Is hiring a sales and marketing co-founder the secret sauce for technical SaaS founders?
In this solo episode, Rob Walling tackles a fresh batch of listener questions, starting with one of the most common dilemmas for technical founders: should you hire a sales and marketing co-founder or go it alone?
He introduces his “Core Four” mental model, the essential skills every SaaS team needs early on, and shares insights on dealing with enterprise clients who keep moving the goalposts, handling a flood of non-ICP users, and a heartfelt message from a listener who just exited their startup.
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Topics we cover:
- (3:11) – Should you find a co-founder for sales and marketing?
- (5:29) – What are the Core Four SaaS Skills?
- (11:41) – Can you succeed without mastering all four, or should you outsource?
- (16:39) – Why sales-led growth might outperform self-serve SaaS
- (21:48) – Dealing with big companies who change your contract terms
- (27:06) – What to do with thousands of unqualified signups
Links from the Show:
- Discretion Capital – M&A for B2B SaaS
- Exit Strategy by Sherry & Rob Walling
- MicroConf – SaaS Community
- TinySeed – SaaS Institute
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
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If you’re looking to hire world-class talent super fast, you should check out today’s sponsor, G two I. They not only give you access to over 8,000 pre-vetted engineers, they clear away the chaos and clutter when it comes to hiring. There’s no AI generated resumes and no time wasters, just solid candidates with at least five years of proven experience. G two I does the vetting for you with customized live technical interviews so you can actually see how a candidate might work with your team, companies like Meta, Microsoft and Shop Monkey Trust G two I. And so do first time founders who just need to get this higher right the first time. If you need a pre-vetted engineer to join your team, quickly head to G2 i.co/ MicroConf to start your seven day free trial. And when you mention this podcast, you’ll get $1,500 off your first invoice. That’s G2 i.co/ MicroConf. Sales marketing, product and development. Those are the core four elements of building a SaaS company. And if you go on social media or you listen to podcasts or you see founders who are trying to succeed and failing over and over, usually they’re missing one or more of these.
You are listening to startups. For the Rest Of Us, I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I answer listener questions covering topics from whether I should find a sales and marketing co-founder dealing with big company customers that make a lot of changes to your deals. This deal is getting worse all the time. What to do with huge traffic of users who aren’t in your ICP and more listener questions before we get rolling on those. If you are thinking that you might sell your SaaS company in the next few years and you expect that your a RR will be between two and 20 million when you go to market, you should reach out to interval@discretioncapital.com. A r From his many appearances, I think he’s up to 10 or 12 appearances on this show and he’s been on Hot Tech Tuesdays. He comes on to explain venture funding and growth equity and he for years has been my go-to person for B2B SaaS M and a and discretion Capital advises B2B SaaS founders who are looking to get incredible, incredible outcomes for their SaaS doing between two and 20 million a RR. They have a great track record of dealing with strategics and private equity in a way that can optimize your outcome. Discretion has been a long time partner of MicroConf and TinySeed and if you’re curious, even if you’re not planning on selling in the next six to 12 months, but you want to reach out, have a conversation about how to optimize the value of your business discretion capital.com. And with that, let’s roll into our first listener question.
Speaker 2:
Hey Rob, love the podcast. I listen to an episode every day on my evening walks. My question is, should I find a business co-founder? As a technical founder, I built the MVP myself, now comes sales and marketing, which I have no experience in. Should I look for a business co-founder to handle that side of the company or hire an agency or a contractor or even do it myself? This is different to the usual question of whether to find a technical co-founder and comes with a different set of pain points that I would love to hear your thoughts on. Thanks.
Rob Walling:
So as he said, this is a variation of a question that I get on this show. What do we think? At least every month? I get it. I don’t always answer it, but it’s always, Hey, I’m a developer. Should I find a sales and marketing? I don’t call ’em a business co-founder, by the way. What does a business person do? What do they set up a bank account and file for an LLC? If they don’t have sales and or marketing experience and the ability to execute in this space, they don’t get half the company because the most valuable things in a SaaS business, the most valuable skills I’ve talked about are sales and marketing. Depending on there are some SaaS you can build with those sales, right? So I’m going to group them together, but you can uncouple them. If you build a true self-serve SaaS, then there is no sales.
So you can remove that and realize it’s just all about marketing, all about driving leads and converting, but sales and marketing and then a product like the ability to decide to follow that gut, to find product-market fit, to decide what gets built, what gets built into the product, what features get built, how they get built, even if you don’t build them yourself, right? That’s product and then development, which is still a crucial skill, but it is lower on the hierarchy. I’ve seen so many companies, SaaS companies succeed with development not being that strong and sales and marketing being extremely strong. Now, longer term they have technical debt, their feature velocity slows down. But it’s amazing what you can go back and solve if you’ve bootstrapped to two, three, $4 million in a RR because your sales and marketing are so strong and technical debt is nothing that I want or that you want as a developer, but it is something that can be fixable.
So what I want to do instead of just answering this question is I actually want to outline, it’s a new framework ish. It’s probably technically not a framework, but it is maybe a mental model is a better way to put it. And since I do get this question or a variation of it so often this is what helps me build these rules of thumb. And for this one, this question of should I get a co-founder to do X, Y, Z or should I hire it out? Should I outsource it? Should I hire my first employee to do it? I want to reflect on what I call the core four, which are, in my opinion, the most crucial aspects of building, launching and growing a SaaS company. So these are the four skill sets or areas of expertise that in a perfect world you would have all of them on your founding team and they’re very, very difficult to outsource.
Certainly hiring someone on Upwork is not going to get these done. Best case, you’re going to find someone very expensive who’s very knowledgeable, who can maybe do these. And when I look at all the, I’ve talked about this, how there are dozens of TinySeed companies doing seven or eight figures in a RR and when I go down this list, none of them hired for or outsourced any of these core four before they were doing about one and a half to 2 million a RR when I used to run and build my companies, I never outsourced these core four until I was doing seven figures of a RR. So I think my rule of thumb is probably going to be, hey, in a perfect world, maybe 2 million a RR. Still, I could see as you hit a million, you could think about hiring out some of these, especially that development is one of them. There’s a stage early on where I think if you hire, you can hire competent people and manage them if you yourself are a developer.
That’s the thing with these Core four is it becomes so much easier to hire for them and then to manage them if you’ve done them yourself. And so there is a difference here. Were you a developer even if you’re not coding anymore, have you hired and managed developers in the past then hiring a developer, not co-founder, but like a founding engineer or an employee number one or someone who is going to write a lot of the core product code that is feasible? It’s feasible to do that, but if you are not a dev and you’ve never managed devs, then no, it’s not that it’s impossible. There are certainly some companies that do it and you might be listening to this and be like, Hey, that’s me. And there are founders like Craig Hewitt who’ve done it. There are a handful of TinySeed companies, it’s not very many that don’t have a developer or co-founder, but the number one struggle that they have inevitably month after month is we have too many bugs.
New agency wants to rewrite our entire code base. We can’t make progress because we can’t ship features fast enough and it just becomes the number one headwind for them over the long term. And I think if you removed that headwind by them having a founding engineer or a dev co-founder who really owned the code base, it’d be a significantly different business in almost every case that I’ve seen. So what are the core four? Well I’ve already defined them in the last five minutes. Sales, marketing, product and development. Those are the core four elements of a SaaS company and if you go on social media or you listen to podcasts or you see founders who are trying to succeed and failing over and over, usually they’re missing one or more of these. Usually they’re really good at product and maybe development too. Maybe they teach themselves how to code, but they really aren’t that good at sales and marketing.
And by sales and marketing, I don’t mean posting on Twitter, I don’t mean audience building because that is not a core skillset of building a SaaS company as you’ve heard me rant about. And then there are some folks who are really good at sales and marketing and they start a company without product knowledge and they hire an engineer or an agency to build their product and they can kickstart that product to something based on their audience size or based on their reach or how good they’re at driving SEO traffic. But they inevitably hit a couple things. Number one, they can’t find product-market fit and their churn is extremely high. I’ve talked about the four stages of product-market fit on my YouTube channel. I dunno that I brought it into this podcast yet, but I’ll have to at some point. But all that said, the high churn is a sign of non-existent or weak product-market fit.
And the big kind of info marketers or the marketers that I’ve seen who’ve tried to lean true SaaS and who don’t know product well, they don’t know what they should build. They don’t really know how to iterate on a product because when you’re an infomarketer, it’s just the headline, right? Hey, what does this thing do to you? This helps make you a million dollars great product inside. Does it really matter what’s in it? People pay you a one time fee and if they never use it, they is like many people ask for a refund versus if you’re building SaaS, you have to be able to take feedback and iterate and know how software works and be able to build something people want and are willing to pay for. And that’s really hard and that is that’s the job of the founder. That’s the product skillset.
I’ve also seen sales and marketing founders with no development expertise and that’s where you get into the code bases that just you basically grind to a halt after 12, 18, 24 months because of the technical debt. So the core four are the four skill sets that in a perfect world I want to see on every founding team, and this is, it’s not the only way to do it, it’s not a hundred percent, but boy, 90 plus percent, 95%, these are the companies that I see just hitting on all cylinders. Sometimes the core four are spread across three co-founders, sometimes it’s two and every once in a while you get a Ruben Gomez who has all four. You get an Iran Galran who has all four of these who came on and talked about selling gym desk for it was a majority buy for 32.5 million. That’s the headline number, but it’s implied that the valuation was higher than that and he in fact has all four of these and I could go on there.
There are other folks, but it is a rare combination to have it in one individual. And so the reason I’m saying all of this is with that mental framework in mind, the question is do you have the core four? And if your answer is no, then the question is are you willing to learn the ones that you don’t have? And I’m not saying you have to be 100% certain that you can be a master of all these because let’s be honest, none of us, even those that have tried to do all four of these as a single founder, none of us master them. But can you do them well enough to scrap and get by and build something that people want? And if the answer is yes and you’re willing to try, then I would say you don’t need a co-founder if you feel like you have the ability to potentially do well enough at these to get along because as a founder, you’re usually going to be Jack or Jill of all the trades and a master of none of them, then no, you don’t need a co-founder.
But the more common answer to this is people say, I don’t want to learn this or it’s going to take me too long, or can’t I just hire for this? Won’t that be faster? No, it won’t be faster and it’s much, much more likely to fail. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’ve seen across the thousands and thousands of bootstrapped, mostly bootstrap SaaS companies that I’ve interacted with across the last 20 years of doing this. So if you’re willing to learn and develop and grow into all four of these, then I’d say a no co-founder. Now if you’re not, I see there’s still a couple options. One is you get a co-founder or you, as I said, you hire that you need a founder level person. So let’s just put, if you’re not willing to learn them, then one option is to get a founder level person in that place, whether you give them equity or whether you’re paying a full salary so to speak.
But there’s also one other option, which is to build your product to basically restrict your idea and probably your growth to make up for this deficiency of only having the core three or the core two. Notice how core two and core three don’t sound nearly as poetic as Core four, implying that perhaps Core four is the right way to think about it. What I’m saying is you can limit your product ideas or your growth if you build a product where you don’t need all of the four. So what are examples of that? Well, I think you always need product expertise. Someone needs to decide what are we? This is founder level. You can’t build something people want by accident. It almost never happens and you need some type of product mind of deciding what gets built, how it gets built in what order, listening to customers getting all this stuff done to build a great product.
So I don’t think you can get around that one period. You’re going to want to learn that hiring a developer, hiring a project manager at an agency. No, this isn’t it. This product expertise is probably the biggest thing that I see missing on teams that just can’t get it right and can’t find that market fit and can’t iterate to make better and better products for their customers. So let’s say product is some knowledge of what to build in what order I think is critical. So let’s say can you build something that doesn’t need development though? Well, you’re not going to build a full-blown SaaS app with that because everything needs development even these days with no code. If you are going to build Drip or Gym Desk or Sign Well or Al or any of the full-blown SaaS apps, you need development skills. So you have to restrict yourself if you’re going to not need development, and I think you can build simple apps with no code and I think you can vibe code.
You’ve heard us talk on the show, you can vibe code Simpler apps. If you recall, I had an analogy of having Derek Grimer over to my house and he and I with really no carpentry skills. We could build an outhouse that would be fine and would stand up and not tip over. We could build a shed like a tool shed the moment he and I tried to build a garage or a single family home or a two story home or a commercial building, that’s when it falls over because he and I would basically be vibe building small structures and at a certain point it just tips over and fails. That’s what Vibe Coating does is you can build a little utility, it’ll work great. I’m going to take a PDF, turn it into audio fine go vibe code that I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s not hard to maintain.
It’s 10 lines of code, 50 lines of code, whatever, whatever it winds up being, you’re set. So what I’m saying is if you don’t want to have development requirements, if you don’t want to need development skill on your team, then you need to pick something very simple and minimalistic and something that can either be built out with the existing no-code tools or with five coding. The problem is how are you going to know? I could look at it and say, oh, that’s too complicated. You need a developer, but how are you going to know? I dunno, ask a friend, ask a developer as far as I can take it is if you want to try to get around development, you can’t just build what everyone else is building when they are a developer or when they have developers. That I think is a huge fallacy.
So what about not having sales expertise and not wanting to learn it? Well pick an app that is marketing only that doesn’t need sales, and this is kind of the indie hacker dream, right? It’s the bootstrapper dream of 15, 20 years ago. Self-serve SaaS usually has a lower price point, usually has higher churn. It depends on the space, but you can do that. It’s rarer these days and in fact, unfortunately I guess for those who want to do that, the fastest growing companies and the ones that grow into the seven and eight figures within my investment portfolio of 200, what is it? It’s 224 companies, but it’s about to bump up into the two thirties about to fund the next TinySeed batch, but the ones that are growing the fastest are doing sales inevitably. I mean when we started Drip, I wanted it to be self-serve and then what I realized is people would come in with a million person list and I’m like, I don’t remember what the pricing was, but let’s say it was a thousand dollars, $2,000 a month.
Well, they did at least want to have one or two conversations and that was worth it because of lifetime value with net negative churn and the lifetime value of one or $2,000 a month for a long, long, long time, it’s just totally worth it. And so if you want to be wildly successful and grow fast, still grow organically, but grow really quickly, you will inevitably want to learn how to do sales. But what I’m saying is you can certainly get off the ground. I don’t think I did any sales calls until we were at 10 or 15, probably 15 or 20,000 MRR with Drip and then I started doing ’em and realized, oh my gosh, I closed so many more deals and we were growing faster. Then I went and hired a customer success person to not only do the sales calls but then to also do customer success and get people onboarded.
So what’s the last of the core four is marketing. How do you get around not having marketing? Well, I mean I guess you could think about it if you were really good at sales and you’re really good at outbound and you have a good network and your unique advantage is you have a huge network within a space you could do not a ton of marketing. If you’re in that position, then good If you’re not and you’re just going to build cold and build an app in a space you don’t have a bunch of reach in. This is where step one businesses work. This is why they work is not only do I think step one businesses are simpler apps and so they kind of can check the box of need less development to maybe where they could be built with no code or with vibe coding.
But at marketplaces where if you go to search MicroConf list of 80 app marketplaces, and I don’t know how many we have on the list at this point, but these are the Shopify app stores, the HubSpot, the Heroku, all these add-ons that you can build. It’s not that you don’t need any marketing, but you just need to learn one channel with a step one business. And this is why stair stepping works, and this is why I preach it to folks, especially where it’s your first time or if you don’t have the core four, you should get a co-founder or you should step one, you should stair step. I mean I think the more I think about it and the more I dug into this topic that’s now my answer to this and I’ll likely take what I’ve just said on the podcast the past 20 minutes and put it into my next book because it feels like when you get to a certain point, you make a decision, you’re like, oh, that’s the right decision.
It slotted in for me, it just clicked for me of like, yeah, if you’re going to ask this question as the question asker did, should I get a sales and marketing? Or if you’re a sales and marketing and you’re looking for a developer, my question is going to be do you have all the core four? And if you don’t, maybe get a co-founder or founder of a person. And if not, if you don’t want to do that, then you need to limit yourself to ideas to where you don’t need the core four. And someone might come in and say, well, isn’t customer support a core four or customer success or I don’t know what is their legal operations? Hr? No, they’re not core to SaaS companies. You’ll figure this out. It’s project management. Customer support is responding to emails and tickets and chat customer success and getting people onboarded.
These are all disciplines, but they’re all things that founders can do. And if you do them, obviously the better you do them, the better off your reputation and the brand you build. But even if you don’t do them that well, if you really execute on the core four product dev, sales and marketing, you can still build an incredible business with, unfortunately it’s not a path I would take, but with crappy support, with crappy customer success, with crappy internal operations and messy finances and blah blah, blah. Now when you go to raise money or when you go to sell, it’ll all come to come back to haunt you, but you get the idea of what I’m saying. I’m just talking about building the product and getting to a point of having revenue and having significant revenue and growth and product-market fit and feeling like, oh, I’ve built something great. So all that said in answer to the question of I’m a solo technical founder, should I hire someone out? I think I’ve answered it here with the first 20 minutes of this podcast episode. So thanks for that question. Hope it was helpful. Now let’s roll into our next question.
Speaker 3:
Hi Rob. I have a question about startups doing deals with much larger companies. I’m in talks with a very large company and things are going well, but every now and then they’ll come back to me and say, management can’t do this even though we agreed on it or they want to change that part of the deal. And it seems unfair, like they’re taking two bites of the apple. They know that I’m the ultimate decision maker within my company, and so I’m not going to play this. I have to ask my wife card. I wonder if you have any suggestions for how to deal with this sort of tactic that larger companies play when doing business with smaller companies? Thank you.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, this is a good question Anon. Thanks for asking. So there’s a couple separate questions here, a couple nuances. One is you’re saying, how do I deal with big customers just changing the deal? And that’s the first question. The second one is, and then they blame it on, it’s the used car thing where it’s like, oh, my manager said, right, they blame it on this other person and that’s how they get around it. I think I’ll start with the second one. You don’t have to tell them upfront that you are the solo co-founder and the solo decision maker. You can be vague about it when you get into these deals and you can play the same game of like, well, no, my co-founder didn’t agree. You can also have even policies like, you know what? Our policy doesn’t allow us to do that. There are things that you can bring to play to also blame, and if you’re in the middle of a deal now obviously that is not going to make sense, but from here on I think it’s something that you might want to do such that you can blame an external factor in the same way that they’re doing.
Aside from that, the question is their big company, they’re throwing their weight around, they’re changing the deal. Yeah, they do that and big companies can do that and it sucks, and I don’t know of an easy way around that other than to say, no, we just don’t do that. We aren’t allowed to do that, or we can do that, but it’s an extra thousand dollars upfront or it’s an extra five grand a year. That’s our enterprise plan. Now that price goes up, you get to make that choice of it. Feeling unfair is one thing, but it being a bad deal for you is another. And when I worked in construction, one of the project managers would, he told me several times, I always liked this, he said, there are no bad jobs, meaning we would bid jobs, right? We’d estimate our is a $5 million job and sometimes you’re high and sometimes you’re low, sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t.
But he said, there are no bad jobs. There are only jobs without enough money in them, meaning even jobs that are complete grind, if you make a load of money, it doesn’t matter and within reason, not a bad idea. And so my big thing is make it worth your while. Know that you are pricing these deals to the point where even as they change the deal over time, you’re still okay with it. So if you’re doing an enterprise with procurement and marking up your Ts and Cs, to me it’s a minimum $35,000 a year contract. That’s USD and I see people doing $250,000 a year contracts. I say people, these are B2B SaaS companies, right in TinySeed some outside of that. And so you just have to make sure there’s enough money in it to make you worthwhile and this is the hassle of it cuts both ways.
Big deals are great. They put a bunch of MRR on your books and they’re annual and they don’t tend to churn and there’s all that, and big deals suck because of everything you’re laying out because of all the time it takes. So whether you do it from the start and you price it accordingly such that dealing with the headache is worth it or whether you get into it and if they really start jerking you around changing the deal, you just say, we can’t do it, and you’re willing to lose the deal or you say, we can do it and it’s this extra cost, realizing that you’re willing to lose the deal, maybe that’s a way to play it. The big thing, I was giving a founder advice a couple of weeks ago and I said, the biggest thing you don’t want to do is quote them a price that if they say yes, you say, oh shit, and you don’t actually want to do it.
Make sure there’s enough money in it that if they say yes, you’re relieved and you’re like, wow, this is totally worth it. There are no bad jobs, only jobs without enough money in them. So thanks for that question. I hope it was helpful. My next question is not a question at all, but a word of thanks from anonymous. He says, Hey Rob, just wanted to drop you a message to thank you for your content and podcast, which I’ve listened to for a long time. I started a bootstrap side project in 2018 that became my full-time focus in 2021. I’ve now exited this week for a life-changing sum of money, and this was sent looks like four or five months ago in mid 2025, back to his email, he says it was a slow burn, but a worthwhile one. Thank you. Keep up the good work as I believe the work you do is vitally important. Exit strategy has helped me during this process as well. I’ll be tuning in again next Tuesday. Exit strategy, if you don’t know, is my latest book, exit strategy book.com if you want to check it out. But thank you so much for the email anonymous. It really means a lot to hear from folks like you who’ve been impacted by the pod. And now let’s dive into our final question of the day.
Speaker 4:
Hey Rob, how’s it going? I’m Marcelo from Brazil. I’m a listener of the podcast for quite some time right now. I love the show, love the content, and yeah, I’m the founder of SaaS platform that’s called Beauty Forge. We’re mostly focused on generating PDF templates using LLM and using no-code builder to generate PDFs at scale. So my main ICP now is mostly SaaS who need to generate lots of different PDF DF templates like okay, n to generates invoice reports and stuff like that. And no-code builders also use all the product, and I usually had 30 to 40 signups every week on my product, but because of my page that I made, which was create your PDF in seconds, query your PDF template in seconds using ai, I began to receive a lot of traffic from the internet and trying to generate one-off documents. So I received 400 new subscribers each week, and so around 2000 subscribers per month, and I tried to build an MVP around it.
I figured most of the users would be like B two cso, one time payment, no recurrent low tickets, and the product didn’t go through the MVP. So I figured, okay, I should abandon this product, but what do I do with all this audience that I’m getting on my subscribers? Do I diverge them to another product as an affiliate link? Do I take down the page and stop receiving these users altogether because they are actually taking a cost to me because on my onboarding they use a lot of the features to try the product out, but yeah, I don’t think I want to sell to them. So what’s your hint on how to act on that? Thank you.
Rob Walling:
This feels like a nuanced question, and it’s almost like having a free plan. Should I kill the free plan? I don’t know if you ever fully free plan or not, but you’re getting, I mean, I’ve seen stuff like this before where you kind of have non ICP customers because they only want to do one-off things, but enough of them stick around that it makes it worthwhile. That’s what I would try to do is actually look, if a hundred percent of them, there’s no value to you and it’s not generating any backlinks. I would think with a tool like this, you’d be getting back links. Is there no virality to it? This is kind of like a free plan question. I think that’s why it clicked in my mind of being similar. If this blog post slash tool or this blog post that is bringing in marketing leads truly is no one’s converting and there’s no virality and it’s not bringing any backlinks, so it’s not bringing any SEO juice, so it’s not bringing any of the benefits of a potential free plan and that’s costing you money, then yeah, I’m not sure why I would keep this around, but something in the back of my mind says, I feel like maybe you should be or are getting some backlinks from it.
I feel like you’re getting some value from it. It’s just a gut feel and I can’t prove that to you, but I would want to get more data about is this worthwhile leaving this up? I hate to turn away from a source of traffic that could potentially, even if it’s a low conversion rate of these folks that actually stick around and become customers, is that worthwhile? Now, if they’re high churn, then no. If it drives your churn up, then that’s not worth the weight on the business. But I feel like I would do a little more investigating and potentially ask someone more experience with this type of thing. If you have an advisor or if you have a founder who’s further along or hire a growth coach or someone who can kind of help you dig into it and see it with a fresh set of eyes, that’s probably what I would think about.
You can do this yourself too, but of course it’s hard when you’re kind of embedded in the business and you have your preconceived notions of it. While I definitely don’t like the idea of having people coming in and using my SaaS tool one time costing me money, support headaches, it messes with your metrics. Then it’s like, well, we got, like you said, hundreds of signups, but our conversion rate to paid is whatever is 2% and it should be 10 or 15%, but it’s muddied. That’s annoying. And so I think I would do a bit more research, not even research, but dig into the numbers as much as you can to see if there’s any value. And then if not, then yeah, I don’t see, could you put it on affiliate, an affiliation? Sure, you’re going to make tens of dollars a month, maybe hundreds. I’ve tended, in my career, I’ve made huge sums of money from a small number of things, and anytime I had this idea of, oh, I’m just going to like this, do an affiliate thing, they’re set up and linking out, and then I’m tracking the affiliate down, and then in the end I make in the lifetime of the entire deal, thousands of dollars, a few thousand dollars versus if I just took that time and put it into my SaaS.
The compounding of of the enterprise value of every dollar of MRR, as you’ve heard me talk about on this show before, is worth so much more than that, and I just value the focus. So again, it’s up to you. You’ve been thinking about this probably for months, and I’ve been thinking about it for about four and a half minutes, so take that with a grain of salt, but that is my gut feeling based on the info you gave. So thanks for that question, Marcelo. I hope it was helpful and that wraps us up for today. Thanks as always for joining me. I’m actually running low on listener questions, and so if you have a question for the show, please do go to startup For the Rest Of Us dot com. Click ask a question in the top nav, and you can send audio, video or text, audio and video. Go to the top of the stack as well as any intermediate to later stage question. I’ll still answer beginner questions, but I just think there’s more meat and more interesting variety in the ones that are folks that are, if it’s questions that would be for someone doing at least five or 10 K of MRR up into the seven and eight figures of a RR as a SaaS company, those are the ones that I really want to tackle on the show. So thanks as always for listening. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 807.
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