Resources
- Arvid Kahl (@arvidkahl)
- Embedded Entrepreneur (embeddedentrepreneur.com)
- Permanent.link
Transcript
Josh: [00:00:30] I’d like to welcome our first guest to searching for SaaS. We have Arvid Kahl is that who say call? Oh, sorry. Who is? I would say SaaS. Bootstrapper this is just, you can correct me after I finished this little bit of intro, but you have now turned into a full-time creator.
You write newsletters you have your own podcast, a solo one, which I do have questions on there and how you even figured to keep talking to yourself. But and you’ve just written your second book. So Arvid welcome to searching for SAS as our very first podcast
Arvid: [00:01:00] guest. Thank you so much. It’s quite an honor to be the very first guest.
I hope I’ll do it justice, but thanks so much for the introduction. It’s, it’s really, it’s kind of hard to put myself into any category at this point. Cause a couple of years ago, I could’ve told her. Yeah, I’m a software engineer and that’s who I am. And then a year later I could’ve told her Yammer. And entrepreneur apparently, and that’s why I am, and now I’m a writer too, and it created all kinds of things.
So I’m trying to jump out of any kind of box at this point, cause it’s just so much more fun outside the box and having multiple feeds multiple appendages in multiple boxes at the same time, quite enjoyable as well. So yeah. Thanks for the introduction. That’s pretty nice. It’s kind of, yeah, it makes, makes me wonder like how many things I have going on at the same time and how I’m dealing with this because yeah, I also run the SAS still at the same time.
In addition to writing and doing like 25 hours a day on Twitter, just like talking to people. So there’s a, there’s a lot going on, but I’m really happy that you have me on as as the guest number one. And I listened to episode 15 where we’re talking about me essentially and having me on as well and was speeding.
Nice. Just listening to how you deal with your problems and your To kind of market first audience, first approach and stuff. It’s really nice to, to join the conversation at this point, but you’re already kind of going at where I want people to go at. So it was really cool to be here. Talk
Josh: [00:02:23] about that today.
It’s timely. And it happened, you know, as you probably heard from that recording, that was episode 15 and which we just released this week. And so a very, very nice and timely. And it just like that you released the book and all those things happen kind of serendipitously and kind of make sense. I think, you know, it was like, oh, he’s probably looking to help promote his book a little bit, which is all good too.
And as our first guests, no pressure. It’s just, if it goes badly, we’ll never have a guest again, aside from that funny.
Arvid: [00:02:50] Yeah. That’s all right. Well, yeah, not really trying to push the book. I just want to have a conversation with you, right. The book is something, but I really want to just talk through this stuff and help people where they are at and say something interesting because that’s really why I wrote it to begin with.
So, yeah. Cool. Let’s let’s have a chat.
Josh: [00:03:10] Cool. Well, first I’d like to, so what I was thinking of covering today was talk a little bit about your backstory, just a bit through your other book, your F your first book, the bootstrap founder. A little bit about your just, yeah. I just had a couple of questions in those areas to set the tone.
Also, just talk a bit about your background and then I still have not read, read your book at all, and that is not hope. I hope you’re not offended, but at the same time, Nate has picked it up and has read. I think he will admit, I don’t know if he wants to admit it publicly yet, but he’s, you’re what 40% through, but yeah,
Nate: [00:03:42] 35% and like, you know, six hours pending.
Josh: [00:03:45] Okay. So I threw you under the bus there, whether you liked it or not. But, but then Nate, we’ll kind of segue into the second half of the podcast and probably ask a little bit more in-depth questions about the book and things like that, that I’m not privy to.
Arvid: [00:03:57] So. Yeah, no problem. Just talk to me about whatever you want to talk about.
My flexible there’s no agenda, so go right
ahead.
Josh: [00:04:04] Sure. So so you, you, you kind of, I would say jumped onto the scene in, it looks like, I think it was late 2019, I believe. And I would assume this was after feedback Panda was sold. Which
Arvid: [00:04:17] was exactly when and why. Okay. Okay. You know, like we were running a business 24 seven, it was just the two of us, Danielle and I, my partner had a girlfriend and we had the assassin and that was with 5,000 customers.
It was a lot of work with just two people and nobody to help us. So I didn’t have any time before that to do anything. No, no Twitter, no writing or nothing. So that’s when I just started really trying to be more public. Yeah. Right,
Josh: [00:04:41] right, right. And then at what point did you start your podcast as well?
Arvid: [00:04:45] The podcast came, I think a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two after I started the newsletter. So I started with the blog. The idea was, okay, I want to give back to the community. I’ve been standing on the shoulders of giants for years, right? You don’t come up with this stuff by yourself. You learn it from people who’ve been there and who’ve done that.
So I’d consumed a lot of podcasts, a lot of books. And in the years prior to building feedback, Brenda and I wanted to be one of those people that I admired for helping me. Just now helping other people. So I thought best way to do it is to write, is to share with people what I know. Cause I had just finished two years of a 24, seven for 365 days of SAS building and SAS growing and SAS selling.
So there was a good time for me to start. So I started the blog and to keep myself accountable, to actually consistently deliver interesting stuff. I started a newsletter because I thought, Hey, at the moment I have a subscriber, I need to provide something to them every single week. I’m a lazy person. I try to automate everything, you know, right.
Josh: [00:05:44] Accountability and some pressure to cut a key, just keep the
Arvid: [00:05:47] ball rolling. That’s like to, I don’t have digitalized stuff easily. I get distracted easily. I go on tangents easily, as you can probably tell already from this conversations. So I needed something to keep me in place to keep me in this loop too.
Yeah. Reach the goal of being consistent. Right. Started the newsletter in a couple of weeks after I had a, I dunno, a hundreds, two hundreds, a new set of subscribers and somebody taught. Yeah. Yeah. People really liked that apparently. Yeah, because I had also written 10 ten-ish articles on the blog that were about customer service or anxiety or getting started or selling a business, all kinds of topics for people to find something interesting.
And because I wanted to spread it, why to see what sticks and then focus on that kind of a, yeah, a scattershot and then pick up the things that land that’s a strategy and people like certain things. And I continue to go into those directions and they subscribed to the newsletter, but told me, Hey, I don’t really have time to read.
I have like three kids and I only have a commute where I actually get to consume stuff and I also have to drive the car, so that’s not going to happen. And I thought, okay, what other format is there? An audio is a clear example of that. So what I’ve been doing ever since, and we’re now it’s episode 87 this week, I just released a couple hours ago.
I’ve been reading the things that I’ve writing. I’m writing an article every week. I’ve been releasing that as a blog post, as a newsletter content. And I’ve been just narrating it to my computer screen every single week. So that, that seems to work. It’s it’s it, it may already kind of answer some of your questions.
It’s just part of my accountability regimen that I read this into this microphone once a week. Right, right.
Josh: [00:07:26] And it’s part of the thing. Right. So you’re, re-purposing your you’ve, you’ve got a process down with it. And like you mentioned, I think it, I think it was really interesting how quickly people picked up on it.
Probably because in general you were really just altruistically looking to help. And also just, I think this is also similar to the way I feel and the way actually, the reason why I started the podcast with Nate just in a different way was like, yeah, I’ve been. Standing on the shoulders of giants, listening in the background, reading articles, consuming everything, then also producing my own mental models, like how I fit this, how I see how I interlay that with my experiences, with my own business.
And then it was like, how can I help other people? And I’m not here to sell anything I’m not here to necessarily. I just really want to help people. And I think that probably came across very clearly. Everything you’ve written and now all the other stuff just, it’s not, it just comes across, you know, very, very helpful in altruism.
Arvid: [00:08:23] Thank you. Well, that’s the idea. The idea was we had just sold a company. So money wasn’t really an issue at this point. That’s the luxury, I guess, to have. And I’m quite aware of my privilege here, but knowing that I could just do whatever I wanted after selling the business, that really helped me figure out what is the highest impact that I can have without.
Dealing with the whole like self-promotion problem, right? Like trying to push something and I was new to the scene. And like you said, I just started being publicly visible and yeah, it must’ve been October, November, 2019, and nobody really knew what I was about. I mean, Deanna Daniella and I, we went to Dubrovnik here in Europe, in Croatia to MicroComp Europe.
And we had a little talk there on stage just a couple minutes explaining how we sold the business and what we did to make it sellable. That was the first time we ever really talked about the business because we had just finished selling it. And the people we actually sold it to were co-sponsoring the conference.
So that’s kind of how that all came together. Right. And that’s that also put us on the map as legitimate people. Like we weren’t just making stuff up. There was a conference that allowed us on stage to talk,
Josh: [00:09:30] right. At least at a starting point there to just like to launch from, to step off from right. You
Arvid: [00:09:35] had something interesting and other people considered this.
Interesting. Right. And then, yeah, we took this onto Twitter and different media podcasts where we just appeared just people at the conference, invited us on their shows because every entrepreneur at Microcom seems to have a podcast. Right. Which is quite hilarious, all these SAS founders, and they all have shows.
It’s really funny, but it’s also nice because all of a sudden you’re in the middle of the network and you immediately connected to the connectors in the networks. Really nice. Yeah, so that, that happened there and it really helped. It also helped that a lot of the people in the community were very, very.
Enthusiastic about somebody sharing the experience and we are in the middle of the belt public movement. And I know you’ve talked about this in episode 13, right? With like how much share and how much you don’t want to share and what you don’t want to talk about because of all these things like share-ability and giving people an edge over other people, or having network effects in the product, that really makes a difference in how much you want to talk about your product or how much you want to encourage people talking about your product.
There’s a lot of nuance to that, but yeah. People are really interested in sharing knowledge and knowledge is something that everybody can benefit from. So having somebody altruistically sharing knowledge is something that nobody will suffer from sharing with their friends. Right. You know, that bit made it extremely easy for other people to retweet it, to like it, to follow me.
And that allowed me to build a rather sizable following in that. Yes. So what is it now? 18 months that I’ve been active on Twitter. It’s been, been quite a, quite a ride so far, but the fact that I’m, I’ve been actively engaging. That’s what I kind of joked about earlier 26 hours a day. I’m really doing this.
I’m on Twitter all the time, trying to help people get other people to join conversations, where they can help with the value that they have to offer. This is a kind of full-time job to be a community connector. And I guess again, highly privileged, cause I don’t have anybody telling me what else to do.
This is my own personal choice to do this. It’s kind of my job that I’ve chosen for myself at this point, be a creator and be a connector. If I had a day job or anything at the same time, probably wouldn’t be as effective. Right. So you just want to like lay down the fundamental CSR, right? Sure. No,
Josh: [00:11:45] definitely.
Has that added any pressure? Have you taken days off, have you taken like. Have you gotten to a point where like, I just need a week off to just, I haven’t seen it. I Al I’m also probably not active enough to notice per se, but has that ever happened yet or do you okay. It seems like it gives you energy as well.
Like it’s one of those things, right?
Arvid: [00:12:05] Yeah. It’s surprising to me. Cause I always considered myself to be introverted. So at joining GE getting energy drained from me while interacting with others. But with this particular group of people, the founder community, the bootstrap or the, in the hacker community interacting actually energizes me.
So I’m, I’m a partial. Extroverts when it comes to the people that I actually like, don’t think it’s much surprising, right? Once you interact with the people you enjoy working with, they actually feed our, we feed off each other’s energy, but I didn’t know until I actually did this, that this was a possibility for me.
I never really liked that much, but yeah,
Josh: [00:12:43] I could see that. That makes sense. I think I’m a similar one where even in that, in that episode where we talked about the building in public, in my epiphany came from this podcast and it was again, a different part of my brain or a different part of a sense of fulfillment.
I didn’t know. And even going in there, I think this morning I was on the searching process handle that’s, I’m kind of my alter ego of that. And going in there, it is, it was like replying to stuff and it just feels more natural and it didn’t bother me, but then I’m sure as you would say, or no, since you ran feedback Panda and had, you know, tons of customers and things like that, like.
Dealing with customers can drain your energy. They’re just not, not that there’s like, you know, you’re, there’s a, there’s a value providing there’s a service you provide, you know what you’re doing there, but at the same time, as I’m sure, you’re like, okay, like I got to turn off. I’m not going to go back.
I’ll just, we, we have these hours, we’re here X hours to this hours and I’ll be happy to answer, check cues then. But at the same time, I’m happy to like, now let me just go sit on the couch and
Arvid: [00:13:42] read a book. Yeah. Sometimes you need that. And it’s, it’s one of the problems that I, I found a lot with my mentees and, and consulting clients that are trying to build a business for an audience.
They don’t really like this, this point of where it starts straining you comes very early, particularly when you’re the only person dealing with the business. Like you get stressed quite quickly. If there’s no like empathetic connection to the people that you’re actually supposed to serve, which is why.
I wrote the book and I’ve been writing about this whole audience first, or audience driven methodologies to so much because I see so many people flipping this around and starting with the product with the idea, you’ve talked about this at length in multiple shows, but the, the, the, the problem really is if you don’t like the people you’re serving, if you only later find out that they actually not as nice as you thought you’re in for not much of a fun experience, because you will have to continue serving them to turn that, to maintain your business.
Right. And to retain them as customers. It’s yeah. It’s, it’s quite a, yeah. It ends
Josh: [00:14:44] up being, it ends up being backwards. Right. Cause you, everyone started this stuff with the intent for freedom and some autonomy, and now they’ve created their own box,
Arvid: [00:14:52] right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they, they cannot leave the box because the box feeds them and their family.
Right. It’s a big problem, right? Like if you don’t get this right from the start or at least start validating. And we’re trying to invalidate it, trying to see where could this mess up my life. If you don’t ask this question early and you only kind of fall into it, because the question is in the room all the time and it’s actually draining you, right?
Yeah. Hence my attempt to talk to as many people as possible, like figuring out or telling yeah. Explaining to them how this can affect your mental health quite quickly, if you don’t get it right. So nice that I get to talk about it here today. Lots of people could benefit from it at least listening to somebody who has had this experience or who has seen people having this experience.
Right. Right. I think
Josh: [00:15:39] that’s a good segue into about, you know, the second book and why, why you wrote the second book. I wanted to ask more about zero to sold, but I think at this point, I think we’re just starting to skate right. Towards the embedded entreprenuer. So I’ll start with the first question and then I’ll let Nate kind of Dig his teeth and a little bit and ask you some more questions.
So yeah. Why, why did you write the embedded entrepreneur?
Arvid: [00:16:04] Cause people asked me to really, I was when, when serious assault was done, people read it and they really liked it. Cause it’s about the whole journey of feedback, right? From the moment we envisioned, like maybe doing something about a problem to figuring out if this was a critical problem for an existing audience to building the product, to then launching the product and growing the product and selling the business.
There was a lot in the book and it’s, it’s 500 pages. It’s quite a heavy book compared to other books in this whole, like the hacking or company building scene. So there’s a lot in there, but still the initial parts that finding the right people to serve and figuring out what their problem is that still wasn’t enough.
For many people, they, they came back to me, they read the book and said, Hey, this is really nice. And thanks for doing all this. And for writing about all these different things, I would never have thought about it. So thanks for that. But the initial step, finding people, how did you do this? Like, how can I do this?
And that was the most. That the feedback I got the most, really like the feedback I have 50, 60, 70 times compared to other things like, oh, I don’t know how to sell my business. And like this particular thing got three or four people. It didn’t really feel as urgent as the whole audience building and audience discovery thing.
So that’s what I went into. I tweeted about it. I said, Hey, I’m going to write a new book, I guess, because we need to dive into this a bit more. It’s got to be called audience first. And here’s the outline that I’ve already had in my mind. I shared that on Twitter, I put a little landing page up and said, Hey people, if you think some other questions to be answered in the book, put in a comment here, put a comment box below.
And people started telling me what they wanted to be in the book, which is nice because if you have your readers, your potential and future readers, tell you what they want to read about the likelihood of the book being. Useful for your readers just increases significantly. Right? So people were involved with the whole writing process from the start, from when I told them what I wanted to write about to the point where I actually had written the manuscript or the first version of it.
I immediately shared that with my alpha Rita squad. I recruited a couple of people onto an email list and they really dove into the manuscript. They tore it apart and added a lot of interesting new ideas that I wouldn’t have come up with. In the end, I had like 550 people looking into the book over certain periods of time.
There was significant and the book changed a lot. And then yeah, people decided what the cover would be. People decided that the kind of format that I wanted, all of that kind of stuff, a lot of people were involved in the book and that made it not really just my project, right. It made it, made it a community project, but people told me what they needed to have explained to them.
And I explained it to them. And then they told me where the explanation sucked and then I made the explanation better. And the whole book really is about. Finding the people you want to serve and empower, like figuring out which future audience you should be serving, figuring out where they are, where you have to go to, to learn about them, learn what their needs are, what their day-to-day is, what they’re complaining about, what the problems are, you know, like the stuff that we as entrepreneurs find interesting.
And we need to understand before we can even start considering how we can solve their problems, then discovering the problems from the communication that happens inside the community. What do people complain about? Whether they ask for alternatives recommendations, whether they just ask for help all these things, you can do data driven analysis on this.
You don’t have to just tend to guess your way into this. You can actually keep tabs on what’s going on and telling them and, and yeah. Do ’em. The ultra firm approach to finding the most critical problem and then envisioning an actual solution to that with your community. Right. You know, like not just building something because you think it’s nice, but building something that is validated in terms of does it fit into the workflow that people currently have, and you have already been talking about this on the show, which is really nice because you can kind of jump into this at a later point, where, what are they already doing?
What are they already using? Right. That kind of stuff you think you can only learn about this by actually being around people, by talking to people and embedding yourself in a community, the easiest way of doing this, because then you don’t need to search the internet. I think Nate, that’s how you described it in the show, right?
Searched the internet for people and that cold email them to get them. Into this kind of conversation they’re already there. You’ve already been chatting with them. If you are in the community, if you are in Twitter with them, if you are in their Facebook groups or, you know, that there’s a lot of different ways of being already present in that community.
And yeah. Then the last part of the book really is about audience building. How can I build reputation within this community? How can I empower people? How can I engage with people? How can I provide content to people? I chose Twitter as an example because that’s where I am. That’s why I’m building my own audience and community.
And obviously this works for many people in many different social media systems. I have a good friend who has a company. His name is Andrew is a company called holding buddies. And it’s like animal hauling livestock hauling from one place to another. It’s just like, get, put a load them onto a truck and get him somewhere, building a marketplace.
He has Facebook groups. He has dozens of Facebook groups, thousands of people in there. And he just organizes his own community where people. Interact with each other and see what problems they have with the whole process. And then he builds those tools in terms of marketplace interests. But yeah, it’s just embedding yourself or building those communities all by yourself.
It’s a pretty solid way of thinking about
Josh: [00:21:21] hence the title. Right. So go ahead.
Arvid: [00:21:24] Sorry.
Nate: [00:21:25] Yeah. And that, that really resonates because I think a lot of the times as engineers, we want to just build stuff for your straight or like, ah, I’ve got this great idea. It’s genius, everyone’s doing it wrong, do it this way.
And talking to people is a way better way of sorting that out. And I really appreciate the, the way that comes across in the book. I don’t think you hammer too much on the stop coding. I think you’d hammer more on the start talking part. Yeah, that’s really cool. Is there, like, I think what you talked about is that like it seems like a lot of the later problems are easier to find solutions for, right?
Like how do I communicate to my existing audience seems to be a well talked about thing. And talking about that, how do you start part, I think is really important. I think, like you talk in your book a bit about making lists of about people that, you know, and stuff like that. Do, do you mind to talk a bit more about how, how to go through that and kind of what your approach is for that.
Sure.
Arvid: [00:22:15] Yeah. So your 35%, and I’m just trying to figure out which parts of the book you already have, have seen, because there’s, there’s a part later on that, like I said, the fourth part, the audience building part that dive speedy deeply into how to jumpstart this kind of audience building process, but even within the audience exploration phase, which you’re referring to right now, that one of the best things to do in a community is to find the people that matter and to follow them, listen to them, engage with them and the audience that is actively following them as well.
Cause there’s something really interesting and we call them influencers, which I guess it’s a damaged term. Cause just way too much Instagram in that particular term, but even on Twitter, like there’s people out there, Justin Jackson, isn’t it. Nope, no matter if he wants to or not. Right. He’s a big guy in the SaaS community.
He has a lot of people that listen to him. He doesn’t post pictures on Instagram. I mean, he has an Instagram and he shows pictures of himself snowboarding sometimes, but that’s not what it is about. Right. D as in the SAS community. And he shares his experience building transistor FM with, with John Buddha and on his podcast as well.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff that he does and it’s very public. So he’s for me considered an influencer. So if you want to build something for SAS founders, you follow Justin. And then you look at what Justin is talking about. And whenever he posts something interesting, you look at what he’s posting and who is resonating with him, who is either extremely appreciative of what he’s posting, engaging with them there, or who is also another expert.
Who’s like weighing in on something that he said, and then you followed them. It’s a whole recursion thing because you need to figure out what’s the lay of the land and the community. And if you don’t already know that cause different part of this community for a long time, you have to do a lot of recursive searching both for the influencers in the space and who they interact with and for where the communities actually are.
Because let’s just say you want to dive into the. The coffee, aficionado community. Cause you really like coffee and you have all these beans that you really enjoy and you have a $4,000 coffee maker or something. And you want to find other people like this that appreciate this, that you might want to serve in the future.
Well, the easiest thing is to find somebody else like you and ask them where they go to hang out with people like you. That’s really just, this is the easiest way to figure out where it’s the first step. You go into that community, which could be a forum. There’s a barista forum. There’s a barista hobby, the Rista forum.
I’ve done some research on this because I like coffee. And there are Facebook groups that are exclusively for people who serve other people. Coffee. You have to be invited there by showing that you really care about this, and you’ve done your research and you know what, like the different grades are that you can grind your beans and all that stuff.
And you go into those communities, you try to find a way in there and then, you know, where else do people go? Is there maybe a private telegram group? Is there a private kind of forum where you need to be invited in? So to get access to the expert in the space, and I’m saying this, because I’ve heard you talk about this on the show that you’ll find it hard to find the experts in the community.
This is something that you can only really do if you’re already established in the community. And then you ask people where else do these people hang out and is there a way to get into their private groups? Because often more often than not, it’s private masterminds, it’s private telegram or WhatsApp groups that you want to join to see the actual experts talking to each other.
Funny enough that it’s mostly these, these kinds of technologies. It’s not on Twitter. It’s not on Facebook. It’s in instant messaging kind of situations where people can help out each other immediately. So you do this with influencers. You figure out who, who follows whom and you build out your own little following network or following network, I guess.
And you do this with communities. It’s themselves as
Nate: [00:25:49] well. Right, right. And so I guess what I’m hearing you say that, that I kind of had different in my mind is that I’m not used to searching for people online that I don’t know. I’m used to the, the physical world where I meet someone in person or at a conference, or, you know, like a regular sales type interaction.
And then I find them online and then I become part of their community. And where you’re saying is like, we’re searching for these communities online already. Then you kind of have to, you have to interact with those communities and get used to that. Yeah. And, and that’s a, that’s a whole, a whole learning curve on itself.
Josh: [00:26:21] I guess, speak the language, speak the language of the natives. Right?
Arvid: [00:26:24] You got it. That is, that is the whole point. Yeah. Learn the lingo, learn the jargon, learn, understand what and how they talk about things. So you’re not an outsider. Exactly. You, you want to be, it’s all tribal. In many ways, most communities, you can find our tribal, they have shared interests.
They have an internal structure of reputation and they talk about stuff with each other all the time. So you can quite easily burn your reputation. If you’re coming into a community like this and just start advertising, like people would kick you out. If you’re ever been on Reddit and never said anything about something that you’ve done, you’re kicked out of the community quite, quite quickly.
Cause that’s spreading. Very anti self-promotion community for better or worse. I have my opinions on that, but not going to go into that necessarily, but any community thrives on people serving the community. So if you can show that’s, you are a person that wants to serve and like, and begin they serve and make better this community, then people will start listening to you and not be as exhausted quickly.
When you start talking about what you want to do, you know, like they’re, they’re not going to react as, yeah. As much as, as like an allergic reaction in many communities, they’re going to give you some slack and yeah, you have to be in the community to, to build a reputation, but you don’t have to be necessarily established in a community to find out who the people are that matter in the community.
And there are tools out there. If you go to spark Toro, and you look for people who are talking about, I don’t know, bootstrapping or drop shipping or something, you will find that these tools have mapped the community graph. Off Twitter and other communities, obviously, but Twitter is a big one. There’s Facebook and LinkedIn too.
And they will tell you that here are the people that sit at as a central node in the network of people that talk about X, follow them, interact with them. And there are other tools out there like this that allow you to figure out who the influencers are, and then just start listening to them and listening to what they talk about, what resonates with their audience and that kind of stuff.
Nate: [00:28:24] Right. And so this is really like, just like the title of your book. You’re really trying to immerse yourself while you’re trying to like, get into the community and see, you know, like, be part of that community. And that’s interesting because that that’s sounds like a quite intensive process. And if I looked at myself, like, I think I’ve, I’ve been kind of into the marketing part of the marketing community in different parts for the past, probably I don’t know, four or five weeks.
And like, that’s a really intensive process of like trying to learn what’s new in this community. What do these people care about? What are the metrics? How do they talk and all of that and making each interaction a really good learning experience so that you can, you know, get there as quickly as possible.
But I guess, how do you not go down the wrong path with that? Like, you know, maybe I’m gonna go and go down some community that, you know, there’s nothing there. And I keep going down more communities that have nothing Any thoughts
Arvid: [00:29:17] on that? Pretty interesting question, because that is a somewhat clear indicator that there might not be an audience for whatever you’re trying to do.
Or there might not be a group of people that is actually consolidated enough for you to reach them as a community, because consider, if they don’t talk to each other, like who do they listen to? Right? Because in any community has its leaders, but people also communicate with each other because that’s the community sense that they have.
So if there are no leaders and if there’s no community, all these people are essentially isolated, right? If there’s nothing going on, you don’t have a cohesive unit, a cohesive kind of existing market, even that you could serve. Right. Unless you’re just really bad at finding communities. Well, there’s that too?
No, but I’m thinking I couldn’t even stay you in the face at some point.
Nate: [00:30:07] Right. And, and I’m not thinking so much that, like I have an idea or a, a group that I want to go after and I can’t find the community. I’m thinking more of the case where so I, with my recent ideas, I recently was targeting dropshippers pretty tightly, and I kind of found that it didn’t seem like that was a great fit for what I was looking for.
And now I’ve been looking more at like online marketers and trying to kind of figure out if there’s a niche in there that I’m interested in. And I’m just thinking to myself, well, I’ve just done one. And you know, I’m kind of written that one off and now I’m going on to two. So, you know, is it going to be five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, or, you know, like, is there a way that I can improve my chances?
In that case,
Arvid: [00:30:50] Well, you’ve already read the first chapter of the book, like the audience discovery thing where introduced this little guy, this step-by-step guide, right? Because the idea behind this whole process is to not follow the wrong audiences that turn out to be blanks that turn out to be uninteresting, which is why I try to share a data driven approach that takes into account how much affinity you have for any given group of people.
How much opportunity there is in this space. And that’s kind of where this question is going to, how much appreciation there is for stuff that helps people is their budget. Is there, or is it just a hobby for people? And then finally is the market big enough, the market size, that’s kind of what this initial five step guide allows you to rank all the potential audiences that you might be serving into some sort of table or a spreadsheet with a numerical final results that.
If you then pick the top one or top the first one, the second, the top three, you’ll have a pretty high chance of those potential audiences being very interesting for you as a business avenue. So what I recommend is doing this before you jump into the next one is really starting to figure out. Is this something that is interesting to me, just, I mean, the opportunity step of this is looking into community and looking into potential problems that you can find quickly, right?
Are there enough interesting problems? You don’t have to find your problem just yet at that stage. That’s what the problem discovery phases for later, once you already within the community, it’s just do people have problems because I can tell you, there is a lot of communities where people don’t really have interesting problems and look at the craft beer brewing community.
Like if you’re not deeply entrenched in this community already, particularly as a consumer, people know where to get their beer, they know what to find and where to find new and interesting varieties because there’s this whole social network of people talking about beer all the time. There’s lots of apps and stuff in this space.
It’s kind of hard to get a foothold in that. So if you look into this and you search for 30 minutes for something interesting, and nothing comes up, the likelihood that there’s nothing interesting for you to solve is pretty high. And if you do this early enough before you actually commit four weeks, To that.
And I’m not saying you did anything wrong. I’m just saying like, if you can already do this quite early, you get a feeling for the opportunity landscape within a certain community, and then there’s always swimming out and assuming it, like you were looking at marketers, right. There are digital marketers.
There are marketers that are into like the food industry or like, I don’t know, visual marketers or copywriting and not going to, so that’s niching down, but then you can also go out and then you, you, you don’t just have marketing, you have the whole sales and marketing and the interplay between these, these two, right?
How can one facilitate the other, how can they communicate? How can data be exchanged? And yeah, the business intelligence stuff. Maybe that’s an interesting topic to you about the whole landscape of marketing and where it’s moving, where it’s coming from, report building and whatever they could be.
So you can always swim out and swim in with one particular audience already. So if you have that in your list, you could spawn like 10 more different varieties in the list as well. Th there’s a lot of opportunity has an early stage.
Nate: [00:33:56] Right. And I think that you kind of touched on something there that it’s not, it wasn’t clear to me is that that list building exercise might not be a one and done kind of thing where you you take something at face value or you take something at an hour’s worth of research value.
And that’s it. Instead you could kind of iterate on that. You can as you go deeper into the community, you can start to split that thing out into multiple rows of, you know, maybe digital marketing, maybe print marketing and that sort of thing, and also adjust your affinity for that as well. That’s the point?
Arvid: [00:34:26] While you build the list, you will come up with stuff. That’s the whole idea, right? It’s a creative process. And while you think about things, you will make these connections. So like when you, when I built the list for myself, of course, I started with what are my big audiences as well, software engineers and makers and writers and what I’m doing, because I was literally as sitting in front of my computer, having just written something, tweeting to software engineers, like there’s all this.
Immediate stuff, but the more you think about it, you find things in your life that you are actually interested in, that you may already be part of a community in that are not very obvious, right? Musicians. And like I dunno, people who like whiteboards and there’s a lot of stuff that comes from just thinking about this.
Who’s using white books while people plan, right. And then you go into what kind of industries are very big on planning. And then all of a sudden you are in marketing, but you’re not in just marketing. You are in marketing scheduling for marketing agencies. Like you could so quickly get into these tiny, tiny niches because of just the, yeah.
This interplay of ideas, which is why this exercise is so powerful because you get to that. Yeah. Well, of the
Josh: [00:35:38] things that, one of the things I found interesting, which is Nate, if you track back to like where we started with the idea and the process we went through, which was our, our idea was looking at markets.
A product like a product, nice for a product position plus a distribution. And that was the process we kind of developed when we were starting this, which is interesting. Cause it lay it LA how’s, you go down a certain direction and a certain approach to that, but still where the rubber is going to meet the road is like, Talking to more people getting more tactile feedback on, you know, your idea.
So ours had a idea first and now it’s like looking dues. And I think our vids is interesting because I didn’t realize the book was all about like the start of it is kind of more, I would say I was to paraphrase and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like it’s an audience first based approach to finding an idea and going that way.
It’s a little, it’s an, all of these things. We know that all of these components like a funnel have to happen. Now, the order of operations, some people might be adapt to taking a one certain approach. And I think like communities and all of these are going to have those and you’re going to look at those.
And then later, a later problem that we looked at first was like distribution and positioning. We’re looking at that. We looked at that first where you’re looking at the people first, it’s almost like a flipped. And interests and there’s no wrong way for any of these people. Absolutely. Obviously Bumble around and find them any way.
Yeah. It’s interesting
Arvid: [00:37:05] that just as important racial positioning, right. And distribution, that, that is kind of why I’m trying to put appreciation and size into this, this step five step guide. Cause appreciation kind of is what the distribution is like, are people buying stuff? Is there a way to actually reach them and sell them something right.
Have other people succeeded at this or would I be the first person to try and sell a SAS? So I don’t know, like craft beer drinkers and 20,000 people have tried this and failed. Right, right. You can, you can kind of see this in the market, if it just look and, and do some, some research and, and size market size, it’s the same thing.
Like if you’re if you look at a market and you see, or you look at a community maybe, and you see there’s only 20 people in this Facebook group on this particular topic, that is my whole thing. Well is there really any interest there that could even build a business from that or what I fizzle out immediately, because nobody would be interested.
So this needs to happen at all at all times. The question is where, where does the idea, the idea. And the people that you serve, where does this connect and how is this, this kind of structure? Because there’s always a relationship between what you’re doing and who you’re serving, obviously, because you’re trying to serve them.
The question is, where does it originate? Does it originate in something that you conceptualize your idea, the thing that you want to build, and then you find the people who need it, which is. The product first approach, right? Or does it originate with some needs that people express to you and you then build,
Josh: [00:38:33] see if it’s sellable after that?
Right? It’s like,
Arvid: [00:38:36] there’s nothing yeah. Wrong with this. The only problem is that validation is so much harder. If you build something first and then try to find the people that might buy it, right. Compared to, if people tell you I need this and they build it with you and then you sell it to them. Because if you build something and you hope that people are out there who need this, there’s a chance that there are not.
But if people are out there telling you, I want this, they have demand. That’s pulled from this market. Well, then there is a market out there. You don’t need to validate that as a market because the market literally told you that they need something from you. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to convey here.
There’s nothing
wrong
Arvid: [00:39:13] with doing product first. It’s just more risky. And if you’re building a bootstrap business and you’re using your own money, And you don’t have venture capital just thrown at you because I don’t know. It’s the next Uber for cats though. Then you, you really need to make sure that as many validation steps as possible happen before you start building right for VC funded companies, this might not be the right approach.
They might want to be the disruptors of everything and build something that nobody thinks they might use. And then it turns out to be the best thing ever. Right. But for a solo preneur bootstrap business, I don’t want to waste the little money that I have on my account on something that may or may not work out.
I want to try to validate as much as possible from the beginning. Hence, I started with the people that I’m going to be serving.
Josh: [00:39:59] What’s interesting is Nate’s first comment when talking about your book was like, he, you, what did you say? You said you liked how it didn’t. It wasn’t basically. Telling you not to code it just kept telling you to go do this other thing, right.
Where we were going through the process through Nate. And I’m still trying to get them to not code, but it is he’ll battle right? Every, every week is like, I’m like, I’m like do this without coding. You can do this without building your product. You can do this without investing in this. These are still all questions and all information you can gather without building, but it is because it is more of a product led approach idea, but I’m trying to hold him on the reins to like, Hold them back from building product, because he’s so close to the, the iron there, and then your approach to pitches.
This is like, you know, you’re not even close to it. That’s, that’s, that’s over there on the other side of the bridge and now I’m pulling Nate’s over here and he’s like, well, you can’t even get to that. So you’re not even tempted. So let’s just retrain your brain in this. So I think that’s, it’s an interesting approach, especially for developer first people, product, product, first people to pull.
It’s almost like it just pulls the polarly to another way of thinking and say, find your communities. You’re not the idea, creator. They’re the idea creator. You’re just there to listen. And so it’s interesting. It does.
Arvid: [00:41:18] That’s the hard part. And that’s the hard part for people like us engineers that were trained in a problem solving solution approach, like built solutions.
I have this problem. Okay. I can code up something, right. I can, can build like a SAS for that. Or I could build a little script for that, that solves this immediately. Or I have some, some Cron job somewhere that does this automatically every couple of hours. And you’ll never have to think about it again.
That’s how I work too. And it’s really, really hard to suppress this. Oh, here’s a problem. Well, let’s immediately build something to solve it, obviously. That’s, that’s great because I can actually do it and I could build something to solve it. But is my time really spent well solving this instead of figuring out how this can then or prior even be turned into something meaningful that helps somebody instead of hoping that it helps somebody, that whole retraining process is super complicated.
And I, I don’t doubt that it’s super hard for almost every single technical background person out there because we are trained to solve problems with solutions. We also told that we’re socially inadequate. We shouldn’t talk to people cause we’re the nerds. Like I’ve, I’ve heard this many, many times in my life and I had to actively and drain and train my mind to not think.
That I’m not a good person to talk to other people. And if this is part of our cultural expectation of who we are, it can be really, really self-limiting if we don’t talk to other people, because we think, ah, we showed them marketing, people do this. I mean, we are also marketing people either of our own worth of own skills or of the product or solution that we built.
So we have to market this. We have to talk to people. And by reframing this as a, as a framework that has a higher chance of succeeding, I’m trying to learn engineers, enter it. So they at least think about it a little, right. Because it’s hard. It’s really hard to do this because yeah. It’s, you don’t even know that the thing is, and that’s what you just so, so adequately explain, sorry.
Adequately might not be the right word. So wonderfully explained is that if you go audience first, your idea and the product doesn’t matter for a long time. And that can be super painful because we think we know what’s good. Right. We are the, we, we judge stuff all the time, right? This text editor is like so much better than this text editor or, you know, Ruby on rails.
So good. And then we have all these weird conversations where we do this, this have these minuscule advantages of one thing over another. And we invest a lot of energy into that instead of saying, Hey, I don’t know. What’s good yet. Let’s listen and see what people need. And let’s, let’s even not even think about what it might be.
Let’s just look at what problems they have right now. Super hard to do. But I think it’s a better way.
Nate: [00:43:52] I have one thing to thought that maybe you could comment on is you were talking about like audience first versus product approach or product lead as like, kind of like two polar things. And I wonder if there’s some middle ground in there somewhere where you don’t actually go and build anything, but you come up with at least a concept of an idea.
Because I’ve been using this for the past two weeks now I’m trying to get in touch with marketers because I found that looking through communities online, I was getting a lot of noise and a lot of mixed messages and I was having a hard time kind of narrowing in on, on anything. Interesting.
And so what I did is I I talked to a few friends who are in the marketing space and just listened to the ones that were willing to talk to me just because they know me. And then I came up with a couple of concepts that I’m not really tied to. I just think they’re cool. And I would say to them, Hey, do you know someone else that I could talk about this concept to?
And that was a talking point that, that made that. That introduction a lot easier. And that made the conversation with people. I don’t know, a lot easier. I wonder if you have any thoughts on, on using that kind of tools to to talk to people.
Arvid: [00:44:58] Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s a great way of engaging the community and whatever community you have.
Right. That’s that’s the whole idea is if you have a couple friends that are in there and you can talk to them without having to. Like cold email, anybody that’s wonderful. Just be aware that there might be some buyers towards the idea, right. There might always be some sort of I like this guy, I’m going to tell him I like it.
Right. It’s just
That is going to be the number one message there that you have to actively filter for and actively be aware of. But other than that, if they can introduce you to people who are not as biased, then not saying your friends are biased, but I hope they are because definitely some friends, you know, the moments, you get people
into
Arvid: [00:45:39] this and have an actual conversation.
And you did this, you talked about what are they currently doing instead of asking, do you like this? Right. You’re trying to source information on what, what is their status quo? What are their troubles? Where would they want to see improvement? And that kind of stuff. If you do this. Perfect because that is the kind of audience exploration.
That’s the active part because you’re not just supposed to sit down and observe. Of course you should observe and listen and take notes on how many people talk about certain problems. But the moment you find something interesting and you have a solution in mind, why not talk to people as long as they appreciate this and understand this as something that might actually help the community instead of seeing this, oh no, this guy is building a business and he’s just trying to make some money off us.
Right? You always have to be like socially smart and understand that. If you ask people about something that happens within their community, there’ll be protective of the community before they will give you the benefit of the doubt. And the benefit of the doubt is something that you have to build up through reputation that makes it easier to get access to people.
But as long as you make it clear that you’re trying to help everybody. And the business is a result of this, not the reason. You know, then this is a great active method of exploring the community because you can also, you will also find criticality, urgency, and importance in these conversations, right?
You show them something and they say, I don’t really care much about this. Cause I only have this problem in once every two months. And if you’re building a SAS with a monthly recurring revenue model, not a good idea, you know, like you can, you can get a lot of, you can infer a lot of information from how active people are actually engaging with certain ideas and to put them out there is a great way to do it, but you have to be careful not to overdo it or else they’re going to see you as somebody who’s just really trying to make money off their community.
And that is risky. But I guess if you are in the marketing community, that’s gigantic a couple of conversations. What caused this? But if you were in the marketing scheduling tool maker community, that would look all of a sudden, quite a bit different, right? Because it’s a smaller community, it’s probably more tight knit.
And if you engage them in a way that they don’t like you’re going to be out pretty soon. So I like the idea. Just be careful not to overdo it.
Nate: [00:47:42] Right. And I think maybe it makes a difference to whether you do it one-on-one versus in a public forum. Right? Like I found that like talking to people say, I have one-on-one and saying, I want to help.
And I, I don’t know where I’m going has been a really good way because people feel like they’re able to guide you and just giving them a brief introduction of like what my background is really helps them to say, okay, this guy actually can help me. And he probably will. So I’m going to, you know, try and try and guide this conversation.
Arvid: [00:48:12] That brings up a very interesting point, because if you are in the community, if you’re interacting with the community in, in public, like on Twitter, it’s always a performance in some way, right? You might be just yourself, but it is something that happens in front of other people in interaction between two or many more people.
And somebody is watching that you might not even know is watching. So anything you’re doing in public is always perceived through the lens of, okay, this is somebody who put thoughts into this and how it’s going to look. You know, even though it might be different levels and you might not even have thought about it.
Yeah. At all. You just posted something because you felt that is kind of funny. Like whatever means you just have it on your phone. Wait at any given point. Like I often do, but people will always see this as a public act. Now, the moment you move this into DMS, the moment you actually talk to a person like a human being first, have you built a real one-on-one relationship?
And if you don’t open with, Hey, this is my project, it’s the link. Can you retweet it? Like I get many of those messages that go straight to trash, right? If you actually opened with, Hey, I saw you, we were talking about this. This is cool. I’m I’m interested in helping you. Without front loading, all kinds of links and stuff that you want people to click just really have a human connection, build an actual relationship with this person through a conversation that is not happening with like lights on it, but it’s actually happening in a, in a cozy little one-on-one situation, totally different kind of communication that you have with those people.
You will still have people who wonder who you are and you’ll have to present what you can do. And you have to actually show your background like you do, but you will also have people who are just intrigued by you reaching out to them. You know, it depends, but it’s always a much better way of building connections.
And the great thing about preference like Twitter is that these experts that we talked about earlier, these influencers are just one DM away. And if you don’t do a cult DM, that is horrible. Like, I just told you, like throwing links at them, asking them immediately for something. If you just go out and say, Hey, I really like what you’re doing.
Yeah. I have a second to talk to me about this one thing, but we don’t need to make it a call. You could just text me here, make it as easy as possible for them to reply. Yeah. You will build these meaningful relationships over time. Particularly you do this thing where you try to talk to one person every day.
Do this for two months, and you’ve talked to 60 people that have meaningful reputations in their community. Like you cannot not succeed if you do this, right.
Nate: [00:50:35] Yeah. Yeah. And that’s so true. What you’re talking about about talking to known people on Twitter by DM. Like I’ve had really good success with that, both on Reddit and Twitter, where I’m just being very flexible with how they’re willing to talk to you and saying, Hey, like I I’m looking for help.
Not I’m going to, you know, promote my product for me. Totally. Yeah. Involve
Arvid: [00:50:57] people that, that’s kind of the whole idea. I am. Once you get into the audience building section of the book, you’ll find that my whole audience building approach is centered around engagement, empowerment, and valuable content and engagement is the most important thing.
Helping people supporting them, empowering them as the next biggest thing. And then only do you talk about like writing blog posts or creating videos, content, that kind of stuff, not as important, but engagement is at the core of everything and engage with this, talking to people where they are. And they are usually in their DMS because that’s where they are, but also the co the community where they are, and in the conversations where they are, people feel so much more at home in a comfortable space.
And if you are a part of that community, if you are a part of this group of people that talk to and with each other, instead of being the person that talks at people all the time, then you will get at least some sort of reciprocity. People will give you the benefit of the doubt, because there is not much doubt, you know, you’re already kind of where they are instead of just jumping into a new community and telling them how great you are and okay, you’re going to revolutionize something.
You’re just another guy asking a question, and that makes you relatable and relatable leads to yeah. Relationships logically. Okay,
Josh: [00:52:04] cool. Yeah. I did want to round us up a little bit. We’re getting a little long an hours in terms of minutes, sorry. In terms of how we usually done these, but I didn’t want to make it so that we were forced to split this into two or anything, but this has been awesome.
And. One interesting thing I’ve kind of stepped back and looked at, as you would explaining, you know writing your book, your experience with feedback, Panda and stuff, and, and the whole embedded entrepreneur book. And it seems to just paint this picture of, it’s probably going to be pretty easy to find out what Arvin is going to do next.
If you just actually listen there, it’s like, he’s, he’s pulling this, like, you know, we’ve got this, he’s in these communities and he’s getting these questions and it’s probably going to be an easy If I was a betting man, betting on betting horses, knowing what Arvin is going to do next by just seeing like what what, what is essentially going on in his feet.
Arvid: [00:52:55] I’m not hiding that much. And I don’t want to, because honestly, the, the feedback that you get for being honest is equally honest. Sure. So I’m, I’m still kind of wondering what my next book project project is going to be about, but I’ve hinted at it a couple of times already. So, you know, like I’m, I’m just trying to feel for stuff by not being like extremely over it, but I’m not lying.
I’m not keeping
Josh: [00:53:19] anything. Yeah, definitely. And, and it shows, I think that’s probably what may, it’s your, your authenticity and your vulnerability with it? Definitely shine through, obviously, even just talking to you, you, you realize that quickly. So this is, you are exactly as advertised in terms of what I’ve seen on Twitter for good or for bad.
But I did have two final questions. Again, this are our, our first podcast guests, so I would podcast guests. So I would be Shameful and not saying, Hey, how can people reach you? You know, giving you a minute for that. But my other question was you have this other SAS that’s been that you have permanent links.
So this is on there. If you want to give us like a ten second, like, I know you said it’s kind of on hold right now or whatever’s going on with that. But that’s the part that we’ve never covered in this story of where that’s at or just, how does that fit into this, this puzzle that you have in your life right now?
Arvid: [00:54:09] Okay. Quickest explanation. When I’ve worked my first book, the links that I put in the books, they just started to break days after I released a book. Cause you know, link rod Israel and blogs move and links break. And I thought, Hey, that has to be a solution to this. And I found that people had linked forwarding on their own domains, that many authors use that like they put links, like I dunno, it’s called.com/book/link one.
Right. And that would automatically forward to whatever kind of resource that link targets. So I thought this could be probably product eyes because I needed it. Definitely. And then I. Shot chatted with lots of writers. And they said, Hey, I also need this. And then I built that. So permanent link is the link for warring, for authors who want to have links to that books that don’t break.
And as much as I’m not spending as much work on it right now, cause I’m writing so much yesterday, I got my fourth customer. So there you go. Fourth and SAS customer for the thing. It’s not a non-profitable yet, but it’s part of my expenses as a writer, I guess. So I’m slowly building this because it’s a long-term project.
So literally a permanent project, right. Because the links, those books are supposed to work forever. Yeah, it’s, it’s a pretty low touch SAS. It has one function and it’s almost feature complete, I would say because what is, what is that for wording, right? Yeah, that’s, that’s where that is, but it’s still, it’s still happening from time to time.
I’m building a new thing or like fixing a bug. All right. So how should listeners reach you? All right. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter every single day, every single hour at K H L that’s, that’s why you can reach me personally. And then I have a blog called the bootstrap founder, where you can find my newsletter on my books and all that kind of stuff.
So the book the books are found at.com, but please find me on Twitter. Send me a message. Tell me what you’re doing, cause I really enjoy that. And then I’ll talk to you. Awesome. Wow.
Nate: [00:55:55] Well, thank you so much. Sorry for a changing my perspective on life. I really, I really liked the way that you frame things and it’s really, really resonated really, really resonated with me in a way that a lot of, a lot of books and advice hasn’t.
So I really appreciate
Arvid: [00:56:07] that. Thank you. Extremely grateful for this. Thank you. This is wonderful to hear and thanks for having me on the show as they are first and best ever again. Now, thanks so much for having me today. That was really, really cool. It’s like awesome. Cool. All right. That’s a wrap. Cool.
That was nice. That was sweet. Thank you. Yeah, if you guys have
Nate: [00:56:30] like, that’s like your,
Arvid: [00:56:33] I like it. Thank you. I yeah. Just yeah. What, what I was going to say, like, if you have any questions about the stuff that you would like to have an opinion on or something just like reach out to me and we can have a chat or we can, like, you can send me an email or Twitter DM, if it isn’t drowned by all these, but you could make my stuff there instead, I’m getting, getting, getting worse.
But yeah, I I’m, I’m really looking forward to, I, I just joined the the, the slack, the bootstrap, this slack, by the way, have we probably saw that you can also reach with our, obviously let me see, is that whatever it is. Talk to me, I’ll gladly help you out with whatever I can help you out with.
Awesome. Yeah.
Nate: [00:57:07] And with what, like what we were talking about, what you were just talking about, about reaching out with help and stuff. I think in our slack a lot in the marketing channel, we talk about stuff like this.
Arvid: [00:57:16] Cool.
Josh: [00:57:18] Yeah, it’ll be, it’s a, it’s a fun group. I don’t know. How, how did did, did Mike reach out to you or Michelle?
How you Sheldon?
Arvid: [00:57:24] Yeah. Michelle got meet me in Danielle, invited into the, into the site, which I’m very grateful for. Cause that’s a BD cool community. Got to say like it’s quite amazing to
Josh: [00:57:34] see. Yeah. It’s very tight knit too. It’s very like, there’s probably, would you say Nate, like maybe I’d say 30 or so regulars and then there’s some people that drop in and drop out and, but there’s.
Enough conversations where it’s not, it’s funny, as someone was mentioning this to me the other day, it’s like you click on a slack group and all of a sudden everything is lit up white and you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m just, there’s way too much going on to keep up with, but there’s enough little groups and then you’ll see the same people you get to know.
But yet I think Mike keeps bringing, getting some, you know, slowly people kinda, it’s a nice flow of enough new people that keeps like chain. And yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been a great group part of it for what a year and a half or so. But I knew Mike from way back and I’ve actually our product manager that I have at referral rock was found through Michelle.
Like I become friends with shell, become friends with Nate, all of these other, you know, connections that are harder to, to find, and also a very trusted group that you can. Talk about things that are, you know, pick up and talk about numbers and we’re not worried about it, or what’s great about someone being like, oh, so what you’re, you
Arvid: [00:58:42] know, that type of stuff, that’s hard to find.
Cause you have, you have a lot of people in, in, in the bootstrapping communities in particular where a lot of new people, a lot of newbies that also don’t really understand the complexities of keeping stuff on the reps. You talked about building in public and not sharing certain things like that. That can be disastrous if you share the wrong thing.
Right. I really like it. It can motivate somebody to go after you that would never have thought about you, if you hadn’t shared it, stuff like that. Right. And you kind of want to avoid these situations. So it’s nice to have a community of people who understand that. Right. I guess that’s, it’s an experience thing as well.
So it it’s very, again, an honor to be invited, it’s not just this wonderful podcast, but also into this community. So yeah, my weakest is full of amazing things. Apparently this was one of them. Cool. Thanks.
Josh: [00:59:27] Thanks a lot. Good luck with the launch and everything. Hope you sell through the roof.
Arvid: [00:59:31] I hope so, too.
Thanks so much. Talk to you guys. Bye.