Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas) invests in bootstrapped businesses. Wait… Aren’t those supposed to NOT take investment money? What’s going on here?
Alignment is what’s going on. Where traditional VC’s often have very different goals from founders, funds like Tyler’s Calm Company Fund focuses on helping niche software businesses that don’t chase hypergrowth. Instead, Tyler supports those who want to build calm and profitable ventures. You know, the regular kind of business. The one that focuses on making money.
In our chat, we dive into how bootstrapping and investment go together, how a fund manager makes investment decisions, why NoCode is a massive business accelerator and how the Calm Fund has adapted over its 5-year history.
Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today, I’m talking to Tyler Tringas, good friend of mine. He runs the Calm Company Fund. A calm company is really just a revenue focused, sustainable, slow but intentional growth company. And he runs a fund that funds obviously, a lot of them almost 80 companies. And I think just four companies over the lifetime. Now five years of this fund have folded in the world where they tell you only 1 in a 100 companies succeed, I see 77 companies here and four that didn’t make it. That 73 that are making it and that is amazing. I’ll be talking to Tyler about what it means to approach building a business in a calm way, what it feels like to run a fund like this, how it’s different from all these VC funds that we see all over the place and how he runs it with a really, really skeleton minimal team. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Now, here’s my friend, Tyler.
Tyler, when I sold my SaaS business back in 2019, you were the first person that I call to make sure that our acquisition was going to be a good idea. And now five years later, you run the Calm Company Fund and you’re helping what is it like 77 bootstrapped sustainable, profitable companies making their way towards building a life changing business, I guess? You must have started the fund just around the time 2019 ish, right? So how were those last five years for you? Were they relaxed and calm and chill?
Tyler Tringas 1:24
You know, I think the thing that I like to say is that calm is something that we all aspire to. It’s not actually it’s a sort of equilibrium worth striving for. It’s not necessarily a description of the day to day of running a calm company. And that’s definitely been pretty accurate. You know, it’s been a pretty wild ride. I feel like, you know, I just did a big summary of kind of looking back on those five years. And it’s actually not so much. But it’s been fun. It’s been rewarding. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 2:02
Yeah, for sure. Let’s dive into the last five years because I read that summary that you were talking about. And I think I’ll put it in the show notes because it’s just such an interesting, just historical document at this point, right? Because you’re looking back at five years. And I think in five years time, you’re gonna be looking back at this document and you’re gonna see things that have changed and progress that has been made. So maybe let’s dive into five years ago, when you started the fund. I think I am invested in the fund because I really believe that something like this needs to exist. And I guess you are the person that didn’t just believe that it needed to exist, but also did something about it. So how did that happen? How did you start with this? How did you figure out that somebody needs to build a fund for sustainably profitable bootstrap businesses?
Tyler Tringas 2:46
Yeah, I mean, well I think I figured out that it needed to exist the same way everybody did, right? In the sense that, you know, at least for me, I had a very direct experience of this when I, you know, I quit my first job and decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I think I was always really only a fit to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t last very long. I actually never really applied for a job ever in my life. I got an internship in college and they offered me a job and it was like, really fun for about three years. And then we got acquired by a big company. And that was the last time I ever worked for somebody, you know, it was like, yeah, I have to be an entrepreneur. And when I first started doing that, I had an idea, you know, like you would think of just like a great opportunity for entrepreneurship. I understood this kind of niche market better than most people. I taught myself to code. So I was able to build a product that I thought met a need that other people weren’t seeing, you know, like the classic ingredients of just like, I should go build this business, right? And the thing that I ran into is that it was a software company, right? There was software involved. It was building, it was a product to help folks switch to solar on their homes more easily. This is a time when it was very like manual process and would come to your home to give you a quote to you know, just to say like, oh, this is going to cost like five times more than you think and like waste your time. So I built some software to let you get a kind of instant quote for solar and was going to build a business on top of this. And at the time, this was like 2010-11 and starting a business was just way less capital efficient back then, you know, I mean, just even incorporation, like was go to a lawyer and pay like $5,000 to $10,000 to start your business, right? It was just like not like, you know, go to Stripe Atlas or Firstbase and pay $300 and you’re done. And so we were like, okay, we need some money to get this business off the ground. I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t raise a friends and family round or anything like that. And so my co founder and I basically spent two years discovering that there were no investors out there who would invest in these kinds of software companies unless you were trying to build this like unicorn, this multibillion dollar company and it was a really hard lesson for me. I basically wasted like two years of my life. I spent, you know, all of my savings and then like ran up about $60,000 in credit card debt. And finally I like gave up, you know, and I had to like leave New York and fly to Thailand to live on like $500 a month to sort of rebuild my life. And that was a really hard lesson. And then I bootstrapped a B2B SaaS business and ran it for about five years and sold it. And I was like, well, I still could have used some early capital to get that thing off the ground. And if someone had invested in me, they would have done well, you know, would have been like, all in all win-win. Why it doesn’t exist? And so that was the question. And then, you know, the magic of Twitter and writing on the internet, as I was building that business, I met a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs like you like, you know, dozens of other folks, a lot of whom eventually became successful and sold their companies and had money to invest. And they all had the same idea. Like, why can’t we invest in these kinds of companies? They’re great. We built one. I would have loved to have invested in me, why isn’t that an option, you know? And so that was the origin of the fund was basically me just kind of like firing up a spreadsheet. You know, I just happened to be the one weirdo bootstrapped SaaS founder who also had a prior career in finance, you know, working with venture funds and pension funds and stuff like that. So I was like, I think we can make a fund work here, guys. What do you say, you know? People said, alright, let’s try it. And that’s the origin of it.
Arvid Kahl 6:28
That was really cool. I’m glad you have that background because just seeing it being real for others, makes things more, you know, easily accomplished or at least dreamt off by yourself, right? Somebody that something like this, I can try building something. Let’s see where it goes. I love that. And honestly, back in the day, probably 2012-2013, I was trying to bootstrap something in Berlin back in Germany with my friends as well. And we were looking for money. We were going to banks and they were like, you’re not building a factory or we’re not going to give you money. That was literally what they said. It was really bad. And then the only other option we had other than government kind of funds in Europe, there’s a lot of money to just trickles down into technology because the European Union. There are other things that they’re building to be used by other people so they give you money to implement it. That was horrible. But other than that, all you have were all we had were accelerators and accelerators are great. But they still operate under the other paradigm, right? They still operate under this kind of VC hypergrowth paradigm. Let’s maybe establish a little bit what calm businesses aren’t, like let’s maybe look into what the default is or has been for how to raise money or how to raise money that’s already kind of implication of this, but how to fund your business, right? Obviously, calm businesses have a different money requirement. And the calm fund is not a hypergrowth VC fund. Let’s talk about what it’s not.
Tyler Tringas 7:51
Yeah, it’s funny because, you know, in many ways, when you try to describe a calm company, you basically end up just describing like a good business. And then people who are not really in the industry are just sort of like, what are you talking about? Why is this a thing, you know? But the reality is that the kind of venture model of building companies has just come to over dominate the conversation where every business seems to, you know, everybody seems to think they need to build some sort of venture scale business. And venture capital and this whole mindset of building venture scale businesses is really actually like a niche subset of the ways to do entrepreneurship. And the basic premise of it is you take on really high risk opportunities. So if you’re a venture investor and you make 20 investments, you expect a lot of them to fail because these are like moonshots, right? You’re gonna do space factories and you’re gonna do a cure for cancer and you’re gonna do next competitor to Facebook, et cetera and most of them are going to fail. So the way that you make the whole math work is you need to have some massive outlier winners in that portfolio to make up for all of the other failures, right? And that’s how you make that work as a venture investor. And that mindset then trickles down to how you are encouraged to build companies in a portfolio like that. And the general approach is you need to take on, you need to maximize your chances of building a huge company, right? So like, even if that means taking on more risk, growing really fast, raising as much capital as you can, every lever you can pull to increase the chance that you build a $10 billion company is worth doing. Even if that decreases the chance that you build a really successful 100 million dollar company, right? Or $10 million company, right? And so that’s the kind of mindset that flows through into this type of entrepreneurship. And calm companies are really just sort of the opposite of that. You sort of unwind a bunch of that where you say, you know, we’re not going to raise as much capital as we possibly can. We don’t want to become dependent on outside capital. We will work with investors. We will raise capital as we need it, but we’re going to treat it kind of opportunistically, right? We’re not going to keep raising and then assume we’re also going to keep raising, raising, raising, raising, raising. We’re going to try to get back to being a real business that’s profitable. And then maybe we’ll raise more money later down the road, that sort of thing. Same thing with growth, right? You say, what’s a sustainable growth rate? Something you can actually keep up, right? So maybe we can repetitively do and let it compound for decades over time, not let’s try to create this hockey stick growth no matter what, right? And it’s a couple of things like that. But it’s mostly just a process of looking at this, like sort of specific way of building companies and unwinding some of them back to a sort of normal way of thinking about building companies, which really aligns with how most entrepreneurs want to build a company anyway, especially
Arvid Kahl 8:16
They want to succeed, right?
Tyler Tringas 9:24
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 9:48
Sorry, I didn’t want to cut you off there.
Tyler Tringas 9:53
No, I think it’s right. It’s like, you know, I think if you talk to most entrepreneurs, they would like, what do you really shooting for? And the answer for most of them is I want a high percentage chance of building a fantastic company. Right? And if you say, would you trade that for, you know, a low percentage chance of building $100 billion company? Like most entrepreneurs would say, no, you know. Like, I want a really good shot at building a great company, is the answer to most. And that’s actually the wrong answer for like 99.999% of investors out there.
Arvid Kahl 11:20
Yeah. Isn’t that bizarre? Like, in a way it feels like a very hazardous way of dealing with money, like an investor has money. Somebody’s money might be a pension fund, might be a private equity or whatever it is somebody else’s money and they want to play this extremely risky gamble situation, like all the time with everything they do. It feels very misaligned to me. It’s very interesting, right? From your perspective, like from a fund that doesn’t subscribe to this perspective, how have you implemented processes within the fund or even just aligned the goals of the fund to not just look for moon shots? Do you still have moon shots? Do you still have these exits happening? And how do you orient the funds if that’s not your active goal?
Tyler Tringas 12:09
Yeah, there’s a couple of I mean, there’s some things that are similar, right? So you’re always looking, at the end of the day, you’re investing in the early days as an entrepreneur, so you do want to look for things like, does this founder have a unique insight into the market? Do they have like an unfair advantage, you know? Do they bring an audience and trust that they’ve built over decades or not, those sorts of things? Those I think are common to all kinds of early stage investing, then there’s ways that are divergent. And so one of them is the idea of going after a huge market or a niche market. I think that’s like the most important one where, you know, when you go after a huge market, if you want to build $100 billion company, you have to go after a huge market. It’s like a definitional thing. You cannot build a company that big in a smaller market. But there’s other attributes to that very, very big markets also attract a ton of competition. They also attract a ton of other competing venture investors. So now all of a sudden, you know, like Uber and Lyft is a classic example, right? They got into this like war where they were like raising as much capital as they could. They were losing money as fast as they could just to sort of do battle with each other. That dynamic is not going to happen in like a much smaller niche market. It can only happen in a market that’s so big that you can attract, you know, Softbank to give you a you know, $10 billion to go after it. And so we kind of unwind that again, right? And so we’re like very comfortable backing entrepreneurs that are going after niche markets where, you know, if they really hit a homerun and they capture, you know, 30-40% market share, they’re still not going to necessarily build a billion dollar company in that, but they can build a fantastic, very profitable, very healthy company as long as they don’t raise way too much money along the way, right? So that’s like one example. And we kind of tried to take, like a similar approach to thinking through an investment thesis and then, you know, choose intentionally which ones we feel are the same and which ones we’re going to take a sort of divergent perspective on.
Arvid Kahl 14:07
Well, the one thing that really stands out to me and just how you value your company, so you look at the value of a company that the fund might invest in, you don’t go for these kinds of unicorn weird virtual fake valuations like all this stuff that happened over the last couple years, where it was just massively inflated in one round and the next round, it was worth nothing. Like that stuff just doesn’t catch you at all. Like it doesn’t make any sense for you to even look at these things. Right?
Tyler Tringas 14:34
Yeah. I mean, valuations is a really tricky topic, right? Because I think you know, first of all, just like what are the current valuations is a very difficult question to answer because you only will hear like a dataset of this is pretty hard to come by because these are private deals being done. And so, you know, every fund like when I go and do an investment and I set a valuation on a company, like eventually my investors in my fund might hear what that number was. But they’re not obliged to share it with anybody. And there’s nobody aggregating that data to figure that out. So what you end up with as an entrepreneur sort of thinking, like what our valuations is you kind of read like more the outliers because the outliers will get reported, oh, this company had $100 million valuation with like, almost no revenue. That will show up in the news, right? And so like, what is it normal valuation is even difficult to even start with? And then the question is, like what valuation do you want as an entrepreneur is also tough because you would think this is a obvious kind of zero sum game, right? Like a better valuation means I can raise more money while giving up a lower percentage of my company. So obviously, like as better of evaluation as high evaluations I can get that’s like, objectively good. The problem is that you have to think about how the game plays out afterwards because raising the money is just the starting line, right? And so one dynamic that we saw a bunch, especially over the last couple of years, where money was really widely available, evaluations were crazy, is entrepreneurs would go and they would raise like, you know, in my opinion, like way too much money. Then you raise this money, it’s not like you raise, let’s say like, $3 million dollars or $5 million or $6 million. It’s not like you can then like just build a nice, small team of five people and say, great! We have four years of runway. We can just like, chill out and spend time figuring it out.
Arvid Kahl 16:23
No!
Tyler Tringas 16:24
There’s so much pressure to spend it, you know. The investors are like, dude, we gave you this money to spend it, you know. Like, we have this fund like we want you to take it and turn it into growth, you know. And so what happens is, now you go and you hire 25 people and now your monthly burn is, you know, $400,000 a month and you maybe you start building this business and your revenue starts going up and going up and going up. But you start to burn through that money and you tend to burn through like the money in 12 to 18 months no matter how much you raise. So now like 12 months have gone by, you’ve got good revenue, but you’re nowhere near breakeven, right? Because you’ve raised so much money and you hired so many people. And so now you’re staring down the end of this runway and now you have to go back to the market to raise money because there’s no way you can get your revenue to break even in time. Well, now, the last valuation that you just raised that is your new low watermark. It’s technically possible to raise at a lower valuation but there’s immense pressure to raise at the same or higher. And now you haven’t really got much progress, you know, you’ve like grown your revenue. When you raised at a 20 million, $30 million valuation here, now you’re gonna go to the market and say, oh, we’re doing 500k of ARR. We want to raise it 50 millionaire valuations and everyone’s like, no, you’re not worth anywhere near that. If you had scaled that whole thing down and you could raised, you know, $400,000 at $3 or $4 million and then you had 500k ARR, you said we need another $500,000 at 6 million. Everyone’s like, yeah, that totally works. So it’s a really tricky dynamic, where you can actually kind of like run yourself off a cliff with an otherwise good business simply by overshooting on valuation. I know it sounds like it’s kind of like I sound like I’m like talking my book because I’m on the other side of the equation. But I really do think that like setting fair, reasonable valuations and reasonable investment amounts is on average, like a win-win for founders. And yeah, it’s just tricky, though. It’s been a very interesting ride for the last couple of years to have this conversation over and over again with founders. Because, again, it’s been like, in this context, where all of those numbers were like going crazy. And now they’re kind of settling back to earth. But again, you don’t get that in the news. There’s no news report that says like, valuations much more reasonable these days, right? Like, that’s not a headline that really gets any traction, you know? So yeah, it’s an interesting topic. But it’s yeah, it’s tricky.
Arvid Kahl 18:51
It is, I think, also the case that most of the media outlets in our space to report on these things like TechCrunch and stuff, they only look at Silicon Valley. They only look at these massively funded companies. So like, you were right, the outliers get reported. And they are already like, even the base foundation of the people that they look at, they are already outliers compared to the rest of us, right? So you have the outliers within an outlier group, man. Yeah, of course, this is going to distort the perception of this. I really like your very reasonable approach to raising, right, like raising money. And one thing that I read in the article that you wrote is that you changed your perspective on follow on investments and I think, like raising rounds is effectively getting investment ones and then having a follow on. How and why has this changed for you?
Tyler Tringas 19:39
Yeah, so follow ons is basically a term where you invest in a company and then maybe you invest again. Oftentimes the way that would normally work is you’d maybe be the first or the only or the lead investor in the first time and then they want to go raise a bit more money, maybe from a bigger fund and there’s an opportunity for you to invest more alongside in the second round. And in general, we had to sort of stake out a position on this because in the venture world, this is like standard operating procedure is you actually reserve part of your fund. So if I go and raise a fund, as a venture fund, I won’t invest every single dollar out of that fund in first checks. What I’ll actually do is I’ll keep a big pile of that aside. I’ll do all my first checks. And then as those companies mature, I will take some of my reserves and I will use that to invest in to follow ons. So it’s like standard operating procedure. And then there’s this extra dynamic called signaling risk, which is basically, if your existing investors have an opportunity to follow on into your company but they’re not doing that, they’re choosing not to do that, the new investors will say, well, what did they know that I don’t know. Right?
Arvid Kahl 20:46
Okay
Tyler Tringas 20:46
You know and this is called signaling risk, which says like, if people are not following on into you, this might be seen as bad because they’re set up to do follow ons and they’re choosing not to out of their reserves, right? So we took the opposite approach. We said, most of the companies we invest in are like not going to raise any more capital, so there’s no point of reserving. And if there’s no point in reserving, then we’re just gonna say, we don’t do follow ups. And we just say, we write our first check. And that’s it. And we’re done. Over the last couple years, a couple of things have changed. Basically, we got more and more comfortable investing larger checks. So we initially were writing checks around like 150 to 200k. And we kind of realized that more like 250 to 500k was the right number to be investing for a bunch of different reasons. And then also, we got more comfortable investing in more mature companies. We found companies coming to us that were, you know, almost maybe doing a million of ARR who still were not finding the right investors to invest in our company, which I didn’t predict when we first started the fund. I thought we were only going to be investing smaller checks earlier. And that was it. So we found those opportunities. So what we’re now finding is we have companies kind of transitioning within that phase, where we get to kind of bites at the apple, so maybe we’ll invest a smaller amount very early on. They then grow, but they’re still within that range, they want to raise a little more capital. And we’ve said, okay, well, we got to change our rules now because these are good opportunities. We would invest in them if they had just come to us as a new opportunity. Whether we had invested them or not, they’re a good fit. So now we’re going to invest again. So we’ve kind of changed that approach where we still kind of treat it as a brand new opportunity. We’re not like reserving money to do follow ons. But we will do that now because we’re seeing enough opportunities where we’re like, it’s actually a good fit to go ahead and invest more in the same companies in our portfolio as they like, grow and hit milestones and mature.
Arvid Kahl 22:43
I mean, that also is I think, almost in the sense of the word a sustainable approach because it sustains you know, like the momentum that you see in your relationship with this company as well. I kind of like this. It’s kind of you feed back into something that you obviously see is working, right? That’s kind of nice.
Tyler Tringas 22:59
Yeah. And I think what I look for there is like, I want to see and I think founders should also think this way is like a kind of seeing breakeven as like this equilibrium, that you’re comfortable kind of like diverging from but then you know you’re going to rotate back to versus like when it becomes a capital dependency, right? When you become a money pit and you’re like, we need more money so that we can bring even more money so that we can bring even more money and raise even more money versus like, you know, we’re growing. We see how we could take more money and invest and create a slightly better growth trajectory, which will get us back to break even just off of the money that we raised. And we’re basically seeing companies kind of still have that kind of like wave almost where they raise a little bit from us. They invest that they hire a few more people than they could otherwise. You see an inflection point in, like their revenue growth. And they say, okay, well, we could get back to break even. But we want to do even more of what we just did. So let’s raise a bit more money, you know, but as long as it feels like it’s going to have a pathway back to good business that makes more money than it spends, then we’re excited to keep doing it basically.
Arvid Kahl 24:05
That’s really cool. I love this. I would like to talk a little bit about the spread like both in terms of like, how many companies you have, how many of them are profitable, how many have quit along the way, all those kinds of numbers are interesting to me. And also the size of them, like the recurring revenue that you have on an MRR level because you just said something about a million ARR. And I would assume that there are probably very small, very early stage, just having reached profitability businesses in there as well. So what’s the spread in terms of success? And in terms of monthly revenue?
Tyler Tringas 24:37
Yeah. In terms of like within the portfolio right now?
Arvid Kahl 24:44
If you can talk about it.
Tyler Tringas 24:46
Yeah. I think like the upper end of companies would be starting to push, like starting to like top end of seven figure ARR basically. So a couple companies in that range. So like, you know, eight figure ARR is like on the horizon. Yeah, and then all the way down to, you know, especially with recent investments, you know, we were pretty comfortable investing in, you know, companies that are post launch post revenue, but quite early even within that, right? So even just like a few 1000 or one to 2k MRR is something that we can sink our teeth into and invest in. So it is a pretty big spread, which is kind of funny because like, something that I’m honestly still not sure what the right answer is. Because like, a lot of if you look at like the traditional accelerators, right? Which we were talking about, they have figured out this cool kind of like cohort based approach to things where, you know, you get comments at the very early days, you get them from, like preseed to seed and then you like, send them on their way. And so you’re always dealing with companies that have like similar ish challenges. We kind of just have this like, ever expanding portfolio and because like, not that many of them die, you know, only, like 4 companies have shut down out of 77 of them
Arvid Kahl 26:05
Wow!
Tyler Tringas 26:06
And but also like, not that many of them will, you know, exit or like a lot of them are just like still growing, you know, they’re just still doing their thing. So they’re still kind of in the portfolio and they’re still so we have this like real, diverse set of like needs experiences, etcetera within the portfolio that is an opportunity because it’s a lot of different things. You actually can have, like founders within the portfolio mentoring newer founders like that. But also like, what does our portfolio need from us? It’s like very hard to pin down because it’s like this now, like big growing blob of companies at all stages and inflection points.
Arvid Kahl 26:42
Is that a challenge for you? Is that something that
Tyler Tringas 26:44
Yeah
Arvid Kahl 26:44
You want to fix?
Tyler Tringas 26:45
It’s a challenge. It makes it very hard to know what to do. So if you think about, for example, like a lot of accelerators and stuff will do programming, right? So they’ll, like have people on to give talks and we’ve done experiments like this. And one of the things we found is like, you know, like not everybody needs the same thing at the same time. So it’s very hard to know, like, what to sort of sequence. So where we’ve sort of settled is to kind of take like a community based approach that’s very, like choose your own adventure. It’s like, here’s a bunch of resources. Here’s a bunch of mentors. Here’s a Slack, a directory, a way to ask for introductions, a way to talk to us to get you to connect that you have, oh, blah, and then you just kind of like, tell us what we need. And we kind of like route you to stuff. And we actually just launched like an AI concierge inside our Slack now, which has the same basic idea. So you can just ask it. You can be like, who do I know who can help me, you know, hire a CFO? Who do I know that’s in the travel industry that could make introductions for us? And so we kind of just like try to make it like that. But it does make it like a difficult group to build product for, right? Which is, I don’t know, it’s a challenge. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 27:46
But it sounds like you want to keep it that way. Right? It’s not that you want to move up market and just say anybody, like below 20-50k MRR go do your own thing. We only take these people with the higher numbers. That’s not what you got to do, right?
Tyler Tringas 27:58
No. I don’t think so. I think that is a thing that happens a lot with people running a fund business like I do is they realize that life is a lot easier when you move up market. It’s a bit like the same dynamic of you know, you’ll see like recurring meme and in kind of Bootstrap or Twitter of like the difference between like the $100 a year customer and the $10,000 a year customer and like I get it and there are attributes of that. But like, I don’t, I just want to help early stage entrepreneurs, to be honest. That’s just like, what makes me happiest. And so I think that we will always do that. But at the same time, we have to be opportunistic and look for like the best investments we can make. So I think for now, we’ll just like continue doing stuff that’s a little bit like a wider spread than might be like optimal. But that’s just because it’s what I love doing. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 28:53
There are other ways to help people outside of just giving them money, right? Like the fund is. That’s what I love about the fund and being part of it is that is effectively a mentor network. And you kind of mentioned this, like founders that are in the funds that are in the businesses that the fund funds, help other founders in the fund or the sub funds that exist in it. That is really cool, effectively building a community and I think even outside this kind of closed community that is kind of, you know, in this money relationship, you can do a lot of work. And, you know, we used to have a podcast. We used to have an idea and how to do this, right? So there are ways to do this outside. Do you have any plans that are, you know, like educational outside of the fund?
Tyler Tringas 29:37
I don’t have any firm plans to be honest and we should probably just pick that conversation back up. Because, you know, I mean, I don’t know if folks followed this a while but you know, last year you and I had this podcast. We were talking about creating like a common VA, right? So an educational sort, of course, kind of counter programming a little bit like we were talking about how like this sort of like Silicon Valley venture mindset is kind of over dominated, you know, how can we kind of create an alternate path? And I think it’s worth picking back up, you know, to be honest. Like, I mean, I wrote about it a bit in this essay that I shared with you. But you know, it was a pretty challenging year for me personally and for the fund last year in terms of like restructuring the fund. We had to reduce the team size quite a bit. We were also dealing with, you know, pretty challenging legal issue that I don’t want to go into too much detail on. But it consumed a lot of my time. And so I basically just didn’t have the extra bandwidth to really participate in it. But I do feel like it is something that really weighed on me a lot. And I guess, like if someone had asked me the question about this, I guess I would have seen it, but it just sort of blindsided me a little bit that like, running a fund like this is like, you know, 99% say no, right? Like, you know, a founder, you meet a founder who like really wants to build a company. And your main tool and the toolkit is saying, like no, I’m not going to invest in you for like all kinds of different reasons, right? And a lot of them are not the founder’s fault. A lot of times my answer is I think this is a great business to bootstrap, but not one that I can invest in, right? Which is like, not helpful to the founder. And that kind of sucks actually, to do that for like five years and you end up spending most of your time saying no to founders who are looking to you for help. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to layer in more work that is helpful to all entrepreneurs. So we should keep talking about that.
Arvid Kahl 31:39
Yeah, for sure. Did that impact you like the just having to deflect and say no to people like did that challenge you on like a mental health level? It kind of it sounds like it’s quite stressful to tell people with a dream to no, not today?
Tyler Tringas 31:54
Yeah, it does. And I mean, it really sucks because you go in, at least I go into every conversation wanting to say yes, you know what I mean? Like I, you know, every time that we have this, like open application process, where people can go to our website and they can, you know, basically fill out their hopes and dreams, right? They like, tell us their strategy for building this company and why we should invest in it. And every time I open it and start reviewing applications, I like, you know, am crossing my fingers that there’s gonna be some stuff in there that we can, like totally invest in. And, you know, especially if it’s like, you know, I review 30-40 applications and not a single one is like something that we can actually invest in, like that is a real bummer, you know. Like, there’s no real equivalent to that when you sell a product to customers, right? Because like everybody who wants your product, you can kind of maybe there’s like a similar thing in consulting, maybe. But like, you know, it’s not the same ratio, you know, you’re not often doing 95 to 1 or something like that. And it is like it weighs on you, for sure, man, like, I did not anticipate that.
Arvid Kahl 32:59
I mean, the open process is I don’t want to blame anything or anyone here. But I mean, you flipped the script on how people get into funds as well, right? You used to be you need to know that guy. That guy’s going to introduce you to them and they introduce you to you and then you come over and you have this weird coffee meeting because you need to look the other person in the eye and really see if they can live the dream if they can be that your golden goose or whatever, right? That is different. You have a completely remote company. The process is open. Everybody can apply. So I guess there’s also a lot of misalignment submission there happening, I would assume. Is that right? Like, do you get a lot of things? Do people come to you too early? Maybe that’s an interesting question or do they come to you with the wrong ideas? Or why do you say no? Maybe that’s a good question here.
Tyler Tringas 33:51
I mean, every possible permutation is on there, you know, I mean, we try to aggressively pre filter it with like, the way like the language that we write around it. You know, it’s not just like, investment application form, you know, fields. Like there’s a lot of stuff which is like, here’s what we like to invest in, here’s the stages we invest in, here’s what we don’t invest in, like a lot of that wrapped around it. And even kind of it’s like an app now. So it’s like, got like inline feedback and stuff like that. So we try to filter it but even still, we get people who are like I’m launching a new soybean farm in Indonesia and I’m looking for investors is like okay, great. You know? That’s the downside of the open application process is you get some like totally random stuff. But I would say like, by and large, the largest reasons that I say no to stuff that maybe looks like it kind of fits the parameters. So one is that like, can be like really too niche even though like I am interested in investing in niche markets. Like sometimes it’s like I think this is too niche to even support like a solopreneur business. You know, like this is just a niche within a niche within a niche. You got, you know, 400 MRR and I think you’re gonna like struggle to break 1k here, you know and there is an element where as an investor, like, you know, what we’ve tried to do you have this misalignment, right? Between, like how big of an outcome is a success for the founder versus how big of an outcome is a success for the investors. And like, in a lot of venture funding, you might end up in a world where that gap is huge, where like, the founders like $10 million would be life changing. But the investors have invested so much money that the business has to be worth 500 million for it to even like register or a billion or whatever. And so you have a huge gap, you still do sometimes have that gap, right? Where like, you know, somebody’s at a point in their life where building a business and selling it for, you know, six figures would be life changing for them. I can’t invest six figures and then get a return on that, you know, that outcome. So they say like that’s like, pretty common, too early is definitely a common, right? So no revenue yet, no traction, or kind of like, what we often see is kind of like fake traction in the sense that it’s like, we have 20k of MRR but actually, those are like consulting contracts and you’ve kind of like, spun out a product, but that product doesn’t really have the same amount of traction and you’re kind of like, playing a little sleight of hand here with the traction. I would say that’s like another big one where it’s like, you kind of inspect it and it’s a bit like, um, like, you have people who signed LOI’s but they haven’t actually paid you, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 36:29
So yeah, so you just get a lot of different dreams that people have in whatever shapes they might be. I find it very interesting because like the fund itself as it’s not chasing the big unicorn exit. You know you have to make money somehow. And the more I looked into it, obviously, when I started, I was amazed by the shared earnings agreement, the idea that you don’t really do revenue sharing. You do earnings sharing. And I think that is an interesting difference that is the ultimate alignment. Like for me, and you can explore this in a second. I just wanted to tell you why I love this so much for a second.
Tyler Tringas 37:05
Yeah
Arvid Kahl 37:06
I love that you make people pay themselves and only then does the fund make money that I love. I love the alignment here. You want founders to make money and then you make money. You don’t make money in spite of founders, you make money because of founders. And I love that.
Tyler Tringas 37:20
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, again, like, it’s funny, right? Because like, I think if you dropped somebody in who had like no context on all this market, they would be like
Arvid Kahl 37:29
Yeah sure
Tyler Tringas 37:30
What are you talking about? Like, you invested for a piece of the business, like you should make money as a proportion of the founders making money, right? That’s often not how it works, right? You know, so for example, like a lot of early stage funding structures really are only optimized to get paid back through an exit, right. So if the business has an opportunity, if there’s a moment in time where the business could basically take their foot off the gas and you know, start to become very profitable and start to throw off several million dollars a year in profits, a lot of times investors don’t want that, right. Because they, either the funding structure doesn’t even really entitle them to a percentage of profits or just the way they’ve structured their fund and all that sort of stuff is they don’t want like a dividend stream coming back. That’s not what they told their investors they were gonna get. So they’ll tell you like no reinvest all that money, try and like grow as much as possible. And you know, sometimes you can reinvest that money and you don’t get growth, you know or you reinvest that money but the market valuations for your company come down, so you grow your top line, but then when you sell you make the same amount as if you’d sold three years ago and taken millions of dollars in dividends out of it, right. So there’s all kinds of times where investors and founders are misaligned. And one of the things like from day one was we wanted to be aligned with founders who made that decision to say, I think the sensible thing for us to do is to take a healthy amount of profits out of the business right now. We want to say like, great, you know, we’ll also just take our share of those. So it’s basically one there’s a threshold so you know, they can kind of pay themselves a modest amount of money. But once that, you know, either dividends, profits or founder compensation goes over a certain level, then they are obligated to pay a portion of that back to us. And right now, I think we have like 12 companies who are paying quarterly shared earnings basically a profit share payment of some kind, which is pretty cool. I think that’s like it’s pretty far ahead of schedule. You know, when we originally kind of modeled this out we didn’t expect any companies to be profitable until about five years in and so you know, it’s been about five years since the first investment, right? And also those profit share payments have been happening for several years now for some of them. I think we got the first one like two years in or maybe even less so that’s been kind of cool to see companies like succeeding and it’s pretty cool like I don’t know if you saw I did a conversation with Reilly Chase from HostiFi who was the first investment that we did. And he shared there and on Twitter that like he paid us $300,000 in shared earnings. But that was as a function of paying himself a million dollars in profits for several years. And it’s like, yeah, that’s the exact kind of like high five we wanted to create.
Arvid Kahl 40:17
Yeah, that’s the ultimate win-win right there, right? And even that you were talking about signaling earlier. That is the signal. That is the signal that this works to me that somebody gets to make money and you make money. And then this is just such an encouraging motivational thing. I love seeing this. That was one of my favorite Twitter conversations of the last couple months, just seeing the joy of somebody building something that’s so valuable. And you having helped make this happen along the way and everybody benefits. That is really, really, really cool.
Tyler Tringas 40:47
One thing I do want to say, actually, since we’re here and I think that people listening to your show will care about this a lot. So we did get quite a lot of feedback, you know, so we crafted the shared earnings agreement as this like relatively new structure. And I think it did two things. It was kind of a trade off between alignment and complexity, right. And so like, the agreement is like a little bit more complicated. In my thinking, it created quite a bit more alignment. The main dynamic here is this concept that you can sort of invest. And then as you make shared earnings payments back to us, you’re actually also sort of like repurchasing some of your equity. And to me, this created a lot of alignment. Five years in, I think where we’ve landed is that on average, it’s too complicated for most situations, mainly because of the repurchasing and all that sort of stuff. It’s like, how much do the investors own is this like, dynamic target.
Arvid Kahl 41:46
Changes over time? Yeah, that’s interesting.
Tyler Tringas 41:48
People don’t like that or something like that at the beginning, not knowing like what it’s going to be in the outcome and then not knowing quarter over quarter how that’s going to be. So where we have landed is like, obviously, the majority of our deals now have the same components where you know, we’re an investor. We have a slice of, if you sell the company or if you’re very profitable, we get a percentage of it, but we’ve just kept it as more of a flat number. So if it’s, you know, 6% then it’s 6% of a sale and 6% of shared earnings. And there isn’t any sort of dynamism to the dynamic there. We actually use a standard safe, which is like a very well known convertible equity instrument and then a side letter that describes all the shared earning stuff. We still do both. But you know, I think that’s an important update because I think some people have gotten a little turned off from working with us just by the, oh, I don’t even know what this is. I don’t want to do due diligence on it, etc, etc. And look, you know, we listen. So we use both tools for the right, you know, occasion. But that’s like, definitely one of the, I would say lessons learned in five years in is like, overcomplicating things has a cost. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 42:58
You’re building in public, right? Like you build things that may change that will change and you get the feedback from the people that it matters to. I think this is just the cost of business ready, you try something you see if it works or not. I think it’s really smart to revisit this now. And look at what the complexity is and how people. I honestly, I love the idea that this is so aligned. And personally, I would not have a problem with this. But I know that other people may have different perspectives and it’s nice that you see or that I get to see you like moving into a more compatible way of doing this. So that’s really, really interesting.
Tyler Tringas 43:32
Yeah, I always honestly thought like, all of these are just like tools for the job, right? The thing that’s unique about us is the thesis that we’re trying to execute and everything else is just, I have no like identification with it or attachment to it. Like if it’s not serving the thesis or if adding other things to it serves that thesis better, then we’re going to do that, you know.
Arvid Kahl 43:51
Tools off the job. Now that you mentioned it, you’ve been heavily you’ve already mentioned it have been using AI tools inside of the fund. And also I think you have an in house no code team. I find this very interesting. Can you can explain how that came to be? Because I don’t think it’s normal. You said it, most funds of that size are like a guy somewhere doing something. And you have a team building no code tools for your internal communication stuff. That’s really cool. How did that come to be?
Tyler Tringas 44:18
Well, it came to be because I don’t know how many people know this these days. But Ben Tossell who built Makerpad and sold it to Zapier and now runs Ben’s Bites which is a super popular AI newsletter. He was the first employee at the fund. And you know, he kind of I wasn’t even really hiring basically. Because again, you know, we had no budget to hire anybody. And Ben approached me and you know, Makerpad was this sort of side hustle project where he was teaching people kind of no code, but it wasn’t really making very much money at the time. And so he came in and worked for us. And immediately I saw all this incredible stuff he was building with these no code tools and I was like, this is the future. Like I don’t want to have to have a you know, three person engineering team, you know, writing code for us. We’re gonna build everything and go all in a no code. So he kind of got us started down that road and then basically, Makerpad started taking off. And I said, like, you look, you gotta go full time. And by the way, we’re gonna invest in Makerpad and it all worked out because he sold to Zapier like 12 months later, which is awesome. But he got to start down that path. And then later, Michael Rouveure who joined the team and some other folks kind of, we really went all in on no code tools. And please, so we have like, a back end tool for analyzing deal flow and HQ tool for connecting the community. We also have like, a bunch of internal things that we use to wire up to our Slack. At any given time, we have like, hundreds of different zaps running like 1000s of times. And so that was really cool base. And then when LLM started to really come along, it’s been really cool because they’re so easily integrated with these no code applications where you can just like take a Zapier step and just pluck out a piece of it and say, well, instead of just forwarding this thing, why don’t we also take it and summarize it and forward it with a summary attached to it. And so we’ve been really like for the last year, experimenting a ton with all kinds of different ways to layer in LLMs into our workflows. And it’s been really fascinating project because I don’t know if we want to go off on too much of a tangent here. But one of the things we’ve been finding is that like, it’s really hard. There’s a lot of sort of shiny objects in the sense that you try something with LLMs. And then like, once or twice, it works amazing. And you’re like, oh, my God, this is incredible. So I’ll give you an example, which was, we tried to use LLMs to basically do competitor analysis on the inbound applications. So somebody would send us an application. One of the things I do is I go and research the competitors. And so we said, let’s try and have an AI do a first pass at this, figure out what kind of product this is, and then go find the competitors to it and give me like a rough draft of it. The first couple times we tried it, it was like amazing. I was like, oh my God, this is incredible. It’s like actually doing a very good job of this. The problem is, over time, there’s just enough like hallucinations and things that were wrong and all that sort of stuff that I ended up not being able to trust it. So basically had to go and recheck the work every single time, which more or less reduced the value of it back to zero. Like if there’s no way, you know and there’s been a bunch of things that we’ve found where it goes like that, where it’s like, this is so cool. Oh my God, wait, it doesn’t work, just oh, now I can’t rely on this at all. It’s worthless, right? But there’s a few things that make it through that filter, right? Where it’s like, oh, no, this actually works, works reliably enough that I can sort of lean on this often enough that now it’s a part of our workflow. And so that’s been like a really cool process of finding those few things that make it through there and then integrating those in to create a bunch of leverage.
Arvid Kahl 48:01
That’s really cool. I’ve been noticing the same thing, like I’m building Podscan, right? Yeah, there’s a lot of LLM that I use in the background both for you know, for transcription of audio, which has its own hallucinations. And it’s kind of hard because you know, accents and words that don’t exist in the English language, all that kind of stuff. But on the other side, I use a lot of inference too. You check for keywords and check for themes and that stuff. And it took me a long while to get a local AI because I run it locally. I don’t want to run any API because of platform risk. I’m a bootstrapper. I’m not going to trust the success of my business in open API’s like Microsoft weird platform or whatever. So I run this locally. And it took a long while to find anything that reliably produces true results, right? I’m really just checking. Is there something like this in this piece of text or not? It’s not too complicated. But even that is hard to get to a point where it works reliably, like 95% of the time. So I know that. I mean, we are at a stage where LLMs like the idea that we even talk about this is like what six months old. This is the nascent stage of all these tools. And every week, just a couple of days ago, I guess Google released a new thing. And now we’re looking at the next Mistral or whatever, like all these things come out in such rapid succession that we just have to, you know, check if the new thing works every single time every week. You know, that’s just working with these tools at this point, right?
Tyler Tringas 49:21
Totally. Yeah. But this has been cool because we just started we spent about a year really playing with this stuff iterating. And now I think we’re at a phase now where we have a good enough sense of like how to wire together some of the no code tools, what stuff is likely to work versus not likely to work that we’re starting to basically do like internal consulting for our portfolio companies for free, but like basically just like coming to them and saying, like, let’s see how we can, you know, find something in your workflow that’s going to improve you. So like, one example would be like using looking through their inbound like either free trials or their CRM as like new leads come in. If you know, hey, real estate companies are really valuable leads for us. Okay, like let’s set up a no code automation that runs off of every new thing that comes in through HubSpot, strips out the domain of the email goes and looks at the website does an inference of like, is this a real estate company or not? And if so, like notifies, you know, your head of sales in Slack. We’ve been able to sort of figure out how to like, create that for portfolio companies and set that up for them. Whereas they might not really even know where to start if they don’t have anybody looking at this sort of thing.
Arvid Kahl 50:29
That is awesome. That’s incredible like that. And that just shows how valuable it is to have some kind of central fund for this, like the fact that you are effectively and I’m using this term, almost ironically, an accelerator for these people because you get to actually accelerate internal processes. That is spectacular. Really cool. That is really interesting. And again, it just shows that you don’t need to build everything yourself, you could just kind of take the tools that exist and connect them with each other. I think Zapier, you’ll probably have a lot of platform risks around Zapier at this time thinking about that, right? That connection, have you ever thought about this? Like what that means to the fund?
Tyler Tringas 51:08
Yeah, we have platform risk, for sure. But it’s been a trade off, right? This was like a conscious choice. Because of the stuff that we’ve built, you know, again, like I mean, I talked about this a little bit in the essay again, that like it’s really hard to build a fund business. And I really underestimated. I know that sounds like whatever like I’m, you know, I’m not asking for sympathy here. I’m just like stating some things that I’ve learned, which is, your top line revenue for the company that you’re building is management fees from the fund. And that’s basically like getting handed a budget, like as if you were inside a big corporation. And it’s like, here’s your budget for the year. And there’s none of that stuff where like you’re an entrepreneur, where you can sort of make these bets. You can say we’re gonna hire this person and we can’t really afford them right now. But we know that they’re gonna be able to generate enough revenue that they’ll pay for themselves, eventually. There’s like no version of that. So the situation where I could have like an actual team that could be developing real software products, it’s like I have to have a massive fund to be able to have the excess budget to hire, you know, whatever. We take five people to run all these products for us. So we were able to build it with a much smaller team using no code tools. So we have way more automation and leverage than we possibly could have on the budget that we had. But you’re right. We have a ton of platform risk. Maybe the next phase is going to be, you know, sort of like having folks take some of these things that we’ve kind of proven worked and then rebuilding them, you know, as more robust, standalone software products. I don’t know.
Arvid Kahl 52:41
I was gonna say is that another business that I hear, right? Because that is tooling that other people, I mean, you’re probably not going to be the only calm company fund in this space forever. Right? Like, obviously, this idea is getting much more validated over time. And other people might want to build similar things because there are way more businesses, I think you say this in the article for every company that you know about there are like 50 that went the VC route and kind of failed that you didn’t know about, but could have helped. Right? At that point, would you have known about them, And I guess the cake is big enough for the pie, I guess. I mean, I do love cake. But you know, the pie is big enough for a lot more. So building tooling for these funds would also be an interesting business, man. Yeah. Ever the maker, huh?
Tyler Tringas 53:18
I think, well, look, I think you’re right that like one of the things I’m most excited about is that I think we’re at a crazy sort of turning point for this idea of building companies. I think like we went through what I think might have been one of the toughest times to make that choice because you know, honestly, like, it is short term much like building a business is scary, you know and like not knowing if you’re going to have enough MRR to make payroll is a really scary position to be in is very comforting to have a big slice of capital and to know you have 12, 18 months runway, you know, like that is helpful. And if that’s available, you really can’t blame founders for taking it, you know, left and right if it’s on offer. And so but I think we’re we’re going through a phase now where folks are going to see that, hey, this actually, if my goal was to build a sort of like, amazing long term company that I want to run for 20 years or to build generational wealth for myself, this was actually not a really good plan, you know and we’re seeing that like, that’s starting to happen. And I think, you know, at the same time, you have all these folks who are going to basically have been a part of these like things where they’re unicorns and they felt they had $10 million in employee stock and that’s going to zero. So you’re about to have this like tidal wave of people who are like, you know, I think I want to build whether they know it or not, they like where they know the name or not, they want to build a calm company next. So definitely think we’re about to see like, a big upswing in those kinds of companies and founders trying to build those kinds of companies. I don’t know that I want to build products for other funds. I’m having to be helpful. But for the same reason that building a company off of management fees is hard. Selling to businesses that operate off management fees is also very hard.
Arvid Kahl 53:24
Yeah, good point!
Tyler Tringas 53:36
I don’t think they’re very good customer. But I would like to be as helpful as possible to anybody who wants to start a like calm, fun type of fund without selling your stuff.
Arvid Kahl 55:20
Look at Maybe, right? Look at them, like a pivoting into open source. I had Josh on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Thank you. It is not just a cool conversation. It’s a cool move to make this happen. Right. And I think that could also be an option for you. I mean, you’re already teaching a lot of things to these companies. Why not teach other people how to build these operations as well, right? You could easily do this as just, you know, just speculating. That’s the founder mindset. I’m just trying to see where this could go. I honestly think thank you for sharing all of this is extremely interesting and exciting. And you’re right. It’s a pivotal time with a lot of disillusionment, you know, towards the traditional ways of funding and still a lot of very positive motivational direction that I see these businesses going into. People want to be calm and lifestyle business, what used to be an insult and you write about this in the article too like, that’s what people VC funds kind of looked at your business like or looked at people’s, like yours, businesses and see like, nah, this is just not a real business. It’s a lifestyle business. They’re just doing this, you know, to make some money. That is churning, it’s churning into a positive direction. And I think calm business and lifestyle business are very positive forces and worse descriptions of things that we do. It’s really, really interesting.
Tyler Tringas 56:41
Yeah, I’m really excited.
Arvid Kahl 56:43
I’m excited too and I bet and I hope that people listening to this conversation are equally excited. If they want to follow you, if they want to follow the Calm Company Fund, if they want to apply with their hopes and dreams to the Calm Company Fund, where should they go?
Tyler Tringas 56:56
So calmfund.com is where you can find a ton of information about the fund and where you can apply for funding. Still, the best place to keep track of stuff is probably my Twitter or my X. Do we say X now?
Arvid Kahl 57:12
Let’s just call it Twitter.
Tyler Tringas 57:14
My Twitter, so just @tylertringas. Yeah. Say, hey!
Arvid Kahl 57:19
Certainly say hey. I’ve been really enjoying the way you write about things. It’s always really interesting. You’re very reflective. And you’re non combative. I like that about you. You’re on Twitter, you’re not fighting with your opinion. You’re just sharing your opinion. And you’re giving really, really interesting observations about the world that I know often very little about. And you elucidate. Is that a word? You enlighten me that way.
Tyler Tringas 57:45
Yeah
Arvid Kahl 57:45
It’s really, really cool. I really appreciate this. Highly recommended follow. Thank you so much for being on the show explaining calm companies, the calm fund and the inner workings and your amazing automation and AI usage. That is really cool, unexpected, but really, really cool. Thanks for being on the show, love talking to you. And you’re right. We should maybe take up that other podcasts we used to have.
Tyler Tringas 58:06
Yeah
Arvid Kahl 58:06
Right? Let’s talk about this in the future. I think we both are currently busy doing stuff. But I would love to rekindle that fire because it’s an important thing that we’ve been doing. And I think we probably should rethink it. But thank you so much for being on the show today. That was amazing.
Tyler Tringas 58:24
Yeah, thanks, Arvid. It was great catching up with you.
Arvid Kahl 58:27
And that’s it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you’re a founder who’s built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That’s the dream of every SaaS founder, right? The problem is, you’re not growing for whatever reason, maybe it’s lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest, you don’t know. You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach. They really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who’s facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn’t look different every time is a story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don’t do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It’s certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They’ve helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it’s me and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It’s always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It’d be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people’s feeds. And that’s, I think where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
