It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us.

I am your host Rob Walling, and in this episode, I am joined by fan favorite Laura Roder,

who has made several appearances on this very show.

And in this episode, we talk about how she and her small but mighty bootstrapped team beat

a venture-backed competitor.

And I believe, if I recall, it's in the episode, but I think they raised $10 million.

It's a significant amount of money.

And while Laura talks a lot about why the venture-backed competitor failed,

in a way that almost makes it sound like they beat themselves,

I would encourage you to listen to this episode and listen to what the funded competitor

did wrong, but also what Laura has done right. And what Laura has done right is a lot of

marketing, a lot of focusing on building the right things for their customers, not building too much, not having

a large, bloated org chart, hiring a lot of engineers. She's been very focused on what her

customers need and then very focused on how to find more of those customers. It's always an inspiring story to hear a founder

who is bootstrapping against a funded competitor and that bootstrapper wins. And sometimes it

happens this way and other times it doesn't. There is no funded companies always implode or

funded companies will always win. There's none of that. It's always nuance. It depends a lot on the situation. It depends a lot on the founders. That's something else I want to call out here is if Laura Roder had $10 million in funding, she still would have won. Or at least that's the position I would take, given everything we talk about in this episode.

But before we dive in, I want to let you know that microconf mastermind matching is open.

One of the most valuable things you can do as a founder is surround yourself with people who get it.

And that's exactly what this program is designed to do.

A recent member had this to say, quote,

Our fear is all the same. It's that our product's going to

...