There is an inflection point in many SaaS founders' Build in Public journey: around $25.000 monthly recurring revenue, founders who have previously been very vocal about their revenue numbers stop sharing them. Why is this? What makes successful founders retreat into secrecy? It's oversharing, and it's one of the most hard-to-balance activities when it comes … Continue reading Building in Public: Oversharing
Author: Arvid Kahl
Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur. He co-founded and ran FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company, with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the business.
Arvid writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com because bootstrapping is a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company.
He has written the best-selling book Zero to Sold and is currently writing The Embedded Entrepreneur.
In over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business.
Passive Income and Entrepreneurship
For many entrepreneurs, having passive income is the ultimate goal. It's a great goal, too: having money coming in without having to do any work sounds better than selling your time and attention to the highest bidder. My entrepreneurial journey has mainly been focused on building a portfolio of income sources that are as passive … Continue reading Passive Income and Entrepreneurship
Building in Public: What to Share at Which Stage of Your Journey
There is no recipe for success while building in public, but there are a lot of tried and trusted ingredients. Let's fill up the spice rack today and put a few cans into the pantry for later. Every business moves through several stages: we all start in the Preparation Stage, where we conceptualize and plan … Continue reading Building in Public: What to Share at Which Stage of Your Journey
Building in Public: Taking Breaks
Let's get one thing straight right away: building in public is a performative act. It's not something that "just happens." It might be something that you do gladly because you love building and chatting with your audience. But whenever you act in public, either by sharing, teaching, or engaging with someone else, you expend energy. … Continue reading Building in Public: Taking Breaks
Building in Public: Balancing Building and Sharing
One of the major problems that Build in Public novices face is how to split their attention between creating their product and talking about their journey. How much do you build before you tell your audience? How much should you talk the talk before you walk the walk? The first step to finding answers to … Continue reading Building in Public: Balancing Building and Sharing
Too Little, Too Much: Advice and How to Take It
For even the very wise cannot see all ends."For even the very wise cannot see all ends." ― Gandalf, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring Whenever people talk about advice, they either lament that there is too much survivorship bias (as in "anecdotal evidence of what worked for them won't help others") or that … Continue reading Too Little, Too Much: Advice and How to Take It
Burnout
Every week, I see more people talking about burning out. It seems to be hitting anyone: from seasoned entrepreneurs with glowing track records to people scrapping their side projects because they can't even handle their day job anymore: people are struggling. I feel it too. Being cooped up for years isn't cool, not even for … Continue reading Burnout
What Founders Can Learn From the Facebook Outage
If Facebook can survive a 6-hour outage, so can you. Let's talk about unexpected downtime, which is often a direct consequence of dependency risk. Even Facebook experiences platform dependency risk. In fact, their attempt to avoid platform dependency risk introduced a new dependency, which caused this fail cascade to happen. Because Facebook truly wants to … Continue reading What Founders Can Learn From the Facebook Outage
Copycats and Endurance
Almost every product that ranks #1 on ProductHunt eventually gets copied. Someone sees an interesting product getting traction and decides to build the same thing. They check out the product's landing page, copy that verbatim, and sign up for a free account. If it's a SaaS, they go through every product interface, take a screenshot, … Continue reading Copycats and Endurance
Audience-building is not Community-Building
I've seen people make the following observation more and more: "you shouldn't build an audience; you should build a community!" Now, there is a lot of truth to that statement. It appears, on the surface, to redirect self-interest towards something more collaborative. It's not about having an audience to sell to, but creating a thriving … Continue reading Audience-building is not Community-Building
