Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig, welcome to another episode of road startups,
Speaker 1 00:00:23 Two 28. How are you doing today, Greg? I'm good, man. I'm good. I was, I was up till like one o'clock in the morning, last night, uh, working on like marketing automation and sales automation, pipe drive management stuff. So I'm a little, a little ragged today, but, uh, it's good. Yeah. I just don't experience that kind of insomnia man. It's crazy. I mean, it's just one of those things, like family time kind of wind it down and I was like, I'm not tired. And then three hours later, they're, I'm sitting on the couch like fussing around and all this stuff. I was like, Oh, this is, yeah, this is not healthy. And I don't do it that often, but um, everyone's I do it a couple of times a month maybe. And it's, I actually really enjoy just having kind of non work time to work when not when the family's done or not.
Speaker 1 00:01:11 I don't feel guilty about that, uh, in about taking time away from them. So yeah, every once in a while, like I kind of, I guess I kind of seek it out. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm actually really jealous of people like you, who can just sort of like get so deeply involved in something that you can't sleep because my body is like a fucking robot sometimes. Like I am like a 10 o'clock my body just mentally and physically wants to shut down and I actually have to actively work against it in advance in order to prevent that from happening. So like when I'm at big snow, um, you know, uh, conversations frequently go until 1130 at night and you've of course been doing physically exhausting stuff during the day. So I have to drink coffee at three o'clock in the afternoon, four o'clock in the afternoon in order to make it past nine 30, 10, you know, as a 15 year old, it's kind of pathetic actually.
Speaker 1 00:02:15 But you know, it's like the fact that you've got that energy and you can do something with it, you know, is very, um, it's, it's amazing to me because I just, I've never been able to push past that. Like I never was able to successfully do an all nighter in college. I pulled it one time. And then after the chemistry class that I pulled the all night or four, I skipped the rest of my classes that morning and slept worthless. Right. Was totally worthless. Yeah. Like I, I just had to turn around and make up other work and other classes, I was like, damn it. So it was totally not worth the effort I ended up putting into it, but, you know, yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing that you can do that. I'm not, not definitely not Superman. I pay for it, but I, I actually do enjoy,
Speaker 2 00:03:00 Like I just get some, I get some quality time with myself and in my automations. It's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:03:07 There's a phrase.
Speaker 2 00:03:09 Yeah. Edit again. Oh, um, how about you, man? I mean, I know that our, our kind of announcements episode of use on the plugins went out as we're today as we're recording this. So how, um, how are things, you know, uh, a week after the sale things kind of sinking in, at this point,
Speaker 1 00:03:30 We are fully signed, sealed and delivered at this point, the wire transfer hit my bank yesterday. And you know, I went running upstairs to show my wife the balance in our bank account and she's like, cool. And that was it. Uh, you know, it was over and kind of like that. I was like, Oh, okay, well, alright. One thing that has been kind of odd about, well, let me just reiterate what I kind of said in the last episode, and that is everything was smooth. I mean, there was literally no part of this transaction that did not go without a hitch. There were questions that were being asked. The questions were fair. I answered the questions, things proceeded to the next step. Like that was just the way it happened all the way along. So, I mean, I cannot overemphasize how glad I am that Stephan, Steve, and SIADH ended up buying this because they just made it super smooth.
Speaker 1 00:04:26 You find the right buyer, the whole thing goes like clockwork. So that's the one thing, you know, we took from the last episode, right. Since then, you know, I kind of, I thought there would be some aha moment, some celebratory high or sense of relief for something I've had nothing. I mean, you know, there was the moment I had when I showed my wife the wire transfer and we celebrated with opening a nice bottle of wine, but that was it. You know, like there wasn't this overwhelming euphoria, there wasn't a sense of relief there. Wasn't like, you know, I mean, there was a small tinge of nostalgia when I shut off my email accounts. Like I mentioned last time, but that's it, that's it it's like, okay, you're moving onto the next phase here. And that, you know, for as big of a transaction as this was for me, that kind of surprised me a little bit. It really did.
Speaker 2 00:05:25 Right. Do you think that the part of the reason that you don't have more kind of regret and emptiness is because you have other stuff going on because you hear like, I listened to, um, built to sell the John Warlow podcast. And a lot of the people he has on say, like, I got really depressed or I became an alcoholic or like, I didn't know what to do with my life after I sold my business. Cause they have nothing to do. And I know you don't have nothing. So maybe that's, that's part of like, you just feel good, but not bad or like empty.
Speaker 1 00:06:00 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that probably has a huge amount to do with it because there's definitely plenty of other things going on. My freelance client has got lots for me to do right now, the recapture stuff that's going on right now with SMS marketing and testing and some other bugs that came up and recent infrastructure stuff. And you know, we've got black Friday coming up by, I'm thinking about black Friday here and all the emails I need to start sending it in September. So it's like, this was literally okay, I'm taking this thing off my plate and I've got these other things that are over here. My plates still two thirds full at least maybe more. Right. Cause it's not like the plugins were taking up a third of my time and a third of my bandwidth and a third of my effort. So if anything, maybe that's why I don't feel so empty about this is because I do have all these other things to focus on and it's not like that was it. Okay. Now what else do I do? You know, I have some plans for the proceeds of the sale here and what I would like to do with that. But you know, even that's another thing I have to think about as well. We're still evaluating a couple of possibilities of things that we could, you know, buy instead or use to enhance recapture or whatever. So, I mean, definitely my Headspace is not emptied as a result of the sale of these plugins by any means.
Speaker 2 00:07:22 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're not sad or have regret about it. I think that's the only one that you can't, you wouldn't be able to easily fix, you know, if you're kind of neutral, that's great. Um, you know, happy, happy is obviously good to that. Like you're glad to have a valve your plate. There's probably more of that than you realize, but it doesn't sound like there's any regret, which is great to hear.
Speaker 1 00:07:41 I, yes, I can say with great confidence, I have a hundred percent zero regrets on this sale. It went to the absolute right. People and I'm so happy that they've got some strong plans for it. They're going to be better for the customers and better for my team and just better for everybody. So. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. How about yourself? How are things over in the podcast land? They're good,
Speaker 2 00:08:04 Man. They're, they're really good. We're, we're having a couple of really strong months, which is cool. We just released a big feature that we've been working on for awhile to kind of expand our private podcasting functionality. So, you know, our podcast is public and everybody has access to it and can have access to it. And we've had private podcasting for a while with just like a single private feed. And we added the ability to invite individual private subscribers, uh, within Costos. So, you know, think about you're a company and you want to invite your team members to a private podcast, or you're a course creator and you want to invite students to a private podcast or your membership site, and you want to invite your members to a private podcast. So that's all possible now. And so we're kind of exploring like a lot of the edges of this because not a lot people, not a lot of providers like us are doing this and I don't feel like anybody's doing it really, really, really well.
Speaker 2 00:09:02 And so we are, we're exploring a lot of like what, what this looks like and, you know, kind of what now with, with some of this. So it's pretty cool to see like a different part of the ecosystem, different types of customers we're talking to and use cases and things like that, then just kind of regular, publicly available podcasts. So it's, it's cool to have a really big feature we've been working on for awhile out there now. And then kind of looking at what's next in that respect is, has been cool and kind of reinvigorating, uh, from a product perspective.
Speaker 1 00:09:33 Nice, nice. And how has, uh, Matt Maderis worked out so far as the chief podcast officer?
Speaker 2 00:09:41 Yeah, that's a really good title. Uh, Matt is great. I mean, mats been on the podcast here and we've been on his, I mean, it's, it's really interesting to have someone on the team that has a lot more experience than I do in, in a lot of areas of, of what we do. It's been really good in a lot of ways. It's been challenging, like kind of, to me personally, in some ways in a, in a good way, you know, not like we have a hard time getting along or anything cause we don't, cause we're both like podcast sales guy. So it's like in a lot of ways we're really similar, but, but mean basically having somebody that is a real, super a player come in and, and start asking a bunch of questions about how we do stuff and you know, where's this and why do you do that? And how's this setup. And you're like, wow. I, I feel like shit sometimes. Uh, cause I mean we're as successful business, but I still feel like we suck at a lot of the stuff we do. And so it's just kind of come out with, with a lot of stuff. Matt really wants to make better and we can do a lot of those things and we can't do a lot of those things cause we don't have $10 million in the bank, so,
Speaker 1 00:10:49 Well, it's good to have somebody there, you know, like you said, hiring an a player makes you a better person. You know, I know that some people are threatened by other people that are challenging ideas. And you know, obviously if you're a good manager, you want to hire people that are smarter than you because you want those ideas. You cannot be the source of all things good and beneficial in an organization because that's pretty much a straight, you know, grease pulled a hell of stagnation in my opinion. And I've seen that at plenty of different companies. And so, you know, hiring the guy like Matt and bringing him on and letting them challenge you a little bit is awesome. So yes. Yep. Continue with that. Even if it hurts a little bit, but yes, not having $10 million in the bank will of course limit all the scope of ideas that you can have, but Hey, you know, throw an idea out there and maybe you can find the $10,000 version of it instead of the $10 million version of it. Right.
Speaker 2 00:11:43 There you go. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been, it's been good to just have another set of eyes on a lot of stuff for doing and yeah. Asking a lot of good questions, why and how we
Speaker 1 00:11:54 Do things and not in a kind of threatening or condescending way from him, but just, yeah, he wants to win as much as, as we all do. So it's really cool. Yeah. I feel like we very much got the right person for this role. Yeah. Nice, nice things in the recapture world. Recapture is good. You know, the last time I think we talked about it, I was discussing the infrastructure problems that we had and you know, that was kind of stressing me out because it was like at anytime we have to work on infrastructure, it pisses me off because a, I know it's necessary. And so we can't avoid it. And B it means we're not working on features. And I was really trying to get a bunch of features done this summer on a certain timeline and that kind of derailed the timeline a little bit.
Speaker 1 00:12:40 And then I got the plugin sale, which derailed my availability to do testing on those features. So, you know, there's been some delays that have prevented the SMS marketing feature from going out. And now I want to add one more thing to it because what we created isn't quite right. But anyway, the good news is the infrastructure problems are solved. I've not seen those alerts happening for a while now. And the, you know, I've been looking at the overall rates of use on the platform. It hasn't really dipped. And the customers that we brought on that were super big, aren't causing our infrastructure to like grown under its own weight. So that's hugely good news, especially considering that we actually were able to reduce our servers a little bit after we did these infrastructure upgrades. So you finally get auto scaling. Is that, is that the improvement?
Speaker 1 00:13:29 No, no, we didn't do auto scaling. We did, you know, you would think we would have done this awhile ago, but the original setup didn't have reverse proxies built into it. So each of our web tiers should have had an engine X reverse proxy sitting at the front of it. Instead, we just had the node process handling all the traffic coming into it. And anybody who knows anything about infrastructure is now currently doing a face Palm going, Dave, you should've known that. Um, and the truth is yes, we should have, but our infrastructure was handling things okay. Previously. And it just, it wasn't something that was like, yeah, we really need to be working on this until we suddenly did. So yes. You know, it's one of those just in time kind of infrastructure scaling things. So now this allowed us to do some other standardization.
Speaker 1 00:14:16 Like we hadn't, we hadn't really standardized on some Docker images either. And so now one of the guys basically built out our Docker infrastructure so that each server has a standard image. And now we can provision and set this thing up in under a few minutes, whereas before you had to like set up the new instance and then everything was done manually on there and it just didn't happen all that often. So it wasn't like a, it wasn't as a solid investment of time. But now with this, now the next thing we can do is we can move to auto-scaling with a Docker image in there. We could have done it before. It's just a little harder. So now that we've got this auto scaling as a distinct possibility and come this fall for black Friday, I'm probably gonna lean that direction. So we don't have to fool around with it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:15:02 We use server images and like, you know, templates kind of, but we don't do Docker. We just spin up new instances, you know, with this image or this kind of template. Right.
Speaker 1 00:15:13 AMI templates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the way we were kind of going before, but there was still something where you had to like refresh the source code and you can do that within a Docker image, but it was harder to do like with an AMI, you had to do it manually. So at least the way we were doing it anyway. But anyway, the good news is, is that recapture is a growing this month. We have definitely seen some positive, positive income and not the churn to go with it. So I think those, the people that were struggling in the previous two months, uh, have stopped and, or moved on to something else or their stores are shut down and we're done with that phase. So now we're moving into the growth phase here and that's good. We're also doing, I alluded to this earlier, we're evaluating a, an opportunity of something that might be a complimentary business to recapture the I'm struggling a little bit with the pricing of that particular business, the way that it's set up right now, but it is a decent business. And I think there's some obvious things that could be immediately impacted by taking it over and doing some pricing changes. So it could be highly lucrative, but, you know, I had to wait until all of the pieces of the plugin sale were in place before we could really move forward on that. So now I'm, I'm looking at that more seriously.
Speaker 2 00:16:36 Cool, cool. It's a, it's also in eCommerce or it's in Shopify specifically, or it's another Shopify app specifically, right. So
Speaker 1 00:16:45 Would be another thing we could start to branch that out across other platforms, but you know, there would be a pretty sizable chunk of work to do that first, so Hmm, Hmm. Have to weigh that against the price and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 00:16:57 Yeah. Yeah. So if this, a Twitter thread that we would chat through today on kind of personal finance and personal wealth creation for, for founders, right? So this, uh, I don't know, bugger OEF, I don't know who this person is, but, uh, they had a thread last week about, uh, how a lot of what we do as startup founders. And I think he's talking about specifically like venture track folks, which we're not. So maybe we could talk about the bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped version of this. I think the, the essence that I get out of the thread is that so much of your, your wealth is tied up in your startup and you aren't paying yourself a market, right. You're really not that not worth that much until some kind of liquidity event happens. And that a lot of startup founders kind of think they and their, their startups are so important that they don't need to pay themselves and of financially take care of themselves as they're going. And they're all kind of shooting for this exit as the reward for all this hard work they're doing. And now that's a bit shortsighted and it is that get close to encompassing what you think he's talking about.
Speaker 1 00:18:02 Yeah. I think the core part of his thesis that I wanted to kind of focus on that I thought was more relevant to bootstrappers is that, you know, he said that startup founders do not understand risk mitigation in their personal lives. And I feel like as a bootstrapper, we probably have a better handle on that because if we didn't, I feel like we would take more risks and make bigger riskier decisions by going bootstrapped. It feels like you're kind of making that, you know, you're still taking some risks. Right. But it's, it's a more conservative kind of risk in that. That's an oxymoron. Right.
Speaker 2 00:18:39 But yeah.
Speaker 1 00:18:40 Yeah. But I mean, you kind of get the notion of what I'm saying. If you're, if you're trying to shoot for the moon and you get millions of dollars in funding and the whole thing, crashes and burns, that's a huge risk. And for a startup founder in their twenties or Thursday, thirties, going through this whole exercise, you can end up and I have seen this on the, you know, on the starting side, it looks really good. And on the ending side, there's a huge smoking crater there, and you literally have nothing to show for it. You know, if you're doing a funded startup, you usually have a very low salary for the first several years. And then if you get to a decent marketish kind of salary, it's still, it's difficult for you to build personal wealth. And so the core of this thread was talking about how was it that you can build wealth in a startup?
Speaker 1 00:19:31 Because if you look at all the personal wealth threads that are out there, they say things like, you know, invest don't save and become becoming a startup. Founder is very antithetical to doing that. It makes it so that you basically can take away five to seven years of your life. You can go work on something and you can underpay yourself. So you're not really able to invest in a retirement fund. You're not really able to build personal wealth. It makes it harder to buy a house if you're doing that at that time. And even if you're doing all these things bootstrapped, you know, it's still difficult. Even if you keep this as a side hustle, right? Cause now you have limited bandwidth to work on a startup idea that you've got and that makes it take longer, right? So you're even further away from that particular event.
Speaker 1 00:20:20 Now, the reason that this thread kind of resonated with me is the whole plugin sale that we just went through here. I originally bought these plugins for a very small amount of money and it was a, you know, I've talked about it several different times that the amount of money that I put into these things was something that my wife and I were comfortable risking at the time to buy something. If it totally didn't work out it going to wipe out our personal finances and you know, it, it gave us something to grow. And, you know, I happen to be incredibly lucky in many different ways. So, you know, I was in the right market at the right time. It was early enough in WordPress plugins. I saw some obvious flaws with it that were easily fixed and could grow it. I had them for a very long time.
Speaker 1 00:21:10 I was able to make them, uh, relatively independent. And so these things ended up, you know, becoming a cash generation source for me for a long time, probably, you know, I definitely made solid six figures off of those things over the course of nine years and may have even gotten as high as seven. I haven't really added it all up, but somewhere in there, but, you know, I mean, that's pretty substantial right there. But when I sold them after that, there was a significant multiple that came with that. And, you know, I ended up getting some wealth out of this, but mine is not the common story in this. There are so many startup businesses where you're working and working and working for years and you just, you're not able to get the wealth out of it. You know, it might be making a few thousand dollars a month and that, you know, makes a little difference in your bills. Maybe you can get a car, maybe it allows you to take vacations, but it's not like this, you know, instant, instant ticket to wealth, right?
Speaker 2 00:22:17 Yeah. I mean, I think that the balance is you, you know, you want to pay yourself what you're worth and make the money that you think you should for, for doing what we're doing and having the skills that we do that we have. But every dollar you pay yourself is a dollar. You can't reinvest in the business to grow it, to make it less risky and more stable and to, to exit with a higher number and probably a higher multiple, you know, if you get over a million dollars in revenue, annual revenue, your multiples higher kind of automatically, if you're, you know, a $50 million business is going sell for a lot more than a million dollar business, just on a multiple perspective, even I think. And so I think that that's something that I struggle with a lot is like, I know what I need for our family to live on.
Speaker 2 00:23:07 If I pay myself really any more than that, it's a little silly in the kind of medium term, because my business really is probably one of the best investments I can make. You know, I don't know where I would go put this extra thousand dollars a month that I could pay myself that in the next five years I could get up, you know, whatever a hundred time return or something that I could, I could potentially get on putting that towards marketing or hiring developer or whatever. So I think that, that on the bootstrap or mostly bootstrap version that, that we're playing in, that that's more the, the balance that, that I can have a hard time with and pretty have settled on like pretty much pay myself what I need. We're not saving a lot. We're saving a little bit of money, not saving a lot of money because I know that this is a fantastic investment vehicle. And I think it's pretty, pretty safe. It's not super safe, but I think it's pretty safe. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:24:03 I had the whole safety thing is definitely relative, right? Like it seems like as, as bootstrappers we have a greater awareness of the risk that's going on, you know, in 20, some odd years of consulting, the funny thing to me is that people still view their jobs as incredibly safe. But me as a consultant, I've always viewed mine as very tenuous. And the truth is they're both about the same, you know, if you're doing a good job as a consultant and you're doing a good job as an employee, your business, your, your job is about at the equal amount of your at risk, the same amount in mind. And, you know, if you suck as a consultant, you're going to get kicked out. If you suck as an employee, you're going to get fired or laid off. So, you know, the whole notion of what that risk is, is very opaque to people that are employed all the time.
Speaker 1 00:25:03 I think. And as a bootstrapper, we're a little more aware of that risk. So yes, I look at it and I'm like, you know, three months from now, we could be fucked. And I'm constantly thinking that that's been a consulting mindset that I've had for years. Oh, well, if I don't get this in three, three months, we're fucked. You know, we're always three months away from being fucked. Now it's a little farther, we've got, you know, a greater until you're fucked runway, but it's still, it's still something that you have to pay attention to. And I think this is, this is where, you know, funds like earnest capital or tiny seed where they can give you some money up front and help you. De-risked this a little bit by giving you that wealth to pull that off the table, um, in different ways, of course.
Speaker 1 00:25:50 So with tiny seed that saying, all right, we're going to give you a year to do that upfront. If you're doing it with earnest capital, they're basically saying, we're going to take this percentage out of your business and we're going to be that percentage owner, and we're going to give you some money in return for it. So you can basically get some personal wealth out of the business in a different way. Right. And the other one is now I can work on the business with less risk. And I would say that even between those two right there, you know, there's still the consideration of how much do you have to keep investing in the business to keep that growth humming along until you're able to pull out a market salary, right? That's the thing that you alluded to earlier, you know, I know what I have to live on.
Speaker 1 00:26:31 And so that's the part that you take out. The thing that I've struggled with in the plugins and still with recapture is that, you know, recapture is making five figure MRR. And I need to get to a point where I can have pay for the staff, pay for the expenses, like the servers and, and stuff like that, and still pay me the market salary. And right now, like I'm able to do the first two, but not the last one. And as long if I'm not continuing to reinvest into the business through paid acquisition and marketing things and, you know, so on and so forth, then I'm sacrificing growth to try to pay myself on that. So there's definitely a balance you've got to, you know, it seems like anything below 20 K MRR is kind of tenuous as a business. Like you can pull money out of it, but you know, either you're just on a, uh, an automatic growth trajectory and you don't have to do any work to get that further, or you're just not planning to grow it bigger than that. But, you know, until you hit that 20 K I don't feel like you've got enough. You don't have enough resources to kind of reinvest into the growth engine and continue the maintenance of the thing and consider anything else until that point. You know? So there's a huge amount of risk that goes into that. And I think that's, that's a struggle cause how many businesses don't make it to that point a lot, right?
Speaker 2 00:28:02 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people say, Oh, I want to get the 10 K MRR. And like, that's the, that's the point where I really got something. And I agree that that's where you probably have like a pretty good degree of product market fit, but like the business is not really viable until yeah. I agree. 20, 25 K for you to pay yourself what you're worth and have, you know, say a developer, a marketing person and a support person, which I think is kind of like the bare bones that, that you need to be able to continue to grow. And so you've got to pay all those people, plus your infrastructure and taxes and, and your salary. And I think back about, you know, some people that have been really transparent about this. So I think we've heard Rob walling talk about like the amount of money he put in personally to fund drip was significant.
Speaker 2 00:28:46 You hear Nathan Barry talk about with convert kit. He didn't take a salary until they were at like 50 K. I think if you, if you listen to some of these interviews and like the fallacy of like, I'm a developer, I can build this thing and just make it go without anything else I think is, is very rare. I'll say it can happen. Right. Josh Pigford maybe as an example of that, like with bare metrics. But if you, I would guess if you look at his road to being kind of self-sufficient even for himself as a solo founder, it was probably pretty long, even though I think he was in the right place at the right time in a lot of ways. Yeah. And then even after that, once you're self sufficient and the business can kind of operate on its own without you having external funding of some sort, the decision of where to allocate those next dollars, I think is really hard.
Speaker 2 00:29:37 You know, when do you need a developer, when you need more support, when do you need marketing? When do you need ops? When do you need these things? Um, and those are a lot of decisions that we're making right now because we're profitable and we are profitable. And I look at my bank account and I say, that's great. You know, but like that money is not doing me any good, just sitting there, like let's put that puppy to work. And so that's, those are hard decisions, cause it's still not enough money to really go crazy with, you know, like not like raising 10 million when you can just go hire a team of this and a team of that. So,
Speaker 1 00:30:08 Right. And it's kind of funny to hear people talk about, you know, and I do this myself. I don't want to disclude myself from this conversation, but you know, you look at your MRR, so let's just throw out some numbers here. Cause this is really easy. If you're making 10 K a month, you know, that's 120 K annual recurring revenue. So if you're doing standard sass multiples, assuming that that's 10 K of profit, right? Not just 10 K of gross revenue, but 10 K of profit, then that is anywhere between a selling price of 360,000 at the lowest, for low growth to, you know, maybe 480,000, uh, or possibly higher than that for high growth, 600,000, right. Five X. And that only matters if you get the sale. And then, you know, it's always the question of what do you do after the sale, right?
Speaker 1 00:31:04 If you don't have a recapture to put that something into or work with, or you're not doing something else, you're not just going to sit on that money and retire because $600,000 isn't enough for anybody to live off it for 30 years. So, you know, you have to, you have to constantly think about where does this get invested in what are you going to be doing with it next? And, you know, unless you get a multimillion dollar retirement, or you're going to move to like the Bush in Alaska where $600,000 could last you a lifetime, you know, it's a, it's a consideration. But anyway, this is, these are, these are the struggles I think that, that we have as bootstrap founders and the notion that somehow our businesses make us rich because in truth, I don't feel like they do. And even when you get that equity event, you know, it comes with a lot of other caveats and asterisks is,
Speaker 2 00:31:55 And I do think the other, the other part of this is I think that we all have a decision that we can make to say, I want to, you know, kind of put myself first and pay myself a lot as the business goes. And if I can exit also, that's fine, but I'm going to value my personal income and wealth now. And I'm going to pay myself 20 grand a month instead of only paying myself, you know, five or eight or 10 and put the rest of it back in the business to hope for a big exit at the end. And, you know, in the former kind of running a lifestyle business, if you will, and I don't think it's wrong. I think that's a decision that's super personal, like for you and your risk tolerance and kind of what you want to need a little bit of like the space you're in and the other things going on in your industry.
Speaker 2 00:32:42 Um, and kind of where you see that going and changing in the next, you know, whatever medium term, you know, a couple of years, um, to, to say like, okay, I'm going to sacrifice some income now because I think it's worth it to keep it in the business and have the business grow and be more successful. Or this business is not going anywhere. Anytime soon, like this industry, you know, I'm an accounting app. I can, you know, survive just like this for the next 500 years, I'm going to make the money while I can. You know, I think in some of those cases, that's more, that's more right. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, there's no right answer to this right now. It's all about what, what values you have, what needs are you sitting on top of right now that are just absolute must haves as opposed to want to have.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 So, yup. Yup. And I would love to hear from everybody else. What are your thoughts out there? Do you think that, you know, it's easy or hard to build wealth as a single founder, startup send us an email
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Speaker 0 00:34:01 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
