In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, I'm joined by Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda. We get Arvid to share his journey building FeedbackPanda (an automation tool for online English teachers), how he established relationships with customers, implemented referral schemes and created a template library for growth.
In today’s digital age, it is easy to forget the importance of building relationships for success.
However, Arvid Karl, double author and bootstrap SaaS founder, knows firsthand the power of networking and relationship-building. In this exclusive interview, Arvid shares his insights on how to build strong relationships that can help you reach your goals. Q: What inspired you to become an author and a bootstrap SaaS founder? A: I have always been passionate about writing and technology.
Writing has always been a way for me to express my thoughts and ideas in a creative way. As for my entrepreneurial journey, I was inspired by the idea of creating something from nothing – taking an idea from concept to reality. The challenge of building something from scratch is what drives me every day.
Q: What advice would you give someone who is just starting out in their career or business?
A: My advice would be to focus on building relationships with people who can help you reach your goals. Networking with people who are already successful in your field can open up opportunities that may not have been available otherwise. It’s also important to remember that relationships are not just about getting something out of them; they should be mutually beneficial so both parties benefit from the connection.
Q: How do you go about building meaningful relationships?
A: Building meaningful relationships starts with being genuine and authentic in all interactions with others – whether it’s online or offline. It’s important to take the time to get to know someone before asking them for anything; this shows respect and builds trust between both parties which is essential for any relationship.
Additionally, it’s important to stay connected by following up regularly through emails or calls so that people don’t forget about you!
Q: What are some tips for maintaining strong connections over time?
A: One tip I have is setting up regular check-ins with people in your network – whether it’s once a month or once every few months – so that you stay top-of-mind when opportunities arise or when they need help themselves!
Additionally, staying active on social media platforms like LinkedIn can also help keep connections alive as well as providing value through content such as articles or videos related to topics within your industry/field of expertise!
Finally, don't forget about face-to-face meetings whenever possible; there's nothing quite like having an actual conversation with someone which helps build stronger bonds over time!
Q: What do you think are some key benefits of having strong connections?
A: Having strong connections allows us access into networks we wouldn't normally have access too which opens up new opportunities such as job offers or business deals we wouldn't normally get exposed too without those connections! Additionally, having strong connections also gives us access into knowledge bases we wouldn't normally have access too which helps us stay ahead of our competition by gaining insights into trends within our industry/field before anyone else does!
Finally, having strong connections also provides us with emotional support during tough times since we know there's someone out there who understands what we're going through and can provide guidance if needed!
Q: Any final words of wisdom?
A: My final words would be never underestimate the power of networking and relationship-building; these two things will take you further than any other skill set when it comes down achieving success in whatever field/industry you choose!
Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!
Authenticity and building long-term, real, genuine relationships with people, that is something that businesses are now expected to do, particularly when they're small.
Hello, team, and welcome to this very special episode. We have Arvid Karl, who is a now double author and Bootstrap SaaS founder, has since sold and is now building audiences. We cover his journey to setting that SaaS product and also his view on the power of building an audience first. So let's jump into that right now.
Arvid, welcome. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
No, it's absolutely my pleasure. I heard you on another podcast in the SaaS space, and I've also read the book. And so I'm super excited about this discussion.
Yeah, me too. Let's get right to it. Right. Specifically, I want to start with Feedback Panda, and then I want to talk a bit about that journey. And then I also want to talk more about your thoughts on audience building in Bootstrapping and entrepreneurship and the role that plays.
So my first question, and this was my insight or maybe my lesson from learning about Feedback Panda, is that you guys were able to build a product that had such great utility that the marketing you required for that product was really to be present in some forums, etc.
Would you agree?
And actually, maybe before that, for anyone listening, could you just give an intro to Feedback Panda so people know what I'm talking about?
Sure.
Yeah, Feedback Panda was a tool for online English teachers, really. My girlfriend, Danielle, she was such an online English teacher, so she would teach English to kids through the internet because of injuries she had. She couldn't work anywhere outside of our apartment back in the day.
And we built this tool for her and other teachers like her that would just take like two hours a day of administrative tasks just completely off the table, automate that away.
And that really resonated with the community because it was just really well integrated into their existing workflow, right?
They would teach online and they had these little tools and we had a browser extension that would hook right into it and deal with all these things that took them hours and condensed it into minutes.
So yeah, it was a teacher productivity tool, really. And one of the things that made this tool so interesting to the community at large, not just individual teachers, but a whole community of teachers, was that it allowed teachers to connect inside the application and share things.
Because Feedback Panda was about student feedback, right?
Feedback you give to the parents of the student for just telling them how the student did at any point in time, right?
They learned about apples today. And if you want them to be better at it was English as a second language. So it was very basic stuff in the beginning. If you want them to train how they pronounce these words, here are a couple little exercises. And that's what you would write after every half hour lesson with a one-on-one student to the parents.
We just write the same thing over and over again, because you would teach the same lessons. It was apples here, oranges there, and then apples again. It gets repetitive. That's what took so much time. And we automated that away.
But those templates were not just for any one teacher, right?
You could share them with other teachers because they were teaching the same lessons. It was an online English school with pretty well pre-determined lesson plans and structure with Chinese companies mostly. So you know that they have a pretty rigid curriculum.
And we built this internal sharing system into our platform that turned it from a simple SaaS business that just served individual customers to kind of a marketplace for feedback templates that would be freely shared. It was free. It was not that people could make money off them.
But hey, if you find somebody else's amazing template and you import that into your own database and you start using it, the parents that you communicate with, they will think, hey, this is an amazing teacher. I'm going to book them again. So that was a benefit for everybody to use the internal marketplace of the system.
And that really allowed us to build a lot of our marketing on top of word of mouth, because this is so obviously a platform where every new person is already a benefit because they bring in new templates. And for every new customer looking at the platform, they see, oh, there is like hundreds of thousands of free templates for me to use.
Yeah, that's worth 10 bucks a month. It was very clearly a network effect that we built into the product from the beginning because we knew, and that's maybe the most important part here, that the community was already sharing their templates for feedback through like a Google Docs or like a Google Sheet. It was really basic. But we saw that.
We saw that there was this impetus to share among the community, which is not surprising because the teachers, right?
Teachers love teaching other people and not just students, but also other teachers how to be good teachers. So we just found a really perfect market to build a product to facilitate what was already happening and just made it much easier, much better and quite friendly, cheap enough for people to use. Teachers aren't really the most well-paid people, unfortunately.
And 10 bucks a month was just right for them to use it, kind of Netflix subscription level pricing back in the day. So it was really useful. And that allowed us to do all our marketing in a community way. We went to Facebook, into the communities that teachers were already using and didn't even do much. We didn't really push anything. We just reply to people complaining about feedback.
Well, we use Feedback Panda, or we encourage our customers to tell other people about Feedback Panda. For the longest time, we didn't even have a referral system in place and people still referred the product.
So we built that at some point to kind of capture the intent and make it even more of an incentive based thing, but probably wouldn't have needed it because teachers were just so willing to share in their communities already. And just a quick question on the templates.
If I created a template, would it automatically go into the marketplace or did I have to click a button?
This is a setting that we had that we had it set.
Honestly, I think we switched that around a bit in an experiment, but I think they would per default not go into the marketplace.
But we would encourage people to turn on the default setting, right?
To check the little box to share this in the Feedback Panda cloud. This is just what we called it. And people quite quickly adopted this because they saw the benefit of not just other people sharing their templates, but they themselves also, but themselves just also sharing templates. They were pretty aware of the use that other people might have from their templates.
So I think we had a fairly willing kind of community for that particular feature. The other great thing about that story is that your customer development was probably just having dinner with your girlfriend. Oh yeah.
Honestly, I built this so I could have dinner with my girlfriend because she was working for 10, 12 hours a day.
Because online English teaching, the more you teach, the more money you make, right?
And when you're at home and you don't have anything else to do because you can't leave the house because you're like injury, you teach and she loved teaching and it was adorable.
Honestly, like seeing my girlfriend teaching Chinese kids who barely speak English over the internet with the whole animated stuff, like singing, dancing, finger puppets and stuff. It was just really cute. But the cute ended after the teaching period and then started the hours of slogging through feedback because you had to give feedback to even get paid for the teaching that you did.
There was a prerequisite to get paid at all was to write out these things and send it to the parents. It was intense, but I wanted her to not have to spend that time sitting there typing, but spend time with me, which is why I built a tool with her. Obviously she designs structurally what she needed. I just implemented the technical parts and it was a back and forth for a while.
I built the first prototype. She tried to use it. It was like, and then we fixed it. We actually got a good version running and then we kind of just let it seep into the community.
The first and almost only initial marketing push we made was somebody asking, hey, how do you guys deal with feedback on Facebook?
And Danielle was just saying, well, I use Feedback Panda. Here's the link. And then that was the first day. I think we had like 80 users on the first day just coming in, signing up and starting to use the product.
And I think one of my most favorite anecdotes about this earlier part of Feedback Panda was that somebody tried to pay before I had actually implemented payments on the platform, right?
Before I had switched the test key for Stripe with the production key that would actually allow me to capture money. People were so enthused about this product already being so much better than what they had built themselves with Word or Excel or Google, whatever. So people tried to build something but couldn't because they didn't have the technical chops.
But I had decades of SaaS building experience and I could just really easily bring that into this very niche solution to a very niche problem. It was fairly simple.
Yeah, that's kind of how that happened. And I got my girlfriend back.
I had time now to spend together building a business which is even better, right?
It's not just dinner, it's business dinner. So that was really cool. This is such a great story because the more I spend in marketing, the more I realized that actually, the more you invest in making the product better, the less it's just inefficient to spend more on marketing. And so it's just such a beautiful story.
Was there anything else though?
Because here we have a B2B marketing podcast, and I love sharing actionable B2B marketing tips with the audience.
Is there anything else that you did?
We heard the referral scheme, we had the template library.
Was there anything else that you pushed to help with that growth?
One thing that I noticed, because in a way, you might think that we had like 5,000 something customers at the end before we sold the company just at that point. And we were still two people only running the business. You could think this is like a B2C business, but it really wasn't. It was essentially a B2B business, but with people who didn't really understand that they were businesses.
Like these were essentially contractors, freelancers, online English teachers, right?
That would go to many different schools and work for them on a per hour basis. But they were businesses and they had business budgets and we had to educate them towards that. We had to tell them, hey, you actually are a business and the money you invest into tools like this and other tools is something you can claim against your taxes if you do it right.
So like making the customer understand that they are actually our business in for many industries, that is still a thing because the moment people freelance do stuff by themselves, it always feels like this kind of in between, right?
Between this is just a project, a hobby, and now it's becoming something that could actually monetize my life. So that was the big deal. And how we did that, this is kind of where I'm going with this, is in the customer service conversations on the platform. Like if people had a problem, if they reached out and they didn't really know they want to say, they're just going to ask questions and stuff.
One thing was we were talking about their business of being a teacher. And the other thing, we spent a lot of time building relationships, particularly early with our first initial customers, people who were just trying out to tool, trying to figure out if this is for them.
Sometimes I would spend half an hour just chatting away with a person, which would cut into my development budget, obviously, right?
Made the, gave me less time to build the product because I was the only person who could technically build it. But I still focused on building this relationship with these people.
And I would say in 85, 90% of the cases there, these relationships turn out to be amplifiers for the marketing for years, because these people, people who were just trying a new thing, never expected to even get a reply from customer service, let alone within a minute or two, because I was just there, right?
Quickly replying. They were evangelists for the product for months and years to come.
These initial relationships, they were catalysts that made everything else like getting into new Facebook groups, because somebody needed to invite us, right?
You need people in those key positions. And if you have those people, because they're already there talking to you in your product, if you want to, that's just perfect. And investing time and energy into this was probably much better than investing time and energy into yet another feature that may or may not attract people.
So the human connection, that was something that I quite easily underestimated before, and then quickly learned to value.
Yeah, nice. So non-scalable relationship building, founders doing support.
Yeah, it's really bizarre because most people expect like a customer service drone, if not an AI bot at this point, right?
They think, oh, yeah, somebody's just going to try to get me off customer service as fast as possible.
And when you show up quickly and respond to them in an empathetic way, and kind of also show some of your humanity, like you being a person building this business, right?
You tell them the story, you put the narrative of the business in there, everything changes. It becomes a human relationship, not just this business transaction. Like even in the B2B world, where I also worked before, I worked for an Internet of Things startup in Germany back in the day.
That is actually how Feature Canada happened, because I was commuting back and forth from Berlin to Hamburg, two and a half hours by train for weeks, for a year or so, and like multiple times a week. And I had all this time reading books and listening to podcasts. And that's kind of where the impetus to build my own business came from. But I still worked full time for this things company.
And you can feel sometimes when you talk to people who need support for your product, how they're just exasperated. They hate talking to support people because they always just shun to the side. But the moment you humanize the connection, you will actually have somebody who can give you something meaningful for your business, not just money, but sometimes insight, or even amplification towards their peers and towards other potential prospects for your business.
People severely underestimate the connection and technical people in particular, counting myself as one, right?
I come from a development background. We just think of products and algorithms and strategies. But we often forget that just a chat with a person can unlock so much with so much potential.
Okay, so 5000 customers, that was going to be one of my questions.
I think I read or remember in a podcast interview, it was like 60 grand a month, if that right?
When you sold?
Is that public?
Yeah, that's pretty much where we were.
Okay, cool. And I just like interested in understanding because obviously the company was growing quite nicely, I assume it would have been stressful because there was just a two of you.
But what was the reason for selling?
There were multiple reasons.
Like both Daniel and I, we were living in Berlin at the time, which is a pretty expensive city, even though it's a cheap city compared to other cities in Europe, right?
Berlin is the motto is poor, but sexy. That's actually the city motto. So tells you a lot about the city. But we were we're living in a little apartment and we wanted to we had no savings. We're just working and trying to make ends meet as many people do.
And we wanted to diversify our wealth at one point and knowing that you have a company that is making 60k a month, which is like somewhere 600 or 700k a year around that situation. That tells you that you have a million dollar business on your hands.
But it's just two people, right?
We were just two people running it a couple contractors doing things here and there. But we were just the two owners and operators of the business. And we thought, this is pretty valuable.
But the bus factor, right?
The risk of losing this business with if one of us, God forbid, has any medical condition or something, it's just way too high. So we wanted to diversify that away. And at that time, we didn't know much about safes or partial buyouts, we just thought we just sell the business. That's the best thing we could do.
That's one thing diversification and that has really helped like that really catapult to a new level in financial independence that from where you make much better choices than like month to month paycheck to paycheck.
But that more important for me, particularly choice there was because I was the only technical person I kind of mentioned it, right?
I was building the product, I was doing the customer service when it came to technical things, data and database stuff. And I had to repair the browser extension if something broke, I had to check the servers, make sure everything was fine.
That was stress inducing that the foundational level of stress that I had was just rising and rising and rising because with 5000 customers, you have 5000 potential problems, right?
That's always happening. And if something breaks with 20 customers, maybe two or three of them will reach out because they're using the product. But with 5000, a couple hundred are going to reach out and you have to reply to all of them. I also trying to solve the problem is just a lot of work. And the anxiety in me just, I got close to burnout. I think I was mid burnout.
I just didn't notice it yet. It's kind of the delayed self reflection there because I was just so in the trenches. When somebody reached out to us, but potentially, just potentially acquiring the company, we had listed the business on indihackers.com. We had connected our Stripe verified revenue data so people could actually see that it was just going up. It was constantly consistently going up.
No spikes, no hockey stick, no nothing, no valleys, just right up to the right, which is great. And people saw that and they were interested in it. And they reached out and I was like, yeah, I could sell. Danielle was not at that point. She was fine because she had a better grasp of running a business at that point, but I was fed up.
And so we went into negotiations and had a really good experience with Kevin McCardell, who ran like Shrewsworth Capital at that point. And we just reached out to other people who'd sold to them, made sure on our side that we did our due diligence on that business, who would then acquire us. And then they did acquire us and the transition was great. We handed over the whole project within a day.
It was really simple because I had being a German, I like documenting things and writing things down, structuring process. That's where I come from. And we had built that business with sellability in mind. I had read the book Built to Sell by John Warlow on those many train trips from Berlin to Hamburg before.
So I had understood, yeah, you don't necessarily need to sell a sellable business, but if you ever want to, that's great. And a good business is sellable and a sellable business has to be good. So if you want to build a good business, you might just as well build it in a sellable way.
And I had documentation in place, a lot of automation, had to keep 5,000 people happy, which is two people being in the business. And once we handed it over, took no time at all. We hired our replacements with people at Shrewsworth. And it was great. It definitely reduced my anxiety levels. It increased diversification of our financial portfolio. And we then finally could go on vacation again after a couple of years.
Because if you build a business like this, which is two operators who also live in the same house, same building, you don't really get much time away from anything, each other or the place or the company. It's a 24-7 situation. And that was at the end of 2019, just before the world exploded. It was good timing for us. For sure. And I think so.
When I mentioned I read the book, to be clear, I read it was the first book, which is the title is.
Yes, exactly. And so I think we've kind of, we've almost maybe got to the end of that book now. And I want to move on to almost like the second act of Arvis entrepreneurial journey, which I find quite interesting because the second book is about building an audience and you're like media properties, author cover this. We'll link to everything by the way of Arvis below the show notes.
If you're listening, it's going to check out.
So my question is this audience first, like opinion is the thing that you're communicating now, but actually isn't a way that you built feedback Panda, right?
Because I assume you didn't have an audience of teachers before you build a product. So you tell me a little bit about where this came from. Yeah. What we noticed building feedback Panda is that a community centric business, like a business that listens to a community has a much easier time.
And I kind of understood there for the very first time that focusing on the people you're going to be serving and trying to understand them, like from the inside is a much better approach than trying to make assumptions, right?
It still was not a perfectly audience focused business at that point, because we build it for Danielle really, and then kind of expanded it into the community. Because it would be a hybrid at that point.
But after that, in reflecting on all the mistakes I made both with feedback Panda and the many, many projects that just evaporated before I did that, right?
I've been trying to build bootstrap businesses since I don't know, 2012 or something. It's been a while, 10 years now. That's incredible. Time flies when you're having not much success.
No, but we were just, we figured that the community is incredibly powerful, particularly if it is a community that is willing to help each other. And in then writing more about it, because that was the first thing I did after we sold the business, we had a little vacation, but I kind of still felt I needed to do something because this is what every entrepreneur who sells a business will...
Where did you go?
We went to South Africa. We had a little retreat. That was also, well, you could still travel, really. That was in October or something in 2019. Had a little safari. That was nice.
But while I was sitting on the little wagon being driven through the bush and looking at lions and stuff, I was like, what am I going to do next?
Because I kind of need, I think I need to prove that this wasn't just a fluke. And I've been talking to people. I recently talked to Patrick Campbell, who sold ProfitWell to Paddle for $200 million. That's insane amount of money. And he was saying, yeah. And then I sold and I felt, now I have to build something even bigger to show people that I can still do it.
That this wasn't just a fluke. And if you sell a business for $200 billion and you think, now I have to show people that was just a fluke.
Like, come on.
What does it say to the rest of us?
It's just bizarre. But that's how I felt. And that's how most people who exit their business feel. And I fortunately found writing to be my thing. Writing about my learnings, the story of Feedback Panda, the things that I did, the things that we did to make the business what it was, the things we tried that didn't work, all that kind of stuff.
A lot of mental health focus, because I understood at that point that I was in a burnout state and how to recuperate from that. That's kind of how I started my blog. And then people told me that, yeah, I love your blog, but I can't read while I drive. So I started my podcast. And then people said, yeah, I love your podcast, but I'd like to see you.
And then I kind of started my YouTube channel. It's always kind of feedback focused on the community.
And that, like the focus on who already has a lingering connection and what they think they need and what you can see what they need. That led me to the audience first approach. And audience doesn't necessarily mean just like a group of people who follow you. Right. My definition of audience is a bit further.
It's kind of more almost like market is defined, like the potential audience that you have, like the people who are out there who don't know who you are. Plus the people who are out there who've kind of heard from you, but aren't really connected.
Plus the people who know you and are connected and the people in the past that were connected to you and the people in the future that might connect to you. All of this to me is audience, because just looking at your following on Twitter right now, it's a very limited approach to the group of people that you could be serving. Right. So kind of more encompassing definition of audience.
We didn't do that with Feedback Panda, although we did go into the community and source our feedback and information from the community, but almost wouldn't call it unintentional, but subconscious level. Like we knew that there was something there and that was the only way we could reach it.
And then after we built the business and I had time to actually consider what we did, that's when I went into the whole audience first approach. It's kind of audience centric, maybe as a weaker version of that. Right.
It's not, you don't have to build the audience first, but you have to focus on what will grow, what will maintain and what will satisfy the audience as you build your product.
So right now, would you describe yourself as being in the media business?
Yes, I absolutely.
I'm like, you should see this. I'm sitting here surrounded by cinematic lighting and high quality microphone and a good camera, a teleprompter that I could read notes from if I wanted to right now. I'm in the media business. Tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. Really. You have a teleprompter. Seriously. These are the little things that you develop over time. And I'm kind of an iterative person to begin with.
I started with my iPhone, right?
But the Twitter course that I made was recorded on an iPhone 12 or something with an iPhone 9 underneath as a teleprompter. It was bizarre, but it was fun. And now I really consider myself a media business.
I still run the software as a service business on the side, which was kind of an offshoot of- Which one is this?
It's called permanent link. When I wrote my first book.
Well, link below. Great. That was awesome. Perfect. You should use a permanent link for that.
Now, when I wrote my first book and I put it on the Amazon KDP, the Kindle Direct Publishing platform that allows people to self-publish books in print and in ebook form, I had links in there, obviously, as it is a business book, right?
And a couple of days after I published, the first link broke and Amazon KDP reported that to me. And they flag your product if links in your product don't work. So you kind of have to chase these links all the time. It was bizarre. So I thought, I need some kind of way to control the links in my book forever without having to update the book every time that works.
And I didn't just want to use an URL shortener. I wanted something that has control over the links and would automatically fall back to a cached version of the link so that people can always see what I wanted to show them. So I built this little tool, has a couple dozen customers, really not the biggest SaaS in the world. And it's completely automated.
I don't think I've touched the code base in a year at this point. It just works because again, simple solution for a simple problem. I run this, but most of my time is actually spent on recording podcast interviews with amazing people from the community, writing articles about things that I thought about while having the interview, and then turning all of this into multiple different forms of media.
And that's what I spend most of my time on. It's quite enjoyable.
And honestly, my stress levels, which were like this high, right?
Like almost full me, full stress out all the time. Now all I need to do is edit like an hour of video a week and record another 20 minutes of myself commenting on it. It does take such as so much lower.
People still expect it, right?
But I don't have to run YouTube where the video is hosted. I don't have to run Transistor where the audio is hosted. I just need to, I can prepare, I can do stuff in advance. I can have an empty calendar, essentially. My conversation with you is the only thing I have today on my calendar.
So that has always been my goal, right?
Empty calendar and full day with whatever I want to do. So that's why the media business at this point in my life, who knows where I'm going to be going, is the thing that I do.
And yes, it's definitely a media business. Because once you build the audience, then you can decide, you have optionality over what you sell to these people, if you sell anything at all.
Because they have the Twitter course, right?
And so you have some customer service there, surely people asking you questions, et cetera.
Yeah, usually customer service on my work boils down to, I downloaded this file on Android and I don't know how to open it.
Honestly, that's probably the only question that I get. Because I mean, people still send me emails and tell me, I read the book, this is cool. This I didn't understand that kind of like writerly customer service. As a writer, I explain my thoughts through email or on Twitter when people reach out about them.
But there's no technical component, right?
If Amazon KDP doesn't work, people don't write to me. They write to Amazon or if they can't download the file from Gumroad or iTunes, they have a problem. There usually is either a Google answers already out there, or there's an abstraction layer of customer service that somebody else can do. So I very rarely get technical customer service, but I still do customer service in a sense of that.
I spread my knowledge with people. I share questions that people ask me publicly, my answer to them. And I sometimes pull that into my podcast. So it becomes more of a customer conversation than just a one-on-one service.
I bet you like, oh, maybe I'm making assumption here, but as this audience of like bootstrapped entrepreneurs is growing, I bet you've been thinking about other things that you could build to sell to these people. There's always stuff.
And honestly, with a growing audience, obviously the opportunities that are sourced from directly with Google, within that audience, they also grow, right?
The more you find interesting people and connect with them, they come with interesting projects because they know you're good. They know you have some kind of skill or some kind of reach. And I'm getting close to a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. I have a lot of reach into this community. So I get a lot of project suggestions from people. I can pick and choose.
So yes, there's always something on the horizon, but I'm kind of trying to stay true to my empty calendar model because that's kind of why I went into this risky entrepreneurship thing in the first place is to have a life that I control, not that is controlled by somebody else. So I'm very reluctant to overcommit. I did that in the beginning and it was a bit too much.
I had to retract from multiple projects and now I'm just, whatever comes my way, I'm going to let it, let's just rest a little bit. Like a good steak after you fry it up has to rest for 20 minutes. And the same is happening in my life. If there's a good opportunity, I'll take a look at it and let it rest a bit and see if it actually tastes well.
So we're not riding off the chance of being like a solo SaaS founder again.
No, not at all. I think that could definitely happen. There are so many interesting ideas out there, but honestly, at this point with the approach that I'm taking, I am so much more willing to share my ideas and let somebody else build them that because I want to see the thing in reality. I don't necessarily want to build it.
I mean, I could, and I probably would have fun doing it, but having somebody else built the thing and I can now just like pay them 20 bucks a month. So much better because I don't need to invest two years of my life into it.
But yeah, maybe I'm always looking for things that are adjacent to the thing I'm doing. And the more I get into video, the more I get into YouTube, the more I see little things in editing and in audio recording and in repurposing of content and in content dissemination and archival and stuff that I think there could be something here.
But as long as I still enjoy just coming up with things to talk about and having amazing conversations with people every week, why build something else?
This is good enough.
I mean, look at people like Tim Ferriss, who have this amazing gigantic podcast, one of the first podcasts that I ever listened to in the business realm. And from what I see, obviously a very limited perspective, he's just having cool end conversations with other people. And then he has a team to deal with the rest.
It's not too bad of a perspective to have, right?
Yeah, I totally get it.
What are you finding right now is like the best thing for building an audience?
Because I know you're on various different channels. I think Twitter, in my case, is the best platform to build on because my audience is there. I know that there, I know that the software engineers that want to build a business, they're on Twitter because the software engineering field is on Twitter. Indie hackers who are already building businesses, obviously they are on Twitter.
I mean, they're also somewhere else, right?
They're also on indiehackers.com or they're on Slack's or Discord servers. So you kind of have to go where the people are that you want to hang out with. That's the best place. The best place is where they already are.
In the second book that I wrote, The Embedded Entrepreneur, that I kind of went deep into this because that's what I had to do to find my own audience was to kind of dig and ask people, so where do you hang out?
And then go there and ask people, so where else do you hang out?
So you can get this whole network of communities that people are in because it's not just Twitter, right?
Sometimes it's LinkedIn. It's a particular part of LinkedIn or this weird forum from the late nineties where like slash dot or something where people hang out and talk about very specific problems or specific tools even. You have to go into the community and kind of do this exploration move first to understand where you should be doing whatever you end up doing.
Your marketing or your outreach or your customer nourishment or your customer nurturing nourishment. You don't need to feed them, but the nurturing and just all the things that are kind of the many different parts of your marketing strategy. You kind of have to know where they are best applied.
And to me, Twitter is great. LinkedIn is coming up for many interesting reasons, mostly because the algorithm is not as hyper optimized as Twitter at this very moment could change in a day or two, but LinkedIn gives people a lot of impressions of on content that wouldn't work as well on Twitter or doesn't work as well. And then email is still king for me at least I'm building a newsletter.
I know that the people who give me their email address, they have jumped over a hurdle that they will never have to jump over on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever kind of social media they might be on. Right. It's easy to follow. It's easy to unfollow on Twitter and LinkedIn.
So it costs you barely anything, but giving somebody access to your email inbox, that is quite the cost in any kind of internet age. This was quite the cost, but it is particularly now because everybody wants to send your marketing email.
So building a long-term relationship with people, actually reading your newsletter, reading something that you put out periodically, that is one of the most stable ways to build an audience, giving them the chance to invite their friends into that relationship too, like referral and newsletter systems and encouraging word of mouth, asking people like, you know, in every YouTube video where somebody asks you to please like and subscribe that as annoying as it is, just giving people the trigger to help you if they like what you did so much better than not doing that.
Right. So that's how you build an audience, being honest with people about that you're building an audience and asking them to help you. I totally agree with everything you just said. I think the hard part where most people would fall down is obviously you're going to go into the audience to actually build a, to actually gain followers.
You need to produce content that people really like enough to come and follow you or subscribe.
Now, obviously the way you do that is by spending 10 years trying to build businesses online, but is there any other tips you can give the audience on that?
Yes. One of the things that I found work particularly well for people who don't have a large audience, which is almost everybody, is to consider content creation. Like the thing you just talked about creating valuable things, not just to be about writing things and sharing them on social media, but actually building relationships first and then having the content come later. I call this the audience audition.
Like you go to somebody's account that like somebody in your, let's just take Twitter as an example, somebody with like 20,000 followers and you followed them, you had turned on the notification and you see when they post something interesting, right?
And if it's something interesting that you have something meaningful to contribute to, you go into this conversation, you see what other people are talking about. You reply to them, not necessarily the big account, but to the replies that other people gave to that piece of conversation there.
And you start building relationships one by one by one by one with the people who are already so aligned with you because they follow the same person and engage with the same things that you find interesting. And you do this over and over again. You don't have to even come up with original tweets or write articles to link or share or get them to your blog.
Just put a link to whatever project you want people to come to into your Twitter bio, or noticeably in the link section and maybe even in the bio description and just be nice, authentic, a real person and give people meaningful contributions in the conversation. You don't need to do much more. Just do that for like half an hour a day if you can spare the time.
And over time people will understand this is a person that actually wants to contribute to the community. This is somebody who cares about me as another member of the community, not just about building an audience or getting followers. And then this kind of movement where people will start looking at your work and start interacting with you. That would just keep increasing and increasing.
I see this working all the time compared to people just like blasting tweets into the void. Nobody wants...
If you have two followers and you send a tweet, like you have a one in 10 chance that one of these people even sees it, who's going to react to that?
But if you even just with two followers start engaging with people that have thousands of followers, now thousands of potential followers will see your little interaction and they will judge you.
Is this a nice person?
Cool, follow. That's how that works. That's how you build your audience by just being nice and in public. You're nice and friendly and helpful in front of other people who are watching. There we go guys. No blasting tweets into the void. That's like the tag. That's the quote from the episode.
Now it's actually a great place to finish Avid though, because there's a link between what you're saying there and what you said was so crucial when building feedback boundaries, these one-on-one connections, being a nice guy, being there and actually discussing. Yeah. Authenticity and building long-term, real, genuine relationships with people. That is something that businesses are now expected to do, particularly when they're small.
You can expect Coca-Cola to relate to anybody, but you know that they don't and they don't care because they essentially drain sugar water. They don't care about your meaningful relationship with them.
But if I were building a software service business for taxi drivers, helping them navigate their invoicing or whatever they need to do, then I would probably want to build really well-established relationships with people in this field, with people who are actually driving, people who are actually doing their invoicing so I can understand what their problems are and if their problems change because there's new regulation or you want to have this kind of channel into your community, the people that you're trying to serve and empower and you need this to be a bi-directional channel.
And for that, you need relationships and you can only get them by building them one-on-one in a long-term perspective. It's never about the short sale, never about the quick money with this. If you want to build something that will last, you will have to build relationships to last as well.
All right, guys. On that note, zero to sold on Amazon. You need to search for that now. And then the embedded entrepreneur needs to search for that now on Amazon. Buy both. I actually read the second one, so I'm going to buy that today. I'm going to get reading. If the domain is the Bootstrap entrepreneur, the bootstrapfounder.com, bootstrapfounder.com, YouTube channel and podcast.
Everything I've just said is going to be linked below guys. So just click on the link.
Arvid, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and your wisdom. It was great to hear about the feedback on the story, like from the actual person, not just the book. And it was also super interesting to see what you're doing with the audience stuff. And I'm also excited to see what SaaS product you may or may not start in the future.
Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for having me. And thank you so much for listening. That was an awesome chat. Thank you so much, Arvid, for coming on.
Obviously, thank you for listening. I've got one review here. The title is First Time Listener Here! Hooked! The interview with DH was awesome. And I love her world Tom Arthur's questions. Thank you so much. This was Teviki123 in December of this year. Thank you so much for that review. If you would like to get your review, shout it out on the show.
Just leave a review, send me a screenshot on LinkedIn, email it to me, and then I'll get you and your business a shout out on the show.
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