I was talking to RoxCodes earlier this week on my podcast, and his very honest and vulnerable account of how he’s grieving for the business he sold made me think about how one-sidedly the “Exit your SaaS” dream factory looks at businesses.
Today, I want to talk about what happens if the exit is not the goal. Or at least not the only one.
Let me start with open cards here: I sold a business before. It catapulted me from paycheck-to-paycheck into a life of much stronger financial security. I have benefited massively from looking at my business like an asset and treating it as such. And just like Rox, I was hit very hard with something I wasn’t prepared for when I sold it: a sense of loss.
It wasn’t just that my cool software business was now owned by someone else. It was a visceral feeling of missing a part of myself. The business had become entwined with my sense of self, my identity. I wasn’t just a developer — I was the operative arm of FeedbackPanda, and when the passwords were changed and the Stripe payments stopped coming in, all of that was whisked away.
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Obviously, it was all intentional on our end. We sold because we felt it was the right move. But there are other ways of “moving forward,” and I want to dive into a few of them now.
Let’s start with the most fundamental choice you have as a founder: how do you look at your business? Are they appreciating assets made for some eventual buyer? Or are they “our own”, an extension of ourselves and the impact we want to create in the world?
If you follow the start-grow-exit logic of the software business world, businesses are lifeless mounds of value that can be exchanged for currency. But if you ask most founders who have exited, it becomes more complicated. They all felt some connection to their software businesses that goes beyond the code or a number in a bank account. And some deeply regretted handing over everything.
Fortunately, there are versions of “moving on” from running and operating your own business that are less extreme.
Own and Delegate
The natural progression of every business is to hire specialists to take care of the jobs you’re not very good at. Or even the jobs you enjoy but don’t have the time for.
This often comes as a surprise to solopreneurs. Wait, we can hire? That’s allowed?
Solopreneurship is often an identity that’s hard to move on from. There is a lot of pride in the accomplishment of building something from nothing all by yourself.
(I mean, realistically, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, be it the amazing bootstrapping SaaS veterans and experts like Rob Walling, Laura Roeder, or Justin Jackson or even the massive services that facilitate our work like Github, AWS, and OpenAI.)
But even if there are people who helped and motivated us along the way, giving up control feels particularly hard if you’re the sole agent of progress in your business. I certainly felt hesitant to ever have anyone help me in my endeavors. Only I knew what to do and how to do it. (Which, obviously, is a dangerous fallacy in retrospect.) I have since changed my mind on this and hired better people to do better jobs for better outcomes.
So, hiring is always an option. In his latest book The SaaS Playbook, Rob Walling has a section on the order of jobs a SaaS founder should hire for. Most first hires for technical founders are Customer Service or Marketing, whereas non-tech founders often hire developers first.
I remember thinking about this when my girlfriend and I started FeedbackPanda. I had just finished reading The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber, and in his book, he suggests an exercise that we went through very early on. You create an org chart of your business 5 years in the future. You envision what the business could grow into, and you start defining roles. You start with “owner” at the top and then go down from high to low: C-Level, VPs, Leads, Specialists, Auxiliaries. From CEO to Social Media Account Manager, from CTO to Junior Backend Developer. Anything that comes to mind gets a slot in that org chart; any job you see becoming a full-time thing for someone else down the road gets marked on the chart. We ended up with around 50 positions that we saw become necessary. And we realized that until we would hire someone to do these things, we would be the ones to fill these roles. So, we wrote down our names beside each job we thought would be our priority. I think I had 24 jobs while Danielle had 25, including CEO. Not only did we know what jobs we would need to do, we also knew who was ultimately responsible on every level.
I highly recommend doing this for your own business, whatever its size. It trains you to see where you are, where you’re going, what you need to do to get there, and who might eventually take this over for you.
Many founders want to fill up the whole org chart with other names, saving just the “owner” and the “CEO” role for themselves.
But there is another option here, too.
Own
You can restrict yourself to the owner alone. I will be talking to Yong-Soo Chung next week, and he owns several businesses for which he has completely handed over the reins to an operator-CEO. Someone else runs the business for him and draws a salary, but the value of the business, including dividends, still lies with Yong-Soo.
I find this incredibly alluring.
In a way, this is the ultimate passive income. As long as the business is profitable and well-run by its (equally well-salaried) CEO, you have to do extremely little but get to benefit from ownership just as if you ran it yourself.
Besides, and this is for the technical folks out there, it’s likely that a dedicated CEO can run your business significantly better than you could, even with everything you learned. Just like you thrive on building new and incredible stuff, someone out there is really good at taking over a project and hitting the proverbial speed-boost button.
This is something I definitely will consider more in the future for my own projects.
In fact, let me think about this right now: with Podscan.fm, my latest bet that has seen some significant traction, where do I see myself in a few years’ time?
Between selling the business, running it myself forever, and having help along the way, I can immediately discard the full solopreneur experience. My sanity was already stretched from doing this for two years as one of two founders. I will not make this mistake again.
So that leaves an acquisition or ownership and having a team.
Honestly, I am battling with this. I know myself pretty well, and I can tell you already that a few years after a sale, I’d feel the urge to build again. And this would likely be very similar if I retracted from the operations of Podscan and handed it off to someone else to operate.
For this, my decision will very much hinge on “what is too much” and “what is enough” for me, both financially and in terms of having an impact on the world.
I don’t think I have an answer for this just yet — but I’ll keep revisiting this question regularly as I keep building this business in public.
Oh, and by the way, it is growing: we’re getting close to a hundred users who are searching podcasts, receiving notifications of mentions of their brands on podcasts, and much more. I am still waiting on my first conversion, but since I gave early users a sizeable trial, this is still in the future.
I certainly am considering if Podscan (or, more likely, the larger business it will evolve into) can be my forever business. Working in podcasting has been a blast as a creator, and I see a lot of forward momentum from the software side as well. I’d certainly like it to be a significant part of my future.
So, let’s get back to work and make it happen.
