Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:00:22 All right. Welcome to episode two 27 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you this week? I'm good, man. I'm good. We're back home after two weeks of vacation. And so that's always nice and stressful in a way like to be back home is almost more stressful than being gone, but, uh, it was really nice time to get out of the house and see a different part of the country and stuff. So, but it's nice to be back to how much so. Nice, nice. Uh, we did a little bit of camping last weekend, so we were able to get out into nature, do a little bit of paddleboarding. Um, we got some archery in and um, yeah, it was sort of like a last hurrah before school starts here, this coming week. And uh, you know, we get the massive COVID breakout in Douglas County, such stressful.
Speaker 1 00:01:13 Yeah. The whole thing is stressful still. I think it's not going to, it's not going away anytime soon. No, no, it's not. And you know, it's just, it's like, there's this slow moving train wreck and you know, you can see the train coming a mile off and everybody's screaming. Watch out for the train, watch out for the train and the school. Board's like, we'll be fine, everybody just get on the tracks. It's not a problem. It's like, it's a problem. Pay attention. Yeah. Yeah. I really wish this hadn't become such a partisan issue and that the science is getting ignored. It's very frustrating. But anyway, this is not an episode about politics or science, is it? No thank goodness. Thank goodness. No I, so we're doing a special, special release episode, I guess this would go out, not on our regular Thursday. This will go out on a Tuesday because Dave, you have some big news, right? I have huge news. I have sold the plugins. I've done Q the Q the sound effect here. We'll actually put in a soundtrack.
Speaker 0 00:02:18 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:02:24 Uh, that's awesome. Congratulations. Um, so obviously a lot, a lot to that. So we'd love to, I mean, from what I guess I know more about them than, than a lot of people, but like maybe give a little bit of kind of like what the plugins are doing and your workload and then why you decided to sell them. I think that's an interesting thing to, for people to hear and kind of the lessons to take away. Yeah. Unless you were living under a rock, uh, then I've had two WordPress plugins since 2011 and one of them is business directory and the other one is AWP PCP and the plugins have been my most successful business to date, uh, until I got recapture. Uh, and you know, for the longest time, that was like my foray into the, the great world of bootstrapping here. And so these, you know, I've kind of held onto them really tightly, like my, almost like my children at this point.
Speaker 1 00:03:22 But the thing is, is that, you know, after I've gone through so many major revisions of these plugins, I finally started to feel like I was running out of ideas. I was running out of energy. And when you get to that point, every, every step inside of that business starts to become a slog and the slog was getting harder and harder. And for the last two years, I'd say pretty solidly. I did everything I could to make the businesses run on. Autopilot, had a staff that was basically independent and would make it so that my involvement on those plugins was absolutely positively minimal to the point where I was down to like maybe two hours a week, which by the way, is a fantastic place to be able to sell them. You know, this is, this is where you want to be. If you're selling the business, you don't want it to be something that is like, you're involved in it in 40 hours a week.
Speaker 1 00:04:28 And there's all these pots that you got your fingers in. Like you really need to divest yourself personally. Um, I'll tell a story a little bit later, uh, of a friend's business, who they had some trouble selling it because they were deeply embedded into it themselves. But anyway, as far as the plugins go, my, my own personal energy and motivation has dropped off in the last 24 months to work on these. Cause I've got, I've got my freelancing going on, which is still pretty close to full time. And then I've been spending all of my spare time on recapture trying to grow it because that's the one that I'm more interested in, but at the same time, because I've had these things for so damn long, I just couldn't, you know, I was, it was having a hard time bringing myself to let them go.
Speaker 1 00:05:22 And at first I was like, no, I can just sort of run them in the background. And it won't take that much time. And that's where I, you know, put everything into the mode that it is in now. But after, while I was like, they're just going to die. If I let them live like this. And I can't, I couldn't really do that to him. I felt like I felt an obligation to my customers. I felt an obligation to the team. I felt, I felt like I could do better. So that's when you know about, I guess it was at big in February of this year when we were joking around and saying, you know, you know, what's, what are the big drags on my business right now? And what are the things that are holding me back from being better in 2020? And of course, nobody, nobody answered COVID at that time.
Speaker 1 00:06:12 Cause it was February. Right. You know, that, that would have been the real answer. But at the time it was like, well, you know, why don't you sell the plugins, Dave? And, you know, they had kind of bugged me about it the year prior and I just sort of brushed it off and I put it all into maintenance mode at that point. But this year I didn't really have a better answer. And it just finally dawned on me that, you know, I think I'm going to be better off in my business by getting something off my plate and doing something with the proceeds of that with something else.
Speaker 2 00:06:47 So, I mean, I think the, the, the kind of devil's advocate that, that I feel a lot and it kind of have felt a lot about like podcast motor is cause it's in the same boat. I spend, you know, an hour a day chatting with Becky who kind of, you know, runs the show there and maybe taking a sales call or something. And it provides a really good living for, for us. And so the argument is like, if it's not taking that much time, uh, and it's providing a lot of good cashflow to, to free you up to do other things with the proceeds that you would get from another business. Right. Cause, cause I think that's probably where you are now is like you, you have less businesses and less income. So like you're trading a revenue stream for a bunch of cash up front and a little bit of time, like why not, why not optimize it even further, I'm going to spend an hour a month on this or something and, and, and try to kind of milk that, um, that lifeline as, as much, and as, as kind of hard as you can,
Speaker 1 00:07:42 That's a totally fair question. And it's one that I've really struggled with. And I think what it came down to for me, that's certainly a totally legit thing to do. And in fact, I know other people besides yourself that are doing that, like Brian castle does this with his businesses, he's got one business, that's basically providing them an income and another business where he's spending all this time trying to grow it. And the first business ports, his ability to work on the second business. And that's absolutely a totally legit thing to do. But in my case, I've got two businesses in wildly different spaces. They are completely orthogonal in many ways, you know, directories and classifieds have very little to do with e-commerce. And one thing that I've realized about recapture is that being closer to the money makes it an easier business to grow.
Speaker 1 00:08:41 And it's not that the business directory in classifieds were poor businesses. It's just a question of it's like playing a game on easy mode versus intermediate or nightmare setting. Right. I tried playing the game on nightmare setting, start out with some really crappy businesses. And that was a very poor play. That was not fun. And then, you know, with the word press, I thought I was playing on an easy mode, but w I would call it an easier mode because there are definitely difficulties in the WordPress space about, you know, getting people to pay and making them see the value in stuff and toxic free customers. And there's a lot of stuff that's not great about that space. There's a lot of things that are great about it too, but because I've got two separate spaces, it's hard for me to split my mental energy across those two spaces with you, seriously, simple podcasting and podcast, motor <inaudible>.
Speaker 1 00:09:38 Those things are in adjacent or overlapping spaces. So it's not a huge deal for you to jump back and forth between them. And even between Brian's businesses of audience ops and process kit, he actually can use process kit to run audience ops. So there's, you know, there's adjacency, there's overlap there's things. I mean, I use recapture to help run, uh, you know, business directory and AWP PCP, but it was not like, wow, you know, there's a, there's some real synergy here because they're just there wasn't a lot. And that's what made it hard for me to continue in this space with these businesses, if they were something like, if they were woo commerce focused, I think that would have been a very different play. Yeah. I think I could have actually used those WooCommerce businesses to help promote recapture, but the way I've got it now, it's just, it's not enough crosstalk between those two spaces to make it worth my while. So yes, I could have certainly continued doing that. And that's exactly what I did for two years, but looking down the road, like if I didn't make any changes in the next 12 months, I was probably looking at some pretty serious revenue declines by 18 months out. So I was thinking that now would be the time to let somebody else.
Speaker 2 00:10:57 Yep. And I think that you, what you kind of intimated at before is that like, and so you could do something more kind of grand 10 with more potential with the time and money that you have now, right?
Speaker 1 00:11:09 Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I'm actively looking right now for something that, that is much more e-commerce adjacent or e-commerce direct so that I can focus with recapture and then use those audiences to cross promote the same products there to cross sell those services. I think it's just going to be an easier play and I'm going to get better growth out of it.
Speaker 2 00:11:33 So with the proceeds from the sale, you're looking to invest in another business or a site or app or something like that. Yeah. That's the plan at this point. Why not take those to grow recapture? Like what if you put whatever a third of the money into recapture with developers or marketing, or I don't know what, but have you, have you looked at that like could, I mean, what I'm getting at is like, could recapture be kind of the thing, like instead of starting up another thing, which will have some degree of this, like separation that, that you had before?
Speaker 1 00:12:07 Well, recapture has grown to a point right now where I'm, I'm less constrained by money on it. Like the money that's coming in is enough for me to pay for the developers to do the work that I need to do at the moment. And I'm also using that for paid advertising, paid acquisition. And even after all of that, like all the bills are paid. There's still a little bit left over after that. So it didn't feel to me like taking those proceeds and dumping them into recapture was a necessary thing. It seemed like getting something else that was similar to recapture that we could integrate. There would be a better growth driver at this point.
Speaker 2 00:12:48 Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Just between you and me, like, do, do you think recapture can be something that like gives you all the income you need and is a huge, you know, several hundred thousand dollar a year business? Or are you seeing that like it's capped out kind of,
Speaker 1 00:13:08 I think it can get there. I do believe it can get there. And the growth potential, like with the COVID situation this year, we've seen huge growth for many months at this point. And you know, there's also been some churn because of businesses dying out and things are changing. We have an upgrade downgrade system. So as businesses start to do poorly their monthly rate drop dials back in recapture. So we've seen some of that, but I am seeing overall solid growth. And, you know, I would say 12 to 18 months, I could probably stop freelancing altogether with recapture by itself. Maybe sooner if I had an adjacent business that was also generating some income.
Speaker 2 00:13:52 Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. Um, kind of talking through some of the, the kind of logistics of the sale and like specific things that looking back now, you, you did to get ready and make it like smooth. I know you said like taking yourself out of the business, obviously like a huge part of it, having Bobby to do support developers, to do developments and, and feature work and advanced bugs and things like that. But anything else like bookkeeping and having your kind of shit together to present, to like the brokers, things like that, like that you're looking back now and say, wow, I'm glad I did that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:14:26 Yeah. Yeah. So there were two things I think that made this smoother and easier to do the transition. So one was definitely the books. I mean, right now, every single business out there, if you don't have a specific business entity that owns your assets and has separate books for that particular business, you could be in trouble during a sale because you will be asked to justify what all these expenses are and that they will want to see the books and that they will want to see the payments and that the accounts are all separate, et cetera, et cetera. So I was, I'll say I was 80% good about that, which made the last 20% relatively easy to deal with during the sale. I was pretty close to having things more or less clean, but I mean, I've got three things going on. I got the consulting, the plugins, and then recapture recapture is completely separate.
Speaker 1 00:15:24 After our, I bought that everything got set up separately. Those are all independent accounts, a hundred percent. And I'm glad it's always going to, it's going to stay that way forever and ever, uh, with my consulting because I had started that up. Sorry, you mean, you mean recapture is in its own entity or just have as bank accounts. And those all flow up into the same entity. It has its own bank accounts and its own books, but it's not, it's all under skyline consulting, which is my business. Um, and they're all under that and that's fine, but you know, just separating things in a way that makes it easy for you to peel one out and send it somewhere else is a huge, huge asset because I do know that other sales have gone through. And if you talk to any broker, this is like one of the top things that they will say in advance.
Speaker 1 00:16:11 You need to have your books clean six months in advance. So if you're thinking you're going to sell in 2021, you need to be cleaning your books. Now, like you should have clean books today. And in fact, you should hire a bookkeeper to go back to the beginning of the year and try to clean things up because you need a solid 12 months of history more is better, but, you know, I could go back multiple years with the plugins and show revenue trends and, you know, expenses and things like that. So that gave the buyer, the buyers, I should say much more confidence that, you know, what I said was really the truth of the business. And that's the reality, and this isn't going to change. And we've seen this for many years and it's not that big of a deal, et cetera, et cetera. So that was number one, number two,
Speaker 3 00:17:01 I'm using
Speaker 1 00:17:03 A broker and not just any broker, but a good solid broker. So I ended up going with quiet light on this one. And I worked with Chris Guthrie. And the reason that I ended up going with quiet light is that not every broker deals with WordPress plugins today. And this is, you know, if you're listening to this episode a year from now six months from now, two years from now, this situation could have changed. So I'll just warn you in advance, you know, brokers change over time, what their mix is. But right now quiet light is doing a lot of eCommerce businesses, Amazon FBA. And they also do WordPress plugins and SAS, but you know, they are, they are still accepting these kinds of businesses and not everybody does. Um, so for example, like sure, Swift, wasn't interested in WordPress plugins and hasn't been for a while and FEI has always been kind of neutral on that.
Speaker 1 00:17:56 So you gotta find somebody that will buy your kind of business. If you have a sass boy, everybody wants to get you in, in the, in the door. So you just got to find the most reputable, highest quality broker you can get. Um, and you know, they're going to take a cut. A brokers is definitely going to take a chunk of the pie there, but if you hire a good broker, it will be worth every penny. So Chris got my P and L. So that was another thing, you know, you should have a PNL. And at least 12 months, Chris was asking for 24, which I was happy to give him so he could show some history in the business. And he put together this completely professional prospectus. And, you know, there's a whole interview process that went along with it. And I had pre answered a lot of questions because I had experienced doing this before.
Speaker 1 00:18:45 And I just knew when I was trying to sort of shop this around myself. These are questions people are going to ask. So I just put them in a PDF. And, you know, I started collecting that along the way. So by the time Chris got into the picture, I just handed him the PDF. He asked me some additional questions and boom, the whole thing was done, but he put together this thing and they took a about 10% of the sale. Uh, it was a minimum, a minimum amount, you know, which is not a small chunk, but in my opinion, it wasn't, I would think it was a little less than others. Like I know FEI is higher. Um, but, uh, it was a totally reasonable chunk given what he did, because I know that like the day that we went on sale, he had like, or the week we went on sale, I should say it was like 130 different requests.
Speaker 1 00:19:34 And of those like 26 of them were asking for more information. And then by the time we came down to it, we got two offers that all came in within like 24 hours of each other. And there were probably about five more that were coming in behind that, but they were just a little bit slower. So the fact that Chris got all of that energy behind it, he had this huge mailing list, the professional perspectives, he handled all of that stuff coming in of all those requests, like that would drive you crazy as a business owner, you're trying to run your business. And then you got hundred and 30 requests for information about the damn business. I mean, you would lose your mind. Yeah. So, I mean, I was so thankful that Chris did all of that and it made a huge difference. Um, and you know, it got me a solid offer.
Speaker 1 00:20:18 They, you know, screened the buyers and would make sure that people were serious. And he got us a good escrow company that was the least expensive and still trustworthy, just all kinds of little things like that made, made a difference. So, you know, a good broker and cleaning up your books for the sale. I would say those are the two biggest things that were a major advantage in addition to just all the other stuff that I had done to prep. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah. I think, I think that, uh, I know Thomas calls it like pre diligence. Um, so like
Speaker 2 00:20:48 Answering all the questions that a buyer would have ahead of time, so they don't have to ask you. And that's what I think the idea of a prospectus a lot of times is like, these are all the things I know you're going to ask. So here they are, everything else should be kind of supplementary and kind of exceptions to what the normal due diligence is before somebody makes an offer. Right.
Speaker 1 00:21:05 Right. And it just, it speeds up the whole process considerably if somebody gets a prospectus and they go through this, I mean, when I'm looking at businesses, I can scan through that perspective very quickly and say, is this interesting or is this crap? And if it's crap, I can just throw it away immediately. But if it's interesting, then I'm like, okay, then I can go back and scrutinize it more. And then I can write down questions that I have that are on top of what they already have in there. Cause sometimes, you know, they'll give a vague answer and you want to get more specific or whatever. So that, that just definitely makes the process a lot easier.
Speaker 2 00:21:39 What a, what about the due diligence process, uh, kind of surprised you or how was it in general
Speaker 1 00:21:45 Due diligence was really great. So we haven't talked about who the buyer is by the way, um, which I can make,
Speaker 2 00:21:50 I was saving it for the end, if you, if you know it's okay.
Speaker 1 00:21:54 Okay. So we can do the, I'll just talk about the due diligence and we'll just leave everybody in the dark, little more mystery and in anticipation is good for everybody. Uh, so the due diligence went very smoothly, but this, this is always a wild card. You never know what kind of a buyer you're going to get. So the buyer could be somebody who is very nervous and wants to see lots of proof and is very, um, I don't want to say untrusting, but you know, they, they want to trust, but there's heavy verification bit to it. So they want to see, they want to see screencasts of things. They want us do screen shares of your revenue to see that everything that you claim on the P and L is actual reality. And, um, it turned out that the due diligence on this went very fast and it had to do with the fact that I had a previous relationship with the buyers. So I think that,
Speaker 2 00:22:54 I think now would be an appropriate time to talk about who the buyer is then.
Speaker 1 00:22:57 Yeah. Yeah. So the buyers were Steph and Steve Wells of formidable forms and side bulky of WP beginner slash awesome motive slash optin monster. And, um, they have formed a business collective called strategy 11 and they are, you know, they're running formidable forms right now and some other related things, but what's awesome about them collectively is that, you know, I met them all at PressNomics four. And so we actually say it and I had dinner together. Uh, Brad, <inaudible> sort of put that together and I got a chance to know him several years in advance and Stephan Steve, uh, we actually rode the bus over from the airport and we got to talk before ever even showed up to the conference. And they're super nice and I've run into them before MicroComp, uh, and other, you know, related events. So, you know, there was, there was definitely some comfort there in, you know, they knew who I was.
Speaker 1 00:24:00 I knew what kind of people they were. I know what kind of business they run. So, you know, they, they asked some very key questions and asked for some exports of some data that they know would be, you know, difficult to, uh, to make fraudulent or forge or whatever. And that was it, you know, I mean, there were a few questions about things, but most of it was answered in the prospectus. And I'd say that this, it was a little unusual, but I wouldn't say it's like completely, it wasn't a unicorn experience. Cause I know that other businesses will do some very short due diligence and they'll come up with a letter of intent. And then when they're going through the deeper process of transfer, they'll hammer out whatever details in there. Cause they're not concerned about that. Or they are looking at it saying, Oh, we can totally handle all of these things. It's not even something we need to do in due diligence. So I think for them it was mostly about just revenue verification and then they're done.
Speaker 2 00:24:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a really sophisticated buyer. I would guess this kind of consortium they're putting together is buying a bunch of other stuff. So they they've done a lot of this on its side and also motive have bought several large WordPress plugins and sites. So that's not surprising that he was like a sophisticated kind of easy and fast buyer. Um, so that's, that's great to hear him, that's what you want. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:25:19 And the transfer has gone equally smoothly, by the way, you know, they were very prepared. There's lots of stuff. Like the day that we started on the transfer, I like dug out a bunch of stuff out of my last pass vault. I pasted it into their vault and they basically just started going in and changing accounts like left and right. Adding emails, switching credit cards over. I mean, it was like it was blazingly fast and unbelievably efficient. And then, you know, I went away for a weekend on camping trip, came back, Steph had a bunch more questions for me. I answered them all. And you know, we're basically, you know, the domain is now in flight between our two registrars and once that's done, uh, it's just a matter of sending the, the wire over to my account.
Speaker 2 00:26:06 That's cool. That's cool. I had a question about domain registrars for like production environments, like our art. So we bought the casto.com domain and it sits in a separate registrar from the rest of my stuff in a way. I kind of think that's nice because it's all by itself. Like if, and when we had to sell the business or wanting to sell the business, I could just transfer it that whole account, I guess. But I'm very nervous about moving that domain from one registrar to another, because we have a ton of like DNS that routes through there, like, is that always a seamless process or does like name servers and DNS just get dumped on the floor when you do that. Sometimes it kind of depends on who you're working with.
Speaker 1 00:26:44 So my DNS is a Namecheap and I've had good experiences with Namecheap and if you're staying within the same registrar, like Namecheap to Namecheap, which is what I ended up doing with recapture, it is like butter smooth. If you're going across DNS servers, it can be a little bumpier, but if you're sticking in the major players like GoDaddy to Namecheap or, you know, something like that, something similar to that, it should be okay. The DNS settings generally transfer along with it. If you have custom DNS servers, like you are, you know, proxying through CRA cloud flare or something like that, then it gets even smoother because all of your real DNS stuff is in CloudFlare. It's not really in the DNS registrar. Yeah. It's just the naming register
Speaker 2 00:27:31 On the domain level. Yeah. So, I mean,
Speaker 1 00:27:35 I've generally had positive experiences. The only time I've not had a positive experience is when you had to like cancel a transfer and then re initiate it. That's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 2 00:27:46 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not broken, it's not the best interface to log in to that domain registrar to renew it every year, but it's fine. So I'm not, not probably not going to change it because it's a potential for disaster. Yeah. Um, Oh man, that's awesome. I'm, I'm really happy for you. I think. I mean, you and I have been talking about this kind of off air for awhile. Um, I think it's a great move, you know, I think it gives you focus, which is great. It gives you money to go do something else with whether it's, you know, pay the bills at home or, or invest in another business. I think that's always good. And I think the more you can continue to focus on, you know, recapture as kind of your one thing. Cause I do agree that it has the potential to like really be that big deal, um, that, that the plugins probably never had the potential to. And I think it's tough to take like that comfortable situation of like, Oh, they're paying rent and you know, don't spend that much time on him and all this kind of stuff, but, but they're never going to be like that half a million dollar a year business, um, than, you know, take, take the uncomfortable time now for the opportunity to have, you know, something more significant later on. That's a hard decision, but that's cool.
Speaker 1 00:28:55 Yeah. And I think, you know, because this ended up in Stephen Steve's wheelhouse, I think, I think they are actually are going to be better poised to really take this somewhere and grow it because you know, the natural thing to do is integrate the forms into the directory. And guess what, the number one qualm is about the directory, it's about the look and feel and how to manage the damn fields while we're basically building our own kind of form plugin in there. And what do you think Steph and Steve have been doing for years? I mean, this is like, this is their major area of expertise. So if they can swap that out, put their stuff in, that's a major upgrade for the directory. That's a, you know, they can now have a whole new product to sell it's dovetails with the formidable forms. They can actually have people forms on the site and turn around and pipe those to a directory.
Speaker 1 00:29:44 That's all work that we would have had to spend a ton of time doing to get it right. And then we would have to pick a form provider and there's a lot of them out there. Well, Steph and Steve are the foreign providers. So there are not only experts on this, but you know, they have a set of customers that are very focused on this. So, you know, while it may not have been a growth opportunity for me, I think this is a huge growth opportunity for them. So I am so incredibly happy that they're the ones who ended up buying this site as awesome Steph and Steve are awesome. I think that grouping right there was the perfect kind of buyer to pick something like this up. You know, if I said, all right, who in the WordPress community do I want to do this?
Speaker 1 00:30:25 They were definitely at the top of a very short list. That's awesome. That's awesome. So did you guys, uh, you and your wife celebrate, you go buy a Maserati or what? Uh, yeah. So if you knew me, I'm not really a Maserati guy, I'm not even really a car person. Like I have a 2007 Camry and a, yeah. It's not getting upgraded anytime soon. Go buy some really sweet covert masks maybe. Yeah. Well I think we'll probably, we haven't officially celebrated yet. I was waiting until the money got transferred to the bank account so that it got a, you know, it got real at that point. We'll probably crack open a bottle of nice wine and talk about it, but we've been having discussions the whole way along this. And when we were camping, we did a celebrate with a toast to having the whole thing mostly done at that point.
Speaker 1 00:31:18 But it was definitely past the point of, you know, the major concerns and the risks have all been surmounted in and now it's just going through the checklist and making sure it's done. So we'll have something, you know, if, if it wasn't COVID right now, I'd say we'd go out to dinner, but I don't see that's going to happen anytime soon. Hmm Hmm. Yup. Yup. Awesome, man. Want a super, I'm super excited for you. I think it's a, I think it's a good move and I'm excited to hear about kind of what yeah. What changes with your focus, you know, what changes with the time you spend working, uh, here, you know, going forward the next couple of months. Um, and yeah, if you're, if you're on the lookout for another business, how that goes that's that's interesting too. Yes. I will say in one, one partying thing here about the plugins, you know, I just shut down the email accounts the other day on my local email client.
Speaker 1 00:32:05 And I have to say it, it felt kind of weird for like a day because I just suddenly got a whole lot less email coming through my box. Yeah. Because it was always going through there just so I could kind of keep an eye on things. And you know, when that stops, it's just, it's, there's definitely a feeling of loss there. So that was, that was an unexpected thing about the sale of it, but I definitely don't regret it. And I'm really glad that said Steve and Steph are the ones who pick this up and I'm excited to see what comes moving forward
Speaker 2 00:32:40 Here and getting this off my plate, I think is, is a huge thing. Cause I was really feeling a lot of burnout, so yeah. Yeah. Nice man. Um, the one kind of update from my end, as far as cast goes is, uh, we're we're hiring. So we're hiring a senior PHP developer. So someone to kind of live in both the Laravel world for our web app and working on seriously simple podcasting in our suite of plugins there. Um, so if anybody has interest or know somebody who might be a good fit Castillo's dot com slash careers, check it out, um, we'll be re reviewing and receiving applications for the next few weeks, probably through the middle of September. Um, and then hopefully making a decision and moving forward there, but it's cool to be adding more people to the team. I think, you know, a few months ago, we weren't exactly sure what the next handful of product decisions and kind of direction would be.
Speaker 2 00:33:31 And now that are really clear. So that's cool. Um, and so it makes sense to hire somebody, um, because we can and we need to, so it's, um, yeah, it's good. It's exciting. I feel like I'm getting better at it all the time. Um, but uh, yeah, it's not as much reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch at this point. Excellent. Excellent. Yep. So Dave, congratulations again. I think I know this is, uh, it's big news and, and you know, I know it's been a long time coming, so congratulations. It's really cool to hear. Thank you. Thank you. It's it's very exciting to, Oh, you know, close this chapter and open up a new one here. I think it's, it's definitely time to have something new and different, so we will be discussing that in future episodes. No doubt. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So folks, if you have any kind of questions or comments for Dave, shoot his message podcast@roguestartups.com or hit us up on Twitter. And as always, if you're enjoying the show and want to leave some love, please leave us a rating and review in Apple podcasts. Thanks so much. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 0 00:34:34 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.
