Episode 774 | How a Non-Technical Founder Bootstrapped to Millions in Revenue

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Rob Walling sits down with Noah Tucker, the non-technical founder behind Social Snowball, an affiliate marketing SaaS built for Shopify. Noah bootstrapped the company to $5M+ in ARR, navigating technical roadblocks, team-building hurdles, and a crumbling codebase, while leveraging bold growth tactics like influencer partnerships to scale fast. Topics we cover: (3:26) – Spotting the gap in affiliate tools for creators (7:09) – The agency MVP failure and early dev misfires (11:15) – Losing a CTO to priesthood (16:33) – How influencer partnerships fueled fast early growth (30:12) – Hiring a world-class CTO and engineering team Links from the Show: Discretion Capital MicroConf Remote | May 21, 2025 TinySeed Noah Tucker | LinkedIn Noah Tucker (@noatuck) | X 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

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Startups with the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode,
0:04.7	I talk with Noah Tucker, the founder of Social Snowball, about how he, as a non-technical founder,
0:12.2	has bootstrapped Social Snowball to millions in ARR. And then the episode, he says, they're between
0:17.6	5 and 10 million in ARR and growing about 30K of MRR per month.
0:23.2	It's an incredible story about overcoming the challenges of not knowing how to hire good
0:29.7	engineers and having a code base that's falling apart and eventually finding very strong
0:35.1	product market fit, moving up market, and now he's in a spot where he has
0:39.0	an incredible engineering org in place. But none of it fell into his lap. And it's really a story
0:45.3	of a lot of hard work, grinding, to learn new skills, as well as some luck, as there always is.
0:52.2	Before we dive in to my conversation with Noah, I want to
0:55.5	remind you that if you are doing seven or eight figures in ARR and you're thinking that you might
1:01.6	want to sell your SaaS business, let's say between one and a half and 20 million dollars of
1:06.4	ARR, discretion capital is the place that I recommend people go.
1:11.7	You can reach out to my tiny C co-founder who is the founder and the principle of
1:15.0	discretion capital.
1:16.0	Head to discretion capital.com or email an R at discretion capital if you want to learn more
1:21.5	about how they can help you as a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder
1:26.0	looking to sell their company.
1:27.9	Also, I want to invite you to MicroConf Remote on May 21st.
1:32.0	It's all about early stage SaaS sales, and it runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern time.
1:38.5	It's just three hours. We're going to have three presentations, amazing talks by Stephen Steers,
1:43.6	Nick DeSobtoe, and Anastasia Kudrow,
	...

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