Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 523 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Entrepreneurship for Kids, Common Bootstrapper Mistakes, and More Listener Questions


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In episode 523, Rob hosts a rapid-fire lightning round of listener questions ranging from whether to focus on one or multiple businesses, finding the right amount of customer research, breaking through slow growth, and teaching entrepreneurship to kids.

The topics we cover

[4:38] If you were starting a business today and you were earlier on in your career, would you try multiple business ideas at once or go all-in on one?

[8:11] If building your first tiny product, like a WordPress plugin, what level of customer research should you do?

[10:56] What advice would you give to someone entering a somewhat competitive market?

[15:55] What questions would you be asking yourself if you had a slow-growing 12k MRR B2B SaaS?

[18:22] How would you go about offloading tier-one customer support?

[20:28] How do you feel about entrepreneurship being taught to children?

[22:24] What are things you noticed that bootstrappers commonly overlooked that are preventing them from achieving their goals?

[23:18] What are some of the biggest takeaways you can see across your portfolio of early-stage SaaS companies?

[25:01] Have you ever built a business that got a fairly large portion of its revenue from services instead of products, but not just you consulting?

[26:56] How do you prepare financially or otherwise for your retirement?

Links from the show
  • MicroConf Connect
  • SavvyCal
  • Stay on Top of Your SaaS Metrics: Know What to Measure to Maintain Sustainable Growth – Craig Hewitt
  • The 2020 State of Independent SaaS
  • ZenFounder
  • Indie Founder Bootcamp
  • AudienceOps
  • Castos Production (formerly Podcast Motor)
  • If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned.

    Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode.

    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!

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    Startups For the Rest of UsBy Rob Walling

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