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

I'm trying something a little different this week. I came across this really long email that I had sent about 15 years ago,

and then an ensuing email thread talking about software products and really talking about me acquiring this product.

If you're familiar with it, it was

really the first product that I made any substantial revenue from. And what's interesting about this,

well, there's a couple artifacts of that time, phrases and companies that you'll hear me mention.

But what I think is even more interesting is just to see the mindset of where I was at.

And I would say kind of where this space was 15 years ago and the thinking and just how

nascent it was and how there were no examples of really being a solo founder and building

a bootstrapped software company that didn't go and raise funding. And even though my aspirations were

not large, you know, they were truly to pay my mortgage or to make eight or 10K a month and be able to

quit consulting, even though that's all I wanted to do, the topic of funding is mentioned several

times in this thread as we try to iron this out. To give you context, this email was to

a friend of mine who was also a longtime colleague and who I had done a ton of consulting work for.

He had run an actual, like an agency, a consulting agency during the dot-com boom and then had

pivoted that when everything crashed into basically a remote agency.

You know, and this is 2001, 2002, and it was just a remote group of developers.

There were only a few of us that he was keeping busy, but we were contractors and I was able

to work from home for the first time in my life. And that was super game changing for me.

I was able to set my own hours for the most part.

And for him, I was respected his sales chops and he just was a person who had business acumen.

I did not grow up knowing people who had business acumen, who knew how to market, who had

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