Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where to start a founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:20 All right, welcome to episode one 75 of rogue startups. Craig, you have some big news today?
Speaker 2 00:28 I do. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a, it's been quite the whirlwind last couple of days. Um, yeah, we, we found out a few weeks ago, I guess that we were accepted that castoffs was accepted into the first batch of tiny seed companies and they made the announcement yesterday. And so yeah, it's been a lot of, you know, getting that organized and chatting with folks and all this kind of stuff. And it, it feels really cool to be able to tell everybody and talk to you David. It cause you didn't know either. I didn't tell anyone, but my wife I think about it. Um, so yeah, it's really cool to be able to talk about it and I think it's, I think it's a kind of important to talk about why we did it. Um, because a lot of folks, like you asked before we started recording, it's like, why did you do this? And you don't, you know, didn't seem like you needed to do this kind of thing. And, but yeah, we're super excited and I can already tell that it's a really special group of companies in there and a really special group of mentors. And obviously rob and I are super involved, which is really powerful too. So
Speaker 1 01:32 yeah, I mean I've seen the announcement of the various mentors and they're all top grade folks for their respective areas of expertise and so on and so forth. But let's just dive right into this because I mean, what, you know, what was your motive for doing this with cast those, cause we've been talking about Castillo's four years at this point and this wasn't something that I ever heard you really allude to saying, man, I wish I could just get some funding or I really feel like, you know, if I had some more money I could really take this thing to the next level. I just, I wasn't hearing that. And so either I'm totally naive and I missed some subtle signal that you threw out there or you were really playing this close to the vest here.
Speaker 2 02:14 Yeah, I think it's more the latter. I mean, I, um, I haven't, I just haven't talked about this at all and the reason, well, the, one of the reasons is like we're in a really competitive field and a competitive field kind of even within our little world, you know, there's other people that we know that are doing this kind of thing and so that's part of it. But we, it all kind of started not from, you know, me needing the, the tiny seed money to live on or anything. Cause I mean Casto says, uh, you know, pretty big and successful SAS app and what area, it's not big but it's whatever. It doesn't need extra money for me to live on. But it really was, I started thinking around the end of the year about like, what if we raised some money for the business? Like what could we do with Castillo's as to bootstrapping it?
Speaker 2 03:00 Um, because we're seeing even now is still seeing like really solid, like five, six, seven, eight, 9% growth every month after two years even. And you know, we, we passed having a thousand customers back in like December or something and we've been growing since then. So we have a, you know, whatever, we have solid revenue and are growing and you look at like the podcasting space a little bit and you're like, you know, this player gets bought by this player in Spotify, buys these guys and all this going to stop is happening. I look at it and say like, could we be base camp or MailChimp and like run this business forever as bootstraps, you know, company. Yeah, we could probably, but I think that the chances better that we would miss out on some kind of opportunity either from being involved in something like tiny seed or having the resources both financially and mentors and connections and all this kind of stuff with tiny seed to open the door for opportunities for us in partnerships or whatever else might come down the road or just growing a lot faster than we could, you know, with being bootstrapped.
Speaker 2 04:09 So that's really why we did, I mean tiny seed. I know like originally the thought was it's for people who are just trying to get a new app off the ground. I can tell you from some of the other people that I know were in the cohort and by the time this episode goes out, there'll be another couple of announcements about the other companies in the first cohort. Some of them are definitely like pre-revenue, just getting their MVP out the door and that's cool. But there's also other companies like <inaudible> in there that have been around for years and people are saying, okay, it's time to really get serious about this. And put some muscle behind it. So,
Speaker 1 04:42 well that's interesting because I mean, maybe I read too much into what they were talking about in their initial announcements about this, but it very much sounded like they were trying to give the living wage for founders to be able to really focus on the business. But that's not what you're doing here. And obviously they know where you're at and they know your personal story and that you don't need these, this for living and that you're going to invest in the business. So that's definitely okay. That's, that's something that's on the table for them to stay. Yeah, we, we definitely approve of this kind of investment as opposed to just making it for living.
Speaker 2 05:21 Yup. Yeah. I mean, I, when I, uh, whatever around the end of the year and the early kind of spring was talking to rob can offline about like, you know, hey, I'm thinking about raising money, kind of how did you think about raising money or not or you know, as eventually getting acquired by leadpages when he was with drip. And, and that's kind of where, you know, some of the conversation about like, yeah, probably some more resources beyond the business would be <inaudible> better than the, like the risk and the downside of taking on an investor, the potential upside is probably bigger. And then I talked to a bunch of other people after this and, and kind of confirmed that and they went from, yeah, you probably should do this too, you know? Yeah. I mean, tiny seed initially was kind of built for people who are just trying to quit their day jobs so they can focus full time on their APP too. They're investing in businesses that can become seven, eight figure businesses. And it doesn't matter to them really what stage you're at. It's just a matter of, you know, would, would it investment and the participation in the accelerator program and the mentors and all this kind of stuff help you get there. And for us the answer is hell yeah. I mean, almost like even without the money it would be worth it,
Speaker 1 06:27 you know? Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it makes total sense. Uh, so can you share what the plans are that you have for the next three to six months?
Speaker 2 06:37 Yeah, I can share pretty roughly what the plan is. Um, so we, I'll give God a percentages of what I have planned. So of the, I like a financial perspective of the money that we've received. We'll spend probably 75% of it on marketing and advertising and customer acquisition and about 25% of it on product. And so product for me is like design and development. And the cool thing about it is, you know, I already make a salary from Casios. We already pay. All of our people, you know, were already four people will, will kind of increase the hours on one of our folks, uh, are, are probably two of them to bring them up to pretty much full time and then just spend the rest of the, the money hiring a full time marketer and spending in giving them a budget to play with.
Speaker 1 07:28 Nice. Nice. Did you well, yeah, I mean, I don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of what you're doing because I'm sure as you're going along here in the next few months, we'll talk about, hey, you tried this experiment and this is what happened. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So that's super exciting, man. I, I'm very stoked for you.
Speaker 2 07:44 Thanks man. Thanks. Yeah, it's uh, it's definitely another level in terms of like how I feel about the business, you know, like it was a cool, good business before, but now it's like, okay, I am, I am in like a, you know, we're not the big leagues or whatever, but like I have responsibility to someone other than myself and my family know and like, we gotta make it happen and you know, talk to the team about that. Yesterday morning we had a, we had a call before the announcement went out and you know, tried to relay that pretty, pretty subtly but succinctly that like, you know, okay, we're not like a huge venture backed company with like 20 million in the bank. But the goal now is this money is not sitting in the bank. This money is going to get deployed to grow because that's its job and we can, we can use this money to grow and then we can become a profitable kind of more lifestyle profit driven company. That's cool. Um, but we probably will just continue to plow as much money as we can back into the growth of the company and I don't, I don't plan on taking, you know, a bunch of profits or dividends from, from the business anytime soon.
Speaker 1 08:47 Excellent. Excellent. So I'm sure that, uh, we will all be glued to the four updates over next few months to see what you get to do with all of this because we've had those conversations in the past. Like what would you do if you got a budget of $100,000? Well, you just got $100,000, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. Great guest to live the dream here.
Speaker 2 09:11 Yeah, I'm excited about it. Let me say, know the hard thing is, uh, the, the first thing I'll be doing is something I'd never done, you know, hiring a marketing person, which is something you should be kind of my job. Um, as the non developer, I should be the marketer and I still will be really involved in marketing from probably the high level strategy, a perspective. But you know, we need somebody who wakes up every day and thinks how can I get more users? And I think about that a lot, but I think about about a lot of other shit too. So, um, we need to have someone that's just like singularly focused on this and I think that'll make a huge difference. So
Speaker 1 09:46 yeah, it's hard to be the founder and distracted all the time and have that singular focus on that. So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Everything's or the human things are good. I haven't, uh, you know, not a lot of updates or changes since our last episode about updates and things like that. We're trying to push a major update of the plugins out the door. And once again, it's delayed on my account trying to get an a site update done and not had any time to dedicate to that. So I'm flirting with the idea at this point of hiring somebody to try to actually do that. But I'm not really sure where the funds are going to come from. So I think I'm just going to have to buck up and work extra hours to get that piece done so I can push this out the door and say we're done. Hmm.
Speaker 2 10:31 This is a like a front end marketing site update or,
Speaker 1 10:35 yeah. Yeah. That's for the classifieds plugin. I mean we have a wordpress theme on there from 2011. Uh, yeah. I mean I, I had to struggle, so we had a forced upgrade and wordpress engine, WP engine, sorry. Uh, that was PHP seven. The damn theme wasn't even PHP seven compliant because it was so old. Oh Wow. UPDATES. Yeah. It was an old woo theme thing, but they just stopped supplying updates several years ago. So I've had that sitting on the site and I updated the one on business directory plugin a long time ago. When we upgraded the version, but I'd never went back and did the same thing for ADB PCP. And now that we're getting ready to push a major update, I'm trying to do that except that when I went back to look at what I did and BDP cause I was like, oh, I'll just take a lot of the same ideas and thoughts and page structure that I had over here and dump it over and data BPCP I don't really care. Yeah. You know, I can change the content very easily if I had some basic structure to hang it on. Well, for whatever reason, I can't seem to figure out how the fuck I got the structure into BDP. It's just really embarrassing as a wordpress guy. Uh, but in my defense, I haven't touched that theme in three years. So yeah.
Speaker 2 11:47 Use like a genesis theme or something for it or
Speaker 1 11:50 yeah. Studio press. Yeah. Yeah. The press theme. It's a genesis. Uh, it's called centric pro. Great theme works like a tramp. Just however I set up and configured that thing, I can't seem to replicate it at this point. And I, you know, I'd like switched in between then and now like to other things. Like I read the parts of big snow, tiny comp by hand, and then I was experimenting for a while on redoing recapture but with beaver builder. And so I have like this jumble of shit in my head of how I put this stuff together from the content perspective and I can't unpack it anymore. And I, I, yeah. So I mean I'm like trying to relearn how to run one of these new studio press themes from scratch and then getting distracted. Like if I had two or three days, I'm sure I could nail this thing, but I don't have two or three unfettered, totally dedicated distraction free days. And that's my, that's my limiting factor here, which is, yeah. So
Speaker 2 12:49 yeah, we so well all of our websites run on genesis and uh, yeah, I don't know if you've taken a look at the widgets area, like a appearance and then widgets. It controls the front page typically where you code and a bunch of like html in widgets. And those are the different like sections on the front page. I Dunno if that's how centric works or not, but that's how all of our stuff works, which is Kinda nice cause it's a little modular but it's definitely not like beaver builder element or something like that where you just get on the front end and design it around and make it look like you want. Um, it's pretty old school like that.
Speaker 1 13:20 Yeah. The front page is a, is one of the pages that I was trying to Redo. The other one, which is not the front page at all, is my features page. And I thought I knew where that was and I think I found the content, but then when I go in there and I changed the content, it's not updating the front page. So I think I have old copies of shit laying around in the sites. I'm having trouble. And what's even more infuriating is that, you know, the dashboard search on the admin. So I look for keywords to certain things in content. It's not finding them in the genesis areas on like the,
Speaker 2 13:52 it's tough. It's so tough. You know, on this, on this front, I've been hearing more and more about web flow as a CMS of choice lately. Uh, I don't, I've used it just a little bit when we bought sales camp, the homepage for it was on webflow and so we played around with that a little bit then and it was fine. It was okay. But yeah, I mean I hear it quite a bit of buzz around it these days, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes in the next, you know, year or so.
Speaker 1 14:18 Yeah. Um, do you remember Jason Glassby from the Rhodium group? Yeah. So he posted something on Twitter where he was really interested in, uh, getting a job with web flow and he'd like built a whole resume site in web flow for the web flow job. Awesome. And then he tweeted about it, it was really a cool experience to watch and I thought, you know, hey, that's totally unique and why would that not get their attention? So it, I don't know if it their attention or not, but I asked Jason privately, I said, hey, you know, did did this work for you? And he's like, wow, I'm really heard back. So I was like, that's weird because you know you've got somebody who's interested to be an evangelist of your technology. He used your technology to build a resume to apply for a job to promote your technology. I thought it was cool. Apparently I was the only one so
Speaker 2 15:12 no man. I mean you know, it's amazing though Dave like more and more that is, that is really like all that matters when you're, when you're hiring somebody or trying to get a job. I feel like all that matters is like what you have done in the field or what you can do like resumes and even interviews too to a certain extent in the interviews for like personality and fit and culture and stuff like that. But like for aptitude, open source contributions and your social media and like what other marketing roles have you held and stuff like that are so much more important than like a one page document that should describe what you are, you know, like it's just crazy how your resume is the shit you do online these days
Speaker 1 15:54 pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. You know the validity of Linkedin, I think it goes down every year just because it's, you know, mostly about connections spam and stuff like that. Or people are doing cold outreach but it has less and less applicability I think in terms of like your quote unquote resume. I just don't people looking at that as a resume as much anymore. Yup, totally. Totally. So speaking of other cool tools, did you see the article from heat and Shawn the other day?
Speaker 2 16:23 Yeah man, this is super interesting. Talking about no code, no code movement.
Speaker 1 16:29 Yeah. Yeah. So on his site, use fyi.com and we'll link this in the show notes so you don't have to look this up. But he didn't, was basically doing a survey of almost 300 makers and he was trying to figure out like what were the things that they did and are they doing, you know, what are the tools that they engage in? He was trying to figure out what's going on inside of the no code movement. So if for some how you've been living under a rock, the no code movement is, you know, building up a series of services or business based on other existing services without you having to write the traditional, you know, build up, here's a server and I'm going to have a front end of the server and I'm going to deploy this out into a, uh, web machine somewhere out there and I'm going to have a database.
Speaker 1 17:17 And like all of this other technology horse shit you have to go through to stand up a whole service and a business that these no code services allow you through things like Zapier and air table. And a variety of other things type form where you can just sort of connect a bunch of these services together and deploy a business with a whole lot less ceremony and much more quickly than you would if you just wrote this stuff all from scratch. Yeah. And what was cool about the, the survey that he had here, is it, you know, like what are the things that people were struggling with and how many of them have used certain kinds of no code services. And so you kinda got like this broad and deep insight into the maker community. But the thing that I like about the whole no code movement, and this has been going on for years.
Speaker 1 18:06 Like, you know, can uh, can Wallace of mastermind, Jan put the whole thing together for his initial version using all know code you did, it was AP or in type form and a bunch of other things that he hobbled together that I think this is the, the future for all of our, you know, MVPs and things that people are trying to get out there, especially in areas where you have lower expectations or niches where they just don't have as many choices for various kinds of software. You can put something together pretty quickly and demonstrate to others the value of your proposition in a way that gets that right in front of them. And the, instead of you just waving your hands, they actually see and get to play with something right away so you can start doing your customer iteration more quickly.
Speaker 2 18:53 <inaudible> <inaudible> yeah, I mean I think, I think that's something a little bit to be careful of is that putting on it an MVP just to get in front of your customers is maybe like more dangerous now than it was before because there's so much competition that, that, you know, people are getting good looking. MVPS are first versions of products from, you know, maybe your competitors if you're in a really competitive space. But if you're in countertop estimation software, then you know, hooking something up with type form and Zapier and Google sheets, uh, and MailChimp is probably perfectly fine
Speaker 1 19:28 with apologies to Harry and Ted who are probably in their heads right now. Our customers would hate that. And rightly so.
Speaker 2 19:38 No. Right. But you mean, you know what I mean? Like somebody getting an industry where people don't expect much. Some software, which is not the area where you and I are the consumers of most software. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.
Speaker 1 19:50 No, and in fact one of the very first things that I ever worked on was for a lumber company. They were a lumber wholesaler. Yup. And one of the very first things they had me do was to basically build a transportation workflow. So they had the staging series of, of staging criteria for their trucks. So they would basically be trying to fill a truck with lumber. And then when that truck was ready to be loaded, then it moved to a different stage. And then when that truck was in transit, it went to a different stage. And I built that all first and excel, then later and access. And then at some point I had to upgrade access so that it was just the front end and I put SQL server on it. And this was like over the course of eight years. So these guys were super appreciative of the fact that I could do all of this because they simply did not understand that these things would be possible. And today with a no code movement, you could go to a niche like these guys and say, all right, well what is it that you need? And you could cobble something together with no code and it would likely be way better than what they have today. And it's most likely in an excel spreadsheet.
Speaker 2 20:58 Yeah, no, this is, uh, this is absolutely true. And I think this speaks to another article that you had sent me around this topic is that everyone's competitor, not everyone's competitor is Xcel. And like it talks about the deep bundling of XL Kinda like, uh, folks of deep bundled, uh, you know, craigslist and people and you know, things like Stubhub, uh, have come out of craigslist niches and they've said, okay, instead of just using like the tickets part of craigslist, they can make a whole app around this fuel. You're kind of saying the same thing about like CRM software and email providers and all this kind of stuff is really just coming out of excel because the barrier like the barrier to entry for people to come in to use your tool always higher and the cost is always higher and the learning curve is always higher than just using excel or Google sheets, whatever you want to call it. And so I think like no code is a, is a way to take that opportunity. You know, like the opportunity to say like, yeah, excel is really easy but it kinda sucks. What if I could build like this functionality into a dedicated app that does it better than excel? That's the, that's the opportunity. But the risk is people could just use excel, you know, like a, it's definitely a risk, you know, an opportunity and a risk at the same time.
Speaker 1 22:17 Yeah, I think there has to be a specific stage that the users of excel, our APP, because it has to be where the complexity of what they're trying to do is suddenly outweighed by how easy it is to do an excel at that point. And that's the same point that the trucking company, that lumber company that I worked for got to manipulating this and excel was just too much and it was too complicated and things were getting dropped and it didn't function as the tool that they wanted it. But you know, if you're, I mean here, here's a sad admission for you right here. I have been using the same excel invoicing template for my clients since 1994 that's fantastic. Yeah, and I've had this thing upgraded. I mean I can't even tell you how many versions of excel that's been through at this point, but the poor thing has been upgraded at uses macros.
Speaker 1 23:12 I mean it is, it is not the best experience, but guess what? I sent one or two invoices a month to my clients and it does exactly what I needed to do. Like for me to upgrade to less accounting or something like that. I just don't feel that kind of pain. Like it's not there for me to, to want to make that step up. But if I am like running an agency and I'm sending out 30 40 invoices a month or I'm sending out weekly invoices and I got to track everybody's time and I got this other stuff to go along with my accounting and time tracking, like that's where the pain is spelt. And sure you can say that, you know, excel is going to work, but at some point that scale falls down and then you have to find a SAS. So I think that's, well maybe not a SAS, but you gotta find something else, right?
Speaker 1 23:58 Yeah. And that's where this unbundling of apps from excel. So if you're looking for inspiration or something to do the will link this one article in the show notes as well. You can look at the long list of excel functionality and excel being a wildly general tool. They know they're talking about here's a real estate profitability sheet and a landlord checklist and costs, um, benefit analysis and profit loss statements and invoicing and time tracking and all of these things. And then of course they have this very hard to read series of links that are going from all these ideas in this long list saying, here's what this, here's a startup that does this. Here's the startup that does that. I didn't even recognize most of the startups on their, that's, that's how you know out of that loop I am. Because those are very purpose driven solutions. Like you have to be in that industry to know, hey, I had this specific set of needs and excel no longer fills that.
Speaker 2 24:55 Right. I think that's where like a lot of us who kind of live and online businesses only can think of solution for online businesses. Right. Cause I mean, you know, for us to build an APP for a lumber yard would be really dangerous and scary because I don't know anything about a lumber yard other than they have trees that are cut up, right. And like, I don't know how they run or what their problems are and all this kind of stuff and to, to try to go dive deep enough to really like peel the onion and understand what those people are looking for is really hard. And so I think that's probably why, like those tools are obscure for us and kind of relatively unknown as, I mean there's not a lot of people that have those problems and it's really outside of our wheelhouse as you know, digital working people.
Speaker 1 25:45 Yeah. And I will say that the reason that I discovered that opportunity in the first place is that I was, you know, I was young, I was already working for software companies, but I was looking for something a little on the side and those, I happen to have a friend that worked at this company and she mentioned to me that they were looking for this. So I, you know, set up a meeting and went in and talked to them about it. And I was totally honest with them and I said, look, I don't understand your business but you know, I am happy to sit here and talk as much as you want for free to learn that so that I can properly do what it is you need to do here. And they patiently sat down and we wrote up, you know, screenshot and you know, screen mockups and, and you know, wrote down requirements.
Speaker 1 26:28 And I sat there and clarified with them and this was all very much a discovery process. But by going in and doing that deeply, I was able to write something that was very useful to them. And that I got paid for. Like, you know, at that point I was like, okay, I understand what you guys want. I understand how I can build it and what I didn't understand. I had friends I could go ask. So I went and put that whole thing together at that point. So you know, this is a great thing if you have a connection somewhere or are willing to put yourself out there and say, hey, I would like to learn about your business and I would like to help build something that you're struggling with right now. And maybe it's a replacement for what you've got an excel. And I can, you know, if you're doing it with a no code solution, you can say, look, you know, once I understand this, I can probably deliver it to you at a very reasonable price because I don't have to build everything from scratch.
Speaker 1 27:16 And I have all these tools in my tool box over here that basically allow me to throw up a hoe house in a very short amount of time with standard materials. And then if you want to customize that house, okay, then we can talk about that later. But then let's get the house standing first and see what, what you guys think of it. Yeah. Yeah. But so there's an interesting counterpoint to this. So I was having discussion last night with some big snow folks. We have some people here in Denver that are regular attendees to big snow. And so we try to meet on a quarterly basis. And last night we were hanging at Torchy's Tacos and we were talking about the difficulty of cracking into certain markets. So this no code movement I think is really cool, but there's a lot of stuff that if you took a no code approach, you would be eaten alive. Here's a great example. Uh, if I tried to write support vine today with no code, I would be fucked.
Speaker 1 28:13 I mean, I was fucked the last time I wrote it, but if I tried it again, now the feature parody problem basically screws you. So if there are strong competitors in a niche or let's not even say niche, if there are strong competitors in the market and you are not going against the niche to where you have a specific advantage or a specific workflow that's tailored to a group of people that are underserved, then you are going to have a hell of a time cracking that market because feature parody is what everybody expects in that market. Derek Reimer just said this with level <inaudible> fully expect slacks. So here he is building level and he's going out there and then he finds out that the need is not quite as burning as he expected it, but it was enough that it was annoying. And then when he really dug into it, you know, people were like, well, I really like slack, but this kind of annoys me about it. So what they're really, you know, another way of saying that is I like the features that slack has and yours isn't quite there. It replaces some of the things that annoys me, but I'm also missing a lot of stuff. If I come over to your thing, therefore why would I switch? And you know, that was part of the motivation of what ended up making him shut that down.
Speaker 2 29:27 Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's tough and I think that, I don't want to come off as the like uh, anti bootstrap guy now cause I'm definitely not. But I think this talks to, and I think Derek even said it like in their episode, maybe the one that was like a week ago at this point, which would have been like the Jesus like the 15th or whatever it may that kind of around their episode was that like to build level as a bootstrapper is not an option to build level as a funded company. Or You could have five engineers and make the IOS APP, make the android app and make the native desktop and make the web and all this like look and feel beautiful just like slack does. Might've worked, you know. Um, and so I think that's another thing. It's like if you have access to raise a bunch of money, you can skip the no code part and go straight like full implementation. But I think if you're wanting to bootstrap or need to bootstrap, then looking at like no code or an MVP and a <inaudible> like a native way in a less competitive field or something like that is a good way to go. But, but I think if you're going to try to get into basically anything in digital marketing or anything like that, you have to be able to put the first thing you put out, be really, really good, you know?
Speaker 1 30:46 Yeah, yeah. Like another great example, right now, if you go to ecommerce, if you want to do ecommerce on any platform, feature parody is already a problem because you've got big commerce, you've got Shopify, you've got, whew, you've got Magento, depends on who you want to talk to about that. But there's a whole set of features that have been years in the making there. And if you come out with, you know, a replacement for easy digital downloads, guess what? People are gonna judge you against easy digital downloads. And if you don't have feature parity with them, which by the way, they've got a substantial engineering team and they put years and years into this. So you know, I have no idea how many engineer years that works out too. But that number is way, way higher than what you will be able to put in in 12 months. Right.
Speaker 2 31:32 So 12 months or not, they're going to be light years ahead of anything you could do. Yeah,
Speaker 1 31:36 right, right. They continue to move forward. Like if they had stopped, maybe you got a shot, right? Because at that point people are looking at this as a dead platform and maybe you can leave, but then there's other options. And do you have feature parity with those options? So that is a huge struggle today. So that's why I'm definitely a strong advocate of the niche solutions. Um, I was looking at various things that were popping up on Fei and there's a lot of generalists stuff that's out there for the SAS things. And I can see that those apps are probably struggling for competition at this point because they're generalists. So struggling, not struggling to grow because of competition you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Like if you're not out marketing your competition, then you're growth is at risk. Yeah. So, yeah,
Speaker 2 32:25 and I think that, you know, I'll apply a, an example of, of Castro's to this is that I think the only reason that we, I have been successful so far and that, you know, the tiny seed folks thought that it was, you know, worth the, the, the risk of an investment because all of these companies are risks, uh, is that we are different than almost all the other players in the podcast hosting market because of our wordpress integration. So like, that's a differentiator that sets us apart. That, I mean, for someone to come in all build a podcasting plugin for wordpress, good freaking luck, man. I mean, we spend hours and hours and hours every week on it and it's already, you know, five years old. So, yeah, I mean if you don't have a thing to say, I can make this different because like been Ornstein is with Tupelo, like screenflow is just dead.
Speaker 2 33:15 There's not another good competitor. We can go make another good competitor or you know, my podcast hosting platform is better because we integrate with wordpress better than anyone else. And wordpress is really content, popular place to manage your content, you know, pretty viable or I have insight into this market that no one else has. That's really a technologist. That's probably an option. But yeah, I mean I agree Dave, I look on Fei every once in while just out of curiosity and like these social media scheduling tools that are making three grand a month, you're like dude, buffer is not going anywhere.
Speaker 1 33:50 Yeah. Buffer that lunch. You're just getting scraps at this point.
Speaker 2 33:54 Yeah. You are just going to get killed and yeah, I mean it's, but I mean it's scary man. And this like reminds me of like Jason Fried's talk for micro conflict. Oh, I, I, I heard heard of it and watched parts of it and like he talks about like getting lucky cause they were so early on in the SAS and project management space that at this point they're just an entrenched player and, and he says, you know, I, I think we got lucky and I don't know if we could do it again. And you look at like, man freaking Jason Fried, right? Like the guy could do anything. And he's saying, I dunno if I could do it again. It should give the rest of us like pause to say if you have something good freaking go for it. And if you don't think you have something good, then don't start it. Probably, you know, because like your chances of succeeding are, are really low unless you have a thing, you know. And that thing can be a lot of come from a lot of different angles. But if you don't have a thing that makes you different and, and gives you the confidence to keep trucking, then you're probably going to get your ass handed to you.
Speaker 1 34:55 Yeah. And it can't just be any old thing. Like you can't be a feature. Features can be copied. It's gotta be like a defensible thing. You know, a defensible, competitive advantage I think is what the VC vernacular is. If you don't have one of those, you know, people aren't interested in investing in you and even if you aren't looking for investment, if you don't have it, defensible, competitive advantage, competitors are going to come in and try to eat your lunch and you're either better than they are and can stay ahead of them or you're not. And you know, spoiler alert, most people are not. Um, you know, if you're not the innovator in that space, then chances are somebody's gonna overtake you at some point. And that's going to,
Speaker 2 35:37 yeah. Yeah. I mean that's a good point is this is not a point in time thing, right? It's not like when I decide to do this or buy this business or go down this road, then that looks like this. It's shit. What happens, you know, three months or three years in, am I innovating? Am I thinking strategically about where the market is going? And what customers need and all this kind of stuff. Uh, and can you stay ahead of everyone else in your industry because you're going to have to hope you have competitors and can you do something different or better than all of them? Yeah,
Speaker 1 36:07 yeah, that's true. So with that said, what are your thoughts this week? Do you think that Craig should be spending his $100,000 on some defensive, competitive advantage that a he hasn't thought of? We'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com tell us how wrong we are. Tell us how right we are. Tell us to shut the hell up a whatever you want to tell us. Really we'd love to hear from you. And of course our one ask is usual. If you feel like were valuable to you, share us with somebody else that you know that would be a value to them as well.
Speaker 0 36:46 Until next week, thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
