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

Each week on this show, we talk about ambitious startups, but startups that don't necessarily

need to raise buckets of venture capital. These are companies that build real products and

sell them to real customers for real money. Sometimes that's bootstrapped. Sometimes it's raising

a small amount of funding, but it's really founder-controlled, founder-focused, profit-focused

companies that provide an enormous amount of leverage due to the amazing software tools that we

have to build these SaaS companies today. And if all is going well, as this episode goes live,

just a few hours later, I will be doing a five-hour live stream, microcomfremote.com. If you want to get a

ticket to that and check out all the amazingness that producer Xander has put together.

And I'm going to be interviewing some guests live in a studio in Minneapolis, as well as some

remote keynotes, remote conversations, all kinds of wacky goodness. So I hope you're joining me

on that today. Today I'm flying solo and I've had several interviews and conversations over the

past few weeks and I like to mix it up and not just have this be an interview show. Today I want to

talk to you about the power of options. And it's the power of options is the ability to have a lot of different paths that you

can take and to not back yourself into a corner in a way that you're constrained. And you can't

make choices the way you want to make them because you have essentially painted yourself

into a corner or made decisions that eliminate some of your options. And I want to start off with

a quick story about a company called Tactical Studies Rules or TSR. So TSR was a company formed by

Gary Gygax to essentially house and publish Dungeons and Dragons. It's a game that he

co-invented, co-wrote in the 70s. And he started this company, TSR, to publish the game, basically,

because no one else would publish it back in 1974. And as we all know, Dungeons and Dragons became

extremely popular, much more popular than any of the other kind of war games of its time. And it became

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