About

Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or are just thinking about it.

Your hosts are Mike Taber and Rob Walling. Combined we have over 20 years of experience as software entrepreneurs and we’re here to share those experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.

In addition to this podcast and our numerous other businesses, we run a popular online startup school called Founder Cafe that helps both developers and non-techies go from zero to launch in 6 months, and MicroConf, the conference for self-funded startups.

About Rob

Rob has been building web applications professionally for 12 years and launched his first software-related business a short 13 years ago.

He self-published a book on how to bootstrap your startup called Start Small, Stay Small that’s sold around 11,000 copies.

Rob owns:

  • An email marketing tool focused on increasing conversion rates for startups and software companies
  • A popular SEO keyword tool that uses your real-time website data to tell you terms you can easily rank for
  • The top ASP.NET invoicing software on the market
  • And several others you can see here

If you’re interested in self-funding a web app or software product, he has an email newsletter; if you sign up you’ll get a free 170-page ebook collecting his best startup articles from the past 6 years.

Mike Taber

About Mike

Mike started his career with a brief, 3 month stint at a start up multimedia company called 2K Innovations Corporation in North Carolina in 1998. He was invited to join full time as a principal, but declined after seeing how the company was being run.

Later that year, he moved to Buffalo, NY to work for a wireless ISP startup called Clearwire Technologies. He bailed a couple years before it went under and sold its name, but learned a lot about working at a small company.

He spent the next few years working for Wegmans Food Markets in Rochester, NY as a Programmer Analyst, providing him the experience of working for a 25,000 employee company.

Following a short and unsuccessful solo stint, he wound up at Pedestal Software in Boston. Pedestal was a start up that was acquired by Altiris two years later for $70 million. Six months after the acquisition, he started flying solo again and has been on his own ever since.

You can keep track of Mike on his blog, Single Founder. He’s currently working on an email tool for managing warm and cold email followups at scale called Bluetick.io.