Episode 780 | "I'll Never Sell My Company" and Other Myths Founders Tell Themselves

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if your biggest growth blocker isn’t the market, but the story you’re telling yourself? In this episode, Rob Walling welcomes back fan favorite Ruben Gamez, founder of SignWell, to debunk common bootstrapper myths. They discuss misconceptions like never needing to sell your company or market your product, and emphasize the realities of growth plateaus, business valuation, and exit strategies. Topics we cover: (4:50) – I’ll never sell my company (11:40) – I can just coast on profit forever (21:48) – I’m built differently, so I don’t need to market (31:54) – Building many tiny projects is a strategy (34:46) – It’s all about luck Links from the Show: Invest in TinySeed Fund 3 Ruben Gamez (@earthlingworks) | X SignWell Ruben Gamez | LinkedIn MicroConf YouTube Channel 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode,
0:05.2	I sit down with fan favorite Ruben Gomez. He's the founder of Seinwell and an Oracle of SaaS
0:12.0	bootstrapping. And he and I talk through a couple of myths or misunderstandings that we see
0:18.8	infiltrating the bootstrapper community.
0:21.5	Like, do I use that clickbait word infiltrating?
0:23.3	Realistically, these are things that we hear enough that we realize folks are buying in to
0:30.1	ideas that could be harmful to their business or their career.
0:34.3	One of them, the thought that I will never sell my company, I'm happy to just run it
0:37.9	forever. There is a conversation about, around being built differently because you don't like to
0:43.8	market, and so you're just going to not market and expect your business to be successful,
0:48.7	as well as some other topics that we dive into. It's a great show. It's conversational,
0:53.8	back and forth, and Rubin and I are
0:57.0	speaking from our experiences, growing our own software companies, as well as the SaaS founders
1:03.0	that we've been surrounded by for 15 to 20 years at this point. Before we dive into our conversation,
1:08.8	if you are interested in indexing across hundreds of
1:13.7	B2B SaaS companies and you're an accredited investor, we are raising Tiny Seed Fund 3. There's only a bit
1:21.5	more room in this fund. And so if you've been on the fence and you're interested in investing in
1:26.9	early stage B2B SaaS,
1:29.1	ambitious founders that go through our world-class accelerator called Tiny Seed,
1:35.9	you should head to tinyseed.com slash invest. You can read more about our thesis there.
1:41.2	Our minimum for the remaining portion of this fund is lower than it has been in the
1:46.5	past, and we are seeing great results from Fund 1, which has been around for about six years.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rob Walling, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Rob Walling and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.