Episode 510 | The Story of Startups.com

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today's episode, Rob chats Wil Schroter about the story behind Startups.com, the importance of output vs. hours, being specific about the kind of things you don't want to do in life, choosing venture capital, and much more. The topics we cover 2:43 How soon after first acquisition did Wil Schroter, CEO and founder of Startups.com, want to start the next thing? 5:42 Wil on building an incubator in the early days 8:55 History behind swapalease.com 11:22 On choosing if and when to take on venture funding and the origins for Startups.com 14:19 What is Startups.com and how much revenue does it generate? 19:41 Why Wil manages so many aspects of the business 23:41 The hardest part of building Startups.com 29:58 Wil's thought process on acquiring companies Links from the show Startups.com The Shocking Collapse of Zirtual and Maren Kate’s Next Act (plus How to Hire Well) | Episode 486 Swapalease.com Virtucon Ventures Clarity.FM Launchrock.com Zirtual.com How can I support the podcast? If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned. Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode. 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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host Rob Walling. Every week on this show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups using an ambitious yet a sustainable approach, an approach where we're not willing to sacrifice our health or our relationships to grow our company. This week I spoke with Will Schroeder. He's the founder of Startups.com, which you may have heard of. Startups.com has acquired a number of
0:23.1	products that I'm familiar with. He acquired Clarity.com from Dan Martel. He acquired Zirtual
0:28.8	from Marin Kate, whom I spoke with, well, what about 12, 18 months ago, about the crashing and
0:33.6	burning and then the acquisition of that. And Will and his team worthy acquirers, Will's
0:38.0	story is incredible. He started his first company. It was an agency at age 19 while he was at Ohio
0:43.9	State. And he went on to exit that in 2003. After that, he started an incubator. And again, this is
0:50.4	2003-2005 time frame. It was called Verticon Ventures, and he called it an idea stage incubator for web startups,
0:57.7	where he helped conceive and launch companies, including swapelise.com and unsubscribe.com.
1:02.9	And he thinks venture capital is a poor use of capital, and he has liked being the second buyer of a lot of companies.
1:09.1	So, fascinating story. 2012, he starts startups.com, which he calls the world's largest startup launch platform.
1:15.8	They're based in Columbus, Ohio. And although there are 200 people strong, fully self-funded,
1:20.8	eight figures of revenue, Will still is involved doing U.X copywork. He said he's a CFO,
1:26.2	the CEO, and he works on the products. So fascinating story
1:29.9	from really, I would say, kind of a Renaissance man who just has this massive skill set and who's
1:34.3	been doing this for 20-something years and just has a deep well of knowledge. So before we dive into
1:39.6	our conversation, I want to remind you again of a microconf remote, which is happening September 1st.
1:45.0	It is a virtual event. If you head to microconfremote.com, you can get a ticket and reserve your
1:50.8	spot. And it is not going to be the typical virtual summit that you are seeing online.
1:56.5	Producer Sandra and I have put a lot of thought into making this creative and it's shaping up
2:00.7	to be a great event.
2:01.6	So I hope you will join us.
2:02.7	That's microcomfremote.com.
	...

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