Episode 674 | SparkToro Pays Back Investors, When to Raise Funding, and X.com (Hot Take Tuesday)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 674, join Rob Walling, Einar Vollset, and Tracy Osborn for Hot Take Tuesday, where they analyze and discuss some of the latest news. They talk about Elon rebranding Twitter to X and the emergence of Instagram's Threads. They also cover the pros and cons of taking VC and SparkToro's unique funding model and paying back investors. Topics we cover: 2:49 – Twitter is now X 5:53 – Does the rebranding make sense? 12:15 – Instagram launches Threads 19:18 – SparkToro pays back investors 26:04 – Planning ahead for the payback 28:53 – “Don’t take VC funding” 35:11 – “We Raised a Bunch of Money” Links from the Show: Tracy Osborn (@tracymakes) | Twitter Einar Vollset (@einarvollset) | Twitter The SaaS Playbook TinySeed Twitter is being rebranded as X Introducing Threads: A New Way to Share with Text Rand Fishkin (@randfish ) |Twitter Casey Henry (@caseyhen) |Twitter SparkToro Postpone SparkToro Year 3 Retrospective: Investor Payback, Systemic Challenges, and V2 on the Way Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin Fly.io We Raised A Bunch Of Money 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 | Google

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of us.
0:02.6	I'm Rob Walling, and this is Hot Take Tuesday.
0:08.7	That's the show format where I invite Tracy Osborne and Anarvoleset on the podcast,
0:14.6	and we discuss recent news stories that impact our bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS community.
0:22.3	In this episode, we talk about how Spark Toro has paid back their investors. We discuss a piece that tries to talk through the
0:30.3	pros and cons are really just the cons of raising venture capital. And then we look at a blog post
0:35.5	from fly.io where they talk about how they raised a bunch of money and why they did that. And then we look at a blog post from fly.io where they talk about how they raised a
0:38.6	bunch of money and why they did that. And finally, we talk a bit about Twitter and x.com or
0:44.9	whatever we call it these days. Before we dive into that, my book, the SaaS Playbook, is now available
0:51.1	in most places the greater books are sold, at least online.
0:55.2	SaaSplaybook.com is a place to go if you want to support me directly,
0:58.9	and I'm selling PDF, ePUB, audio, and paperback copies from the site.
1:04.1	Paperback copies, unfortunately, I'm only able to ship in the United States
1:07.8	due to the unnecessary complexity and cost of our worldwide shipping and
1:11.4	customs situation. But the book is also now available on Amazon.com in Kindle and Paperback,
1:19.6	and it should be available on Audible as an audiobook. If you go to SaaSplaybook.com,
1:24.5	buy directly for me. Of course, that's where I don't give a 30 to 75% cut.
1:30.4	You heard that right. 30 to 75% cut depending on the format. I actually did not know that on
1:36.6	audible, they take 75% of the royalties, even though I wrote the book, I own it. I recorded it,
1:42.1	produced it, and all that. But if I agreed to not sell it anywhere else, they only took 60%. So I get 40. And if I wanted to sell it somewhere else, such as on my own website, for example, then they take 75%. But it is what it is. Buy it in whatever format suits you best. I really appreciate your support.
2:01.9	This book distills all the stuff I've learned about building SaaS companies, whether bootstrapped,
2:07.8	mostly bootstrapped, or even I had a friend of mine who's working at a venture back startup,
	...

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