Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. On this show, we talk about building startups in an organic and sustainable fashion in a way that allows you to build yourself a better life. I think that startups should provide you with freedom and purpose and help you maintain healthy relationships. And that's what we talk about on startups for the rest of us. That's why we call it

for the rest of us. It's not the traditional Silicon Valley venture-backed startup path.

We have several different formats for our shows. Sometimes we do a lot of tactics and we teach

ideas and thoughts that we're thinking about. Sometimes we interview interesting founders.

We answer a lot of listener questions.

And one format that we've only done a handful of times, and it's been a few years since we have,

is one called a founder hot seat.

And the founder hot seat is where we bring a founder live on the show, and we talk through

an issue that they're thinking about or that they're facing in their business.

And sometimes this is a marketing approach.

It's something they're wondering whether they should do this approach or that,

whether they should hire this person, this role, or whether they shouldn't

and should just keep going on their way.

And there tend to be no easy answers to these questions, and that's why we can

spend 20, 30, 35 minutes talking through the pros and cons of it. And hopefully the founder leaves

with food for thought and perhaps an answer to what they're looking for. And hopefully you as a listener,

just here's two smart people trying to talk through an issue and troubleshoot it and think about the best way

to proceed. I've long said that being a founder is more than 50% mental. It's just, it's managing

your own psychology. And much of this is about making decisions with incomplete information.

So today is episode 450 of the podcast.

And I'm doing a founder hot seat with Matt Wensing of SimSass.

We're going to be talking through how to make consistent needle-moving progress on your startup.

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