You decide you want to start a podcast. Two weeks is such a random, ambiguous amount of time for you to decide, like, okay, I have to do this in the next two weeks.

You know, we're a team of six people, and you hear the people that have kind of made it to a much larger extent than I have. It gets to the

point where the people are like the most important and maybe the hardest part of the whole thing.

Welcome back to Tiny Sea Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles,

victories and failures as they build their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling. I'm a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed,

the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. This is the eighth and final installment

of our series with Craig Hewitt of Castos. But don't worry, if you love following a founder week by

week, listen at the end of this episode for a preview of the founders we're going to follow next.

In our last episode, we covered how Craig launched a big experiment. Instead of requiring a credit

card at the start of a 14-day trial, he took away that requirement and expanded the volume

of people coming into Castos' free trial funnel.

The big question was, would this translate into increased conversions?

So we removed credit card from our trial sign-up process, and everything about that has gone really well,

with the exception of our trial-to- paid conversion ratio, which we kind of knew

wouldn't be great just because we have some things in like our onboarding process that

aren't exactly right and some UX things that need some tweaking and things like that.

That we knew when we started that our trial to paid conversion

ratio would take a big hit. It always does when you go from credit card to no credit card,

but we're still a little bit below like the benchmark that I set for us of like 10% is

kind of the low watermark. We're a little bit below that. And so we're definitely still growing.

Our growth is about the same as it was when we required credit card.

So that's cool.

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