Episode 468 | Tables Are Turned As Tracy Osborn Interviews Rob About the Past Year

Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, the tables have turned as Tracy Osborn interviews Rob about his past year. They talk life after Drip, focusing on the backstory of TinySeed and the ups and downs that have come along since its launch.
Items mentioned in this episode:
TinySeed
TracyOsborn
Transcript
Rob: In today’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Tracy Osborn turns the tables and interviews me about what I’ve been up to for the past year. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 468.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome in building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth startup or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob. Today with Tracy Osborn, we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to this week’s episode, I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups, but startups that are real businesses, not the Silicon Valley myth of building a company, having billions of people adopt it organically, virally overnight and not paying you, and suddenly you come up with that monetization strategy. We talk about building real businesses where real people pay us real money. We talk about building businesses that provide us with a purpose that we’re fascinated with, but we don’t sacrifice our lives at the expense of building these companies.
We also talk about building companies that provide us with the freedom, and it’s a freedom from a day job, it’s the freedom of working on crappy projects, and it’s the freedom to own our own destiny. With many different show topics, often times, we talk about tactics or teaching. We answer a lot of listener questions, sometimes with guests. We do founder hot seats and we also have interviews, as well as breaking news, episodes like we did last week with Adii Pienaar. This week, we turn the tables on me as Tracy Osborn takes the interview seat and she asked me really about what’s been going on for me post-Drip and it focuses around TinySeed. That’s really the main day-to-day thing that I’ve been doing since then.
During the course of the conversation, we look at some highs, some lows, things that have been surprises. It’s really the background story that I would tell, if I was talking about building a SaaS app. It’s all the customer development, challenges that we faced and just kind of the story that I haven’t particularly talked about on the show or really for the most part anywhere else. I enjoyed the conversation and I hope you enjoyed this inside look at what’s been going on with me for about the last 12 to 18 months. Let’s dive in.
Tracy: Hey Rob. Thanks for coming on the show. I am excited to be the interviewer for once.
Rob: Absolutely. Yeah, my pleasure.
Tracy: I was looking forward to it, actually, after you answered the questions on WeddingLovely, I was like, “Cool, I can turn the tables on you.” Put you in the hot seat.
Rob: Yup, dig into my successes and failures. Really, really put the thumb down on me. “How did you feel when you were at the bottom of the bottomless pit?” This will be fun. I’ve actually had multiple people tell me that I should do this. They said, “You know? You still have a story going on and you are growing a startup yourself,” and there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty any time you start something new and folks told me it’ll be interesting to hear what’s been going on.
Tracy: Yeah and honestly, you don’t talk a lot about TinySeed. I went through a lot of the episodes of Startups for the Rest of Us, and there were a few dedicated episodes, but in general, it’s been really cool listening to you and Mike talk about Bluetick. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity for you to talk about TinySeed, not j