Startups For the Rest of Us

Latest Episodes:

Episode 650 | Building vs. Buying a SaaS, Day Job Constraints, and More Listener Questions Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

In episode 650, Rob Walling answers more listener questions. We cover topics like how to get more customers while working a full-time job, talking to users when there is a language barrier, and whether to buy vs. build a SaaS product.

Topics we cover:

1:59 - Buying a small SaaS for $10,000 vs. getting financing and buying a SaaS for 6-figures
8:00 - How to get more customers while working full-time
13:33 - Can you hire someone to find an established SaaS business for you to buy?
16:40 - Diverse entrepreneurship podcast recommendations
20:08 - Talking to users when there is a language barrier

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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Episode 649 | Learning to Sell SaaS as a Founder (Book Recommendation) Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

In episode 649, Rob Walling chats with Pete Kazanjy about his book Founding Sales, which is designed to help SaaS founders learn how to sell as well as how to hire and scale sales. We cover a lot, including objection handling, how to ask for the sale, and mindset shifts you need to make when learning how to sell.

Episode Sponsor:

Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups

The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America.

They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running.

When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week.

And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups

Topics we cover:

3:53 - Overview of Founding Sales
7:54 - Growing TalentBin to $6M ARR
10:28 - What Pete is working on today with Atrium
12:28 - Mindset changes when doing sales for the first time
19:26 - Speed vs. production value for sales materials
22:46 - Handling objections
26:50 - Asking for the sale
31:03 - Relentless execution
32:15 - What sets good sales reps apart from those that struggle?

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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Episode 648 | Competing with a Non-Profit, Driving Traffic to A Landing Page, and More Listener Questions Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

In episode 648, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he answers a bunch of listener questions. Some topics covered include competing against a nonprofit, validating step 1 app marketplace businesses, and driving traffic to idea validation landing pages.

Topics we cover:

2:02 - Competing against a nonprofit as a startup
4:11 - The trend of bigger companies building more projects in adjacent verticals
8:03 - Incorporating as a Delaware C Corp
9:57 - Bootstrapping a spinoff startup from a dev agency
14:27 - How to go to market when solving a latent pain
19:09 - How to validate step 1 app marketplace businesses
22:19 - Driving traffic to an idea validation landing page

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Episode 647.5 | Bonus Episode: TinySeed Application Q&A Livestream Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

In this bonus episode, we are playing back the audio from yesterday’s TinySeed Application Q&A livestream.

The TinySeed team (Rob Walling, Tracy Osborn, and Alex McQuade) answers questions from the audience about the application process.

TinySeed is a year-long, remote accelerator designed for early-stage SaaS founders. Our program is designed to help founders with a revenue-generating SaaS optimize product-market fit and grow faster.

Spring 2023 applications are open until from February 6th to February 19th, 2023.

For more information about the program and application process, check out https://tinyseed.com/program

Links from the Pod

Episode 647 | Equipping Sales & Support With Critical Product Knowledge As You Grow Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

In episode 647, Rob Walling chats with Whitney Deterding about product marketing and how to equip sales, support, and your entire team with critical product knowledge as you grow. We dive into how to communicate all aspects of your product, from individual features to benefits and use cases.

When you're one or two people, you're doing all of this as a founder, but the moment you have three, four, or more people on your team, you have to figure out a way to communicate how the product is changing effectively. Otherwise, your prospects, sales, and support won't know that.

Episode Sponsor:

Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups

They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running.

And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups

Topics we cover:

4:08 - What is product marketing?
8:56 - How do you implement cross team knowledge sharing?
14:54 - When should you start writing product or launch briefs?
16:35 - Training new sales and customer success people
23:05 - How to equip your salespeople
31:18 - Product positioning
35:13 - How to navigate positioning changes over times

Links from the Show:

Whitney Deterding (@WhitDeterding) I Twitter
Coschedule
Guru
TinySeed
TinySeed Applications Q&A on February 8

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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Episode 646.5 | Bonus Episode: A Big Change to MicroConf Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

In this bonus episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, we realized that we have never talked about the refocusing of MicroConf US and MicroConf Europe and growing our extended hallway track to focus on helping founders build more connections.

Since we started the event in 2011, we've done 35 of them now. The feedback we've always gotten is that the hallway track is the best part of MicroConf, and the speakers are an excuse to get us all in a room so that we can meet one another and build those relationships.

After Covid hit, we decided to take a chance and adjust our traditional format. We cut down the number of speakers and focused more on additional ways to grow the hallway track. In MicroConf US - Denver - this April, we’re at 5 speakers. All the rest of the time is spent doing activities and connecting with other founders, including through offsite adventures, roundtables, workshops, etc.

Finally, we’ve also introduced Founder by Founder, which is like speed networking. We set a seven-minute timer and encouraged everyone to talk to someone they don't know and introduce themselves.

Whether it's at the workshops, the offsite adventures, or Founder by Founder, we've found getting out of your bubble and connecting with other founders has been an extremely valuable change and a shift to the way that the MicroConf in-person events happen.

Head over to Microconf.com/events to see all of our events happening this year.

Episode 646 | Building a Recurring, Annual Price Increase Into Your SaaS Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

In episode 646, Rob Walling catches up with James Kennedy, the founder of ProcurementExpress, about James’s unconventional approach to price increases. Every year, James does an annual price increase across the board. He talks about how he communicates it to both leads and customers, the pros and cons of this approach, and why it is been a net positive for the business.

Topics we cover:

2:03 - About ProcurementExpress
4:41 - How big is the ProcurementExpress team?
7:43 - Why did James change the company name?
9:48 - What led James to settle on an 8% annual price increase for all customers
15:02 - Communicating the annual price increase to new customers
17:01- How James uses these annual price increases to close more deals
17:36 - When you shouldn’t do annual price increases
23:04 - SaaS buying patterns that James sees
24:00 - The best subject line that James has ever written

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Episode 645.5 | Bonus Episode: Mastermind Matching Applications Are Open Jan 26, 2023

Show notes

Mastermind Matching applications are now open.

Whether you are in the process of validating your SaaS idea and looking for product-market fit to finding a scalable marketing channel, or maybe you are looking for an extra dose of accountability and support as you grow the company, joining a mastermind can help.

With hundreds of successful matches under our belt, we have brought together founders from all walks of life, from over 50 countries across 20 time zones, with a collective $150M+ in ARR.

To do this, we focus on a number of key data points to get a feel for each entrepreneur’s experience level, expectations, work and personality styles, and other key criteria that allow us to make informed matches, including:

Location
Time zone
Language
Experience Level
Current Revenue Level
Goals
Skill Set
Industry served
Whether or not this is your first business
If you already have 1 or more established businesses (like an agency) and building a SaaS as a 2nd business, etc.

We've also made some big updates to the content in our mastermind program, including adding a series of 3 mentor sessions to tackle topics and challenges you are likely to experience based on where you are currently at with your business. These mentor sessions range from how to structure and get the most value out of your mastermind to mastering customer interviews, building a marketing flywheel, and hiring and onboarding your first few employees.

For those of you who sign up for a mastermind and are doing more than $500k in ARR, you'll be invited to attend three virtual office hours with Rob Walling, Co-Founder of TinySeed + MicroConf & Einar Vollset, Co-Founder of TinySeed.

Links from the Show:

MicroConf Masterminds

Episode 645 | Anti-Bro, Nuanced Thinking, and Being Good vs. Being Great (A Rob Solo Adventure) Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

In episode 645, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers whether bootstrapping is the anti-bro movement, the difference between working with someone good vs. someone great, and the rise of outrage culture on social media and how that doesn’t leave much room for nuanced thinking.

Episode Sponsor:

Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups

They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running.

And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups

Topics we cover:

3:28 - The anti-bro startup movement
8:58 - Outrage culture on social media
12:49 - Declining a $9M acquisition at 18
16:14 - What startup founders can learn from outlier performers
22:23- The difference between being good vs. being great

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Episode 644 | Buying Back Your Time with Dan Martell Jan 17, 2023

Show notes

In episode 644, Rob Walling chats with Dan Martell about founder productivity, delegating, and the difference between being effective and efficient. Dan also shares the key frameworks from his first book, Buy Back Your Time, which was released this week.

Topics we cover:

2:40 - Dan’s process for writing his first book
7:56 - The Buyback Principle
12:31 - Hiring and delegating to an assistant
18:02 - The Buyback Loop: Audit, Transfer, and Fill
25:19 - Why no one does it right, and I can’t afford to hire are limiting beliefs
30:53 - 1-3-1 hack

Links from the Show:

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher