Episode 802 | Marketing Not Scaling, Where to Publish Content, and More Listener Questions (A Rob Solo Adventure)

 

Rob Walling:
They say life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get except every Tuesday morning you’re going to get another episode of Startups. For the Rest Of Us, which is what you’re listening to right now, I’m going to be diving into listener questions today, covering topics ranging from marketing that’s not scaling, having a product and then trying to figure out how to best find product-market fit, best places to publish content, and if I should start a media business to get eyeballs before building my SaaS. Before we dive into those delicious listener questions, I want to let you know about MicroConf Remote. It’s on November 5th and as the name indicates, it is a fully remote event that you can join from anywhere in the world. We’re actually switching up the theme this time around and the talks are going to be around shipping and validating fast and landing. 

Your first customers speakers include Sunny Hunt and several others. We have yet to announce. I of course will be there. MCing doing magic tricks, telling bad jokes. The recordings from the event will be available for ticket holders and when you show up live, you can ask questions from the speakers and after the talks we’ll have our Founder by Founder session, which is like the digital version of our hallway track to get all the details and snag your ticket. They’re really inexpensive. You really should grab one in case you want to watch the videos, microcomp.com/remote promo code startups 15 for $15 off. Let’s dive into our first listener question from longtime listener, MicroConf attendee and speaker and many time question asker. James Kennedy.  

Speaker 2:
Hey Sherry and Rob, I just finished Exit Strategy. Really worthwhile read, even if you’ve read all the books about exiting at a fresh take, and I’m glad I read it, recommend it. I have a follow on question which is, have you ever heard of people doing a management buyout, so that means their team actually buying the company because I’m honest, the one thing I got from the book was, wow, this exit stuff is way more stressful than I thought it was going to be. If it ever happened or whatever, I thought it’d been a much nicer actually to be able to sell my company to my team one day when I want to go and do something else. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t, but either way, awesome book. Highly recommend it.  

Rob Walling:
Congratulations. Thanks for the compliments on the book, James. Sharon and I are really proud of this one and I think it’s going to help a lot of people out as they exit. I like your question around management buyouts, so my answer is I have heard of approximately zero startup founders doing that. It of course exists. We do talk about it a little bit, but I don’t blame you for missing it. I think we have half a page on it where we talk about who buys companies and we go in order from top to bottom in terms of who we see usually paying the most, and so strategic buyers are at the top, private equity and then search funds. Then high net worth individuals, then your co-founders, and at the very bottom we have your network, your customers or your employees, and that would of course include a management buyout. 

These are much more common with traditional, I’d say brick and mortars and manufacturing. There’s certain segments where this makes sense where you either have a lot of employees in the business is extremely stable and they can get a loan or some type of seller financing makes sense and the multiples aren’t huge and it’s based on ebitda, right? It’s based on net profit per year, and so if you sell for whatever the multiple is, three years, four years, five years, if you keep running the business, well you’re going to make that money back, be able to pay back the seller financing or the loan. The challenge I think with SaaS is since the multiples are high, and if you’re doing 2 million or more per year and you’re growing, you’re going to get a revenue multiple most likely. And so yeah, let’s say you take a 2 million a r, a SaaS company that’s making almost, that’s basically break even, but growing quickly and you sell it for 10, 12, 14 million manage and buying that out would be tough. 

Now, on the flip side, I have heard of one founder who has sold a small software product that I believe let’s say was doing half a million a RR and it was stable but flat and the team is super small and one of the employees, one of the team members wanted to buy it, and so they did just kind of work out a deal for a super low multiple and the founder was happy because he was able to kind of pass it along to someone who really wanted to grow it and the team member was happy because they wanted to be an entrepreneur, but obviously it’s hard with a day job to do at nights and weekends. So I have seen it done and I think it works especially well if you don’t have other options to sell for higher multiples. If you’re growing quickly and you can get these really accelerated aggressive SaaS multiples, management buyout just isn’t, it’s not going to compare to that. 

But if you are mostly flat declining, maybe growing just a little bit and you think, well, maybe I’d only get a one to two XARR multiple, let’s say you’re doing a million dollars and you think you might be able to get 2 million or you get an appraisal or you get an offer for 2 million and you are a profitable company. Let’s say you’re making half a million a year including your salary and whatever else you take out of the business in terms of covering expenses, what’s only a four x EBITDA multiple? Is that something where they could, they being your management team could each put, let’s say again loose math here, but let’s say you have four managers on your executive team and they each put a hundred thousand dollars down, so you walk away with 400 grand or they each put 200 grand down, so you walk away with 800 grand and then they just pay the rest off over. 

You give ’em a bunch of seller’s note and they pay the rest off over three years or four years or whatever it takes. It might work. I think it’s a creative approach, it’s just not something that I’ve traditionally seen in our space because our space does have those frothy multiples and I think a lot of people, well, a lot of people kind of want to walk away and not a lot of founders want to walk away and not be kind of saddled to the business, but I love creative approaches like this, especially if, as I said, you’re not going to get that aggressive multiple anyways if you’re going to get a low purchase price and you can hand it off to someone you trust, maybe you are willing to extend the time that it would take for you to get the full purchase price. I appreciate your questions as always, James, thanks for writing in. 

Our next question comes from Ali on Twitter. Ali’s the co-founder of Seja and his username is, hello, it’s Ali. By the time this goes live, I think I might be in Istanbul, probably high fiving Ali over a welcome reception, but Ali posted a tweet, gosh, this was five months ago that it gives you an idea of the backlog of questions and at mentioned me and said, really curious if you have any thoughts. Now, I’m guessing the situation has changed since then, but I still think it’s interesting. So Ali said, Seja just hit $65,000 of MRR, but I’ve hit my limit. We have a bunch of marketing channels that work, but we can’t scale any of them. And then he runs through paid powered by link, SEO, lead magnets affiliates and kind of how they’re not scaling. Plus 45% of signups are unattributed in post hog. 

I switched between relentlessly working on one channel to working on all of them to focusing on product. To be honest, I don’t know what is driving branded search. I don’t know if I should keep pushing when it seems to have little impact or just accept things as they are. We have consistent growth and add about $4,000 of MRR net each month, but we’ll plateau when our 4% churn represents more customers than we can acquire in the same period. I lost in feeling overwhelmed. Anyone have thoughts? I really like this question because there’s a lot of detail and there’s obviously no silver bullet obvious right answer that we can just, oh, we’ll do this and this will totally work. I do like that Ollie gives all the numbers and that he says 45% of senates are unattributed in post hog, so you don’t actually know where folks are coming from, so do you stop doing something? 

That’s where it gets tough, right? I did check out Ollie’s profile and I dunno if it’s up to date, but it says Sanja just hit 75,000 MRR, so we do know that they’ve grown 10 K in the last five months. So I have a couple thoughts here of how I would think about this. So a couple things. There’s is several leverage to pull. One is you have 45%, almost half are unattributed in postdoc. If you don’t have it already, I would definitely have a popup, right? When someone signs up, how did you hear about us and try to do my best to attribute rest of those. You’re never going to get to a hundred percent, but if you’re at 55% now you can get to 75 or 80%. You just have a little bit more data. I mean, geez, that’s 50% more data to make decisions with. 

Second thing I would look at 4% churn is okay, but I’m wondering how much time you’ve spent working on that. Have you hired anyone to come in and help you improve that at this point? Either product things or tactics that you can use. There’s a bunch of churn reduction tactics you can check out churn key. It’s for example, it’s a TinySeed company. If you get that down to three or two and a half really changes the equation. So those are the obvious levers that I see right up front. And the other one of course is well drive more leads and Ollie talks about not being able to increase any of these channels, and this is the interesting thing when people say, oh, my churn is low, it’s only 5%, 5% is high and 4% is okay, and the reason is exactly this is at a certain point you can’t outrun churn. 

That’s that high you’re going to tap out, and when I say this, I’ve said this on the podcast and on YouTube and especially on YouTube, I get comments like, yeah, he said, you’ll with 4% churn, you’ll tap out at a hundred thousand dollars a month and I would kill for a hundred thousand dollars a month business. I don’t care about the 4% churn. And it’s like, that’s fine. If you’ve never started a company and that is your goal and you’re willing to do that, it’s fine, but once you get there, if your market is a 4% churn market, it is very, very, very hard to outrun that and you do then have a flat business doing a hundred thousand dollars a month, great, you didn’t have that several years ago, but you also put in years and years of work to get there. And so it’s a thing of this is why when we talk about it, I got in a conversation in the last month on X Twitter and I said, eight to 10% churn is catastrophic business on fire. 

And someone weighed in and said, well, no, that’s like an old way of looking at it. And it’s like, no, that’s not. There are spaces that are eight to 10% churn and it’s consumers prosumers, indie hackers, hobbyists and other folks who think like consumers and those are not great SaaS businesses. They can be okay SaaS businesses, but they will plateau. Those are step one and step two businesses. If your churn is that high, if you want to get to a step three business and you want to be an ambitious SaaS founder and build a healthy, fast-growing seven or eight figure company, you cannot have churn that high. And I want to circle back to Ali, 4% churn is not catastrophic, but between four and 3% it would change the economics of this business pretty substantially and getting it down to two and a half. Similarly, and I’m not saying that’s easy, but I would definitely think about how to do that or if there are ways that I could approach that. 

Lastly, and you’ll notice I’m getting to just adding more leads as kind of the last thing. Ollie already has eight channels going, or I guess one of them is engineering is marketing and he says, don’t have the resource. And social selling and listening is low. ROI, which I would definitely agree and social and build in public is not scaling, which yeah, that’s not a surprise at all. You have an audience, you build the SaaS and if you buy and most churn and then that’s it, your audience, unless you dramatically grow your audience every month, that’s not going to. So it really is concentrated in five areas. It’s paid, powered by link, SEO, lead magnets and affiliates. And I think what I would do is probably ask my, because this is a good list, I mean I don’t want to suggest we start adding more. I would think about if you have not already brought in a consultant, an outside hand that you can pay, for example with your paid acquisition, Ali says, increasing spend causes CAC to skyrocket. 

I wonder, have you had a consultant or to look at that? Because man, if you can get paid to work just a little better, that would be a big one. What I would do is I’d look at this list and figure out which am I most interested in, which do I think has the most potential if I can get them to work? And when I look at this, I think paid is super interesting. SEO is super interesting. All he said can’t find a trusted partner. Signups are from branded terms. Cool. I would find a trusted partner. I know that’s easier said than done, but ask at MicroConf, try to find someone who can refer you to a trusted partner. It would be a big goal of mine to get one or both of those working better. Now, affiliates, I’m curious about this. Three affiliates send 99% of referrals. 

Great. So have you talked to those three affiliates about whether they would like to co-promote with a webinar? When was the last time they sent a dedicated email to their list or did a dedicated social post and then get ’em in A CRM and by that I mean boomerang or snooze an email and every six months reach out to them and ask, Hey, how can we collaborate to get more promotion? Next thing is how do I find more affiliates just like them? People with audiences maybe of their size, similar size with similar demographics or whatever. Affiliate marketing is enterprise sales. It’s finding affiliates who are willing to promote it. It’s not actually affiliate marketing, it’s finding affiliates who have big audiences that are willing to promote your product. And that’s not actually that easy to do if you’re outreaching cold. And this is why I say if you’re going to build SaaS, build your network, not your audience. 

If you have an amazing network, you can usually find influential affiliates who will be able to help with this. So those are my top line thoughts. I mean, the next thought of course is go down the SaaS playbook and figure out are there any other marketing approaches you want to spin up? But man, you have a lot going on already, and I know Ali doesn’t have a large team. They are bootstrapped, so I don’t like that suggestion. I think what you have here can be optimized before you need to start over from scratch basically with a new approach. So Ali, sorry I didn’t respond on X Twitter, you can tell that I had seven or eight minutes of thoughts on it and I didn’t want to try to fit that into a tweet. Might be too little too late because it’s been months. But I hope my thoughts were helpful and thanks for mentioning me as always. 

Are you a non-technical founder with solid revenue and real traction, but your technology is holding you back? You should check out today’s sponsor Design Lee. They specialize in helping founders like you who are stuck with messy code, unclear roadmaps, or a dev team that just doesn’t get it. And for listeners of the pod design, Lee is offering their Impact week completely free. That’s a one week no obligation audit where their team dives into your code, your design system, and your product roadmap to show you exactly what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to happen next. If it’s a fit, you can move on to Solution Lab, a three week sprint where design lead takes over your code base and architects of real roadmap for growth led by a full-time cross-functional team. This isn’t just another dev shop cranking out features. Every sprint is tied to measurable business outcomes so you can scale with confidence and enjoy the process. If your tech is the bottleneck to your next stage of growth, check them out@designlead.co slash For the Rest Of Us, that’s D-E-S-I-G-N-L i.co/ For the Rest Of Us. My next question is about validation and product-market fit. If you already have a product comes to us from Russ.  

Speaker 3:
Good day. Rob Russ here from New Zealand only been listening a couple of weeks. Feels real good to be amongst other bootstrappers. My question is around the age old handed down philosophy of not building first and instead validating first, which I totally get, but I find I’m getting a bit annoyed with this statement, much like anything that appears to portray life as being black and white as it doesn’t adequately cover gray areas like my own. Recently I had been working on a side project while employed as a developer at my last company and it solved a real problem that myself and my now co-founder had seen many, many times in our careers and the intention was to deploy it within that company. But then last October I got laid off, I had a chat to my wife and given that she’d known I’d always wanted to follow my IT entrepreneur father and that we had savings to do so, we made the switch to me working full-time on the product, which as an MVP is fairly polished. We’ve been working since our marketing efforts and while trying hard me to stay off the tools. So my question is a little nebulous. Have you seen others in a similar position where they already had a product for whatever reason and like myself who may have had firsthand experience with the vertical in which their ICP worked? What advice did or would you give them with respect to marketing with the aim of discovering product-market fit? Thanks H Rob.  

Rob Walling:
Here’s the thing about validation. It’s an ongoing process. It’s not something you do upfront and get an absolute answer and then stop with the 2 2200 framework. I talk about spending two hours with research hours with landing page conversations and then 200 hours trying to get an MVP out or get something into the hands of people to see if they actually use it, if it actually solves their problems, they’re willing to pay for it, all that stuff. That’s a simplified framework. More than that. Every day you’re still validating every day, even when you’re live and you have customers using it, you’re trying to have conversations and you are trying to gauge interest and figure out you’re validating assumptions at that point. Which features should we build next? How should we update our marketing, our positioning, our ideal customer profile? There’s all this stuff that is constantly in fluxing. 

I mean, I remember being at 50,000 MRR growing five grand a month and still validating a bunch of assumptions we were trying to figure out. So I mean validation is obviously not a binary, it’s a spectrum and it’s really an ongoing thing. So the biggest thing I’d be doing is having conversations. I think if you have seen this problem come up over and over so you have verified it is a problem, that’s great. Just finding a problem can be hard. The next question I have is your solution something that actually solves the problem in a way that makes it worthwhile for your customers? This is called searching for problem, a solution fit. Have you built a solution to a problem that actually works and that people will use because you can build a piece of software to solve the problem of I want to add two numbers together. 

And you could be like, that’s a problem people have. They’re searching for it in Google, so I’m going to build calculate that addition.com. Boy don’t register that. And people are going to log in, they’re going to create an account. I’m going to ask ’em a few questions and then they’re going to type in numbers and I’m going to solve the problem. This is a contrived example, but you get what I’m saying that is not worth it because people can just go to, it’s easier to just go to Excel, go to a calculator, go to a Google sheet, do it in their head, your solution is not going to work. And so again, while that was an overly simplistic example, you get the idea of you can technically solve a problem but not do it in a way that your customers will use because it’s still more cumbersome or it’s more confusing or they don’t want to learn it or they don’t want to switch the way they do it, or they’ve always done it on paper and they don’t want to move to whatever tool you have. 

There’s all these objections. And so in this case, it kind of depends on your space, the vertical that you’re going into, but I would be having conversations showing people screenshots, getting people to try the app, does this look interesting? Does this solve a problem? Then the next question is, will they pay for it and will they pay enough to make it worth your while? Because you can build amazing software that solves a very hard problem and if a business is willing to pay $50 for it, but for you to find customers and support them and support the software, it’s a hundred dollars a month to make that happen. Obviously the unit economics don’t work and usually a huge cost of unit economics is the cost to acquire a customer because marketing sales are hard and they’re really expensive. So that’s probably, these are in order. 

The next things I would be trying to figure out, it’s not just the problem exists that people are solving it today using something. Usually it’s Excel or clipboards. Those are the most common things. I say Google sheets, Excel, some type of spreadsheet and clipboards. And so then you’re trying to figure out does mine solve it better or in a way that people will switch from a free tool and will switch away from the way they’ve been doing it for 30 years. And then you start asking that question, can I find more of them? And so one way to answer the question I can’t find more of ’em is just to start doing outreach right now. And you can do it on LinkedIn, you can do it on any of your socials, but you can do direct cold outreach, you can scrape lists or buy lists or whatever, and you do this cold DMing and cold emailing. 

And of course if you have a network in the space, you do it warm as well, like, Hey, we’ve solved this problem. And you can tell them, I have nothing to sell you right now, but I would like your opinion. Would you be willing to jump on a call and chat about this? Or would you be willing to exchange back and forth via email or send me a loom depending on how sophisticated the customer is? So that’s how I would be thinking about the next steps, the what’s next. Now, if the phrase validation bothers you, then don’t use it. You just talk about what are next steps? What are the riskiest parts of this business right now? That’s the question you should ask yourself every day when you wake up because the riskiest part is not that you can answer a support email. It’s not that you can write another line of code or build another feature. 

I don’t think any of us are doing incredibly technically challenging development of stuff of can this be built? That’s usually not the question. The risk is part of the business is usually, does this solve a problem that anyone cares about? Will they be willing to pay for it? Can I find more customers like the ones that I have in mind or that are already using it at a cost that makes this a viable business? And of course, in terms of finding product-market fit, which was part of Russ’s question, I have an entire chapter on that in my book, the SaaS Playbook. It is the market chapter, and it’s a tight 19 pages. It’s the first chapter. Get into SaaS playbook.com if you’d like to buy that book for $10. Of course it’s available on Amazon and Audible where you can of course hear the sweet Dulcet tones of this voice puts you to sleep by telling you about SaaS G codes like net negative churn. So thanks for that question, Russ. I hope it was helpful. My next question is about content marketing.  

Speaker 4:
Hey Rob. I’m starting a SaaS app. It’s still pre-launch at the point where I am looking to do some pre-launch content, a little bit of writing. I would also love the chance to continue writing after launch and build a bit of a following because at this point, I have none. I know that the best place to do this kind of thing used to be medium, but I think that people have changed their minds on that. The option for starting a standalone blog is there, but the maintenance kind of scares me. And also the risk of calling myself a blogger scares me for some reason. It’s just, it feels easier and more approachable for me to post on an existing platform. Are you aware of anything else other than medium these days where people can write about bootstrapping and it’s a good place to be? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Thank you very much.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, this is a good question. And I will admit we tried Medium back in 2014 or 15, and I hate building on other people’s platforms because all platforms eventually turn to is really what happens, right? There’s this whole Cory doctor who talks about the ification process. You can Google it if you haven’t seen that. But basically every platform starts for the users and then they pivot to be for the advertisers, and then eventually they pivot to be, it is not a pivot, but they adjust their algorithm or whatever else to be for the company and the company’s bottom line. And that process means that wherever you build, and we’ve seen this over and over and over with social media, I mean, every social media platform ever eventually just screws, its users and screws, its advertisers, so to speak, in terms of just really making advertising expensive and harder to reach and all that. 

So with all that said, I never would’ve built a presence on Medium or Quora or other platforms like that. I think of them as a hub and a spoke. So my hub has always been my domain, Rob Walling dot com, and you can go to Rob Walling dot com slash blog I believe, or you can just go there and see my essays link in the top. And if I were to post on Quora or Reddit or Medium or anywhere else, it would either be a summary or a short think piece that basically references my hub. And if you want to read the full piece, you have to come to my website. And of course, these places all resist that. And Twitter these days, it makes posts or tweets with links less what? Less viral. These are all anti-US Pro platform moves. And so yeah, I would do it on my own website is what I would do. 

And then you learn how to promote it, how to submit it to Hacker News, how to figure out how to get it on Reddit, how to mention it on cor, if that’s still worth doing. There’s a bunch of playbooks of how to get your content out there on social media, and I would want to own the domain authority and I would want to own the link, any link juice that comes from those pieces. And the trade-off is you don’t get that instant distribution, right? If you go to Medium and you hit the algorithm or your posting on Reddit and you hit the algorithm, ooh, you get this big boost, the challenge is those customers are not yours. Those readers are really not yours and they don’t stick around in any form or fashion compared to say, having their email address and posting on Medium, it’s going to be really tough to do that. 

The only thing I might consider is I have heard that it, I don’t use it, but I’ve heard that it is a way to have an email. I like email, email even today. It just outperforms everything else, social media and all the other stuff in terms of reach and engagement. And so substack is something I might consider, but for me, if I was going to start writing about a topic, I would want to own that domain and own the SEO around it. So thanks to that question, I hope it was helpful. And my last question of the day comes from X Twitter. So I posted back in June of 24 that I was recording an episode of the show looking for some questions or Azule said, my hypothesis is that if I focus on building a media business and get enough eyeballs, then the right monetization channels will appear. 

And so I should focus mainly on valuable content creation. Is this a legitimate hypothesis or should I also explore monetization more actively? And so I have a couple different answers to this. One is, if you’re building a SaaS, just don’t do this. Don’t build a media company. If you’re building a SaaS, unless you’re HubSpot or Zapier or one of these massive, massive, when you’re doing nine figures of a RR or you’ve raised nine figures of funding, go ahead and build a media business until then. Don’t. And I think it was an entire episode, or at least a segment on a solo episode called Don’t Build a Media Company. You can go find that in the archives. If you are talking about building an info product course and kind of creator maker business, then yeah, I wouldn’t call it a media business, but basically you want to get eyeballs, you want to build an audience. 

And if I was thinking about that, I would think up ahead at least have ideas of how I was going to monetize that because the right monetization channels just appearing almost never happens. I really want to say never happens. I think it never happens, but basically it’s going to be like, oh, I’ll put ads on it. And if you’ve never done ads, you don’t realize how low the ad rates are and how even with an audience like me slash MicroComp TinySeed, my whole ecosystem, if we tried to monetize this with ads, we wouldn’t even be able to afford my house payment. That’s how much money it would bring in a trivial, trivial amount of money. And we have pretty significant reach built over 15 years, significant reach for our niche, not significant compared to Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss. But the thought that a monetization channel will appear is no, I would not do that. 

I do like the idea. Again, this is info products and courses, not SaaS, that if you want to create valuable content, then do that and think about Hub and Spoke. And your hub is going to be some website use set up where you get people back there, you want to get ’em on your email list, and that’s where you start pitching and selling them on stuff. And that first thing might be a $10 ebook, and then you can do a 50 or a hundred dollars video course. And there’s a playbook for doing all of that I won’t go into on this program. And then you map out, well, what are my media channels? What are my spokes? And it depends on what you’re good at, depends on what you want to learn. Do you want to do YouTube, LinkedIn? There’s all the social medias, there’s TikTok. 

Depends on the topic. There’s a whole thought process I would go through to think about how I would do that. You can’t do them all. Well, this is the myth is people will say, well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to record a video, a 10 minute video on a topic, then I’m going to cut it up into shorts. I’m going to put those shorts on TikTok and on YouTube, and I’ll put the 10 minute video on YouTube, and then I’m going to have chat GPT, summarize it, put it into a LinkedIn post and a tweet thread. And I don’t take a still and put it on Instagram. You can do video on Instagram. So I do 90 seconds on Instagram and I’ll break it up. That won’t work. It doesn’t work that way. Anytime you repurpose a single piece of content into a bunch of pieces, most of them do not work. 

We have tried this over and over and over in different iterations. And what I have found in my 15, well, I’ve been blogging since oh five, so in my 20 years of content creation, but realistically, let’s say 15 years of podcasting and a little slightly less of that on YouTube obviously, is that native content that is focused on exactly hitting that channel’s algorithm and that channels users and what they expect. That’s what it’s going to require. So you’re not going to do seven channels at once. You’re going to pick a couple, and you’re going to get really knowledgeable and really good at them. And you are going to do, I mean, I like the jab, jab, right hook framework from Gary V. You’re going to do content, content, and then you’re going to ask for sale or ask to get on the email list, and you’re going to just rinse and repeat. 

So in conclusion, I do not like the idea of getting enough eyeballs and then having the right monetization channel up here or finding it. I think you should go in with at least a hypothesis of, I’m going to monetize it this way and look at other people who have done this or who are doing this because you are not inventing the wheel here. There are, I guarantee you, there are folks who have done what you’re thinking of doing, and maybe they’re in the development niche or the AI niche or the entrepreneur founder niche or the designer niche, or just pick one and see, oh, what have they done? What has worked? And you might want to reach out to ’em and ask them questions or find out if they’ve been on a podcast and talked about what has worked and what hasn’t. And again, that is for courses, info products. 

If you want to build an audience-based business, if you want to build SaaS, do not do this. Please ignore my advice at your peril. That’s all we have for today. Thank you so much again for joining me here in this episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, it’s great to have you. As always. If we are not connected on X Twitter, I’m at Rob Walling. Please hit me up there and if you were at MicroConf in Istanbul, I hope you had a great time and I hope you came up and said hi. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 802.