Episode 803 | 8 Key Takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2025

Rob Walling:
You’re listening to Startups. For the Rest Of Us, I’m your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk through the eight key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2025, which happened just a couple of weeks ago, and I talk these through with the founder of Rual, Laura Sprinkle, who attended the event, and this was her very first MicroConf. As I said, Laura runs Rootabl, which is a TinySeed company, and this was her first exposure to the broader MicroConf community. So it’s really nice that we each have obviously different exposure. I’ve been to 25 flagship MicroConf, and this was her first. And we weigh in on the key takeaways that we pulled away from the talks and the hallway track. Before we dive in, early bird tickets for MicroConf US 2026 are on sale. So if you listen to this episode and you’re thinking, I want to get in a room with 275 amazing bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap founders, you should head to MicroConf dot com slash us. 

The next event is in Portland, Oregon from April 12th through the 14th of 2026, and we have sold out our last several events. We’ve already sold a big chunk of early bird tickets and prices on these tickets will go up on October 22nd or when the first a hundred tickets have sold. If you’re planning to come, you do want to get your tickets now. The tickets today are as cheap as they will ever be. That’s MicroConf dot com slash us and use promo code Rob 50 for $50 off. And with that, let’s dive into the key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2025. Laura Sprinkle, welcome to the show.  

Laura Sprinkle:
Thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
It is great to have you on for your first ever appearance on startups. For the Rest Of Us, we’re going to be talking through MicroConf Europe 2025 that just happened in Istanbul, Turkey. And before we get into that, I want to give folks just one or two minutes about who you are and your expertise. You are the founder of routable. It’s R-O-O-T-A-B l.com. Your H one is create an affiliate program that gets you more leads and more revenue. So you are affiliate management if we were to categorize it, but unlike a lot of founders who enter a category, you have a ton of background and experience in this space. Do you want to give folks just a snapshot of how long you’ve been doing it and maybe some bon fetus?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s been almost a decade in the affiliate space and I’ve done every witch thing. You could think about affiliate management for clients. I had a course, I did consulting, I had an agency, so I’m really all up in the business of affiliate marketing, affiliate management, and worked with some of the top course creators in the world and just done millions in revenue with them, and it’s been a wild ride.  

Rob Walling:
Any top course creator names you want to just drop here on the floor as we’re getting started?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Sure. It’s funny, when I come into this space, I’ll drop a name expecting like, whoa, and then no one knows who they are, but like Amy Porterfield, Todd Herman, Kate Northup. So yeah, lots of folks in the creator space,  

Rob Walling:
Lot of big names. And you actually gave a lightning talk at this event that we’ll get to a little later about affiliate management or really it was affiliate programs made ridiculously easy. That’s a good title. So let’s dive in a little bit, give folks some background, and then we’re going to do, I think we’ll have eight key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2025 to give folks the lay of the land, whether they’ve been listening to this podcast for 10 years or 10 minutes. We tend to have, in Europe, it’s a smaller audience than our US event. And so we had think a record breaking audience of 160, 1 65 in that range. Oftentimes Europe has been more in the 1 25 to one 30 range, so it’s a little bigger, still felt nice and intimate. I felt like I got to talk to a lot of people, maybe not everybody, but I got to talk to a lot of folks. 

We did sell this event out, it’s like our third or fourth in a row that we’ve sold out. 40 countries were represented, which is a record for any MicroConf that we’ve ever run. And to give folks an idea, I believe, including our local events, we used to run, this is our 39th MicroConf and just counting our flagship events from US to Europe. This was our 25th, and then I believe it was the 12th MicroConf Europe. But who’s counting? I’m not a numbers guy. See, I rattle these things. I totally, I do pay attention to ’em. And some of the crazy stats, which I don’t know if we weren’t collecting these before or if they’ve just gone up over time, but 90% of our attendees at this event had a product with revenue, and at 30% of attendees had at least a hundred thousand dollars in MRR. So 30% seven figure a RR companies, which that’s a significant number that I’m not sure I was aware of. Again, over time, I don’t know if it’s always been that high. I feel like it’s kind of creeping up. This is my 25th flagship MicroConf Fit was your first, I’m curious to set the stage. Is it what you expected? What did you expect, and was it same or different than what you thought it would be?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I think we had a conversation back in April in San Diego and chatting about the difference between Europe and the us. And I will say one thing I was surprised about was there were actually more women than I expected. Not that there were a ton, but it was still more, and also, this is going to sound like I thought it was going to be terrible. I didn’t, but everyone was so friendly. I’m thinking, oh, these are all going to be nerdy programmers. They’re going to be standing by the wall. But no, everyone was so excited to chat and so kind, so that was a surprise.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s cool. Nerdy programmers can be friendly too. You know that as a nerdy programmer myself. No, I agree. And that’s something that, it’s not like we’ve cultivated that on purpose, but a little bit. I think folks who are attracted Microcom spring out of this show, this podcast, and Mike Taber, who I started the podcast with and myself, tend to be just pretty nice people. And so I think people who are drawn to us tend to be pretty nice people. They’re obviously more polarizing personalities in the startup space. I could be a total startup bro and be super aggressive and be like, fuck everybody. And the people who are drawn to me then are of that personality. I think that’s the people who would be at the event. So that’s how we kind of view it. And it is nice, as you said, the vibe of this event in particular, all microscopes are like this. 

They’re positive. But the vibe of this one, I felt like people were really going out of their way to almost offer to help one another. I mean, I was just standing around talking to people, signing books and stuff, and I would watch people come up and be like, oh, how can, oh, I’m really good at this type of marketing and here’s some advice on SEO, or you should talk to my buddy who’s a blah, blah, blah. And I was like, this is so cool to see this in real life. It’s like an extension of the TinySeed Slack is right where it’s like everybody is here, they’re there to learn and help themselves, but also there’s a real, they felt like a really giving environment.  

Laura Sprinkle:
And I think everybody too was they just asked really great questions and you could not tell when you said the 30% were over a millionaire R, there was no, you didn’t know that. Walking up to somebody, everybody was very chill.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s part of what I enjoy about it is it’s pretty rare. There are egos at a MicroConf, and there are folks doing a hundred KARR, a million a r, 10 million. I mean, there was somebody there, there’s several folks there doing eight figures a RR, and they’re as humble as anyone else, and you really have to dig. I mean, I remember one guy was telling me, yeah, I’ve never been to a MicroComp and listed your podcast for a while, really liked your book. And I was like, oh, cool. And I’m just like, so you have a product? Have you started working on something? And he’s like, we have 70 employees and we’re completely bootstrapped and we’re doing north of 10 million. And I was like, oh boy. And you just couldn’t tell. So  

Laura Sprinkle:
That  

Rob Walling:
Was really fun. Now we’re going to dive into the sessions in a second and kind of pull out some key takeaways from each of them, but I wanted to call out the fact that this is the first time, not only we’ve done a MicroConf in Istanbul, but it was my first time in Istanbul, and I believe it was my first time that far east in Europe because I mean I’ve, I’ve been to Thailand, so I’ve been east in the world. But it was a pretty cool experience for me. I got a guidebook, of course, the Rick Steves guidebook and did a walk through Old Town, is that what it’s called? Yeah, old Town and saw 2000 year old mosques and such history there as Istanbul slash Constant denoble ran the world. It was the world trade or a world trade, a center of world trade for hundreds of years. Had you been to Istanbul before and what was your take on it?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, it was my first time as well, and it was the furthest east that I have ever been. And I am sad that I did not go to the Asian side while I was there, but the history is just incredible. We went to the Basilica, the cistern on one of the days before the event, and I was just struck by how they were reusing product and materials from ruins from way before that was built. That’s crazy to me.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Alright, and with that, let’s dive in to our first talk and a good takeaway or two from it. We’re going to go kind of in order. I actually don’t remember the exact order. So I went from memory, and I’m sure I’m a little bit out of order, but folks, there was only 160 people there, the other tens of thousands who were listening to this, don’t care about the order. But the first talk on the first day that kind of kicked us off and set the stage was from Mark Thomas. Folks have heard him on this podcast. He’s also a coach in our SaaS Institute program for seven figure founders. His talk was what to do when growth feels like it has ground to a halt. And he talked a lot about what lead magnets, lifecycle marketing, sending emails, and really taking advantage of your current lead flow rather than just defaulting to looking at top of the funnel and more and more leads. And this is in line, it’s not always the right answer, much raising prices. It’s not always the right answer, but oftentimes it is. And if you’re not thinking about it, it’s probably something you should pay attention to. And I went on a rant a couple episodes ago about this, about, it wasn’t even a rant, but it was some advice of like, Hey, it’s not always just more leads. Make sure your funnel follows these rules of thumb and has pretty good conversion rates and such. What else did you take away from Mark’s talk?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I really loved how he was talking about the, he kept calling it an addiction to acquisition of more leads. And I really, as someone who talks about affiliates a lot, I was like, oh, people need to follow exactly what Mark is doing first before they go get more traffic, whether it’s paid or organic or affiliates. And I am actually going to book a call with him as part of the TinySeed mentorship because I’m like, I want to implement lifecycle marketing. And it’s so hard to, what’s that phrase? See the bottle through the label? No, see the label from the bottle or whatever it is. So I’m excited to tap into that. And it was interesting seeing the room and how people were like, Ooh, send more emails. That feels like a lot, but really, why else do we have the email list? It’s not to build an email list. It’s to grow our business.  

Rob Walling:
And then we had a couple talks after that by names. Most people who are listening to this will know, and these talks were kind of related. They rhymed. They had some similarities. Michelle Hanson, author of Deploy Empathy and co-founder Geo Coio, and now a multi-time MicroConf speaker. The title, her talk was Unlock What You Came here for. And it was a little bit of a workshop where she gave people some work to do around tables and figure out why are you here? And that was followed by John Knox who did a lightning talk called Networking for Introverted Founders. And so a lot of it was about making connections in relationship. And if folks have been to a MicroConf, they know that the second slide of every MicroConf, I talk about strategies, tactics, inspiration, and relationships. And we started by focusing on strategies, tactics, inspiration comes along just, you always get a good founder story here and there, but the relationships is actually what will get you through the hard times. What did you think about Michelle and John’s talks?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I loved how John really focused on, he did a lot of Star Wars references, so I was like all these really nailing it in as far as relationships and making sure to prioritize that at the event. And it was great that we were able to speak with our table during Michelle’s. Oftentimes you’re just sitting at a table but listening. And so that interactive piece was helpful too.  

Rob Walling:
And then we had excursions at the end of that day, and excursions are something we’ve only implemented, we were going to implement in the first year was 2020, and then we canceled all the micro comps. And so I believe the first excursions we ever did, were probably late 2021 or 2022, and this is where we take half the day. And instead of just doing more talks, we put founders in a place where they can have conversations with other founders. It’s the networking, it’s the relationships, it’s just stuff stern in your head from those morning talks and you get to know the people and you can kind of build relationships with ’em. So we had things ranging from hopping on a boat to a, I think it was like a rooftop, I don’t know if it was a bar tour, a rooftop restaurant tour. And there was a Hamam, which is a Turkish bath, and I believe, is that the excursion that you went on?  

Laura Sprinkle:
It is, yes. We did the Turkish bath and then met up with those who were in the bazaar doing the coffee workshop,  

Rob Walling:
The coffee workshop. And the bazaar was pretty cool. It was a low shopping area. How did you feel about, well, I guess to start, have you been to a conference before where it is a mix of talks and getting out and doing things, and then how did this experience feel to you?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, so no, I mean, I host an event, but it was like 40 people and there were a lot of outdoor excursions, but the fact that y’all organized for 160 people to do excursions is next level. And that there were options and so many different things. And I think that was my favorite part of having chosen to go to MicroConf Europe over something in America. And I probably will do more here, but it was like I’m visiting a place. So it was fun to get out in the community, and that’s also why I chose the, it felt the most Turkish of all the options.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. No, I agree. I think if I would’ve gone on one, I actually took that time to kind of take a breath, make sure my talk was really dialed in. I like to do the excursions, but it can be a bit much for me given that I am running crazy the whole time. The other opportunities that we make available for the founders and attendees are these receptions. There’s a welcome one on Sunday night, and then there’s one on Monday and on Tuesday night, and we really try hard to have an outdoor place, otherwise it gets so loud. We’ve been doing this for a few years, and so all the do’s and don’ts, pitfalls of running in a, Hey, let’s have a seven or eight foot marble ceiling and a marble floor and get 200 people in a room. It’s so deafening. So it was nice here that we did have outdoor space, although one of the days, I think it was raining, but this is probably where I got to do the most mingling with attendees. And these were two hour receptions right before dinner. And I talked to dozens and dozens of founders introduce myself. Some folks had been to many MicroConf and some folks had, there was a lot about, it was about 50 50 new versus returning, which was cool. It means that there are 80 people there that I’ve never met, but are somewhere within this MicroConf ecosystem, whether they’re listening to startups For the Rest Of Us or they’ve bought my books or what have you. Any key learnings or meetings or thoughts around the receptions.  

Laura Sprinkle:
I remember actually Michelle said in her talk something about leaving the circle open, so never having just a closed group of people. So there’s always space to welcome a new person to the conversation. And that was so true at these receptions. You could just walk up and it never felt, Ooh, I’m interrupting something. And everyone always caught you up to speed and no, I just met a lot of people. And there was also an opportunity if you did need to rest before dinner or make plans for dinner, you were never just solo unless you wanted to be.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, which is really nice at an event, especially if you’re new. The second day we kicked off with Tiny Seed’s, very own a R vol set, and he talked about, oh, it was pitfalls of selling B2B SaaS and it was value buyers and how you can kind of be, tricked is a strong word, but how you can sell for less than you’re worth. If folks build a relationship with you and then run a process, you don’t get a lot of bitters. So he did a lightning talk, and then I dove in with my AI talk, begrudgingly talked about ai. It is so funny when I surveyed TinySeed in the slack and then I asked on Twitter and I just said, I’m going to talk in two months at MicroConf Europe. What do you want to hear me talk about? And it was super helpful. A lot of people, how do you use ai? What do you think about ai? And I was like, I don’t really want to talk about that. But what I realized, I picked a completely different idea, started writing that talk, and it just wasn’t very good. I didn’t have a soul. I, I  

Laura Sprinkle:
Dunno what it was,  

Rob Walling:
Wasn’t going to great. I might give it again later. Yeah, I liked the idea of it. The implementation was challenging for me. So do you know the book, the Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz? No. It’s basically the story of, so Andreesen Horowitz is Mark Andreesen and Ben Horowitz. Ben Horowitz was a startup founder and raised venture and sold, I don’t even remember the name of the company now, but made, I think it was like a B2B security company or something and sold it for a billion or 2 billion. The whole book is the story of that, and it’s just all the hard things, all the shit that went wrong and all the hard moments. And I believe each chapter is an anecdote of, and then this catastrophe happened and then this catastrophe happened and then this, you know what I mean? So it’s kind of a cool title, hard thing about hard things. 

Ruben Founder Sewell said, no one talks about that for Bootstrappers. So do that. Write a talk. That is the stories. And so I was going to have one section of, and it was going to be a case study where I was going to interview a founder, likely a TinySeed founder. I have easy access to ’em, but maybe a MicroComp was going to have to anonymize some of them, but it was going to be getting a cease and desist, getting hacked and ransom, having your data ransom, who have, I know founders where all of these have happened, right? Co-founder splits, selling your company imploding, shutting your company down, running out of money. I dunno, I had this whole list of things and it was like, Ooh, these are going to be good stories. But when I actually looked at it, I’m like, look, what’s the action here? Maybe it’s a better podcast series. You know what I mean? Just for me, a talk, especially at MicroConf from me has to come with some, got to, it has to make you think deeper than just it’s going to be scary. And that was it. You know what I mean? Or things are going to go wrong and I’m normalizing it, but that didn’t feel like a great talk to me and I got a ways in and then I gave up and said, forget it. I’m talking about ai.  

Laura Sprinkle:
I want to hear those stories.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, yeah. No, I know ’em all. I know. I wonder if man, producer Ron will kill me if I do this. If I did a series, you know how we do the Tiny Sea tales where it’s like narrative and there’s voiceovers in music. It’s like, tell me the hard thing. The hard thing about bootstrapping series wouldn’t be kind of rough. I mean in a good way, right? Hearing the story, we could anonymize voices even with AI now and I could do an interview. We are so far off track, you’ve completely derailed podcast, Laura, that’s a great call. Whatcha you doing? You’ve not only derailed the podcast, but you’ve made me volunteer for some crazy, crazy side quest questing. Alright, bringing us back my talk on everyone. Just forget everything that I just said. No one email or hit me up on Twitter asking me to record that. 

So my talk was from gimmick to growth, how to use AI and SaaS, and what it forced me to do honestly was to sit and think for hours and hours and hours and do research and write things out and then ask TinySeed founders. Once I had kind of a thesis, what I was trying to do was get my arms around what are all the ways that we can use AI in a SaaS company and then in a SaaS product. And I got close. I don’t think I nailed it because actually right after I had five and five ways to use AI in SaaS, in a SaaS company, which actually by the time this goes live, that might be live on the YouTube channel. I recorded like a 10, 12 minute YouTube video about that specific thing, but then how to use AI in your product and what AI can do as a SaaS founder. 

That’s the part that I really struggled with. And I came up with three use cases, generalized use cases, and then a fourth. And then when I surveyed TinySeed founders and said, give me all the examples of AI of how you’re using AI in SaaS. I was like, oh, my categories don’t fit. And so it made me rework it and I loved that It’s a little bit of a scientific process. It’s more qualitative than truly quantitative. I had about 20 different examples that I spread out across five uses of ai, but I in the end was pleased. I was happy with how the talk turned out. It was grueling to write. It was one of the harder talks I’ve written because I didn’t have, a lot of times I’m writing a talk, which is like, I already know what I want to say. I just need to get slides. 

This was like, I think I know what I want to say. Got the slides from the designer, I mapped it all out and then was like, Nope, this is wrong. I already have slides and half of these don’t even work. So then in a panic like four days before the event I posted in TinySeed Slack, you probably saw it. Advice needed, dear founders, please send me examples of what you do with AI to make sure I don’t have a talk that’s just completely wrong. And it was really helpful for shaping it, and I have so much more confidence in it now that it’s mostly right. I think the only thing I missed, or I missed it slash kind of left it left out on kind of purposes, MCP, which is making your SaaS available to LLMs, where they’re chatbots and such that they can hit you. It’s an API for blah, blah, blah. So I think if I give it again, I probably will give it again in MicroConf Portland, and I will probably add that sixth thing in and then make sure it’s dialed in. So overall, I think it was helpful. Was there anything, are you thinking about the use of AI in readable and did it spark any thoughts in your product mind?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I mean I took a ton of notes also. I loved that all of my mastermind buddies from tiny C got shout outs in there.  

Rob Walling:
Oh yeah. Is that right? That’s great pictures. That’s just coincidence. But yeah, that’s fun.  

Laura Sprinkle:
I was like, yay. And I loved what you said about not just adding it to add it. You were like, is this truly going to be helpful for the user then do it? Because that is something I’ve been thinking about and I do think there are ways that it could be helpful for readable, but if I’m going to do it, I want to do it really, really well.  

Rob Walling:
And then our very own, Laura Sprinkle gave a Lightning Talk affiliate programs made ridiculously easy and I loved, it was a great overview and then you dove in to some pretty detailed elements. It was just very obvious that it’s not like you’re a dabbler in the affiliate space of like, Hey, I have some thoughts about being an affiliate. You’re just like, all right, how do I distill a decade of knowledge into 12 minutes and this whole thing is an exercise for the reader? Go do that on your own time. I thought the talk was great. I heard people mentioning it in conversations of like, oh yeah, I haven’t done enough with affiliates or I want to kind get into that. I’m curious how it felt to you to show up to give a talk on something you’re obviously an expert at.  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, it felt great. Someone asked me what was the highlight of the experience, and I said my talk, but not from this place of like, oh, my talk was the best, but more just the experience of doing it felt so fun, and there was a moment getting on stage being like, oh, wait, I’m doing the talk and I’ve got 12 minutes. I better hurry up and get to it. But it was so fun and the fact that there were people there to talk to me afterwards, Michelle Hansen also mentioned doing a talk is this friend catcher because you talk about something you’re passionate about and then people find you. And I was like, that definitely happened.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s a real plus of being a speaker at an event, so thanks for doing that. I know it takes time to put it together and really appreciated you given the talk at the event. Thought it was really, really good. It was great. Our next talk was from Jesse Shoberg, another Lightning Talk, and this one got people talking ranking in chat, GPT and Google’s AI overview lessons learned from Tess on 2000 websites. Jesse is the founder of Drop in Blog. H one is the only blogging platform you’ll ever need, and so as a blogging platform, he sees what he sees. I see they have a whole rank and chat GPT plugin or some functionality built into that as a feature. And so what I really liked about his is there was theory and then there were super concrete examples and just screenshots calling things out. All of these talks will be available for purchase if you didn’t attend MicroConf, and I believe that we usually price ’em around $99 for the run of ’em. They’ll be available within a month or two after the event, and we sprinkle a few of them out on the YouTube channel. But make sure to check microsoft.com/events if you want to check it out, because a few of these really are meaty in terms of implementation, and I thought Jesse’s was just that with some really specific advice. What did you take away from his talk?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I loved how specific it was. Everyone was like furiously screenshotting, taking notes, chatting about after, and felt like he just kept saying, this is something that you can do for all of your old content. So it wasn’t like, oh, I need to go create a whole new strategy or go reinvent the wheel. It’s like, how can I optimize what I have? And I loved that about his talk.  

Rob Walling:
Then we had attendee led workshops. This is a brand new, I’ll say it was experimental, but it’s been requested for years and years, probably 15 years of people saying, Hey, what about the attendees leading workshops? And in the early days, we didn’t have space or budget for breakout rooms. Now we do. So in the afternoon on the second day, well like a month or two prior, we let attendees volunteer to lead a workshop on a topic, and then folks signed up for their workshops. And it wasn’t just a talk, it was a small group where Brennan Dunn talked about personalization and gathering more data about folks on your website. That’s just one example, but I think there were six or seven of them. I’m super curious to hear the feedback on them in the survey that we sent at the end of the event, but I’m curious which one you attended and what your feedback is. Was it good or was it kind like, eh, that’s always my concern, right? With attendee created content, is it going to let people down because the MicroConf stamps on this, and if you go to a session that isn’t good, that’s kind of a bummer.  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, so I actually did go to Brennan’s. I thought it was great. I think the one feedback, which I already gave as well was I think taking up the whole hour for one would’ve been great, so we could really dive in and actually workshop. He did a lot of talking. We had a great handout, but I’m like, all right, now I want to implement this for my business. Let’s do this here.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, got it. Yeah, we had two 30 minute slots and you switched workshops. It was 30 minutes. So yeah, having it an hour. Ooh, that could be really interesting. Another session we did on that second day was an interview with the co-founder of Scraping Bee. Kevin Sahe, obviously a TinySeed founder, and Kevin’s co-founder Pierre appeared on this very podcast just a few months ago talking about being mostly bootstrapped to their eight figure cash exit. And so it was a q and a fireside chat where I interviewed him, and then we got some really insightful audience questions. So his session was called Bootstrap to Eight Figures, scraping Bees Journey. Any notable things that you remember or took away from the conversation with Kevin?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I was talking with a few people after of how he was at 2 million before he hired anybody else, and we were all like, whoa, that’s wild. And also, I was interested to chat with him of what specifically he would’ve done differently, but I loved how he was just so blunt and honest about answering the questions you asked him.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, he was prepared and he basically, yeah, they were at 2 million with two co-founders, zero employees, and I said, oh, our advice was like, don’t do that. We were telling them along, you need to hire. And they’re like, oh, we don’t want to. I said, what would you tell someone who’s doing that today? And he said, I would tell them not to do that. He’s like, it was a huge mistake. And I was like, I know you need to listen to us. It was really funny. I actually didn’t expect him to say that. I would not prompting him. I thought he might say, you know what? It was cool and we figured it out, and then we decided blah, blah, blah. But he was like, no, it was a big mistake. It was burning him out. And realistically, two co-founders at 2 million, if you’re thinking about selling at some point, there’s not much of business there without the co-founders. 

And so you’re saddled to it where you can’t step away. And it’s like then they really need you to stick around for two or three years to run the business instead of having a team that can do it. Rounding out the day. We had two more talks. We had one from Hana, she was a second time MicroConf speaker, former CEO of Thrive themes. Her talk was how solo founders and nimble teams can leverage AI to multiply their marketing efforts. I think it’s no accident that we had three talks that touched on ai. As much as I think I kind of start rolling my eyes when I hear a lot about it and other people are like, do I really want to hear more about ai? I felt like the talks though were practical. It was Jesse’s, it was mine, and then it was Hannah’s, and they all covered different elements. And I’m curious, what if you had any takeaways or want to add more summary of what she talked about?  

Laura Sprinkle:
Yeah, I thought it was great because I think a lot of folks in that room in particular think about AI in terms of product. So reminding them like, Hey, we also have to market our businesses was great. And then I loved her examples of using automations, so not just going to chat GBT of how do I do this thing, but really, okay, you can input some stuff. And then each, wow, I’m so not technical as you can tell, but each agent is going to do a different thing for you. And I’m like, oh, that was a good reminder for me that I need to set those up.  

Rob Walling:
Our last talk of MicroConf Fear of 2025 was from James Mooring, the co-founder of Asty who appeared on this show maybe eight or nine months ago. And his talk was momentum over mayhem, what bootstrapping to 2 million A RR really looks like. And he talked about how they’re now at about two and a half million, and they have a pretty SELT team, and they’ve gotten there actually quite quickly in terms of when he’s always like, it’s kind of a CRM for the NDIS, which is the Australian, it’s a scheme and whatever. He describes it. I’m like, I totally get that and I’m going to forget what that is in 12 seconds. But the fact, if you were to tell me I’m going to build a SaaS like that, I’d be like, great. That’s going to be a great little tiny business and it’s going to grow slowly. And he’s like, no. I mean, they’ve gotten there in a handful of years. I loved, I mean, it’s a classic MicroConf talk of a founder story of how they got there, what they did, the ups and downs, and then key takeaways, what I learned from this, and maybe some advice that I can give you the audience as to how you can do it better, easier, not make the same mistakes that I did. Anything you took away from James’s talk.  

Laura Sprinkle:
So I had sat next to him just accidentally at a table the day before, and it was one of those, oh, I would have no idea that you are this multi seven figure a RR business because you’re so down to earth and so generous with your time. Apparently I have this bad view of people with a lot of money, but no, geez, seriously, he was just so kind and helpful, and that translated so well into his talk. And also, I loved how he talked about doing the not scalable thing and just really showing up and creating a great product and being helpful to your customers and how that’s helped them grow.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, so thanks to all the MicroComp speakers for taking time out of their busy schedules. It’s a lot of founders who are flying halfway across the world to basically give talks to give back to the community. Yourself included, and thanks for taking the time to join me here on this recap episode. If folks want to keep up with you on the internet, of course they can check out reputable.com, R-O-O-T-A-B l.com. It is the best affiliate management software on the internet. Laura Sprinkle, thanks again for joining me on the show.  

Laura Sprinkle:
Thanks so much for having me. This was awesome.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Laura for joining me on the show, and thanks to you for listening to this and every episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, as I mentioned at the top, if this event sounds incredible, it was, you should try to make our Portland, Oregon event in April of 2026 work for you. Head to microcomp.com/us and use promo code Rob 50 for $50 off. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 803.