Episode 615 | Bootstrappable Businesses, Cargo Culting, and How Pricing Affects Growth (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 615, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers what makes a business bootstrappable (and things to avoid), cargo culting, and how large of a business you can build at different customer lifetime value levels. Episode Sponsor: Hiring developers has been tough for years, but it is even tougher these days. Lemon.io is on a mission to make the process of hiring an experienced developer or even an entire team easier. They only have experienced developers on their marketplace, and each one is hand-vetted. It is virtually risk-free as they’ll guarantee a replacement in 48 hours if something goes wrong. Find your perfect developer or a team with Lemon.io. You can also claim a special discount for our podcast fans. Visit lemon.io/startups to receive a 15% discount for the first 4 weeks of work with a developer. Topics we cover: [1:51] What makes a business bootstrappable? [14:15] Cargo culting [20:05] How large of a business can you build at a specific annual contract value or lifetime value? Links from the Show: Bootstrapper’s Guide to Outside Funding Episode 613 I Hacking Your Founder Psychology Episode 602 I Explaining SaaS Metrics to a Child 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	According to our most recent State of Independent SaaS survey and report, nearly 30% of bootstrap founders said they were actively considering taking some outside funding this year.
0:11.2	So at MicroConf, we put together a guide about the top five options that bootstrappers would consider.
0:17.0	It's called the Bootstrappers Guide to Outside Funding, and we cover Friends and Family Rounds, Angel Investors, recurring revenue financing, crowdfunding, and venture capital.
0:27.1	If you want to check it out, the guide is completely free.
0:29.3	Head over to microconf.com.com slash funding dash guide.
0:33.5	That's microconf.com slash funding dash guide.
0:36.6	Thank you. That's microconf.com.com slash funding dash guide.
0:48.1	Welcome back. It's startup for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. Thank you so much for joining me.
0:57.2	Today I'll be talking through a couple topics inspired by listener questions and then maybe one or two solo adventure topics that I'm going to bring in. So definitely going to hit on what makes a business bootstrappable
1:01.8	versus not. I want to talk about cargo colting in startups. And then I received a question about
1:06.9	how large of a business can you build at specific levels of lifetime value or ACV? And depending on
1:12.8	how long those take, I might add a fourth topic in as well. Before I dive into that, it would be
1:17.4	amazing. Even if you're subscribed in another tool, if you would go to Spotify right now, type in
1:21.6	startups for the rest of us, give us a subscribe. And if you've gotten value from this podcast and
1:25.5	want to give a little bit back, I'd appreciate it this episode is actually one of the show must go on type episodes I had a guest
1:31.8	lined up and they had to postpone for a couple weeks and I hop on a plane to Scotland tomorrow
1:38.2	not tomorrow when you're hearing this but tomorrow when I recorded it and since we've shipped
1:42.2	every Tuesday morning for 600 and what 15 episodes, 12 years,
1:48.1	I want to get something out there. So I'm going to kick off the first topic is what makes a business
1:54.0	bootstrappable versus not. And this has come up a few times. There was a question maybe six months ago about this, and I listened back to
2:03.1	that episode, and I listened to the answer I gave, and I felt like it was fine, but it was not great.
2:08.5	So I sat and actually gave it more thought, and I wanted to revisit this topic. And what I realized
	...

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