Episode 612 | Balancing a Side Project and Going Full-time on Your Product

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 612, Rob Walling chats with longtime friend and repeat podcast guest Dave Rodenbaugh. Dave was even at the very first MicroConf back in 2011. In this episode, we have a candid conversation on our experiences balancing side projects with a day job, struggling with the decision in our own different ways of when to quit, and the surprising habits you have to unlearn once you are finally independent of the day job and consulting work. Topics we cover: [1:27] Dave’s thought process behind expanding Recapture [5:34] The decision to go full-time on Recapture [15:05] Dave’s process for unlearning bad employee / consultant habits [20:07] The danger of the arrival fallacy [24:20] What would you do if you sold the business? [26:03] Balancing a side project with your day job Links from the Show: Dave Rodenbaugh (@DaveRodenbaugh) I Twitter Recapture Rogue Startups 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 back to startup to the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. Today, I talk with longtime friend and friend of the show, Dave Rodenbaugh. We talk about both of our experiences, balancing a side project with our day jobs. We talk about that feeling of finally being independent. Dave has been independent from consulting for about a year. We talked through what was surprising for him and not.
0:22.1	And I share the same thing. This is very much more collaborative conversation than an interview.
0:26.9	And since Dave and I have known each other for more than a decade now, he actually attended
0:30.3	MicroConf2011, the very first one. He's one of the handful of folks that are still around in
0:34.7	this community who have been going to microcoms for, well,
0:37.8	more than 11 years now. And since he and I know it to there so well, the conversation flows.
0:42.1	I feel like it's candid and we give some authentic thoughts on what it takes, or at least in our
0:48.6	experience, what it took working nights and weekends, balancing that side project with the day job and eventually
0:55.0	struggling with the decision in our own different ways of when to quit that consulting work
1:00.2	or when to quit that day job when you may have a significant other and or a mortgage in kids.
1:07.4	So with that, let's dive right into my conversation with Dave Rodenbaugh.
1:17.7	Music kids. So with that, let's dive right into my conversation with Dave Rodenbaugh. Dave, thanks for joining me on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Always an honor and a
1:23.0	pleasure to be on the pod here and chat with you, my friend.
1:29.7	It has been a while, and we were actually looking through the archives,
1:31.9	trying to figure out how long that while has been,
1:35.6	and it's just an indeterminate amount of years, 6, 7, 8,
1:39.9	but folks might know you as a co-host of the Rogue Startups podcast with Craig Hewitt.
1:42.4	Founder Castos has been on the pod many times, and you run Recapture.io, which is e-commerce, email marketing software.
1:48.7	Started as card abandonment, but you have expanded into email marketing.
1:52.8	What was a thought process behind making that move?
1:55.9	Well, it was very much a land and expand strategy, both horizontally and vertically.
2:03.3	When I saw Recapture for sale back in 2016, it was Magento only and abandoned carts and like one other feature at that
	...

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