Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling.

Each week on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups in a way

that's organic and sustainable and that works around your life. We're ambitious founders,

but we don't sacrifice our life in order to build our startups. These are not the typical Silicon

Valley startups where fundraising can be a goal in itself and where people build slide decks instead of building businesses.

In this week's episode, I have an in-depth conversation with Ruben Gomez, and we talk about

the new app he's building Dock Sketch in the electronic signature space.

But more importantly, we look back at the 10-plus years that he's been bootstrapping, and we look at lessons learned and how he's learned to make better decisions, how he's meticulous and disciplined and how that leads to him being able to make repeatable progress and being able to have repeatable successes.

This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 456.

Music This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 456. Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast, it helps developers, designers, and

entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups.

Whether you've built your fifth startup or you're working on your first. I'm Rob, and with Ruben Gomez, we're here to share our

experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we've made. The first email I received from Ruben was in

January of 2009. So it was more than 10 years ago. And he was asking about something I had written up

a few essays about. It was about acquiring software products. And from was asking about something I had written up a few essays about. It was about

acquiring software products. And from there, he and I struck up a friendship, and he had been

reading my stuff for a while, and wound up being one of the first four or five members of the

membership website that I launched, called the Micropreneur Academy, that was teaching software

developers,

really teaching engineers how to market. And this is back in the day, just as SaaS was starting

to become a thing. And Rubin was an early success story. And he hustled. And he was, as I said in the

intro, he was meticulous and disciplined and just shipped stuff every week. Even though he was

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