RS035: Surviving The Grind

Welcome to Episode where Dave and Craig are catching up on our businesses, and what we’re doing to get through the proverbial “Grind” of taking our businesses to the next level.  This is a stage that every business goes through, and how they navigate it will tell a lot about the long term future of a company.

Dave, after deciding to shelf Support Vine a few weeks ago, has decided to double down on his WordPress business focus.  With an email list 9,000+ strong, he has embarked on a customer development program to extract new business opportunities for a WP Plugin.  With excellent responses from his first 2 surveys, he’s now deciphering the data he’s received back and trying to figure out which direction to take.  

Doubling down on his strengths in WordPress, his audience both of customers and of followers in the WP space, and his knowledge of how to build, release, and market those products shoul prove to be a smart move for the near future of the business.  Having a strong portfolio of WordPress products certainly has proved to be a great business model for 2 of our previous guests, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.  

Craig has made the move to hire his first full time employee for PodcastMotor.  This is a huge decision to the future of the business, and will allow him to make some really strong scaling moves in the next few months.  This is someone who’s been working on a contract basis for him since the beginning, which gives both a lot of confidence in the fit, abilities, communication styles, and dependability.  All things that are vital when working on such a small team.

As this first employee comes on board it will allow Craig to focus more on sales, marketing, community building, and scaling out PodcastMotor from it’s current 20ish customers to his goal of 50.  This will take a lot of work, some trial and error undoubtedly, and a lot of lessons along the way that we look forward to relaying to you all.

So we want to hear how you’ve dealt with The Grind.  We’re both finding this as a challenging time, as our businesses are established and successful, and now comes the hard part of changing from the things that got us those first customers to the size of business that can support us full time.  How have you dealt with the grind?  Lessons learned?  Leave a comment below or hit us up on Twitter @RogueStartups.

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