// transcript — 880 segments
0:00 <Untitled Chapter 1>
0:07 hello and welcome to productlessons.com a podcast channel on building software
0:10 products and not just building products but talking and evaluating businesses around
0:17 products so if you're listening on youtube but you rather prefer to listen
0:23 on audio only podcast you will find us on soundcloud search for yours productly
0:29 the link is in the description below in youtube i categorize my episodes into
0:33 different sections today's episode is under product entrepreneurship category
0:40 where we talk to product founders before we proceed i would ask you to click subscribe
0:45 because when more people subscribe youtube helps me reach out to more
0:49 audience all right with that let me introduce my accomplished guest today
0:56 arvid kal who has a quite a following in twitter and someone i have been
0:58 following uh quite religiously and that's exactly why i pursued him and i requested him to
1:06 be on my podcast now arvid co-founded bootstrap and sold the feedback panda.com which was the
1:13 name of his bootstrap company it's an online teacher productivity sas
1:18 company and that he started with his partner daniel and he writes regularly on the bootstrap
1:24 founder because according to him bootstrapping is the desirable
1:29 value and wealth generating way of running the company and still many people shy away from it
1:35 and he has been sharing the learning from his journey over the last decade
1:41 in his guide zero to sold in the years running feedback panda he learned how to
1:45 run a self-funded company and he encourages other entrepreneurs to see bootstrapping
1:50 as a viable option not every business needs vc to succeed he says
1:55 and he claims that most businesses are better off without investor expectations so with
2:00 that let's welcome all right hello there hi thanks so much for having me wonderful
2:12 wonderful thanks this is really cool i'm super looking forward to a conversation
2:15 today same here i've been counting days backwards and i said that
2:19 i'm following your twitter feed regularly and your book especially
2:26 created uh just magnified my impression of you i was just uh mentioning this
2:33 to a mentor friend of mine uh he is an author too but your book just
2:36 blew uh blew away uh my my impression of you the reason is it's so in-depth uh and
2:43 it's so exhaustive uh it's not a book that you um that you wrote hurriedly you you every
2:50 every chapter of it is worth the time to spend and it's some somewhat complete so it's not
2:58 like a book that that misses on a lot of uh aspects of entrepreneurship so so yeah so
3:04 thanks for writing that book we'll be talking about that book but the book as
3:07 i said is so exhaustive we cannot be talking about the entire
3:12 book um so we would be talking on areas that i found interesting and maybe
3:16 relevant to my audience my audience is mostly product leaders product managers so i thought so
3:22 ebook is divided into like five shop sections right bootstrapping
3:25 preparation survival stability growth stage but for this interview i would
3:31 focus on preparation which is on two parts idea to product and product to
3:34 business but before going to the book i would rather i'm very curious to know about you so tell
3:42 us a bit about your career trajectory and that would be a good foundation for the
3:46 conversation today all right well yeah career that's that's an
3:49 interesting question right because everything uh nowadays is kind of a very
3:55 wound path but i used to be a software engineer maybe that's that's how i
3:58 should start with this so or i still kind of am because never really
4:02 stop being a software engineer or a coder but um i i always was a
4:08 coder i guess from like ninth grade in school when i got my first computer
4:14 until today i guess but i did study um computer science at the university in
4:19 2003 somewhere here in berlin in germany where i live right now
4:23 um i dropped out of that because um studying was interesting but actually
4:27 coding projects for people was more interesting and i did more of that and less of the
4:31 university and while i learned a lot i i didn't get a degree but it didn't really hold me back
4:38 because there was enough um let's say like work to learn from outside of university
4:44 particularly in germany which is very technical and when it comes to university studies
4:49 and computer science when they teach you something usually that's like already
4:51 five years old so it doesn't really give you much in terms of marketability for yourself
4:58 but um yeah i kind of dropped out and i think world of warcraft was also a big
5:01 problem for me at that point so there's a reason that i didn't go to university much
5:06 but i could work from home right so it kind of kind of worked i studied
5:10 something completely different a couple years after i went into political
5:12 science and philosophy because i wanted to learn the exact opposite of something
5:17 technical i wanted to be involved in something social which was
5:21 very interesting because you learn a lot of things in these softer
5:27 more social sciences that are highly applicable to dynamics between people
5:31 that can be easily applied in an economic or in a marketing kind of
5:35 perspective it's quite surprising what something as abstract as philosophy can
5:39 later down the road give you some insights that other people
5:43 may not so that's it can be an unfair advantage um i also dropped out of that one
5:47 because you know i um i really didn't uh like the academia part too much but i did like
5:52 the applying the knowledge kind of part and i did drop out of the second one because
5:57 i actually got a twitter dm back in 2011 from a silicon valley company that found
6:05 a project that i had on github some open source code that i had
6:09 published because i was trying to just build with some new technology that was out there that
6:13 was pretty new at the moment and they saw that they and they had the same tech stack and
6:17 they said well you seem like you know what you're doing do you want to work for us
6:24 so all of a sudden i had a remote um silicon valley position at that point
6:27 had that for a couple years and i learned so much more just from the couple weeks
6:32 of interacting with these people that i had from years of studying at a
6:35 university so at least when it comes to um just the applicability of knowledge
6:41 being in the trenches you cannot beat that right it's not theoretical it's highly
6:46 practical so that's kind of what got me going on this journey of being a professional
6:51 software engineer i stopped working for them at some point i started consulting freelancing with my
6:57 own time and most recently i think the last job like real job that i actually had before i
7:03 founded co-founded feedback panda with danielle was i was working for a company in hamburg
7:10 in germany which is around three hours or maybe two and a half hours away from berlin where i live
7:17 um and i had a half remote half presence kind of job so i had to go to hamburg
7:21 commute to hamburg three times a week which two and a half hours there two and
7:25 a half hours back is five hours a day just commuting and i did this for
7:31 two years almost so that's 15 hours a week of commuting and that's commuting in the
7:34 train right where i'm just sitting there and doing nothing or pretty much well you can't do
7:39 anything because in germany that the wireless is super bad on the train and
7:43 you can't really do work so what i did this whole time was reading and
7:46 listening to podcasts so i kind of took everything in the the whole
7:50 entrepreneurial podcast scene every book i could find on hack indie hacking on building a
7:54 business on marketing all these kind of things for years and that
8:00 then led to me finally being able to have a more successful attempt at building
8:04 businesses i had a couple attempts in the past but they didn't
8:08 really go too well but after this episode of learning a lot right um it
8:13 worked out so that was 2017 when we founded feedback panda and yeah
8:17 i guess that would be my resume if you can call it that right
8:21 excellent so let's since you mentioned about feedback uh panda why don't you uh
8:27 share the story of feedback panda briefly uh it seemed like you wanted to solve
8:32 something for your partner right who is the english teacher yeah pretty
8:35 much then danielle was teaching english online she was working from home because
8:39 she had a leg injury at the time she's an opera singer she's a trained
8:44 musician right usually a singer would go out and sing but if you can move you kind of have to
8:48 find a job that you could do from home and that was obviously 2017 long before
8:53 that the covet 19 kind of lockdowns that we are kind of forced to endure at this point
9:00 that was something um where remote work wasn't really necessarily that well um
9:05 established particularly in the non-technical fields right in
9:08 education remote was not a thing but there was a couple of companies in china
9:16 that with the the digital infrastructure becoming ever better started to understand that
9:19 you could teach so many chinese kids how to speak english online by just finding people from
9:29 north america who speak english natively and have them connect through a virtual classroom that
9:34 was already there in 2016 2017 and danielle did this for a living
9:40 she taught like 10 hours a day just sitting in front of her computer
9:43 teaching kids who didn't speak a word of english or very little
9:47 english without herself speaking any chinese that was it was fun but it was a lot of like
9:52 dancing a lot of singing involved and that's a stressful job but that's
9:56 not the only stressful part so the stressful part and that's also the thing
9:58 that led us to build the business was that she needed to provide student feedback
10:05 like actual couple paragraphs of text for the parents of the student to read
10:09 and she needed to do that for every single lesson that she taught
10:13 and if you teach 10 hours a day that's 20 lessons and trying to remember who you taught
10:18 what and what lesson and what they need to work on after the fact like when 10 hours are
10:22 over that's just that's you can't really do that without going at least partially insane
10:29 so what most teachers did and all of these teacher teachers kind of did the same thing they
10:33 taught the same classes just to different students highly organized curriculum they took
10:37 notes and then after they taught for for 10 hours they spent two more hours writing
10:41 the text and then submitting it and they had to submit it because if they didn't they
10:46 wouldn't get paid for the teaching itself so here was a problem danielle
10:50 was clearly suffering from this because she was losing two hours of unpaid time
10:53 every day and we knew that all the other teachers and there was like five to seven
10:58 thousand of these teachers in this one school already when when we uh when danielle taught
11:04 there they had the exact same problem and she started making her own little
11:08 templates and a word document in an excel sheet and i just at some point we talked and
11:12 she said can we deal with this in a better way and having built sas platforms and
11:18 software products before i said yeah this looks like a perfect situation to turn it into a
11:23 custom product with custom logic that can amplify all these processes and
11:27 make it so much faster the result is feedback panda a tool that
11:32 integrates with those classrooms that all these teachers have to use to work
11:37 and turns this to our after the fact job into a five minute job that can be easily done in between
11:42 or once you're finished saving people's two hours a day quite a significant improvement and
11:49 people were willing to pay for that and we just built a business
11:53 right from from that product alone got it so um by then i think you had
11:58 solidified your intuition of or your knack of finding problems
12:04 worth solving right because not everybody would jump into identifying and trying to solve it
12:12 so so this is a question that i always had um what does it take for an
12:20 entrepreneur or what kind of a mindset one should have to be able to identify problems um
12:28 that are worth uh solving because this that should have a monetizable uh proponent to it
12:32 right so how how does one develop that i i would think um i've been doing this for i guess like 10
12:39 years or something now and with varying ranges of success in the
12:44 beginning i had a lot of cool ideas and i built things and nobody needed
12:47 them nobody wanted them and sure nobody paid for that always
12:51 this kind of um i guess very engineering driven perspective where i
12:56 work with products every single day this thing is a product this
12:59 computer in front of me is a product everything is a product
13:03 so all i think about is products i think about building an app building some
13:05 software without actually understanding that the product itself is just an implementation
13:10 of a solution to somebody's problem and in this equation i think many engineers in particular
13:18 people who come from the technical fields they go at it the wrong way they start
13:22 with the idea of the product and then they try to figure out well is this really solving a
13:28 problem and if so who may have it it's like a lot of guesswork in between
13:31 what i found to work much better both for me and for the people that i've since
13:38 um mentored and consulted for is to flip this whole equation around
13:43 and really start with people like try to figure out who you want to
13:46 help that is the most important part because it doesn't really matter how you help
13:50 them as long as you help a certain group of people let's call it an audience for the
13:55 better for the lack of a better term if you find this kind of potential group
13:59 of future purchasers just people with problems then what you
14:04 need to build and how you build it is almost secondary because that will come from you just
14:11 introspecting and figuring out observing what problems do they have how
14:15 do they usually solve their problems how can i solve them better and how can
14:19 i do this in a way that doesn't mess up their workflow so um and i've been talking about this
14:24 in the book and you said it like the book is spread into like five parts and the
14:29 preparation part is like almost half the book in size because it's such
14:32 an important step it's like if you don't get the first step right then you can try
14:38 to build a business out of this as much as you want you can waste your money on
14:40 marketing if the product isn't good because it doesn't really solve
14:45 a critical problem for a well-defined audience then you can build a great
14:48 product but everything else isn't there right a great product that nobody wants to buy
14:55 so i think the kind of question that you ask is like do you need some sort of
14:59 special perspective or personality i think you just need the right strategy
15:04 and the strategy is for me at least what i've seen work better than the other approach is
15:08 to really focus on finding an existing group of people out there
15:13 and that might be that it doesn't have to be a market right it doesn't have to
15:16 be the i don't know the indie hacker community it's great if it is
15:23 but it could also just be people who like warm showers as random as
15:29 is an example right if you if you can build something for those people to have a more
15:33 enjoyable shower then all of a sudden it turns into a market for your particular solution
15:38 to their critical problem which hopefully is i want to have a nicer
15:40 shower right you need to really start with the people figure out what their critical
15:45 problems are and i guess with this audience is a bit of a bad example but let's just say
15:50 plumbers it's also i think an example i use in the book because it's such a nice real
15:54 job right plumbers people who do pipe fitting who um yeah just take care of the plumbing
16:01 what problems do they have well without asking them you will never know unless you're a
16:06 plumber right so if you have a plumber in the family ask them if you have a friend who works
16:10 in plumbing either as a plumber themselves or as somebody who works in the adjacent fields like
16:15 the logistics people selling to them or people who hire a lot of plumbers
16:18 like hotels or um um what's it called hospitals right all of these kind of groups of people
16:26 have interests and they need problem solved and without talking to them you will
16:30 never figure out how to build a good product or have a good idea
16:34 because if you you need to solve a critical problem and that comes
16:37 from observing an audience got it thank you uh in your book you say that
16:44 uh and i'm just quoting you it says i think that everybody can be
16:50 an entrepreneur and create a sustainable business that will allow them to live a life of
16:57 freedom and financial independence it will require some sacrifice as
17:01 building a business will take a lot of work and time but will lead
17:04 you to a life of control a life of choice and a life of opportunity
17:10 could you very enticing could you elaborate and the reason i say this is
17:14 because 9 out of 10 businesses fail and we hear success stories but
17:21 uh there are a lot of stories where people have burnt their fingers
17:25 and have had financial turmoils so how do you reconcile the the two here yeah to me it's um
17:33 very much about the journey and and not just about the attempt
17:37 because my journey in particular consisted of many many attempts some of
17:41 which were kind of successful um i i have an example here i founded a company with a
17:48 couple of friends and we had customers paying customers for a product that was
17:52 in the journalism photography journalism space and people uploading images to a lot of agencies
17:58 and then we made big mistakes in in terms of marketing and just running the
18:02 business kind of into the ground by not having a vision for it
18:05 the product was good and we had paying customers but the business still
18:07 faltered so you learn from that and then i built a business here in berlin with a couple
18:11 friends trying to get local food from outside the city a good
18:17 locally grown food into the city of like what is four million people
18:22 who only have access to like food from out of the country i guess
18:26 that is cheaply imported and we wanted to make this a more locally connectable thing
18:32 and we built a product we built a product that kind of worked for the
18:35 people buying but we kind of forgot the other side of the market the people
18:37 producing we built a sas product for farmers who never went to their computers so
18:44 how could they ever like really type in their inventory if they're
18:48 always kind of farming the whole day that's what they did that's
18:51 that was their job so we forgot to validate the product and that was a big
18:53 learning so i ever since then i've been much more focused on validating the product
18:59 and the same with the other business ever since that experience i've been
19:02 much more focused on understanding that there needs to be a vision
19:05 and some sort of marketing perspective so i'm not saying that
19:08 if you start a business you will guarantee um or if that will guarantee
19:12 you success immediately i you may have to start a couple of them
19:17 and get through the learnings of each individual one to ever to get to a point
19:23 where you may have some success i think what what i what i'm trying to explain
19:27 here is that everything you do exposes a bigger plot on the opportunity surface of your life
19:35 right you have this kind of potential of opportunities and you start out coming out of school
19:40 with i guess very little practical experience and with everything you do you kind of
19:45 get a new plot across this plane and opportunities strike in random
19:48 points at random times so being prepared for this and having
19:52 understood certain concepts either through reading through conversations
19:58 like this or to through actually having gone through that that prepares you to act on this at this
20:02 very moment what i what i also want to say a life of control and a life of choice
20:09 that's i guess is the bootstrap part that is the part where you don't
20:12 necessarily go for venture capital funding because many people particularly here in
20:16 germany it's a big deal to do if you have a startup you better get venture funding or else
20:23 you're not a real startup that is one of the biggest problems that
20:26 i see in the local community here particularly in berlin but there's a lot
20:29 of vc funded startups if you want to bootstrap people don't take you seriously and i think
20:34 that is changing because people understand that bootstrapping just really means trying
20:40 to see if the business you're building can quickly generate revenue to be
20:43 self-sustainable and if not it's not a good idea you don't do it anymore you do something
20:50 else which is why a lot of bootstrap projects are also side projects but people still have a
20:56 a job i i was explaining that i had a job at hamburg well feedback panda
21:00 existed already for i think maybe three or four months maybe even half a year before i quit my
21:05 job there like we had a five-figure monthly recurring revenue when we quit
21:10 our jobs both me as a software engineer and danielle as a teacher respectively
21:15 so you can do this on the side and you can you can build a business um
21:20 just to see if it works because even though you may have found your audience the critical problem
21:26 your solution and that built the product it still may not be enough there still
21:29 may have been a validation that you didn't do in between that
21:32 catches up with you but that's kind of the yeah yeah it's about this journey the entrepreneurial
21:38 journey that will it on at some point someday leave you with
21:41 something really meaningful it might just take a while and i think
21:44 it's a it's a long-term project and we have to understand that there's no
21:47 overnight success right even feedback panda was two years of us running a business
21:53 and scaling it from zero to fifty five thousand dollars in mrr
21:56 which is quick but it only happened because we both had a lot of talent and a lot of
22:01 experience in our respective fields got it yeah the the reason bootstrapping is not
22:04 Reason Bootstrapping Is Not Considered Seriously
22:09 considered seriously um is again the the notion the the outside notion the public notion um the
22:15 market notion of a business has to be skilled scalable high skill business is only
22:22 considered a business but a lifestyle business where you take
22:28 control on how you want to scale is something that is never considered
22:31 seriously um so do you so do you think that bootstrap business
22:35 can also uh scale that or you need help external let me ask you maybe why would it need
22:44 to scale right like what what is the goal that you have and i think the
22:49 the lifestyle business it's almost used as an insult the phrase
22:53 right having a business that can sustain your lifestyle that you want
22:57 how is that a problem right how is that something bad that you as a single person as one
23:03 human being in the world of billions can create something that is digital in many cases that is
23:10 scalable to a certain degree because it is like um a digital product it's not a
23:14 physical thing you need to make and it can sustain your lifestyle with i
23:19 don't know somewhere between 10 to 20 thousand dollars mrr or whatever adjusted to where you
23:23 live that to me is a big plus compared to not only having to
23:28 reach this kind of hyper growth scale that all these uh vc back businesses
23:35 aspire to have because investor um just a relationship with their investors kind
23:38 of suggests that one of the hundred businesses that they invest in
23:43 needs to be the unicorn so everybody needs to try to be the unicorn
23:46 something that i personally would never want to do like i i personally would
23:49 rather build a business that really slowly gets me to my mri goal my kind of um income revenue
23:56 whatever goal then having to force every single day to force the business to explode so just
24:04 that some investor who made 100 bets in parallel gets their payout
24:10 i mean where am i and where are my goals in this um i think as a bootstrapper you have so
24:14 much more control over your own outcome and honestly if you want to do hyper scale stuff with
24:19 your business you can always take vc money later a proven business
24:25 there are and the thing is you don't necessarily have to have hyper scale vc
24:28 expectations either we see now um funding options for bootstrappers
24:30 Funding Options for Bootstrappers
24:36 that are much less vc like and still involve some sort of venture
24:39 funding so if you look at earnest capital or ndvc or tinyseed
24:45 these three in particular they give money to you they either get a small amount of um
24:52 shares in your business like significantly smaller than a vc would
24:54 take or they even get get some some kind of share um amount of shares in your business and
25:02 then have some sort of revenue-based financing where you can
25:06 buy back your own um share in the business by buying out the investor
25:13 so the alignment between somebody who wants to make money on your revenue that you want
25:18 to make every single month and you who also wants to have revenue
25:21 every single month is so much higher than the alignment between you who wants to do
25:28 revenue mri sustainably and a vc who needs a billion dollars in two years from now
25:33 right so seeing the financing options that are now coming out more and more makes me very
25:39 happy because they take lifestyle and they actually cement it
25:43 they actually want people to live in a lifestyle business they wanted to slowly
25:48 generate mrr over time thus generating more and more income for them
25:52 and they do this with 10 businesses in parallel expecting every single one of those to make money
25:57 to me that is what you said it earlier right nine out of ten businesses fail
26:04 well yes if the expectations are that nine out of ten fail and all
26:07 financial instruments around it are aimed at that as well but if you have systems in place that
26:13 sustain all the businesses in a batch like what you see with tiny
26:18 tiny seed or with earnest capital like all of those businesses that they have
26:22 under their wings are making money to some extent and to me that's what i'd like to see a
26:27 community of people where everybody makes sustainable revenue not just a
26:30 couple who make like the billions but everybody makes a couple tens couple hundreds of
26:35 thousands a month or a year so much nicer right i mean that's my personal perspective
26:42 but no no what do you think about that i i love that perspective the only
26:49 thing that people get caught up caught up with is the glamour part of it
26:53 where you are not written in techcrunch if you have a small business
26:57 okay but you have to trade trade between the piece of peace of mind and not being answerable
27:03 to a bunch of vcs who are behind you and getting your quarterly numbers but
27:07 having a life and business under your control so what is the trade-off so thank you
27:11 for uh for uh putting putting forth that perspective and yeah so the the other thing that in your
27:19 book you said that within two years you built a niche service from a proof of concept into a
27:24 thriving business that was attractive enough for a private equity firm to take
27:31 How Do You Find a Niche
27:31 it off your hands uh my my point is how do you find a niche for
27:35 your idea and how deep should be the niche when you are starting out
27:43 i can give you the definition of of the the audience that we had for feedback
27:45 panda i think it was north american online english teachers teaching through
27:51 a web-based application for chinese kid english companies um
27:57 teaching english as a second language to chinese children aged four to sixteen
28:07 i think 10 qualifying factors there and the thing is um it's super hard to find these things
28:12 because they are hidden among so many other things right if you
28:16 if you just go up one level you remove the whole china thing and
28:19 then you have unknown english teachers teaching through web-based portals and all of a
28:24 sudden you have a lot of people like the whole learnship system which is
28:28 a worldwide um operating business um goes through that or every english teacher
28:33 every language teacher every teacher now who teaches through zoom
28:37 is now an online teacher right so the market is all of a sudden gigantic
28:42 so in that market exists so many particular niches already that you could go for english as a
28:48 second language or physics teachers or like music teachers and all of a sudden
28:51 you see oh yeah they have totally different requirements to how
28:55 they actually teach right if you teach music all of a sudden
28:59 you may need to have a really low latency bidirectional channel
29:02 so that your student can play the piano and you can critique them in almost real time
29:08 if you teach physics or if you teach english you can have a latency of like a
29:11 second or two and it doesn't matter so all of a sudden technical um
29:19 reasons and constraints are giving you a completely different perspective into
29:21 the niche so what i'm always encouraging people to do is to look at
29:28 first off um if if you already have an audience you want to serve perfect look
29:32 into it try to figure out what it consists of right what other groups does this larger
29:36 group consist of and how do they differentiate themselves from each other and how deep
29:41 can you go because within music teachers like i said you have the piano teachers but you also
29:46 have the singing teachers right you have the vocal teachers and those have a completely different
29:51 approach to teaching they might just want to critique you really on the quality of certain kind of
29:56 physical things i mean i know this because danielle is a trained opera singer and she's also
30:00 capable of teaching voice so i i know there's a lot of physicality and actually like
30:08 seeing very clearly the the physical um skill of singing in other people to
30:12 be able to critique them so now all of a sudden the high definition camera may be
30:14 needed and you know like every niche has this little diff differentiation
30:21 and um you can figure this out you can look into all of these you can make a
30:23 list of your niche of the sub-niches of the sub-niches of each and figure out
30:29 um i'm currently writing an article on this it's going to be out next week
30:31 How To Find an Audience for a Site Business
30:33 about how to find an audience for a site business that might might help here
30:37 and it's all about figuring out which audiences you belong to
30:41 listing them figuring out how much you like each audience i'm just going to
30:44 give you a quick overview this is going to be a 30-second thing um then
30:49 figuring out if there's opportunity for interesting problems
30:52 in each of those scoring them all from zero to ten like giving them a number
30:57 then um i guess how likely people are to pay for solutions in that niche because if you sell to i
31:02 don't know i don't know b2b companies they're more likely to pay you money
31:06 than just a fan of a certain kind of sports right you these people will be more
31:10 reluctant to pay for certain things while a business can easily write it off
31:13 and then figuring out if the market has the right size if it's big enough for you to
31:17 sustain a business but also small enough not to be immediately um
31:23 encumbered by the large uh income and businesses like you don't want microsoft to build
31:27 uh a competition product with your business immediately after you launched it right
31:31 so it's about um yeah being aware of the of the the niche that you that you want to
31:36 find maybe going up and down like niching down or niching up depending on if it's
31:41 too small or too big and then figuring out if there's school
31:44 opportunities if there's affinity if you like it if it's big enough and finally
31:49 if they're willing to pay for solutions got it um i would like to take a few audience
31:54 questions yeah um let's go ahead so so there is uh one from franco muniz
31:59 and he says if you're building a product and suddenly you realize that
32:03 that there are already super similar products in the market should you still
32:06 go for it i um yeah i think i would say yes because your vision of what the product
32:12 should be or can be will always be different from what other people's vision is
32:19 right it's the same with the everybody talks about oh what if somebody clones
32:21 my business well let them clone your business they can clone your tech stack they can clone
32:26 your front-end code or whatever but they can never clone your vision of what you want
32:31 this to be so if you think that you have a product that can turn
32:38 into something extremely unique even though there's competition in the market
32:40 by similar products but you have a vision why you founded this
32:44 right you have a vision why you built this in the first place then i
32:48 think you can just follow that vision just not necessarily ignore the competition but
32:55 don't think that they're gonna um that they shouldn't impact what your vision
32:58 of the product is i mean look at all these podcasting platforms that are out there there's
33:02 anker fm and there's these old-school kind of audio syndication platforms and still
33:09 transistor fm the u-kit on the block has been extremely successful
33:15 it's not like a seven-figure arr business even though there have been
33:20 podcasting platforms for decades this has existed for a while
33:24 and they what did they do well they went for the indie hacker and founder market
33:27 Convertkit
33:27 for the entrepreneur market and i think convertkit is an email
33:32 service provider mailchimp existed before and i i there's many many email service providers out
33:38 there but convertkit focused on a very specific audience as well
33:43 i think it was also developers or writers like something really specific
33:48 and from there they outgrew their niche into something bigger
33:52 and expanded into a bigger place but honestly if you build a product and you have a
33:57 specific niche audience in mind make it happen that only your product
34:01 serves them perfectly then all the competition will have to do
34:05 their own thing and it doesn't matter because you found your audience
34:07 Disruptive Innovation
34:08 got it yeah so this is what a disruptive innovation is right so you are so small
34:12 and so niche that the traditional big players would not take you seriously
34:19 but over time you would have captured a lot of their market share
34:22 or even if you're not as you said you could you could be happy with your small
34:24 market share and your small issue right because if your mailchimp you're going to try to
34:30 get every single person once an email list into your system because you need the market share
34:35 because your venture backed and all these things right but if you're if
34:39 you're convertkit which is a bootstrap business they can be picky they can say
34:42 well we're going to build this project for this our product for these people and
34:45 it's still like what is it like an eight-figure business now
34:50 it doesn't matter apparently it's still a company of i don't know maybe 20
34:53 people maybe even less and they're making like tens of millions
34:56 a year just from their their subscription revenue i think that's a big success you don't need to
35:02 scale indefinitely to reach success i guess base camp with the dhh and jason
35:06 fried right the creators um i mean here of hey.com and you know and basecamp the the product
35:15 itself um well they're happy with where they are and they're like 50 people
35:21 running a multi-million dollar business they don't need to explode their business they don't need
35:26 to drive growth because they they have reached where they want to be and remotely
35:32 remotely and without actually working their their employees to death right the
35:36 book uh it doesn't have to be crazy at work i highly recommend it just if you
35:40 want to see how a sane business can work if you're working in one that's not you
35:44 know like there's a lot of opportunity to make work less bothersome
35:50 it can actually be enjoyable because if the goal is not growth for growth's sake
35:54 but if the goal is reaching a certain stage and being happy with it
35:59 work turns into something completely different and i quite like that
36:04 awesome excellent i will take one more question and this is about keeping at it
36:11 okay because usually entrepreneurs are asked to have patience and keep at it
36:17 but then what is the limit for how long does one have the patience to keep at it if
36:21 they do not see the light at the end of the tenth tunnel right so is it is it 12
36:26 months 24 months 36 months what is yeah what is a good patient's
36:34 duration well i yeah super hard question to answer because i don't think there's
36:36 a number there's only a sense um that a founder has for if it's still worth pursuing
36:43 something or not and um personally personally over the the last decade i've
36:50 understood that my understanding of the market informs that feeling right there you can
36:56 be you can understand the market completely come to the market with a
37:00 problem and it's not just the right time it's just a bit too early and i think
37:04 that's what we had here in berlin with our local food um platform because now surprise there's
37:09 a lot of local food platforms that actually did it well that validated
37:12 their product and built something meaningful it we did it in 2014. it was just too
37:17 early it did not work out at that point and um we kind of kept the company running
37:24 more or less sleeping i guess and then at some point pivoted into subscription
37:27 boxes so the company still exists and it's slowly growing in another
37:31 market but um we we understood quite quickly that even though we were building something
37:38 that we thought the market could need the market did not demand they did not
37:41 want it and once we understood that we kind of said okay let's just really stop this right
37:47 now let's stop wasting our time and that was a couple months after we
37:50 started trying to market the whole thing and so okay let's let's go into other
37:54 things that's that's really do something else what i would what i
37:58 would suggest is to try and have as many conversations as possible
38:04 with your prospective audience and if you if you feel like you're just not
38:08 getting to these people then two things may happen either you're
38:11 actually asking the wrong questions or you're trying to build the wrong thing you're
38:17 trying to solve the wrong problem you have to re-validate your critical
38:20 problem and your solution or you're actually talking to the wrong
38:23 people so you have to go back even one step further and figure out
38:28 who do i want to help these people don't want to they don't seem to be
38:33 want to be helped can i find somebody else that i could either help with what i
38:36 currently have or can i salvage what i built and turn this into something that could help
38:41 somebody else because most online sas applications are pretty much like you know you have a
38:49 user login and you have like a dashboard and something happens
38:52 you can easily rebuild this into a new product if you want to
38:55 serve another audience which is probably better than spending another year
38:59 trying to force a product down their throat which they're not
39:03 willing to eat or inhale i don't know you know like i guess i would say um
39:09 it's like the same thing higher slowly and fire quickly is one of these things
39:11 that that you hear a lot i would say the same thing for building like
39:18 build or validate slowly but invalidate quickly if you see it doesn't work just go back
39:23 and i laid this out in the beginning audience critical problem solution
39:26 product oh this is succession right if your product doesn't work go back one step
39:31 and figure out if your solution isn't right or if your solution doesn't work go back
39:35 one step figure out if there's a new solution or if you're even
39:38 dealing with the right problem and if you don't get the problem right find
39:41 another problem or find another audience which is i think how i laid it out in
39:44 the book as well it's like this step-by-step validation because if you
39:47 have a validated audience validated problem validated solution and
39:52 you're building a validated product then you have four validations in one
39:56 and success is at least more likely and if it still doesn't work
40:01 go back and figure out where you didn't validate correctly got it so so what happens after uh
40:09 say say you have validated and you have created your first version
40:14 your your past your mvp how do you how do you get your first customer
40:18 to your uh first product or maybe yeah first customer and maybe the first
40:22 50 customers or so if it is a consumer product it's going to be very different for each business
40:27 because every business has a different audience but every audience
40:34 is a community in some way right um even even though uh people who like warm showers my
40:38 really lame example from earlier that is in itself a community because
40:42 you will find a blog dedicated to showers or shower heads or
40:46 like water temperature differences or something like this there's gonna be a
40:49 niche community somewhere where people communicate and i guess in
40:53 business we call this the the water cooler right the the area where
40:56 everybody goes to when they want to have a coffee or when they want to get some
40:58 water when they chat about their professional lives and you have
41:03 the water cooler in every single community um you just need to find it
41:08 and you that's the great thing about going audience first the approach of
41:12 figuring out your audience and then the problem solution and product later
41:15 is that you already know where those people are because if you validate your
41:18 audience i guess if you follow the steps that i laid out earlier if you find your
41:23 affinity for it and the opportunity and size and that kind of stuff
41:27 you have looked into this you have found the forms they hang out in you have
41:30 found the facebook groups they may hang out at the twitter community in which they are or maybe
41:34 there's actual like institutions where they have a newsletter going out every month right
41:41 plumbers there are plumbing associations in every single state of the united
41:43 states and in europe and every single country you can subscribe to the plumbing
41:50 associations of new jersey's newsletter and you get new information about
41:53 plumbing every single month well this is a community and you can
41:57 either advertise on the community or you can just really talk to the people sending out the
42:01 newsletter and tell them what you're building and ask them if that's interesting for
42:05 them to put a segment on or find a facebook community you embed
42:10 yourself you you start communicating with people without actually forcing them into your
42:14 product but just really to establish yourself as an expert in
42:18 the field because the moment you become part of a tribal community
42:21 and a tribe i guess is characterized by people who have the same interests
42:25 they share the same interest they follow the same people and they hang out in the
42:27 same location and are highly interconnected well once you are in in this kind of
42:33 tribe if you elevate your own reputation people will start listening to you and
42:34 How Can You Elevate Your Own Reputation
42:36 how can you elevate your own reputation well by providing value without taking
42:39 value and i think that's what i what i've done um without really wanting to do it but
42:45 now in retrospect i figured out that's what i did in providing a new blog post and a new
42:50 newsletter and a new podcast for free every single week for now almost a year
42:55 it is not surprising that people who followed my journey for this whole year every week they got
43:00 something and when i finally had something i could sell which was my book they jumped onto this
43:06 right i sold 350 copies within the first 24 hours not because people necessarily really
43:12 wanted to read this book immediately i hope that some would but
43:17 people really wanted to give back and that is something you can leverage
43:19 in the community because if you establish yourself as the plumbing expert in the plumber
43:24 chat the plumber tele group i don't know then people will listen to you
43:31 and you can find people who want to go on a beta who want to sign up for your beta a
43:35 couple weeks after you started really giving value you said i'm trying to build this
43:40 this is something um that i'm trying to help this community with i'd be happy if you join but
43:45 you don't have to it's still completely optional you don't have to pay
43:50 and if you become a customer later there will be a hefty discount because you
43:53 were one of those people that made it happen you can be like sociable and still get
43:58 people into your product just don't do it immediately when you
44:01 join a community provide first and take much later i think that's
44:07 reddit is notorious for that if you find a reddit um as separated somewhere on
44:11 on the topic on the community that you want to sell to join and stick around for a couple months
44:16 because if you put a link to your product in there within the first couple
44:18 weeks you're out of there immediately so communities will protect ourselves right
44:25 and you need to be a part of them but that's how we find our own customers
44:28 let me let me finish with this our first customer was a person that clicked on the link that
44:34 danielle had posted in response to some message in the facebook group for
44:38 online english teachers but people ask so how do you do the feedback how do you deal
44:42 with your feedback danielle said well i use feedback panda put the link in there and that's how the
44:46 first customers came fact in fact that's how all our customers
44:50 came because it was a tribe and the moment they had something
44:53 valuable they were sharing it with each other and all our marketing has been word of
44:57 mouth we didn't i think we paid like 200 euros all together for paid advertising in the
45:03 whole history of feedback panda that's an interesting point that you
45:06 made so you said that in the previous examples that you shared
45:10 building community and building trust in the com in the relevant community
45:16 is an exercise that you could begin much before the product is being built isn't
45:18 it yeah you have to start it right now because you want to be as long and you
45:25 want to be in these communities and established in as long as possible listen that is a
45:29 reputational journey yeah so you don't have to uh build the product and then
45:35 become active but much as early as possible isn't it and the thing is if you join a community
45:39 let's say you join some subreddit on some obscure hobby that people have
45:43 well if you observe these people communicating every single day
45:47 you will figure out what their common commonly held critical problems are
45:51 right because if everybody complains let's say gamers let's say gamers complain about i don't
45:56 know what game to play next uh yeah i don't really know and i tried this but i
45:58 didn't like it nobody can tell me i like these games what should i play next
46:03 well isn't that a critical problem for somebody in the gaming community
46:07 right and if you see this every single day people complaining about this
46:11 well then you know what to build because you don't need to have an idea when you
46:14 join a community in fact i would completely put your ideas aside and just
46:19 really observe the community for what they need because it could be that they need what
46:23 your idea can provide but that is a gamble by going with what they what they say they need what
46:31 they are complaining about you have a much higher chance of reaching them
46:37 and building this kind of market building this audience and then maybe later you can build
46:42 whatever you wanted to buy in the build in the first place but maybe you don't
46:44 need to because the thing that you build following their complaints and following
46:49 their critical problem may just be the thing that actually makes it a big
46:55 and sustainable and growing business that you want right it doesn't have to be a first idea but
46:59 it should be something that really helps the people you want to empower
47:03 and you can only find that by observing them and listening to
47:06 them complaining about their problems got it um so let's move to the next
47:09 stage so you you bootstrapped your marketing you did not spend a lot you were creative you
47:15 built your community but over time uh you you went beyond your first few customers
47:22 and now you want to also evaluate the the market around it right the market
47:25 How Do You Decide the Size of the the Market
47:25 potential around it so how do you decide the size of the the
47:29 market and uh interestingly you you had a phrase goldilocks zone so maybe if you could
47:36 spend some time on market and goldilocks yeah market size is an
47:42 interesting problem because usually if you want to build a big business the
47:46 bigger the market the better right it's very easy if there's a big market
47:49 awesome is there a bigger market let's go over there but i feel in for
47:52 bootstrap founders in particular for businesses that supposedly grow
47:58 slowly or doesn't have to be slow but sustainably over a longer period of time and they
48:02 don't exhibit the hockey stick but really almost linear or at least
48:07 not exponential but maybe geometric graph you know like let's not not be too
48:12 A Market That Can Sustain Your Business
48:12 too math specific about this here if you want to have a market that can sustain
48:15 your business you want it to be big enough that obviously is the case right but it
48:21 doesn't have to be infinitely big because the moment you get into the waters of
48:27 um then i set up said this earlier where microsoft could build a competing
48:30 product and it would be economically point yeah purposeful for them to build
48:34 this then you're in a much too big market at least for starting out
48:39 you can always build a business like let's let's say convertkit right
48:43 they they build a small product they they grew they're now uh
48:46 um they make i don't know hundreds of millions of dollars of course they've grown into a bigger
48:50 Goldilocks Zone
48:51 market but they didn't start in one so the goldilocks zone is um i guess
48:55 from the fairy tale it's not it's not too hot it's not too cold
48:57 same goes for the market it's not too big that you have these
49:01 gigantic gigantic businesses with a lot of marketing money that could easily
49:04 outspend you just by throwing um a rounding error for them could be a couple million dollars in a
49:11 yearly marketing spend you could not afford this as a bootstrapper who doesn't have any
49:15 funding right so that is way too big but that's also way too small because if you want to
49:21 sell a product to all the star trek fans in berlin right i mean we have four million people
49:25 there's probably i don't know like 10 20 000 diehard star trek friends in the
49:29 city still that's not a big market so what i and first of what are you
49:33 going to sell to them again a very stupid example that is a highly specific niche star
49:37 trek fans in the city that also like coffee something like this not going to be a big market so
49:43 you're not going to be able to sustain a product that maybe is going to have
49:46 some competition at some point so you need to find a market that is big
49:49 enough to sustain just from purchasing your product a business that you feel is safe to
49:57 build and is reliable um for growth for you for the next couple years
50:03 for us at feedback panda when we started danielle was looking into the amount of
50:06 teachers that were in her facebook groups was a good indicator for the size
50:08 of the market that was like around 5000 people maybe 7000 people there at this point
50:15 and that was 2017 a couple weeks later there was 10 000 people in this group
50:20 and a year later there was 20 30 000 people in this group it was pretty clear that we were looking
50:26 at a highly a growing fast growing market and that gave us a
50:30 lot of confidence that if this market continues to grow or gets stagnant at some point
50:37 here's 50 000 people that each could pay us 10 10 a month that is pretty solid and we
50:43 ended up only kind of serving 5 000 of them when we sold the business
50:46 still they were paying 10 to 15 bucks a month though 50 55 kmr so that was okay for two people
50:53 and it was only two people right it's only the two of us um and maybe this this actually brings us
51:00 to franco's second question that uh he just posed on youtube there
51:03 because i find this um a good opportunity to talk about this
51:09 we were two two people team at this point not a one-man team but two
51:14 but honestly almost the same right you because you if you don't have an actual group of
51:18 employees taking over work for you even if you split it halfway it's still overwhelming and we
51:24 had 5 000 customers there was a lot of anxiety and stress in our lives at least
51:27 in mine and i talk about this a lot because you do want to make sure that you don't get
51:34 a panic attack or a breakdown or burnout from your business which is supposed to
51:37 be your lifestyle business i don't think burnout is lifestyle
51:40 that is necessarily something you want to go but if you were one-man team um and deciding
51:44 Deciding between Selling the Business Hiring or Raising Capital
51:48 between selling the business hiring or raising capital well it really depends on what you want
51:53 if you want to build a business that will nourish you forever and you're
51:58 going to work in it you're going to work on it or you just own it
52:03 well then you hire because hiring in a in a in a company means like you find
52:06 somebody to do your work for you right so you build a sellable business
52:07 Build a Sellable Business
52:10 Building a Sellable Business
52:11 and i highly recommend the building a sellable business approach
52:15 um i highly recommend reading the book built to sell for the business price in
52:18 it and by john warlow because building a sellable business means building a business that other
52:22 people want to buy and other people want to buy a business that is highly automated that is good
52:30 well documented that can be easily um taken over and a sellable business has
52:34 one key characteristic that means that's the that the um the
52:39 ceo of the business or the person doing the operations is replaceable
52:44 highly replaceable and if you make yourself highly replaceable
52:48 well then you have two options either you don't replace yourself and you just
52:51 keep working and enjoying the fruits of your labor or you replace yourself with somebody
52:55 who can do your job pay them a bit and still make more money from them
52:59 doing your job so that is always an option right sellable business means you don't have
53:03 to sell you can sell and you can replace yourself all of these options are valid
53:09 i honestly don't know much about raising capital after the fact we've seen this a couple
53:15 times i think um for the past a year or two that bootstrap businesses
53:20 have started raising money at a certain point just to amplify
53:24 growth i think one password is an example for that they were bootstrapped all the way and
53:28 then they decided at some point you just raised like 10 million dollars to
53:33 really get into the i guess the business markets and trying to promote their business
53:37 product or something it happens but honestly out of the options of selling or continuing
53:44 to run your business i would rather pick one of these two than raising vc capital because you've
53:48 chucked along nicely building your business until that point and now all of
53:51 a sudden you have a board and not only or you have investors who
53:56 really really wants you to make changes because your linear growth
54:00 bootstrap business is not going to cut it necessarily if you raise
54:03 unless you raise this kind of bootstrapper friendly capital but
54:08 if you've been bootstrapping for a while and you are somewhere in the 50 to 100k
54:14 mrr um range and you are a solo founder or a group of two the funding options are pretty dire at
54:18 this this point it's still mostly the initial phase or the much later phase
54:23 Selling Your Business
54:24 so it's going to be tough but let's talk about selling your business because
54:26 that's something um that produces a lot of i would call it financial security
54:33 immediately right you have a you have a business that i don't know makes half a million a year
54:39 um the multiples for selling is selling this thing is always going to be
54:46 somewhere between i don't know 1.5 and five times that just on average it really depends on the
54:51 business you've built and how it works what the market is looking like
54:57 1.5 1.5 would be way too less isn't it um yeah it would be quite little but it
55:01 really depends if you build a business that doesn't have high margins
55:05 i mean you you have i don't know 500 000 in revenue but you have expenses
55:09 around 350 or something like that because you're actually like sub licensing or some complicated
55:15 um and expensive stuff in there or you have to pay out people
55:19 i don't i don't know right it depends um then it can easily be just a 1.5 or 2x of
55:23 that but often you have 4x5x6s maybe 10x if it's in a super explosive market so let's let's say you
55:31 get super lucky and you sell this business for four million dollars
55:37 or something right minus taxes and all this kind of stuff you're looking at two
55:40 to three million dollars that you have now all of a sudden right
55:43 work that is interesting right that's definitely definitely an interesting
55:46 situation for you as a founder because now first off you're personally secure for a while
55:53 you can invest most of this live off the dividends or whatever
55:56 and all of a sudden you have this kind of post-economic state of mind i
56:00 heard a very successful founder talk about this because now you can make
56:04 different decisions start a new business sure invest like a couple tens of thousands of dollars
56:09 into the the first couple months hire somebody not a problem you couldn't
56:12 have done this in your bootstrap business but you definitely can when you sold so
56:16 i i would assume if you don't want to build this into something that you have to or
56:23 want to be running for the next decade or two sell it sell it to somebody who wants to
56:28 do this wants to continue growing it and you can elevate yourself to this
56:31 next step and build the next thing if you want to and build the next thing
56:35 that you love about and you can consciously make choices on what you want to do for the
56:40 rest of your life and most founders most founders experience
56:45 something during their process of building a business that they then want to fix with their
56:49 next business i think you have this if you look at rob walling who founded
56:53 drip and organized micro conf and tiny seed right the accelerator like he built a sas product
57:00 he built lots of sas products and he figured out oh funding is a problem and now he's built
57:06 the fund for bootstrap sas products and the conference for people to learn
57:09 how to get their um bootstrap businesses off the ground it's it's always the same
57:14 people build something figure out something during their journey didn't
57:17 work out as well and then they built a solution to that next
57:20 something didn't work the next thing is going to be a solution to that
57:23 the serial founder that's how it happens right because people just
57:28 they run into walls and they make a note a mental note tear down this wall with the next
57:32 business and then they do that and then they run into a new wall it's really
57:35 nice it's uh it's a never-ending source of new ideas it's cool
57:40 but the paradox here is and most people who are not entrepreneurs always imagine this that
57:46 that financial independence could be the key if he has already made millions
57:51 after selling his business why would he want to go through the rigors again of building
57:55 something instead of retiring in an island okay because we need purpose in life honestly
58:02 when i sold when we sold the business and when i was just like i was running the business 247
58:08 every single day i was there answering customers building things so it's super
58:10 energetic and then all of a sudden you just run into this wall and nothing happens
58:18 it was like i was i was sitting at home with nothing to do because all of all of
58:22 the purpose that i had in life for the last two years was in this company that now was run by
58:28 somebody else and you're in this void you don't know what to do do i just play
58:31 world of warcraft now or do i watch like old star trek reruns on tv is this what
58:34 my life is gonna be if you are somebody who wants to help people you
58:40 need to find something that gives that to you some purpose where you can do
58:42 this and if you're an entrepreneur that is i think the core tenant
58:48 right the the core principle of entrepreneurship is empowering other people it's not
58:53 really about the money the money is great and it's great to be financially
58:55 secure it definitely feels good but it feels even better to know that you're helping
59:02 other people get to the exact same point so i feel um that's
59:08 yeah great great segue let's talk about this question let's talk about how do you find these
59:09 how do you find these communities
59:12 communities if you're not in them if you're not already part of a
59:15 niche or a community right i would wager that you manuel are already part of communities you just
59:23 don't know it yet i am i i've ran this experiment with a couple of my mentees i said
59:30 from tomorrow on everything you do you take a note of what kind of audience what kind of
59:35 community could be around this you start your day you wake up take a
59:39 hot or cold shower you have your coffee and then hmm coffee right
59:45 there are coffee aficionados all over the planet like people who import the
59:48 finest coffee from somewhere who want to learn how to get the right
59:51 temperature with the right pressure and the right amount of you know beans
59:55 and what kind of granularity they need to be ground there's a community and then you start
60:00 your commute you go to your job you get into your car okay there's a lot
60:05 of communities around cars people who like car um hi-fi audio systems or people who
60:12 um i don't know optimize routes where to go i'm trying to come up with weird audiences
60:17 but just really step through your day and write down whenever you think you're
60:20 part of a community you look at your apartment you see your computer okay you're a software engineer
60:28 or you see your um your your gaming mouse okay you're a gamer
60:31 you really like computer games there's a community and there's a lot of sub
60:34 communities in there or you have an aquarium oh now all of a
60:38 sudden you're an aquarist you you like to build um aquariums or you like to run
60:43 aquariums there's a community that has problems you come home from your job you turn on
60:47 the tv you turn to like a sports channel you're a sports fan there's now
60:53 fantasy football there's a community how do these people solve their
60:57 remote um of communication problems now that um people can't meet and hang out in the
61:02 bar anymore that kind of stuff you are part of lots of communities
61:06 already and i think by consciously going through your day and taking notes
61:12 not just who you are already in a community with but who could also be a community around
61:16 things that you haven't thought about just yet podcasting equipment right there's a
61:21 community like just being on youtube there's lots of communities in there
61:27 i i i have a problem with this honestly for myself because wherever i look i see
61:31 communities it's not so easy right because you can't just enjoy things for
61:34 what they are my mind always jumps to okay what audience is this at this point
61:39 you can train yourself to find this and you make a note and you list them up and you start
61:44 ranking them to who you want to help and if there's opportunity and if they're
61:46 big enough and all this stuff and you will see some rise to the top
61:50 you will see some that are better for you to build a business in and if you don't find it in
61:55 yourself go to your significant other what is their job what do they like what hobbies
61:59 do they have what hobbies do your parents have what hobbies do your siblings have your
62:04 friends just explore outside of yourself always where there's a direct connection so you
62:09 can actually ask those people what kind of critical problems do you
62:13 see in your industry what's the day like in the life of a plumber you know that's
62:16 where this example came from like in the family there's a plumber so
62:21 i know plumbers have plumbing problems and i looked into this i don't want to
62:24 build something for plumbers i'm just making this as an example i'm just
62:26 putting it out there you can find out a lot about an audience
62:30 like this but just going and talking to people and being aware of these people existing
62:36 and then just really diving deep into this industry super enjoyable because you learn so
62:41 much and you can apply these things in different industries we can talk about this i think um
62:45 another time because i see that we're getting to the end but audience
62:49 exploration is a very very rewarding thing and if you do it in a structured way and i'm gonna
62:54 drop this blog post next week with a more structured approach um you
62:57 can find a really good initial audience to build a business for
63:03 excellent so manuel says thank you for that and as i said i'm being mindful of your time
63:08 as well but i just want to ask one last question before we close this
63:13 and the question is you seem to have an advantage of being a techie
63:17 okay and then that's what you got uh started with uh how about people who have ideas but
63:22 they are not techies themselves so what would the what what kind of route could they
63:29 take uh for building a software product yeah okay the grow the greatest thing
63:33 about living in 2020 apart from the crazy pandemic and that the world is
63:39 uh exploding and stuff is that we are in the middle of the no code movement
63:43 like the building things has never been easier and funny enough no code is a
63:46 thing that appears every now and then and like there used to be products in
63:50 the 90s and 2000s that were essentially no code products but only now have we started to
63:55 understand that it's not just about building fancy websites without having
63:57 to build code but it's about connecting things right now we have services like
64:03 zapier and integromat and if this than that these things that are the glue between
64:08 other no code products i would highly recommend if you're not a
64:11 technical founder if you're not technical at all and if you don't want to learn to code
64:15 which i would still recommend but still if you don't want to do that look into
64:19 the no code community look into makerpad the platform where you can find a lot of tutorials
64:26 many of them free and they don't have to become part of their community
64:29 but it's still recommended to be part of this community because
64:33 if you are going into the no code space there's no better community for that
64:36 and look for no code websites newsletters and tutorials you can build pretty much everything
64:44 that uh at least the prototype of your product would need without needing to code a single thing
64:50 mostly if code is involved it's just really glue code that you need to copy and
64:55 paste from one position into the other that's how these um no code tools
64:58 interact mostly but most of them interact through just clicking connect with
65:03 and then you connect these two things and now when something happens here
65:06 something else happens there learn how to use no code tooling and
65:09 maybe if time allows look into how to code just a little bit
65:16 just try to understand how code works you don't have to be able to do it you
65:19 just really have to be able to instruct somebody to do it for you
65:22 at some point because when snow code is not enough anymore you will need to um get a coder
65:29 or if it's enough then you never have to but no code that is yeah no code in one word is
65:34 something that i would google immediately if you want to understand how to build
65:38 something without needing to code but could you bypass this process at all
65:42 if say you you develop cold feet while you're building some trying to build something
65:46 for the first time could you could you just outsource this or you hire a developer or
65:52 yes but it's i think it's very risky because it's expensive the great thing about the no code tools
65:57 is that if you want to get a web flow account or just a website going it's like 10
66:02 bucks a month and you can build and save your uh one of these glue
66:06 code tools um subscription you get pretty much everything for free until you hit a
66:12 certain kind of amount of usage and that won't be until you're paying
66:15 customers so you pretty much use it for free until you have revenue i would say if
66:19 you want to build something um you always should prototype it anyway
66:25 and having somebody build a prototype that you then throw away
66:30 is a waste of money um both for their work and also because you could have actually
66:34 built this prototype much quicker using local tooling and having maybe you can hire a no code
66:42 expert like a no code developer to wire your no code tools together for you much more efficiently
66:47 than you can but i decided you don't have to either get a coder or do everything by
66:51 yourself there's still no code experts out there and they're not as expensive as coders
66:55 because they're not wasting hours building the thing that somebody else had already built
67:01 so i would say particularly for prototypes you're just really trying to
67:05 fit something together and see how people react to it so no code would be
67:08 my number one go to at this point for that got it i mean i think the audience would also appreciate
67:14 if you could write a blog uh on how to build uh for non non-techies uh so exactly what you just
67:20 mentioned maybe a little more in depth uh to how to get started so you mentioned
67:27 a few things like zapier integromat web flow and stuff like that but if you could
67:31 just string these thoughts together and write a blog post i'm sure that's going
67:35 to get popular yeah i think that's a good idea it's definitely somewhere on my list like
67:41 when i when i when we sold the company i made this list of blog posts that i
67:43 wanted to write and i think it's now with 200 titles of which i've written about maybe
67:48 50 or 60 at this point so there's there's still some uh unwritten stuff but i think it's a good
67:53 idea the only um the only problem i have is that with with that in particular is
67:59 that the market is changing quite a bit all the time right it's one of these
68:03 things where um you mentioned a particular technology and it will probably still be around
68:07 because many of these snow code businesses are vc funded and they have a lot of money
68:13 um because people have understood if we get into the building blocks
68:17 then everything on top of them we can have the trickle-down economics going on
68:21 there so these tools are well funded but i would still i like the idea
68:25 and i'm probably going to do it it's a question of when i get to do this so
68:27 much stuff to do so much to write thanks for the idea i'm definitely gonna
68:34 look into this well well thank you this brings us to the end of uh
68:38 insightful conversation with arvid so i mean all the all the pursuing that i was
68:42 trying to do was well worth it because as i said he bypassed all my initial impressions of
68:49 him and also very nice to see so many audience questions here i think they all
68:55 followed you from your twitter account um but arvind again thanks a lot
69:01 and um appreciate your time and energy thank you so much it was it was a lot of
69:05 fun thank you so much see you then bye bye everybody see ya
