In episode 620, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure as he answers some listener questions. These questions range from which SaaS business metrics to pay attention to and how to find good SaaS ideas to helping an employee transition from a task-level to a project-level thinker.

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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Welcome to Season 3 of TinySeed Tales, where we follow the founders of one SaaS startup throughout a year as they share their struggles, victories, and failures.

On the first episode of Season 3, Rob introduces us to Tony Chan, the cofounder of CloudForecast. CloudForecast is a daily AWS cost monitoring service for busy engineering teams. Tony is one of 33 startup founders from TinySeed’s Spring 2021 accelerator batch.

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.

In episode 618, join Rob Walling as he chats with Sam Dogen, the founder of Financial Samurai, which is one of the longest-running and most popular personal finance blogs. Over the last 13 years, Sam has personally written over 2,500 essays along with a Wall Street Journal Bestselling book. We talk about achieving financial freedom, money mindsets, and relentless execution.

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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In episode 617, Einar Vollset and Tracy Osborn join Rob Walling for a bootstrapper news roundup episode. They cover a wide range of topics from ProfitWell’s big 200 million exit, spreadsheet mentality, watching an acquirer ruin your company, and much more.

[3:06] What’s your take on ProfitWell’s acquisition?  

[5:52] Watching an acquirer ruin your company 

[14:03] The spreadsheet mentality 

[23:09] If you can’t buy it twice, don’t buy it

[36:00] Balancing realism with optimism as a founder 

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 | Stitcher

In episode 616, Rob Walling chats with Liam Martin, the co-founder of Time Doctor and author of the new book, “Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers.” We dig into the fundamentals of asynchronous communication, how to do remote work better, and some surprises they saw during the pandemic.

Hiring developers has been tough for years, but it is even tougher these days. Lemon.io is on a mission to make the process of hiring an experienced developer or even an entire team easier. They only have experienced developers on their marketplace, and each one is hand-vetted. It is virtually risk-free as they’ll guarantee a replacement in 48 hours if something goes wrong.

Find your perfect developer or a team with Lemon.io. You can also claim a special discount for our podcast fans. Visit lemon.io/startups to receive a 15% discount for the first 4 weeks of work with a developer.

[2:46] What Liam has learned running Time Doctor for the past 12 years 

[6:23] Can extroverts thrive long-term in a remote work environment? 

[11:14] Liam’s approach to metrics and KPIs for engineering teams 

[18:23] Why remote companies that move faster collaborate less 

[21:31] How far can you take async communication in a remote team  

[24:29] Combating isolation on remote teams 

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 | Stitcher

In episode 616, Rob Walling chats with Liam Martin, the co-founder of Time Doctor and author of the new book, “Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers.” We dig into the fundamentals of asynchronous communication, how to do remote work better, and some surprises they saw during the pandemic.

Read more... »

In episode 615, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers what makes a business bootstrappable (and things to avoid), cargo culting, and how large of a business you can build at different customer lifetime value levels.

Hiring developers has been tough for years, but it is even tougher these days. Lemon.io is on a mission to make the process of hiring an experienced developer or even an entire team easier. They only have experienced developers on their marketplace, and each one is hand-vetted. It is virtually risk-free as they’ll guarantee a replacement in 48 hours if something goes wrong.

Find your perfect developer or a team with Lemon.io. You can also claim a special discount for our podcast fans. Visit lemon.io/startups to receive a 15% discount for the first 4 weeks of work with a developer.

[1:51] What makes a business bootstrappable? 

[14:15] Cargo culting 

[20:05] How large of a business can you build at a specific annual contract value or lifetime value? 

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 | Stitcher

In episode 614, Rob Walling chats with fan favorite Derrick Reimer. They start out by talking about Derrick’s decision to take a sabbatical from The Art of Product podcast after co-hosting it with Ben Orenstein for more than 5 years. Then, they answer a handful of listener questions, including when to quit your day job to focus on your startup full-time, coping with anxiety as a second-time founder, and choosing a domain name.

Hiring developers has been tough for years, but it is even tougher these days. Lemon.io is on a mission to make the process of hiring an experienced developer or even an entire team easier. They only have experienced developers on their marketplace, and each one is hand-vetted. It is virtually risk-free as they’ll guarantee a replacement in 48 hours if something goes wrong.

Find your perfect developer or a team with Lemon.io. You can also claim a special discount for our podcast fans. Visit lemon.io/startups to receive a 15% discount for the first 4 weeks of work with a developer.

[2:18] Derrick’s decision to take a break from The Art of The Product podcast 

[10:22] When should you go full-time on your startup? 

[17:20] Before looking for tech firms, should I know the best frontend and backend architecture for my SaaS MVP and then only shop for firms who specialize in that?  

[24:13] I'm starting a new SaaS business, and despite a previous successful experience, I can't stop feeling extremely anxious about it. Is this something you're familiar with? How did you deal with it?

[30:34] When choosing a domain name for my startup, should you go with a meaningful and expressive name, but a less serious TLD.io or a somewhat fictional name combined with the best tld.com?  

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 | Stitcher

In episode 613, Rob Walling chats with Dr. Sherry Walling about the release of her new book, Touching Two Worlds: A guide for finding hope in the landscape of loss. They cover a lot in this episode, including the hustle of launching a book, the behind the scenes of how Sherry has hacked her own psychology to help promote the book, and grief in entrepreneurship.

Hiring developers has been tough for years, but it is even tougher these days. Lemon.io is on a mission to make the process of hiring an experienced developer or even an entire team easier. They only have experienced developers on their marketplace, and each one is hand-vetted. It is virtually risk-free as they’ll guarantee a replacement in 48 hours if something goes wrong.

Find your perfect developer or a team with Lemon.io. You can also claim a special discount for our podcast fans. Visit lemon.io/startups to receive a 15% discount for the first 4 weeks of work with a developer.

[4:04] What it is like to publish a book with a traditional publisher 

[5:30] The process of launching and promoting a book

[9:24] A clever way to reframe cold outreach 

[15:52] Hacking your founder psychology 

[21:03] A short book summary 

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 | Stitcher

In episode 612, Rob Walling chats with longtime friend and repeat podcast guest Dave Rodenbaugh. Dave was even at the very first MicroConf back in 2011.

In this episode, we have a candid conversation on our experiences balancing side projects with a day job, struggling with the decision in our own different ways of when to quit, and the surprising habits you have to unlearn once you are finally independent of the day job and consulting work.

[1:27] Dave’s thought process behind expanding Recapture 

[5:34] The decision to go full-time on Recapture 

[15:05] Dave’s process for unlearning bad employee / consultant habits 

[20:07] The danger of the arrival fallacy 

[24:20] What would you do if you sold the business?

[26:03] Balancing a side project with your day job  

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 | Stitcher