hired, definitely. That is my second big mistake. And honestly, I don't really have a third one that comes to mind. But you make a lot of little mistakes.

Customer-facing, like marketing campaigns you should have run or would have run or would like to have

run?

Yeah. Like, did you do a lot of SEO?

We did not. Like, we didn't do any content marketing really outside of a newsletter. No search engine optimization. We didn't do any paid ads either. We should have probably tried that a little bit more because even though—

You didn't do paid ads at $55K MRR? That's crazy.

No, we didn't do any paid ads at all. All our marketing was completely organic. We eventually implemented a referral system that kind of helped a little bit more, even though people were already referring it without our ads. It was very community-driven. And paid ads may have reduced the perception Yes. To community work. So I don't really know. But we could have probably tried it. We could have expanded a little bit into different industries that might have made the business itself more resilient to the change that then at some point came and after we sold the business kind of caused it to fall apart. But that is not my mistake. I guess, at least, you know, it's something that the acquirer could have considered and put resources into. But no, like market Marketing-wise, it was very community-centric.

Who could have predicted that coming though, right? Like, that was CCP being CCP. Like, you can't just— you can't predict that kind of shit.

China decided from one day to another that their children in China were not allowed to learn online or to study online after 9 PM. That was the rule. Like, for some reason, they just made that, or 8 PM or something, something like early evening. And that was a rule they made. And that meant that all Americans who were online teachers for whom that was like the afternoon where after their regular day job, they would have done some more work, were now incapable of doing their work because they would have had to do it at like 2 in the morning when they slept. You know, so it's just, they completely, by doing a very unilateral thing, destroyed the economy that came of that. Yeah, it's spectacularly sad.

Yeah.

For the kids and teachers as well, because, you know, there are relationships formed there, right? These kids, these Chinese kids learning how to speak English online, that was kind of of the teacher crowd we were serving, they were super cute and they loved talking to people over the internet and learning a new language in the process. There were relationships formed like friendships and like families were exchanging information and stuff and all of that just fell apart once the new legislation came in.

Crazy. But anyway, all in all, thanks for sharing, you know—

Pleasure.

Your lessons, your insights, some, you know, reflections on your mistakes, you know, this is fun. Awesome. Thank you so much. And where can people find more about you? I'm gonna plug you nonstop in the show notes. But is there actually one, where can people find you, which, you know, I would love to give you a chance to plug, but also any parting thoughts around people who might be on the bootstrap journey, you know, who might have the same aspiration that, you know, they want to go from an idea to a million-dollar exit?

So right now, we're at a time where it's going to be harder to than it was a couple years ago, just really from the whole economic perspective. People, there's always an order of services that somebody cancels, right? Imagine you have to save money. So you cancel the things that are least important. And then you cancel the things that are not as unimportant as that, but still not important. So the last thing to cancel is your database that you pay for, your payment provider that makes you money. The first thing you cancel is probably some analytics tool that gives you a nice little dashboard for things So if you build a business, you probably want to move the criticality of your business more towards the last thing to be canceled than to be some vanity project that somebody kind of pushes some money in because they have too much laying around. Because nobody has money laying around at this time. No. So there will be more pressure on you to solve very critical problems, which in itself becomes more of a mentally challenging task because building critical infrastructure means you have to be there all the time. You have to spend a lot of energy in into convincing people that you're trustworthy, where with a vanity project, you could just say, yeah, it's a little joyful tool here, $10 a month, that's it, right? So that is going to be harder now. It will be different once people have more money to waste on little projects that you can just get started at. So maybe consider starting out with building plugins for existing platforms like Shopify or WordPress or Heroku, where people are already running their infrastructure, their critical infrastructure, and they need certain specific little tasks solved that they will pay like $5 or $10 or $15 a month or $20 or $30, depending on the size of the task you solve. It's kind of a mix of something that is not as critical, but it is part of a critical infrastructure. So, you know, it gets you into this, into the revenue mode where you can make money off a little project, then you just increase that and then you outsource it into your own SaaS or whatever. That's kind of the path that I would suggest is to go for platforms first. Don't try to build a vanity project. They probably won't make much money at this point.

Right. No, I think that's incredibly practical, you know, and given the macro climate right now. And overall, I think it's just always good advice to have very little dependency on like— sorry, to focus more on must-haves, you know, versus just nice-to-have use cases, right?

Painkiller vitamin thing, like people will buy vitamins to 2, if they have already spent money on their painkillers and still have some leftover, right? That's kind of the idea.

That's always good advice. Awesome. Thank you so much, Arvid. Folks can follow you @arvidkahl.

That's right. Follow me on Twitter because that's apparently where I hang out all day. That's pretty much what it is.

But you also run this incredible website called—

thebootstrappedfounder.com. That's—

Wait, is it bootstrapped or bootstrapper?

No, bootstrapped.

Bootstrapped. All right, good. I

should probably buy the other domain as well, but yeah.

You should get it. You definitely should get it. All right, awesome. Thank you so much, Arvid.

Thanks so much. That was awesome.