RogueStartups

Today’s guest is David Rosenthal, one of the hosts of the “Acquired” podcast and an early stage Venture Capitalist. We discuss startups who use outside funding and how this positively or negatively affects a business. David started as an Associate at Madrona Venture Group in 2010 and rose through the ranks of the company. While there, he not only met his future “Acquired” co-host, but he also … [Read more...] about RS113: Venture Funding – When and How to take on Investment with David Rosenthal

This week Dave and Craig are catching up on some new developments in their businesses, talking through their current development practices and strategies, and looking ahead to the end of the year run. Craig is getting ready for his Microconf Europe talk, coming up in Lisbon, and has been spending some time looking at what his next business venture will look like. Dave's looking ahead a bit … [Read more...] about RS112: Development Process, and Updates

Today Dave and Craig walk through the most recent SaaS company survey conducted by David Skok and the team at Matrix Partners. This survey included more than 400 private SaaS companies, with average annual revenue of $8.5M, and an average growth rate of 47%, so in many ways this is the 'best of the best' in SaaS. As we are somewhat smaller SaaS providers right now this survey offered both a … [Read more...] about RS111: SaaS Metrics Survey by David Skok

On this episode, Craig and David sit down with Josh Haynam, the co-creator of Interact. They discuss the origins of his business and content marketing strategies. Josh is one of the brains behind Interact, the company you may recognize from that internet quiz you took. Interact seeks to grow businesses’ social media presence and thus generate more sales leads using fun quizzes. Listen in as … [Read more...] about RS110: What Kind of Shrimp Are You? The power of quizzes with Josh Haynam

In this episode Dave and Craig talk about some of the challenges and not-so-easy sides of running a business.  The discipline that goes along with drawing real profit from your business, upcoming conferences, and the fact that the 4th Quarter of the year is facing us all squarely in the face. We also touch on Transparency, and when it can be an asset to your business, and when it becomes a … [Read more...] about RS109: Transparency, Real Profit, and Cutting Your Losses

This week Dave Nevogt, co-founder of Hubstaff is my guest.  Dave and his partner Jared Brown have grown Hubstaff from scatch to > $200k/month, all without taking outside funding. Hubstaff is also one of the pillar partners in Baremetric's Open project, where their entire revenue and user dashboard is open to the public.  You can check out Hubstaff's dashboard here, and note how well Dave and … [Read more...] about RS108: Data Driven Growth with Dave Nevogt from Hubstaff

In this episode Dave and Craig talk about some of the highlights and takeaways from SaaStock 2017 last week in Dublin. Similar to SaaSter in San Francisco, SaaStock is a mainly European conference focused on (you guessed it) SaaS businesses, and venture capital firms.  As a contrast to a conference like MicronConf in which most businesses are bootstrapped SaaStock had a nice mix of funded … [Read more...] about RS107: Dragon Glass – a SaaStock 2017 Recap

Today we're talking all about how to create profitable and sustainable WordPress products with Brian Hogg.  Brian is a veteran of the WordPress space, and has created several plugins that do very well in the plugin space. Brian has also just recently released a course on Making Pro Plugins.  I've been through the course and it's really great.  A lot of both tactical and strategic information … [Read more...] about RS106: Building a WordPress Business from Scratch with Brian Hogg

This week Dave and Craig are talking about the convergence of two articles that were recently floating around the interwebs.  Both have to do with living the life of an entrepreneur and dealing with the constant ups and downs of this life we live. This first article is about this Seesaw effect that we see in our businesses where the balance between growing our business infrastructure, … [Read more...] about RS105: Riding the Seesaw and Winging It

In this episode Craig and Dave talk about the hidden secret behind great marketing, psychographics.  Talking to your customers on a personal, need and desire level leads to more engagement and ultimately more conversions. In this great article by the team at Sumo.com several aspects of how to use psychologically based messaging techniques to many aspects of your marketing … [Read more...] about RS104: Psychographics – The Secret to Better Marketing