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Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 523 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Entrepreneurship for Kids, Common Bootstrapper Mistakes, and More Listener Questions

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9819 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 523, Rob hosts a rapid-fire lightning round of listener questions ranging from whether to focus on one or multiple businesses, finding the right amount of customer research, breaking through slow growth, and teaching entrepreneurship to kids. The topics we cover [4:38] If you were starting a business today and you were earlier on in your career, would you try multiple business ideas at once or go all-in on one? [8:11] If building your first tiny product, like a WordPress plugin, what level of customer research should you do? [10:56] What advice would you give to someone entering a somewhat competitive market? [15:55] What questions would you be asking yourself if you had a slow-growing 12k MRR B2B SaaS? [18:22] How would you go about offloading tier-one customer support? [20:28] How do you feel about entrepreneurship being taught to children? [22:24] What are things you noticed that bootstrappers commonly overlooked that are preventing them from achieving their goals? [23:18] What are some of the biggest takeaways you can see across your portfolio of early-stage SaaS companies? [25:01] Have you ever built a business that got a fairly large portion of its revenue from services instead of products, but not just you consulting? [26:56] How do you prepare financially or otherwise for your retirement? Links from the show MicroConf Connect SavvyCal Stay on Top of Your SaaS Metrics: Know What to Measure to Maintain Sustainable Growth – Craig Hewitt The 2020 State of Independent SaaS ZenFounder Indie Founder Bootcamp AudienceOps Castos Production (formerly Podcast Motor) 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!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thanks for joining me this week on Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and this is episode

0:04.1

523, where I answer a bunch of listener questions, have a rapid fire lightning round of listener

0:10.8

questions. This episode is actually from MicroConf on air a few weeks back, and there were so

0:16.6

many good questions. I spent about 30, 35 minutes answering them. It felt like almost a natural

0:22.4

startup for the rest of us episode. So once we dive in, you will hear a little bit of the intro

0:27.0

music and hear me intro MicroConf on air, which is a live stream that we do every Wednesday at

0:32.4

1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. If you haven't checked it out, head to microconf on air.com. And you can check out an episode. Sometimes I do live Q&A, taking questions from the chat in

0:43.5

MicroConf Connect and in the YouTube comments. Other times I have a conversation with a successful

0:48.7

entrepreneur or an early stage founder. And it's just, it's a good time. You can hear those

0:53.9

microcomf on air episodes in a

0:56.0

podcast feed at microcomf podcast.com if you're curious to check them out in audio each week. Before we

1:02.4

dive into that I want to remind you that through microcomf we are putting on the first of its kind

1:08.3

SaaS podcast awards. You can head to sasspodcastawards.com

1:12.5

to nominate your favorite SaaS or bootstrap or podcast in one of four categories. If you

1:18.6

haven't already gone and nominated, or if you just want to nominate a couple different shows,

1:22.3

please head over to sasspodcastawards.com. And with that, let's dive into this all-listener

1:26.8

question episode of

1:28.5

startups for the rest of us slash microconf on air, where I answer questions like, how do you

1:33.0

feel about entrepreneurship being taught to children? If you had a slow growing B2B SaaS app,

1:38.3

what questions would you be asking yourself to break through the plateau? How do you prepare

1:42.3

financially and otherwise for your retirement?

1:44.6

What are things you notice that bootstrappers commonly overlook that are preventing them from

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