Episode 703 | The Accidental SaaS Entrepreneur

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 703, Rob Walling interviews Jordan Hansen, founder of Cobalt Intelligence. They dive into Jordan's unexpected journey into SaaS and the growth of his company, which specializes in business verification through API. Jordan reflects on quitting his job to pursue his startup and the benefits of community and mentorship he has received from TinySeed. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 2:30 – What does Cobalt Intelligence offer? 5:45 – Team scale, market, and business origins 9:55 – Starting YouTube and finding motivation to continually publish 13:27 – Working with a savings runway and applying to TinySeed 23:50 – Finding product-market fit 26:58 – Unlisting content to align with business goals 31:50 – “Accidental” SaaS founder Links from the Show: Register for MicroConf US in Atlanta, April 2024 TinySeed The SaaS Playbook Jordan Hansen (@JordBHansen) | X Cobalt Intelligence (@CobaltIntell) | X Cobalt Intelligence Lianna Patch (@punchlinecopy) | X The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual by John Sonmez Episode 698 | How to Launch a Million Dollar Business (With Noah Kagan)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Whether this is your first or 3001 episode of Startups for the rest of us, welcome.
0:06.1	It's great to have you here this week.
0:07.7	I'm your host, Rob Walling.
0:08.9	This week I talk with Jordan Hansen, founder of Cobalt Intelligence, about his really interesting journey of becoming an accidental SaaS entrepreneur.
0:18.9	Cobalt Intelligence is a SaaS that allows you to do business verification with Secretary
0:24.5	of State data using an API.
0:27.4	And in the conversation, you're going to hear how Jordan kind of just got there almost
0:31.6	by accident that he really didn't want to launch a SaaS, but he wound up building what is a pretty
0:36.6	incredible business and has actually
0:38.6	taken funding from Tiny Seed. You'll hear us discuss that in the episode. And I want to address that
0:42.7	up front, actually. I hope that, you know, given this podcast been going for 700-something episodes,
0:47.3	I hope that you know that I don't use this podcast as a commercial for Tiny Seed nor for MicroConf.
0:52.8	Obviously, I am motivated to promote things that I'm working on.
0:57.0	If I'm running an event, I want you to show up.
0:59.0	If I'm running an accelerator and you want funding, I would love for you to apply.
1:02.0	But the reason I bring folks like Jordan on and Matt Wensing, Derek Reimer, Ruben Gomez, and
1:08.0	other Tiny Seed founders I've brought on this show in the past several years
1:11.2	is because their stories are interesting, they're knowledgeable, they know how to communicate
1:15.9	what made them successful, they're willing to talk about both failures and successes.
1:21.5	They tell their story well, you know, there's so much to it.
1:24.1	And if a company or a founder has all that and can bring the thunder to this
1:28.6	podcast that I think can help keep you motivated or give you some strategies and tactics to succeed,
	...

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