Podcast appearances and mentions of earnest capital

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Tyler Tringas (GP & Founder, Earnest Capital - now Calm Company Fund), discusses: - what life is like as a VC - what a SEAL is - what's wrong with the term 'bootstrapping' and more.

Bootstrapped Web is no longer bootstrapped, on either side! Jordan starts off this episode with his “coming out” strategy, which all starts with his initial three-post series on Rally. He also dives into Rally updates, comparing your start-up businesses, and the importance of developing a unique view of the market. Brian takes funding from Calm Fund (formerly Earnest Capital), which has been a month in the making. He talks about the different decisions and considerations to be made when exiting Audience Ops and taking funding for ZipMessage. If you have any questions, comments, or topic ideas for Bootstrapped Web, leave us a message here. “I love this [angel funding] ecosystem and how it's been evolving.” – Brian Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Here are today's conversation points: Jordan’s “coming out” strategy for RallyBrian takes funding from Calm Fund (formerly Earnest Capital) “I have been sitting on so many secrets, it's not healthy. It's not healthy to be quiet and fearful. It's not my natural state.” – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Resources Rally Blog “Your Startup is a Movement” by David Sacks Calm Fund Brian on Twitter

On episode 4, season 2 of the Founders Forward Podcast, we welcome Tyler Tringas. Tyler is the founder and General Partner at Calm Company Fund (formerly Earnest Capital). The Calm Company Fund invests in exactly what it sounds like — "profitable, sustainable, calm businesses." Tyler offers a unique perspective as someone who invest in companies that may not be the huge companies that a traditional venture capitalist eyes. He joins us to break down what exactly a "calm" business is, the current market dynamics that are creating more need for funders like Calm Company Fund, and much more. Our CEO, Mike Preuss, had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Tyler. You can give the full episode a listen below:

Moritz Dausinger, three-time bootstrapper, tells me why he recently sold a small stake of Refiner.io to Earnest Capital.Between recording and publishing this episode, Earnest Capital renamed as the Calm Company Fund.Links:Refiner.ioCalm Company Fund (was Earnest Capital)Moritz on TwitterSAFE agreement   

For full show notes click hereEnjoyed the episode? Leave us a review here :)Would you like to be a guest? Apply hereQuestions or comments? Please email podcast@memberspace.com

Topics this week: Tyler has a new iPad and doesn't know what it's good for. Rick has added a client through word of mouth, and we discuss how churn and word of mouth are constantly battling with one another. Rick has resolved a major issue one of his clients had with their dental insurance. Crisis averted. Tyler has been working on the wrong things, and is trying to correct that. We discuss Less Annoying CRM's new leadership team. Rick is applying his new javascript skills to his Airtable data. Tyler is writing blog posts in a new way: First write the tweet storm, then write the blog post. We discuss Earnest Capital's rebranding to Calm Company Fund.

For full show notes click hereEnjoyed the episode? Leave us a review here :)Would you like to be a guest? Apply hereQuestions or comments? Please email podcast@memberspace.com

For full show notes click hereEnjoyed the episode? Leave us a review here :)Would you like to be a guest? Apply hereQuestions or comments? Please email podcast@memberspace.com

Michele Hansen  00:00Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I'm passionate about customer service and listening to customers. A few months ago, we noticed something wasn't working on the Oh Dear dashboard. We reported it to them, and they fixed it almost immediately. Everybody has bugs occasionally, but not every company is so responsive to their customers, and we really appreciate that. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app. Colleen Schnettler  00:35So Michele, I'd love to hear about how things are going with the book.  Michele Hansen  00:40They're going. Um, so after our episode with Sean last week, I realized that I kind of, I have to launch this thing eventually, right?  Colleen Schnettler  00:54Yes.  Michele Hansen  00:55And, you know, for, you know, I mean, for months I've been hearing that advice of, you know, do a, do a presale and like, start selling it beforehand, And, and I was like, yeah, I mean, you know, I, that's the best practice. That makes sense. And then just kind of be like, but that doesn't apply to me, right? Like, I couldn't make, um. It's, you know, it's funny, because it's almost, I feel like the way people feel about when they hear about customer interviewing, they're like, that sounds really valuable and like the right thing to do, and I'm just gonna act like that doesn't apply to me.  Colleen Schnettler  01:29Yep.  Michele Hansen  01:30So that's kind of how I was, and talking to Sean really kind of got me to be like, okay, okay, fine. I should actually sit down and do this. So I got a very simple website together, and then I actually did end up launching the presale.  Colleen Schnettler  01:46Oh, congratulations.  Michele Hansen  01:48Yeah, that was super scary. Like, because the book  Colleen Schnettler  01:50I bet. Michele Hansen  01:53And, like, random places where it says like, insert graphic here. Colleen Schnettler  02:01So tell us how many books have you sold?  Michele Hansen  02:03Okay, yeah, so I guess I get to do, like, a numbers update for the first time. This is fun. Um, so I have sold 34 copies.  Colleen Schnettler  02:15Wow.  Michele Hansen  02:16Presale. Colleen Schnettler  02:17That's a lot.  Michele Hansen  02:18So, and that's not including for like, you know, platform fees and whatever. Just like, you know, $29 times 34, basically. $986.  Colleen Schnettler  02:32That's amazing. Congratulations!  Michele Hansen  02:35So close to that, like, 1000 mark, which, I was talking about this with Mathias earlier, and he's kind of like, I feel like that's like a, you know, that's like, the legit threshold, is 1000. Like, and I don't know why, but it's like, yeah, it's like that feels like, that feels like the, the, like, the first big hurdle.  Colleen Schnettler  02:55I totally agree. That's wonderful news. Congratulations.  Michele Hansen  03:00You know, I expected to feel excited, or relieved, or something positive after releasing it, or the presale, at least. And I gotta tell you, like, I just feel pressure. Like, I'm really glad I didn't do this sooner.  Colleen Schnettler  03:25Really?  Michele Hansen  03:27Yeah. Because now I have, you know, at least 34 people I can't disappoint. Colleen Schnettler  03:32Right.  Michele Hansen  03:32And I feel like, just like, the pressure to make something that is a quality product, like, I already had that pressure on myself to put something out there that I'm proud of.  Colleen Schnettler  03:44Yeah. Michele Hansen  03:46Now I have all these other people who are expecting that, and not that anyone has emailed me and said anything to that effect, but that's how I feel. And I was thinking about this earlier. And I was like, man, like, writing and selling this book has like, brought out all of these, like, vulnerabilities and, and self-doubt and everything, like all of this stuff that I like, thought I had dealt with and then it's, like, sort of like bursting out of the cabinet, being like, hey, I'm still here. So it's, you know, I mean, I have tools to, like, deal with that, but it's been like, oh my gosh, like, I thought I had dealt with, like, I never feel this way about anything about Geocodio, like, so.  Colleen Schnettler  04:33So, this is interesting, because I, when I was feeling a similar way, many months ago, I don't actually know if I talked about it on the podcast, but I had a very high value client that I had a great relationship with that needed a file uploader, and mine wasn't quite done, and I had this moment of terror, panic, I don't know, where I was like, I shouldn't use mine because, because if I put it on my client's site, like, it has to work, right? There's no get out of jail free card, Kind of like, you've now sold this book. Like, you have to finish it.  Michele Hansen  05:07Right. It's not just like, throwing it in a PDF and then like.  Colleen Schnettler  05:09Yeah.  Michele Hansen  05:10Oh, whatever, nobody paid for it. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, it's like, no, this is, like, this is serious now.  Colleen Schnettler  05:17Yeah. And I think something that, that I'm thinking of as you're talking about this, I remember at the time, Alex Hillman had a really great tweet thread about you're not scared of failure, maybe you're secretly scared of success.  Michele Hansen  05:32Mm hmm.  Colleen Schnettler  05:33It was really interesting. Like, just when you think about, like, the psychology and all of these new insecurities coming to light for you, like, maybe you're scared of success.  Michele Hansen  05:42You know, and it's so I feel like we should have them on the podcast more, because I feel like they are, like, Amy and Alex in some way are like characters on this podcast, they're just not actually on the podcast. But like, the amount we talk about, you know, 30x500 and everything. She had, I think, I think it was her, or maybe, no, or maybe it was Dani Donovan, the woman who does the ADHD comics. But I think it was Amy, had a thread, like, couple months ago that was like, you know, people with, or maybe, I don't know if she has ADHD, so I don't know if this was her. Okay. Somebody had a thread that was like, you know, people with ADHD, like, you don't ever feel accomplished when you finish something. It's just over. And then you're on to the next thing. And it was like, yes, like, I expected to feel something when I finally got that out there, and now it instead feels like, oh, now I have to put in the graphics. Now I have to do the cover art. Like now I have to like, like, it just, it didn't, there was never this, like, moment of, like, feeling accomplished or anything like that. It just, it just rolled into the next thing. Colleen Schnettler  06:58Interesting. I don't, I don't have that problem. Like, that doesn't happen to me. I mean, but it's interesting, I find that interesting because one of the things, for me, is when I accomplish something, even if, I feel like if I'd been in your position and I got the presales out there, I do feel that, like, internal satisfaction of hitting that goal, and that's what keeps me motivated. So, if you don't get that same kind of dopamine hit, doesn't that make the whole process kind of painful? It doesn't sound fun.  Michele Hansen  07:28Well, what I do get that from is people, like, you know, positive reinforcement from other people. Like, so I've been asking people for testimonials to put at the front of the book. And on the one hand, that terrifies me, and, and then on the other hand, when they do come in, and people are talking about how the, the book and also sort of newsletter and like, like, all this, all this stuff is all sort of meshing together, has helped them, and what it has helped them do, and how they wish they'd had it sooner and everything. Like, that makes me feel good. That makes me feel like I am delivering the, like, a product that is worth somebody paying for, and that I can be proud of seeing how it's impacted other people. But I like I, I don't really get satisfaction out of achieving things, which is really ironic, because I think about younger versions of myself and I've like, you know, I describe me in high school as an achievement robot, like. Colleen Schnettler  08:39An achievement robot.  Michele Hansen  08:41Yeah, you know, you're, like, just taking as many AP's as you can and your life is over if you don't get in a top college. You know, that whole, that whole song and dance that turned out to be a lie, because now I work for myself. Not at all bitter about that. Anyway, um, yeah, it's but, this, so that is really, like, keeping me going or like, people tweeting out you like, hey, like, what is the book coming out? And part of me is like, oh, my God, am I gonna get them by then? But like, I've been getting a lot of really good reinforcement from people, and that, and I think that's, for me, that's been one of the really big benefits of building in public is not, not necessarily knowing that, exactly that people are going to pay for it and how much they're going to pay and having that money up front, but knowing that I'm creating something that is useful for people. Like, that is what keeps me going. Colleen Schnettler  09:31That sounds great, too.  Michele Hansen  09:33But now I got to finish the damn thing, so.  Colleen Schnettler  09:35Yeah. Now you gotta finish it.  Michele Hansen  09:37I was saying that the release date would be June 24. I actually just had to push that back to July 2, because I just, I don't think I have enough time.  Colleen Schnettler  09:44Yeah. Michele Hansen  09:45I do have an idea for the cover. Like, I want it to be like a terminal printout that's like, basically like installing, like, you know, like installing like empathy and like, loading scripts. Colleen Schnettler  10:00That'll be cute.  Michele Hansen  10:01Like, sort of corny. Developers aren't the only audience for it. But I also want them to know that this is a resource that is, like, accessible to them.  Colleen Schnettler  10:14Yeah. Michele Hansen  10:15I don't know. I have zero artistic abilities, like, I can't even, like, think visually, like, so I have so many people who are reviewing the draft right now, which is pretty amazing. Some of them are, like, super close friends of mine who are harsh editors, and I'm super grateful for that. And others are, like, people I have never even met who are so, I guess, so taken with, with the idea of the book that they're, like, helping me edit it, and I have never met them before, which is just so moving. But anyway, so someone has been giving me a lot of feedback on like, oh, like, this should be a graphic and like, this should be a graphic. And I'm like, I'm so glad you're saying that because it would have never occurred to me that that could be a graphic because I communicate in speech, and in text, and there's -  Colleen Schnettler  11:01Yeah. Michele Hansen  11:01Not a whole lot of pictures going on.  Colleen Schnettler  11:03Yeah. Michele Hansen  11:04So, so, yeah, I gotta kind of get all of, all that together in the next couple weeks. And like, hopefully release the, like, the print-on-demand version at the same time, but it's unclear. And then after that, I get to do the audio book, which, honestly, I'm really looking forward to, because then I just have to read the book out loud and as a podcaster, I'm like, I got that. Like, this does not involve any pictures. Like, I am good. Colleen Schnettler  11:32No pictures required.  Michele Hansen  11:33No art skills required. Colleen Schnettler  11:36Are you gonna hire someone to do the graphics? Have you figured that out yet?  Michele Hansen  11:39No, I've been making them in PowerPoint.  Colleen Schnettler  11:42Okay. I'm just saying there's - Michele Hansen  11:45Really simple. Like, there's not going to be like, pictures-pictures, like. Colleen Schnettler  11:47Okay. Michele Hansen  11:48If it turns out this book is a huge hit and I need to do a version that actually has pictures and like, somebody doing, like, professionally doing the layout then like, yeah, I'll, I'll do that, but.  Colleen Schnettler  11:59Yeah, so. Michele Hansen  11:59I mean, so like, more like flowcharts if anything, or like, putting something in a box so that it's, like, called out like even that kind of stuff. My brain is like, doesn't.  Colleen Schnettler  12:09Have you ever seen, there's a couple of people I've met at conferences that are developers, but they're also visual thinkers. And so they'll like, make sketch notes of someone's conference talk. Have you ever seen these? I'm going to send you some after the podcast. They're so cool. I mean, for your, for, you know, especially to hit, like, the developer audience, that would be, and that might be like version two of the book, but like, like sketch notes, or something would be super cool. Like, I could see a lot of cool opportunities here.  Michele Hansen  12:37Yeah, I tried to use something called Excalidraw, and I think my problem is like, I just don't think visually.  Colleen Schnettler  12:47Yeah. Michele Hansen  12:47Like, I never graduated beyond stick figures. My, my efforts that were beyond stick figures are hilarious. Like actually, like, yeah. Um, so I probably should, like, should bring that in, you know. But again, I mean, the book has only made, you know, just under $1,000. So I'm not, I'm not, I don't really want to, like, go out and hire an artist for a couple $1,000 for it. Like, I don't feel like that's a reasonable- Colleen Schnettler  13:21Not yet. Not yet. Right. I mean, that might be in the future. Yeah. I feel like that's not yet. I totally get that.  Michele Hansen  13:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's-  Colleen Schnettler  13:34It's exciting. I'm glad we gave you that push. I mean, I kind of felt like I gave you that push when I was basically like, you're gonna have this up by the time we launch this podcast, right. I'm happy. I hope it wasn't too stressful. But I'm happy you got there.  Michele Hansen  13:49I think I needed the external deadline because- Colleen Schnettler  13:52Yeah.  Michele Hansen  13:52And again, this is kind of one of those, for me, ADHD things. Like, I need an external deadline because if it's a deadline I've come up with then it's not happening. But like, the reason why the book was, is gonna be out by July 2 is because, like, our, well, it was gonna be June 23 because our daughter finishes school for the year on June 25. So I was like, it has to be out before she gets out of school. But then I remember that she has a week of summer camp. So I'm like, okay, I have another week.  Colleen Schnettler  14:16You have one more week. Michele Hansen  14:18No, it has to be done before she gets out of camp because otherwise then I, you know, I won't have as much time, so.  Colleen Schnettler  14:25Yeah. Michele Hansen  14:25External deadline. Super helpful. Yeah. How's, how's stuff in Simple File Upload world? Colleen Schnettler  14:33So, things are good. I, you know, signups have still been consistent, but because I lost that big customer, I'm just below 1k MRR. So I haven't really seen that reflected in-  Michele Hansen  14:48Is the big customer the one that, like, wasn't using it and you couldn't get in touch with them?  Colleen Schnettler  14:53No, that person's still there, but like, I lost one person that was, like, a tier below that, which is, because I have three tiers. And so things are fine. I mean, I'm not seeing a big increase, or really any movement on the revenue because of the churn at that level, at that more expensive level. But I'm pretty excited about some of the things I'm going to be trying to do in the next couple months. My summer is crazy. So I had at first resigned myself to just not really working on Simple File Upload for a couple months. I was like, I'm just gonna let it sit. It's doing great. It requires almost no customer support. But then,  Michele Hansen  15:32I mean, a thousand dollars a month, and then it recurs is like.  Colleen Schnettler  15:35Right! It's like, I mean, okay, can we talk about how awesome this is? By the way, this is awesome. Like, after fees and stuff, after I pay my hosting fees, and my storage fees and my Heroku fees, I clear like 606, 650. Like, that's like, pretty cool.  Michele Hansen  15:52Yeah. Colleen Schnettler  15:53It's like, I'm not so much. So I wasn't upset about this. But like, I just needed to see kind of where my life was and what I was doing. And I was like, I might just have to sit on this for a couple months because I don't have the time. But then I got an idea. So I am going to take, really what happened is I was really inspired talking to Sean last week about 30x500. I have never taken that course. But I read, like, everything Amy Hoy writes on the internet, and so I kind of feel like I get the idea behind Sales Safari, the idea being find where your customers hang out and find out what their problems are. Conceptually, it seems easy. I just haven't had time to do that. And him, he said last week that he spent 80 hours. Think about that. So he was trolling Reddit forums for 80 hours. That is a lot.  Michele Hansen  16:45I mean, I probably already do that, and there's no business purpose behind it. Colleen Schnettler  16:49It's just no focus to it, right? So, so that's, so I really think I'm at this inflection point where what I have is working. It's doing great. I don't need to build new, more features until I know what features people need. And as we talked about, I think two weeks ago, different audiences want different features. As a solo founder, I do, with a job, I don't have the bandwidth to build all the features for everybody. Like, I'm not trying to take on CloudFlare, right. I really want to niche down and find my people and build for my people. I can't do that until I know who my people are, and I still don't really know. So, I am going to hire someone to do some of the Sales Safari research for me since I don't have time.  Michele Hansen  17:42Oh. Colleen Schnettler  17:43Yeah. So I'm kind of pumped. And by someone I mean, my sister. She, yeah, so it's like, you talk about how, like, you love having a business with Mathias.  I would love to have a business with my sister. Like, I would love for her to be able to work for me, for this to become a real company, and, you know, for us to do this together. So she is just coming off her maternity leave. She has decided not to go back to her job. So she has only a little bit of time because she doesn't have a lot of childcare, so she has, like, one day a week that she's going to work for me doing marketing research and Sales Safari, and I was to kind of trying to teach her, like, what I think is useful. We're both kind of learning as we go, neither of us really knows we're just making it up. And we're gonna do that for the summer and kind of see where it takes us.  Michele Hansen  17:55Yeah. Wow, wait, so what is her background in?  Colleen Schnettler  18:35She's an environmental consultant. Michele Hansen  18:37Oh. Colleen Schnettler  18:40So she actually, it's in no way relevant. But she's, so really the deal is she's a writer. So in her job as a consultant, what they do is they, they have to write these, like, epic report. So her background is really in writing. So originally, she was gonna write content for me, and she wrote me a couple pieces, but it's really hard to come in, since she doesn't have the technical background, it's, I, and my, my audience is developers, like, I need really technical content. So I don't think she's going to fit as a technical writer. But she's going to do, she's taking a class in SEO. So she's going to do, like, keyword research, and she's going to jump into the forums and Reddit and try and like, find out what people's pain points are surrounding file uploads. Michele Hansen  19:24You know, it sounds like you guys have a good working relationship together. Colleen Schnettler  19:31Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, all problems, this stuff that I was thinking about. All problems are people problems, right? So, if you want to control your business, and I'm just hypothesizing here, the number one most important people, but the number one most important thing is the people you work with, and I can't think of anyone else I'd rather work with. So, I think she'll figure it out, or she'll hate it and if she hates it, then she won't do it anymore. I'll find someone else. But that's kind of our plan. I'm pretty excited.  Michele Hansen  20:02Like, yeah, you, if you have someone that you work well with, and you believe that they're capable of learning what you would need them to learn, then, you know, like, you trust them.  Colleen Schnettler  20:17Yes. Michele Hansen  20:17And that matters.  Colleen Schnettler  20:18Yes. Yes. So yeah. So this summer, for me, is really for, for Simple File Upload, I think, is really going to be a focus on figuring out what niche to serve. I was talking to another friend, and he just got a new job, and he works for a big event management company. And he pointed out, you know, he was, he actually mentioned you, because he listened to the podcast, and he was like, these huge companies, they don't care about the little guys who are making a million dollars a year. And his point was, they don't care. So he's like, if you can carve out a niche in one of these huge industries, like, you can be incredibly successful, and like, these big guys, they don't care.  Michele Hansen  20:58No. And you know, on your sister, it might be really interesting to have her do interviews with people because she will be completely coming in with a beginner's mindset. Like, I find this is something that is difficult for people to adjust to like, like, we've talked about when, when someone says like, oh, like, could I do this? And you start thinking through, like, whether they could and how you would implement it, or you know-  Colleen Schnettler  21:23Right.  Michele Hansen  21:24Talk about what they wanted to do, and you just like, oh, of course, you wanted to do this because of this, and like, you don't even question it. But she, but she would be like, well, why do you want to upload a file in the first place? Like, Colleen Schnettler  21:33Right.  Michele Hansen  21:33Well, how is that, how does that work? Because she's genuinely beginner. Like, I feel like, in some ways, the fact that I don't have a geography background has been an advantage for- Colleen Schnettler  21:45Yeah. Michele Hansen  21:46You know, for this because like, I don't come in, you know, with it, with all of these preconceived notions about why someone would want to do this.  Colleen Schnettler  21:56Yeah. Michele Hansen  21:56So I think that can be really interesting when she gets her feet wet, and kind of a sense of what's going on, to try to talk to the customers.  Colleen Schnettler  22:05I think that's a great idea. I hope we can grow into that. I definitely think there's opportunity there. I think of her as like you, and I'm like Mathias in the power couple building of a company. So we'll see. I mean, she wants to get into mark, we kind of are going down this route, because I don't have enough time. I want to do it, I need to do it, and she wants to, really she wants to transition into a remote career that's flexible, like most parents, and she's really interested in SEO and marketing. So, I think it's gonna be a fun little adventure. I'm excited to see what she finds out. Part of this was also, I think we've talked a lot about, I have an interest in no-code. So I had a call with the Jetboost IO founder, Chris. Michele Hansen  22:51Yeah, Chris. Colleen Schnettler  22:52Who, I believe, you know, as well, because you're a mentor and he- Michele Hansen  22:55Yeah, I mentor him through Earnest Capital. I literally just had a call with him the other day. Colleen Schnettler  23:02So I had a call with him, independent of your call with him.  Michele Hansen  23:06Which we didn't know about. Colleen Schnettler  23:07Which we did not plan, to talk about opportunities in the webflow space. And, so I think one of the first things I'm going to have my sister, well, not the first, but one of the things my sister is going to try and do this month is really see if there's a need in Webflow. The thing about Webflow is, in 2018, Webflow introduced their own file uploader. So before that, there was a huge need for it. Now, they have their own file uploader. So it might be that what I provide is no longer, you know, something people need or want. So before I go and build an integration with Webflow, I'm going to have her do some Sales Safari research. They have really active forums to kind of see what people are looking forward to see if there's opportunity there.  Michele Hansen  23:54Yeah, Chris was telling me that they have a, like, feature upload, like a feature up vote thing where people go in and request features.  It's exciting. Colleen Schnettler  24:03Yeah, I think it's gonna be great. I think, I think it'll be fun. It'll be good to have someone actually dedicated to reading Reddit and Webflow forums and Heroku forums and whatever, to try to identify, you know, the need there and in the file uploading space. And then with the SEO research, you know, I can then either write the content myself or hire someone to write technical content, depending on my time commitments, my time, you know, what I can do, so. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. I think, you know, the interesting thing about file uploading and Webflow is they have a maximum size of 10 megs, and I, you can't do multiple file uploads at the same time. So the question is, how many people really care? Like, who really, did, are there enough people that are uploading large files, or want to do maximum, or, I'm sorry, want to do multiple file uploads at a time that it would be worth it for me to make an integration into that space. So, so, you know, she's going to kind of dive into that and see what we can find out and like, this is just gonna be a fun marketing learning time because I built this thing because I wanted to build something, as you know, and I'm really happy that I built something to scratch my own need because it's worked out really well. But I still haven't really honed in on who I can serve best, and there's lots of opportunities out there, so. Michele Hansen  25:42There's a lot to be, I think, sort of learned and discovered here, and, and also that SEO work you can do, that, like, that can also inform the kind of feature development that you do, too, like, because there, I mean, this just happened to us the other day, like there was something that I noticed we had a couple of customers ask us how to do, and so I wrote up an article about how to do it, and then, but like, to basically do it manually. And then I just saw this morning that it's, like, our top performing growing piece of content and has like a 400% increase in clicks, and-  Wow. And looking into like, oh, how might we add that? And it's like, okay, maybe we should like there's, you know, SEO isn't just for bringing in customers, but also for figuring out what, what people might want as well.  Colleen Schnettler  26:38Yeah, and you've said before, I think that SEO is your number one channel? Activation channel? Michele Hansen  26:44Yeah. We, we don't run paid ads. We don't do any outbound sales. Like, we occasionally sponsor conferences, but that's mostly because, like, our friends run them, and it's just like, kind of-  Colleen Schnettler  27:00Yeah. Michele Hansen  27:00To support our friends, like we're a sponsor of Longhorn PHP, the Texas PHP conference. But like, that's just because our friend runs it.  Colleen Schnettler  27:12Okay.  Michele Hansen  27:13It's not very, like, organized or intentional. It's just like, sure, like, we'll help you out.  Colleen Schnettler  27:18Now, when you do SEO, do you do, like, now you just said, like, you were talking to a customer and then you got this idea of a good page, but do you do traditional keyword research as well? Michele Hansen  27:34Maybe? Like, we use Ahrefs.  Colleen Schnettler  27:36Yeah, I don't, okay. Michele Hansen  27:39I don't know, I still don't know how to pronounce the name of that company.  Colleen Schnettler  27:42I know, yeah, I don't either.  Michele Hansen  27:43But yeah, Ahrefs, we use that. We used Google Search Console for a long time, which is honestly a really good tool, and it's free, because Ahrefs is, is pretty expensive. But yeah, you can do keyword research and rankings and referrers and all that kind of stuff. I don't keep a super close eye on it. Um, but yeah, whenever we're, you know, we, every so often, like every couple weeks or so we go in and look at what content is performing and what else we might need and whatnot. Colleen Schnettler  28:19Cool. Yeah, I don't know. I really haven't done, I've done absolutely zero keyword research. So I think it's probably worth our time to put a little bit of effort into that to see what people are searching for to get a better idea of how to use those tools. Michele Hansen  28:36Yeah, I mean, our approach is, you know, find those keywords and then write stuff that people might be searching for and show them how to do it with Geocodio, and I think I like that because I, and I think we talked about this is kind of something that I have struggled with with the book, is, like, I struggle with sounding salesy, like and writing, like conversion copy, like, it's just really something that I feel like I sound way too infomercial-y when I tried to write it. Like, you know, there are people who are really good at writing conversion copy and sounding like a natural human being when they write it, like, I mean, you know, Amy Hoy is one of those people. But I, you know, I might as well you know, be like, hocking something on the Home Shopping Network when I try to write it. So, so like writing be like, oh, you're searching for geocoding? Hello, we do geocoding. Here is how you can do it in like, like, all of these different ways you can do it and rephrasing all of those different things. And then here's where you can try it. And then here's where you can do it. And it's very, like, straightforward. That's like, maybe you need it. Maybe you don't. All of those options are fine. Not, like, buy this now or you will die. Colleen Schnettler  29:56Yeah, I'm hoping with our keyword research and kind of, like, since I haven't done this at all, you know, with what, the marketing research she does, as you've talked about, I think a lot of that is going to inform my content and building out future landing pages. So, that's really going to be a focus for me is like, trying to get content and you know, pages out there that appeal to people. Michele Hansen  30:24Well, I'm going to be spending the next week working on the book and you're going to be onboarding your sister and getting this research going. Sounds like we got our work cut out for us.  Colleen Schnettler  30:34It's gonna be a good week.  Michele Hansen  30:37All right. Well, I guess that'll wrap us up for now. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Corey thinks about putting some saved money to work for Swipe Files. Chris has a great week as Noah is off and running on Jetboost support. They also talk about Earnest Capital's upcoming crowdfunding campaign on Wefunder and the viability of a return.Notable mentions: Noah Raskin Corey's tweet on Earnest crowdfunding Crowdfunding the future of Earnest Capital Sacra report on Earnest Capital LendingClub More podcasts for bootstrappers Learn more about their businesses: Swipe Files Jetboost Follow them on Twitter: @coreyhainesco @c_spags

This is Low Code Legends: quick hits with top people in low and no code. Today: Ben Tossell. Ben Tossell is the founder of MakerPad, a two-year-old no-code education and networking platform with more than 2,500 members. He's also an investor in early stage low- and no-code tools through the rolling MakerPad Fund, which he launched last year. Previously, he was head of platform at Earnest Capital, a provider of early-stage funding to internet entrepreneurs. MakerPad was recently acquired by Zapier.

Corey shares the numbers behind course sales, more on the Hey Marketers acquisition, and a Swipe Files revenue milestone. Chris gives thanks to Earnest Capital and sees how great delegating can be. They also talk about the acquisition of Makerpad and how SaaS companies will continue to integrate with media and communities.

Hey everyone, this is your host Gonz, and welcome to another episode of the Seedtable podcast, where we try to make sense of what is going on in European technology.Today I'm doing things a bit different and bringing you two guests instead of one: Fabrizio Rinaldi and Francesco Di Lorenzo, founders of Mailbrew; a Milan-based company that compiles all your favorite feeds, writers, and newsletters in a daily email digest. I've been a fan of the Mailbrew team for some time now, so it was an absolute pleasure to sit down with these guys to talk. We cover absolutely everything: Fabri & Fran's origin story, and the path that led them to build Mailbrew; Why an obsessive focus on design matters so much; the Italian tech ecosystem, the advantages of running a bootstrapped company; why Fabri & Fran decided to raise money from Earnest Capital and much, much more.Though our conversation was a bit shorter than my usual episodes, Fabri & Fran absolutely delivered. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Tyler Tringas is the General Partner of Earnest Capital. Earnest ( Full disclosure - an investor in Makerpad) is creating a new way to help fund bootstrappers by combining venture and debt instruments that allow founders of profitable SaaS companies to leverage capital to grow without having to be set on the path of never ending capital raising and dilution. Tyler started Earnest after 5 years of bootstrapping my own SaaS business, Storemapper which he sold. You can read the whole story here. Ben and Tyler talk about the future of building profitable companies, no-code as a segment and all things SaaS.

TinySeed es la primera aceleradora remota diseñada para bootstrappers y fundadores de SaaS. Sus responsables son Rob Walling y Einar Vollset, dos fundadores en serie que vieron un hueco en la habilidad de las startups independientes para levantar financiamiento sin recurrir a inversores institucionales. Hablamos del potencial de Tinyseed como fondo y aceleradora de este grupo de fundadores de SaaS y discutimos también sobre lo que persiguen las startups independientes que buscan no tener que recurrir a inversionistas institucionales y tienen como meta ser productos saludables y negocios rentables con ingresos probados.Gracias por escucharnos y compartir.Estos son los enlaces a los temas de los que hemos hablado:Conoce más aquí de TinySeed, la primera aceleradora diseñada para Bootstrappers: https://tinyseed.com/MicroConf publicó su colección completa de charlas sobre lanzamiento y crecimiento de startups independientes que no dependen de financiamiento externo. Oro puro: https://www.youtube.com/microconfSigue a Rob en Twitter: https://twitter.com/robwallingEinar Vollset: https://twitter.com/einarvollsetStartups del portafolio de Tinyseed en el batch de 2020: https://tinyseed.com/latest/2020-tinyseed-batchBootstrapper's Handbook: MAKE - https://makebook.ioMatt Mullenweg de WordPress: https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/¿Qué es Y Combinator? https://medium.com/@santisiri/qué-es-y-combinator-5afb5c502365Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups (Pieter Levels): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0Tyler Tringas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tringastyler/Micro-SaaS: https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas/Earnest Capital: https://earnestcapital.comShared Earnings Agreement: https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/Gatsby: https://www.gatsbyjs.orgHilo sobre los inicios de Ghost cuando el término "bootstrap" no era cool, sino todo lo contrario: https://twitter.com/johnonolan/status/1233024423206113281?s=21Canal de YouTube de John O'Nolan: https://www.youtube.com/user/jmonolan/videosInteresante conversación entre Rob Walling y Justin Jackson, cofundador de Transistor.fm: https://youtu.be/0w09SUQwR-cPieter Levels: https://levels.io/¿Por qué Rob Walling invierte en bootstrappers con Tinyseed? https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/082-rob-walling-of-drip-and-tinyseed¿Qué necesita tu empresa para conseguir inversionistas? https://youtu.be/EDZZRLEgaKYStartups for the Rest of Us (casi 500 episodios): https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/Customer.io: https://customer.ioPlatzi: https://platzi.comBuffer: https://buffer.com500 Startups (Latam): https://latam.500.co/latam/Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.comTechstars: https://www.techstars.comCryptoKitties: https://www.cryptokitties.coLibro Recomendado: Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great instead of Big: https://www.amazon.es/Small-Giants-Companies-Choose-Instead/dp/0141031492/Síguenos en Twitter:Danny Prol: https://twitter.com/DannyProl/Claudio Cossio: https://twitter.com/ccossioEstamos en todas estas plataformas:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/saas-product-chat/id1435000409ListenNotes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/saas-product-chat-daniel-prol-y-claudio-CABZRIjGVdP/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36KIhM0DM7nwRLuZ1fVQy3Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8zN3N0Mzg2dg%3D%3D&hl=esBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/saas-product-chatWeb: https://saasproductchat.com/

DeWayne Johnson explains streetwear, overlap between the worlds of art and venture capital, cold outreach and his newsletter on marketplaces — Double Sided. His job at Lambda School is to help other people get jobs. Hear DeWayne's uniquely inspiring story to understand why that work matters to him. [0:55]: Similarities between the worlds of art and venture capital [3:04]: What people don't understand about streetwear [5:46]: Calling on Jeff Bezos' wisdom in deciding whether to drop out [10:09]: Booking a one-way ticket for a coffee meeting with Ryan Delk [13:24]: Finally getting a foothold in tech with a gig at TrueBill (YC W16) [15:48]: Interning at Earnest Capital [19:21]: DeWayne's job at Lambda School getting other people jobs [27:06]: Favorite books and podcasts DeWayne's Twitter - https://twitter.com/dewayneroyj DeWayne's website - https://dewayneroy.com/ Worth website - worth.carrd.co Recommendations - https://www.notion.so/book-podcast-recommendations-59abba1db1db4fc2b9b9a4e08edb0b24

Transistor.fm founder Justin Jackson (@mijustin) goes head-to-head with Earnest Capital investor Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas) on the topic of picking the right market. The decisions you make when you're just getting started on a project carry the most weight and might affect your life for years to come. How big of a market should you target? How important of a problem should you solve? What does Justin mean when advises working on a "main dish" instead of a "side dish?" And how do a serial founder's views on this topic differ from an investor's?Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/152-tyler-tringas-and-justin-jackson

On Episode 23 Kevin McArdle, owner of SureSwift Capital and Jac Stark, Community Manager for tech.mn, welcome Sibi Murugesan, Head of Platform at Earnest Capital, on our first episode of season three of The tech.mn Podcast. This conversation is a delightful cocktail of topics including “The big American dream,” triple cherries, theoretical particle physics, martial arts, alternate endings to Romeo and Juliet, and donuts. And that’s just the first ten minutes.    Sibi shares the story of what led him to the world of entrepreneurship, a detour into the land of corporate America, and why he gravitated back to the startup relm. He talks about his time as a director at gener8tor and working behind the scenes with early-stage companies. After getting the itch to be part of a startup Sibi joined a team with Fanbox and got a taste of the startup life.  Kevin and Sibi give us a deepdive on Earnest Capital and their unique approach to funding and supporting founders. We discuss the community Sibi is working with and the mentorship culture of Ernest. Lastly, we talk about the upcoming Founder’s Summit in Mexico City. Hype Time Every episode we ask our guest to name drop someone doing cool things in the tech community. Sibi gives a shout out to Matt Raskin of Bootstrappers.mn. Sponsor:Thank you to Arthur Ventures for sponsoring this episode of The tech.mn Podcast. Arthur Ventures invests in B2B software founders beyond Silicon Valley and takes a partner approach to venture capital. They support tech entrepreneurship in Minnesota. You can learn more about them at their website and hear about their latest raise here.  SocialsTech.MN on TwitterKevin McArdle on TwitterJac Stark on TwitterSibi Murugesan on Twittergener8tor on TwitterEarnest Capital on TwitterTyler Tringas on Twitter Links:Earnest CapitalGener8torFounder’s Summit (Tickets still available)

Happy Holidays from the upside team!Last year, we shared an episode called: JE006: eight crazy months of upside. This year, we're back and sharing the 12 episodes of Christmas — 12 exceptionally notable episodes we recommend listening to again.The episodes mentioned, in order: CC033: Alex Rubalcava of Stage Venture Partners // investing in early-stage enterprise software UP050: opendorse // helping athletes share more content (feat. Braxton Miller of the Philadelphia Eagles) CC007: the rise of platform in venture capital // a Coffee Chat with Stephanie Manning (Lerer Hippeau) CC032: Kate Shillo Beardsley of Upslope Ventures // scaling early stage investments across the country CC024: investing in the picks and shovels of esports and gaming // a Coffee Chat with Josh Chapman (Konvoy Ventures) UP043: inKind // redesigning restaurant financing with House Accounts (feat. Kevin Tien of Himitsu and Hot Lola's) CC016: a new source of funding and optionality for early stage founders // a Coffee Chat with Tyler Tringas (Earnest Capital) and Kevin McArdle (SureSwift Capital) UP024: Intrinio // powering fintech innovation with access to financial data UP046: MITO Material Solutions // chemical additives for tougher composites UP042: Threatcare // automated third-party threat detection CC017: building a world class venture firm in Chicago // a Coffee Chat with Ezra Galston (Starting Line) UP008: Loop Returns // creating the perfect ecommerce customer returns experience (live from Columbus Podcast Festival) Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefmTake our listener survey: https://upside.fm/surveyAdvertise with an upside classified: https://upside.fm/classifieds

Stair step business building. Tyler Tringas, co-founder of Earnest Capital, stresses important aspects of building a business aside from just the idea.

Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas) may not look like Tarzan, but that hasn't stopped him from expertly swinging from vine to vine. Since we last spoke in episode 10, Tyler transitioned from founder to investor, sold his SaaS business, and is helping to spearhead a whole new approach to funding indie hacker businesses. In this episode, Tyler and I discuss the existing VC model and why it doesn't work for bootstrappers, a new funding model that bootstrappers should all be paying attention to, and why he's betting that "90% of startups fail" should no longer be the accepted wisdom.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/131-tyler-tringas-of-earnest-capital

Tyler is the founder and General Partner at Earnest Capital, where he makes seed-stage investments in bootstrappers, indie hackers, makers, and real businesses.

Tyler Tringas, founder of Earnest Capital, discusses the origin of his alternative to traditional VC funds, the radical transparency movement, building a community of founders and mentors, investing in Default Alive Companies, paid versus freemium models, and more with James Gallagher, editor at Maker Mag, Publicly Traded Person, Pioneer winner, and author of the book "Life Capital". See all previous episodes on Maker Mag. Sponsored by Blockstack.

This week we've delivered a special bonus episode with a slightly different focus than normal. Inspired by Justin Jackson's article on 'the myth of the niche market', your host Louis Nicholls has a conversation about the pros and cons of targeting a niche market, with accomplished bootstrapped founder and investor Tyler Tringas. Tyler previously founded and bootstrapped Storemapper.co to $50k+ MRR, before starting Earnest Capital - a fund dedicated to investing in bootstrapped startups with a win-win, founder-friendly focus and great founder-alignment. You can find Tyler on Twitter at @tylertringas and Justin Jackson's article that inspired the episode is over at https://justinjackson.ca/niche We'll be back to regular, sales-based interviews from next Tuesday! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/message

Hey guys, welcome to part two of Library magic.Eric and I are celebrating one year of upside, and as he mentioned last week in part one, we were particularly struck by Monique Villa's comment in our fifth Coffee Chat:“It's sort of like novelists, whenever you read a book, you're getting the benefit of someone's life's work that they've put into book form. And I really think of founders that way. Anytime I meet a founder, I'm absorbing something that they've been working on for years or sometimes decades -- sometimes longer than I've been alive -- and I just love diving into something and learning about a new industry. And learning about a new way that this industry is being looked at by people who have been, frankly, often times confined by the traditional industry and, and see this opportunity of what the world could become.”We've spoken to over 100 founders in this past year, and published more than 40 of those conversations as episodes here on upside. That's over 100 “founder novels” in our library.But these aren't your typical books. We're not interested in collecting an incremental set of Harry Potter books, and more interested in collecting the rare books that are difficult to find or discarded based on their cover.We're looking for what the book world calls, “first editions.”First editions are prized because they are as close as a reader can get to the source. They are the way the book first appeared to readers, with the original cover art, and sometimes even the original typos.One of my virtual mentors, Seth Godin, also talked about the value of books in his interview on the Tim Ferriss Show:“A book is a screaming bargain. You pay $15-20, and you have something that might change your life; you have something that reminds you 20 years later, sitting on the shelf, where you were when you read it.”I'd say the same is true of running a podcast for a year. It's an order of magnitude more expensive and a whole lot more work, but you build a library that no one else has. You have control over your library.And our library is eclectic. Over the past year, we've spoken with founders in more than 30 cities, including founders outside of the United States.We've spoken with bootstrapped founders and we've spoken to venture investors.We've spoken with community builders and we've spoken with community members.We've spoken to immigrants, and we've spoken to former academics.Our conversations have ranged from virtual reality athletic training to enterprise blockchain to children's toys.We've augmented our learning with the perspectives of guests that are users of a product or investors in a particular market.And while reading the books of others, we were writing our own.Our story is one of exploring the fringes. We're just as interested in learning about defense drones as we are in material science and Quantum Dots.We look through an investors' lens through most of our interviews, but we're just as interested in exploring the fringes of the financing options that are available to bootstrappers and indie hackers like TinySeed and Earnest Capital.For a long time, the founders we speak with were considered on the fringes of investable geography. Investors weren't all that interested in traveling to Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Lincoln, Nebraska.But these locations aren't by chance…Preteckt, a commercial vehicle prognostics company and SOMAVAC, an out-patient medical device, found a home in Memphis, Tennessee, where accelerators brought them to the doorstep of their ideal clients.Freshfry, a technology that purifies cooking oil, calls Louisville home, where they can sit within the franchising capital of the world.Frank Jackman of Local Crate setup shop in Minneapolis, where he both learned from Schwann's and build his geographical advantage through local depots for food delivery....and they aren't the disadvantage they were assumed to be.Corbett Morgan of LOOP Returns is building a reverse-logistics infrastructure to let ecommerce companies all over the country compete with Amazon.ShearShare is located outside of Dallas where they have access to the largest percentage of licensed cosmetologists, while employing a remote team of engineers.The same is true of Vlipsy, a consumer app in Ohio that promises its engineers a better life through remote work.It turns out, it's not so crazy to start a financial data platform in Florida, or a travel and swim apparel company in St. Louis. The advantages of areas inside the coasts aren't just cost-savings, but instead include things like proximity to customers, supply chain and logistic advantages, and access to Fortune 500 companies who Summer Crenshaw told us would take her call when you're in their backyard, “because they are nice, and they want to help.”And you don't have to get giant checks to start -- sometimes, like in the case with Nick Potts, living in a trailer in your parents' backyard can afford the runway to get your first contract with a national pharmacy chain.These founders are scrappy. That may be teaching themselves to code in the case of Seth Miller of Rapchat, or that may be finding non-dilutive funding through grants and pitch competitions like Tony Bova of Mobius.Of course, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, and sure, some founders are located by happenstance. There are still strides to be made in terms of investor education in local ecosystems and convincing investors to invest in other ecosystems. Just about every ecosystem we speak with could use more density and diversity in terms of talent, capital, and support.Our episode with Stephanie Manning was my first exposure to the idea of a “platform” team within Venture Capital. I think “platform” as a concept will mature first within ecosystems, and then across ecosystems.Because none of the founders we've spoken to bought into the narrative that you must be in Silicon Valley to start a company. None of the community builders either. They're finding a way and writing their own narrative.And with this podcast, we just so happen to be the beneficiaries of those narratives.Now, as Eric would tell you, I don't read a lot of paper books. When you're a founder, you don't have time to learn for learning's sake. Instead of picking up a book “just in case” you need that knowledge later, you're more often forced to learn things “just in time” for you to use them. And for the last several years, I've found myself in this camp.And it's for this reason that I often find myself opting to learn directly from the “books” of others. When a problem comes up, I find someone I know has already faced or solved that problem, and I look first for their insight.I gravitate to audiobooks and recorded conversations, just like we have here on the podcast. Looking forward, we will continue to collect new and interesting stories here on our show. We're always looking for those first editions.Thanks to our earliest guests for jumping under the microscope with nothing but an idea. Thanks to Matt Pasternack and Pat Gibson for helping us create the look and sound of the show without a moment's hesitation.Thank you to Andy Curran and Alex Wittenberg for recording our first interviews which were so bad that they'll never see the light of day.Thanks to Taft for making their first podcast sponsorship with us.Thanks to Nathan for making Eric and I sound much smarter in post-production than we ever do in actual production.And thanks to you for listening to our show and supporting us. We're always grateful to hear from you, and look forward to sharing more with you over the next trip around the sun. I assure you, we'll keep exploring those fringes.Follow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Tyler Tringas is a General Partner at Earnest Capital which provides early-stage funding for bootstrappers. In 2011, Tyler quit his job to start a venture-backed software startup called SolarList. He was a first-time founder and non-technical. So he also started learning how to code. The Show Notes StoreMapper Earnest Capital TylerTringas.com Tyler on Twitter Omer on Twitter Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Tyler Tringas is a General Partner at Earnest Capital which provides early-stage funding for bootstrappers. In 2011, Tyler quit his job to start a venture-backed software startup called SolarList. He was a first-time founder and non-technical. So he also started learning how to code.The Show NotesStoreMapperEarnest CapitalTylerTringas.comTyler on TwitterOmer on TwitterEnjoyed this episode?Subscribe to the podcastLeave a rating and reviewFollow Omer on TwitterNeed help with your SaaS?1. Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support.2. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue.3. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Interview begins: 06:02Debrief begins: 58:45Tyler Tringas is the General Partner at Earnest Capital. Earnest Capital provides early-stage funding, resources and a network of experienced advisors to bootstrappers, indie hackers, makers and real businesses. They offer an innovative investment structure aligned with founders and businesses that want to accelerate now and ultimately become a profitable sustainable business. They never want you to need to raise another round of funding and you'll never be forced to exit. Earnest Capital is a collaboration between Tyler Tringas and SureSwift Capital and was founded in 2018.Learn more about Earnest Capital: https://earnestcapital.comFollow Tyler on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylertringas//Kevin McArdle is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sureswift Capital.SureSwift is a holding company that actively invests in, and holds on to emerging media and SaaS properties with the intent to provide exceptional value to existing and future clients. We are a team of 75+ remote individuals in 14 times zones.SureSwift was founded in 2015 and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Learn more about SureSwift Capital: https://www.sureswiftcapital.com/Follow Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kevin_McArdleFollow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Show Notes Niteo (https://niteo.co/) Lanzarote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzarote) Domen Kožar (https://www.parallelpassion.com/20) EESTEC (https://eestec.net/) Windsurfing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsurfing) windsurfer.si (https://www.windsurfer.si/) Mladi Podjetnik (https://mladipodjetnik.si/) Plone CMS (https://plone.org/) Easy Blog Networks (https://www.easyblognetworks.com/) Earnest Capital (https://earnestcapital.com/) FIRE movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) Index fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund) Tony Robbins - Money (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1476757860/parpaspod-20) YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) Toshl (https://toshl.com/) Budgetwise (https://www.budgetwise.io/) The High Probability of Low Probability Events (https://www.thesimpledollar.com/the-high-probability-of-low-probability-events/) Miriam Tocino (https://www.parallelpassion.com/26) How Miha journals (https://mr.si/posts/2018/09/02/journaling/) Hedonic treadmill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill) Recommendations The Four Pillars of Investing (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0071747052/parpaspod-20) The 4-Hour Workweek (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0307465357/parpaspod-20) The Five Minute Journal (https://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0991846206/parpaspod-20) Nejc Zupan Twitter (https://twitter.com/nzupan) GitHub (https://github.com/zupo) Parallel Passion Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/parpaspod) Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/parpaspod) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/parpaspod) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/parpaspod) Credits George Hiles (https://unsplash.com/@hilesy) for the header photo Tina Tavčar (https://twitter.com/tinatavcar) for Parallel Passion logo Jan Jenko (https://twitter.com/JanJenko) for intro/outro music

Al Chen discusses the no-code movement and tools to help makers build products without code with Ben Tossell, the founder of MakerPad and the Head of Platform at Earnest Capital. When does no-code make sense? What is the future of no-code? Listen for answer to these, and more. Sponsored by Blockstack.

Today, I'm talking with Tyler Tringas, General Partner at Earnest Capital, a new fund designed to provide early-stage funding for bootstrappers. I've been following Tyler's writing for a while now when he was documenting his journey of starting and eventually selling his SaaS, Storemapper, but when I heard what he was up to at Earnest Capital, I knew I had to reach out. I'm trying to focus this show less about day-to-day hacks and more about what it actually takes to be an effective leader and build a sustainable business. I think the sustainable part is one of the most important pieces of the equation to listeners, it definitely is to me, but it's typically seen as a negative when it comes to traditional venture capital. Like Rob Walling from TinySeed, who I talked to last week, Tyler is trying his hand at finding a way to invest capital in a way that allows founders and investors to benefit from profitability. In our chat, we dive into what that looks like and how Tyler sees Earnest fitting into the startup ecosystem.

Tyler Tringas is an entrepreneur and traveler. He's started two companies (one worked!) and now is founding Earnest Capital where he wants to help companies avoid going into $50,000 of credit card debt (like he did) to start technology companies. We talk about how this type of investing vehicle can help transcend some of the pressures to "scale at all costs" in ways that may not be suitable for most companies. Topics Digital nomads Starting a company Bootstrapping How to sell a company The four-hour workweek Calm companies Flaws with the VC model Taking leaps Transitions Meaningful work while traveling Related Links: Earnest Capital Tyler Tringas His Journey Selling StoreMapper ------------------------------------------------ For More With Boundless: Consider supporting the podcast on Patreon Join 125+ People Carving Their Own Paths In The Slack Community Set Up A Curiosity Conversation With Paul Join The Free 3-Week Self-Employment Challenge Sign up For The Strategy Toolkit - Learn The Secrets Of Strategy Consulting

On the pod today I have Dutch academic, author, and fear expert Roanne Van Voorst. In late 2017, Roanne published a book called Fear: Extreme athletes on how to reach your highest goals and overcome stress and self-doubt.   Roanne's book dissects all things fear from how pervasive it is in our daily lives to practical tips to overcome it. Through the lens of names like Lynn Hill, Steph Davis, Cedric Dumont, Alain Robert and Alex Honnold among many others, Roanne's mission is to get to the bottom of what makes these seemingly fearless athletes and coaches tick. Spoiler alert, it's not what you might think.    And as a gentle reminder, getting a handle on fear is so important guys. It truly is where the gates to the kingdom either remain locked or are pried open with a whole lot of practice.    Before I get into my convo with Roanne, I wanted to mention an upcoming event.    A few episodes ago, I introduced you to Tyler Tringas, if you remember he is a successful serial entrepreneur who's latest project is the venture fund Earnest Capital, which helps bootstrappers like you and me raise early stage funding for their businesses.   Well, the person who introduced me to Tyler is a mutual friend of ours and part of this podcast community — Eric Shutt, Founder of the brand marketing consultancy, SummitX. This March, I'm partnering with Eric on a 4 day ski retreat for leaders in business and tech in Jackson Hole, WY.    I'll be doing a live podcast recording, we'll be skiing a bunch of days at Jackson, and hearing from some of the brightest thought leaders in leadership development - all scheduled around a little Aprés of course.    If you or anyone you know is interested, feel free to use the referral code APP for $500 off the registration. If you have any questions hit me up, or head over to summitx.co/trips for more info.   Cool, enjoy the show!

(Part 2 of 2) On today's show I have Tyler Tringas. Hmmm… what to say about Tyler. Well - He's got to be one of the most well-rounded and intellectually curious dudes I've ever met. Tyler has done a bunch of different work in his relatively short career. After undergrad, Tyler worked as a consultant for a clean energy startup and pretty quickly realized he had an entrepreneurial itch. Shortly thereafter he started a solar energy company called SolarList, and after fighting the good fight for a few years - had to walk away from that startup after racking up $50,000 in credit card debt.  On the side, he was doing some freelance coding work, and uncovered a popular need amongst his clients, which led to his second business - Storemapper. This time, Tyler grew his small business into a fairly sizable company, all while traveling the world as a digital nomad, and 5 years later ended up selling the company with a nice little exit to live off of.  Now Some people would take the money and go fuck around for a few years or forever for that matter, but instead Tyler asked himself - what work would really matter to me if money wasn't an object? That question landed him at a company called Maptia, who's mission is to foster empathy through storytelling - and do yourself a favor and go get lost in the Maptia website for a while. That position actually led him to work with some of the biggest National Geographic photographers in the world, where he became the Chief Operating Officer at an ocean conservation content creation company called Sea Legacy.  As if that wasn't quite enough, this summer Tyler left Sea Legacy to pursue perhaps his most ambitious and exciting project yet. Tyler's always been obsessed with the problem early stage entrepreneurs have securing financing. To address this problem, A couple months ago, Tyler launched a platform for early stage bootstrappers called Earnest Capital, and the buzz it's already created in entrepreneur and lifestyle hacking circles is pretty awesome.  Anyway, enough of me blabbing - let's get to the interview. Oh and by the way, this conversation got a little long because it was so damn interesting, so I'm splitting it into two episodes, part 1 and part 2.  Part 1 will cover how he taught himself to code… advice on learning to code, Solar List, Storemapper, building a lifestyle business, the digital nomad lifestyle, rock climbing, and clean tech and in part 2 we dive into knowledge sharing and Transparency, Maptia, Sea Legacy, changing hats and stretching your limits in the name or learning and growth, doing stuff you don't know how to do, risk tolerance (or lack thereof), and Earnest Capital.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Tyler's website Earnest Capital Maptia Sea Legacy Paul Nicklen Cristina Mittermeier New Energy Finance (clean energy startup acquired by Bloomberg) Ruby on Rails (Coding language) Upwork (Freelancer marketplace) David Heinemeier Hansson or DHH (Creator of Ruby on Rails and CoFounder of BaseCamp) It doesn't have to be crazy at work by DHH and Jason Fried Rework by DHH and Jason Fried

On today's show I have Tyler Tringas. Hmmm… what to say about Tyler. Well - He's got to be one of the most well-rounded and intellectually curious dudes I've ever met. Tyler has done a bunch of different work in his relatively short career. After undergrad, Tyler worked as a consultant for a clean energy startup and pretty quickly realized he had an entrepreneurial itch. Shortly thereafter he started a solar energy company called SolarList, and after fighting the good fight for a few years - had to walk away from that startup after racking up $50,000 in credit card debt.  On the side, he was doing some freelance coding work, and uncovered a popular need amongst his clients, which led to his second business - Storemapper. This time, Tyler grew his small business into a fairly sizable company, all while traveling the world as a digital nomad, and 5 years later ended up selling the company with a nice little exit to live off of.  Now Some people would take the money and go fuck around for a few years or forever for that matter, but instead Tyler asked himself - what work would really matter to me if money wasn't an object? That question landed him at a company called Maptia, who's mission is to foster empathy through storytelling - and do yourself a favor and go get lost in the Maptia website for a while. That position actually led him to work with some of the biggest National Geographic photographers in the world, where he became the Chief Operating Officer at an ocean conservation content creation company called Sea Legacy.  As if that wasn't quite enough, this summer Tyler left Sea Legacy to pursue perhaps his most ambitious and exciting project yet. Tyler's always been obsessed with the problem early stage entrepreneurs have securing financing. To address this problem, A couple months ago, Tyler launched a platform for early stage bootstrappers called Earnest Capital, and the buzz it's already created in entrepreneur and lifestyle hacking circles is pretty awesome.  Anyway, enough of me blabbing - let's get to the interview. Oh and by the way, this conversation got a little long because it was so damn interesting, so I'm splitting it into two episodes, part 1 and part 2.  Part 1 will cover how he taught himself to code… advice on learning to code, Solar List, Storemapper, building a lifestyle business, the digital nomad lifestyle, rock climbing, and clean tech and in part 2 we dive into knowledge sharing and Transparency, Maptia, Sea Legacy, changing hats and stretching your limits in the name or learning and growth, doing stuff you don't know how to do, risk tolerance (or lack thereof), and Earnest Capital.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Tyler's website Earnest Capital Maptia Sea Legacy Paul Nicklen Cristina Mittermeier New Energy Finance (clean energy startup acquired by Bloomberg) Ruby on Rails (Coding language) Upwork (Freelancer marketplace) David Heinemeier Hansson or DHH (Creator of Ruby on Rails and CoFounder of BaseCamp) It doesn't have to be crazy at work by DHH and Jason Fried Rework by DHH and Jason Fried

Jon and Justin consider a new early-stage fund called Earnest Capital

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I view my job here is to essentially aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is overlooking, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. 00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our guest Tyler Trius of the Calm Fund. Hey guys. And one thing we talk about on this podcast with surprising frequency is cities and in particular that remote work and all these lovely cloud tools make it possible for knowledge workers such as ourselves to choose where we want to live based on quality of life rather than where your employer happens to be. And Tyler, I know you live in Mexico City. Tell me about that decision. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Mexico City is great. The decision is not that interesting. I’ve been working remotely and building remote companies for probably the last 10 years. I spent a lot of time as a digital nomad and then kind of like a slow mad, sort of, you know, slowly traveling to different places. But Mexico City, we’re here because my wife works for the State Department and she’s got a job at the embassy. So since I’ve been running what we used to call Earnest Capital, and now the call company fund. I’ve been sort of just tagging along with my wife. We were in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. We launched it. We’re there for about 2 years and now we’re here in Mexico City. So the decision wasn’t really mine to come here, but I will say I’m very, very pleased to be here. It’s an awesome city. It’s really becoming like the hub of pretty much everything to do with startups up and down Latin America, amazing food, awesome weather, pretty unbeatable quality of life. I’m not gonna lie. So folks should definitely come down and visit us. We throw a conference here and hoping to see a bunch more entrepreneurs down here. So, yeah, it’s good. 00:02:04 - Speaker 2: Interesting, I guess I just assumed because I’ve just visited Mexico City once, we did an I can switch summit there, but I found it such a lovely place. I could very much imagine a person who was working remotely and has any choice they want might well choose it. But you actually highlight another good benefit of remote work, which is then you can go where your partner needs to go for their employment. So I know that it can be a source of great contention in relationships, long term relationships, when it turns out that one person’s school or work needs take them one place and another person needs to go to the other place and someone has to decide who’s gonna make the sacrifice. So here you’re not faced with that decision. 00:02:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that all the time. Obviously now knowing a bunch of people living the foreign service life and it is a big source of tension. Yeah, I mean it’s phenomenal to have sort of built this company in a way that’s fully distributed from day one. So it’s like I tell people when we moved from Brazil to Mexico, if I didn’t tell my team, they wouldn’t have noticed basically, which is, you know, super helpful. The one thing I think remote work hasn’t quite solved it is time zones. 00:03:09 - Speaker 2: That’s the last frontier, you know, that’s definitely a challenge for us between Europe and West Coast US although again, you have kind of a nice benefit of being fairly central, at least among those western places. 00:03:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Mexico City is hard to beat. I mean, I think if you’re able to work remotely, you should seriously come and check it out and give it a shot. It’s really a world class city, just as easy to get anywhere, like if you’re sort of US centric, it’s as easy to get to New York or LA as it is from anywhere else in the country inside the US. Yeah, super good amenities, everything just works hard to beat. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before this turns into a veiled advertisement from the Mexico City Tourism Board, we can transition to hearing a bit about your background and especially what is the alm fund. 00:03:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Cound some folks may have heard of us as Earnest Capital, who recently rebranded this year or so, same exact company, same people, same idea. Really, it’s one of those scratch your own itch companies, essentially my kind of personal history involved. Experiencing kind of both sides of the venture capital and bootstrapped world kind of communities, at one point in my life, you know, had a business that I was working on. It was sort of a clean tech software business in a time when VCs were really, really not funding clean tech businesses. It’s like a little over a decade ago. And so I kind of deeply experienced the possibility of having like a really good business idea that just isn’t a fit for the comparatively small universe, you know, hundreds of people that do early stage venture financing and realizing that there wasn’t a sort of 1 to 1 overlap there that you could have a good idea that probably should use some early stage capital. But just as for one reason or another, not a fit for venture and that if you’re building a software company, there’s really no plan B, right? You basically have to either fund it with rich friends, credit cards, or VCs and kind of really explore that, hey, there’s a big gap in the market here in terms of early stage support for a lot of entrepreneurs. Then I went the other direction and said, OK, I’m not gonna ask anyone’s permission to get started on my next business and completely bootstrapped it, which worked out really well. I was just a straightforward kind of niche B2B sass business, ran it for about 5 years, built a remote team and sold it to a private equity shop, which was a great outcome, super fun, but when I was launching that, I had to launch it with credit card debt. It worked out in the end, you know, that was a positive experience, but those first two years with mounting amounts of debt on my personal credit cards was Really not the ideal way to launch a business, both from this capital perspective and also just a complete lack of any other kind of support. And so those two things kind of combined when I sold the company, I said, look, you know, I would like to sort of build the fund or the partner that I would have liked to have worked with on frankly, both of these businesses. So that’s what we do. We’re. Early stage funding, community and mentorship for entrepreneurs building what we call calm companies. And I think there’s a lot of ambiguity over exactly what that means and things like that. But if you think of yourself as like a bootstrapper or an indie hacker or those kinds of things, you know, we’re trying to build the kind of partner for those kinds of entrepreneurs either who have like Different ways of wanting to run their company that aren’t aligned with the traditional venture model or that are building products that just wouldn’t be a fit, right in the sense of, you know, they have perfectly good market and they can build a company that does millions, tens of millions, maybe $100 million in revenue, but it’s really never going to be like a $10 billion dollar company, you know, we’re trying to build the partner from the earliest stages for that whole swath of companies basically. 00:06:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Tyler, I’ve been watching your journey with Ernest and then calm for some time now. I forget when exactly I found you online, but you’ve been doing this thing where you’re building in public, and I saw your work quite early, and I was really intrigued by it. It did feel like a closer fit for what we’re trying to do at Muse and what I’m trying to do with my career and some of the other options out there, and I’m encouraged to see that it’s doing quite well. 00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks. 00:07:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve also been, I guess, following slash part of the earnest community for a little while, but part of why I thought this rebrand would be a great time to invite you on the podcast is that calm companies, I think, match up a lot with something we talk about in the type of business we’re trying to build with Muse. We talked about this. In our Small giants episode, I’ll like that in the show notes, but is a little bit of a reaction, I guess, to, again, startups and venture capital, which Mark and I have been both down that road, and we think there’s huge value to a lot of that, most notably not bootstrapping, yeah, getting investors who help you share the risk. And then Also ties in well with what we talk about on this podcast, also because in general funding models for different kinds of things that could or should exist in the world, things that could improve humanity, make us all more prosperous collectively, there’s kind of a narrow number of ways we get stuff funded. There’s government funding, there’s nonprofits, there’s bootstrapping, there’s venture capital is kind of a relatively recent, but obviously now increasingly high profile way to do it. But if you draw the map of all the things that we might want to build and what the right funding is for them, you find that there’s really a lot of gaps in that map, it feels like, and part of what I liked about what I discovered when you were doing that is it fills in one of those gaps potentially. 00:08:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s gaps all over the place. It feels like we’re not anywhere near having sort of comprehensive coverage, especially at the early stage. I think once you have a mature anything, usually your options do start to multiply, but We’ve sort of found ourselves in this strange moment where I think the internet and software and stuff has just started to dominate everything. I think that the software is eating the world, you know, thesis is largely correct and it’s playing out before us. And what’s happened is just through kind of process of elimination, if you go back like maybe 15 to 20. years, venture capital, which traditionally was this thing designed to fund like really high risk, high capital intensive R&D intensive ventures in building CPUs and aerospace and stuff like that, was also just the only people who would take bets on software companies when you had to spend $10 million to rack servers before you could even launch your website. And so there’s become this sort of 1 to 1 convergence with this like very narrowly defined asset class and all of this exploding universe of opportunities from everything from indie game developers to online communities and all that sort of stuff. It’s basically like, oh, well, if you’re going to fund them, you have to use this really narrowly defined form of funding, which is venture capital, which has all these like. Constraints and expectations from the people who invest in venture capital funds and all that sort of stuff. And we’ve just sort of backed our way into this world where everybody thinks that they need to raise venture capital or nothing, and there’s sort of no other option and I don’t think we’re going to be the only addition to this space. I think there needs to be dozens of different permutations of ways to solve this because we’re essentially refilling the entire economy. With software and software enabled new variations, and the main driver of this is that most of the world of funding businesses is based around credit models, right, where you’re underwriting against assets and things like that. And all of this stuff has this one thing in common, which is there’s no tangible assets, right? We’re all just a bunch of people with laptops, essentially remote working with no offices and no equipment and all that sort of stuff and so. There needs to be this really broad-based rethink of, OK, how do we support these kinds of companies, organizations, nonprofits, co-ops, etc. from the early stage in a way that can leverage the benefits of capitalism, right? You can access large pools of capital and convince people to sort of continue giving you that money. So, yeah, I think it’s still very, very early days and there’s a lot of work to do for sure. 00:11:24 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is calm companies, and part of why I thought the earnest to calm rebrand was a perfect chance to talk with you about this and connect it to small giants and how we think about news and others that might like to build companies in this way, is there’s the mechanical. of how your fund works, and what kind of companies you invest in, and at what stage. We talk about those potentially, but I’m more interested maybe in the philosophical elements. Even the name gives you a sense right off the bat, which implies it’s a good brand. I’ll also like our episode on brand. At this point we’ve got enough back catalog, I guess, we’ve sort of always have something to reference. But yeah, can you define for me separately from what you invest in, what is a calm company just philosophically speaking? 00:12:10 - Speaker 1: It’s actually like a really tough question, in part I think because it’s kind of a call back to just historical normalcy or historical equilibrium of how people build businesses. Like I was at kind of a family reunion thing, bunch of family members, mostly from my wife’s side where I either hadn’t met them or hadn’t had the opportunity to like explain what do you do. So I was explaining what we do, and when you explain it to someone who’s outside of tech, it just sounds incredibly boring and straightforward. They’re like, oh, OK, you invest in these entrepreneurs and They build businesses and they become profitable and they give you some of those profits, or they sell their company and you get a piece of that and then you do it again. It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s actually kind of weird in this day and age, and it kind of harkens back to the idea that like we’ve actually ended up in this weird spot where the kind of default assumption in tech is that you’re going to build this ultra high growth sort of thing that’s gonna raise a ton of capital and move as quickly as you can and then either IPO or kind of flame out trying. So cal companies are kind of a way to position ourselves first as not that. So what that means is basically growing more sustainably, raising capitals sort of a byproduct, not the actual goal, you’re really optimizing for the long term in terms of team retention, in terms of making sure that folks can work on a sustainable schedule and continue to have high quality output. For decades, not just years or quarters, all that sort of stuff. And the reason why we’ve sort of settled on calm is to sort of affirmatively stand for something, rather than kind of just only positioning ourselves as not this, not that, not that other thing, right? Because that was never the right way to think about it. And so as we kind of Aggregated more and more entrepreneurs that we’re all just kind of picking up the same vibe, right? Everything from folks who are investors and mentors to the portfolio companies that we’ve invested in to the many other folks that are all kind of picking up the same wavelength that for various reasons we haven’t been able to invest in, they’re too far along, too early or whatever. And we sort of said, well, OK, what’s the affirmative version of this that says like, this is actually what we stand for and calm was far and away the winner of what resonated with folks there. So it’s basically about being patient and long-term focused and sustainable and operating and Way where you can be what I call long term ambitious, basically. It’s not like the lifestyle business of kickback and passive income and then sit on the beach in Thailand. It’s about, we want to do something important, we want to do it in a way that allows us to stay in the game for the long run. So, yeah, that’s a calm company. I’m still working on the really pithy answer, but that’s the explanation. 00:15:02 - Speaker 3: I think that makes sense. To me, these companies also have this element of more degrees of freedom, and Tyler, I’m curious if this resonates with you. I think it was you who originally pointed out that when you enter onto the VC track, you’re basically going on this very narrow path that has 5 or 6 steps in the last 10 years, and you basically have to take each of those steps, which by the way, is going to be with a different actor or firm potentially, and they’re all different shapes. And so you really crunch down your degrees of freedom, whereas with a com company I see because you’re profitable and thinking in the long term in other ways, you have the option to do stuff kind of your own way on your own terms in your own time. So if you want to go all remote, you can do that. If you want to stop growing for a year, you can do that. If you want to, I don’t know, pay out dividends or something, you can do that, but you just have more degrees of freedom and flexibility, and to me that’s an important aspect to these companies. 00:15:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I wrote a blog post a while ago, I think it was called like the Founder’s path of maximum Optionality, which essentially just talks about how you can sort of move through some of these phases of reducing uncertainty, de-risking, running experiments, learning about the market, learning about your customers, learning about what’s technologically possible, that sort of thing, without kind of fully opting into the one-way ratchet that can be really getting on the venture roller coaster and I think More and more opportunities right now merit that, right? In the sense of there’s a lot of talk around like pivots and things like that, but I just think that there’s a lot of stuff right now where, as we’re starting to see less just true green field opportunities in the world of software and software enabled stuff where it’s like, OK. Nobody is doing anything remotely like this, right? There’s various things that are adjacent or solving the problem in a different way, but we still see a big opportunity here. You kind of need to keep that optionality open to sort of figure out, OK, what is the scope of the opportunity here, how are we going to fill this, how we’re going to build the company that serves this opportunity. And building stuff that has that optionality baked in, I think is probably the right strategy for most entrepreneurs is to really kind of keep your options open. 00:17:17 - Speaker 2: And there’s two parts of that, both of which connect really well to the Muse story. One is just niche software, so part of the venture box is you need to be able to get to a certain size, but not everything that could or should exist in the world necessarily can get to that size, and we don’t know how big the opportunity is for Muse, but we do know or we expect it to be a niche thing. And we want that. We don’t want to have to switch gears into thinking, how do we make this more mainstream, because we think that would cause us to lose a lot of the soul in what we set out to do. And then the other part of it is, call it the experience for the entrepreneur, which is if you are a person that is a tech person, particularly once you have a solid CV as Mark and I and a lot of our colleagues here do, we have a lot of options, and that’s really lovely, that’s a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful privilege. Then you think, OK, how do I wanna use that and what kind of lifestyle do I want to live, what kind of products do I want to make, what kind of team do I want to be on. And so in thinking through that, we realized, yeah, that intense one-way ratchet adventure is not quite the right fit, at least for what I want out of my life right now. But then to kind of position against some other things as well, you mentioned lifestyle businesses, you mentioned bootstrapping, you mentioned indie hackers. Something we see a lot of in the iOS haps world is, yeah, I would call it in the IOS. Developers where they make a single app or maybe they have a small portfolio of apps, but they’re sort of solo developers or maybe two, something like that. I think of someone like the maker of Agenda, who we had on the podcast a little while back, and that works really well, but you really have to start from nothing. You often are funding on credit cards, or maybe you have a little money in the bank from past success or maybe you have a family member that’s lending you some money. It seems really silly to have to scrape into doing it. And of course, not even everyone can do that when there’s so much investment money out there, but all the investment money is flowing into this one very kind of narrow box. And so you end up with, I think the two sides of the spectrum is ambitious to the point of absurdity sometimes, huge amount of money, narrow constraints, you’re really locking yourself into a certain kind of lifestyle, getting on that roller coaster, adrenaline fueled, whatever. And then the other side is slow and sleepy, small, one person, two people, you just can’t be very ambitious, at least not on the time scale of some decades, and it just feels weird that there isn’t either a middle choice or just other choices. Yeah. 00:19:47 - Speaker 1: And it’s not just that there’s a middle choice and there’s a distribution of, you know, 13, 3, 1/3 between those options. It’s like the middle choice is 99% of every entrepreneur and every opportunity out there. I think what you see is two different ways that people sort of arrive at wanting to build a calm company and both are sort of valid. Often it’s a mix of the two, but it’s kind of a blend of what you were just talking about, which is One is just thinking through the lifestyle that they want to live as founders, the kind of team that they want to build. They want to be able to bring like really top talent who maybe now they have kids and a family and they’re still equally as talented or more so because they’re more experienced than they were when they were willing to like hard charge into a venture back thing in their twenties. But now if you want that person, you got to bring them into a different environment. So there’s that one element of just kind of like, I don’t want to create a company and a life around that kind of approach. And the second thing is just like matching to the opportunity, right? We’re in a moment now where there are just so many opportunities like you talked about that are just not perfectly reasonable, maybe sometimes incredibly sized businesses, especially if you just don’t raise too much money to begin with. So you still own the majority of the company, but they’re not going to reach the kind of billion, 10 billion kind of scale that venture capital kind of narrowly needs. So it’s a bit silly. And one thing I see a lot, there’s like two failure modes that you avoid. One is that I think burnout kills a ton of companies, right? And so that’s where the lifestyle aspects comes into, of like, hey, we’re actually being long term ambitious here. We’re going to try and bring this incredible team together that we know can go the distance, rather than burning out, which I think kills a lot of really good companies. And the second one is trying to continuously expand the idea to the point that it sort of collapses on itself. And I see this all the time from really early stage founders who have clearly been on the sort of pitch train where they’ve been speaking to 50 or 100 VCs recently. And then we started with this idea, and the idea they describe is like great. It’s like the software for this particular industry sucks. There’s still hundreds of thousands of these businesses and we could charge them $400 a month each. We could build this incredible $90 million a year business that we own most of. We started with that idea. But now what we’re going to do is build a platform for like all the adjacent industries that are related. And of course, we’re not going to sell the software because that would limit how fast we grow, you know, it’s like, OK, wow, you’ve just expanded into the realm of, now you’re competing with Amazon and you have no customers yet. It’s like, just go with the good idea. You have this background in this industry, you can build great software for them. You know, they want to pay for it. Just do. that idea. And I think that kills a ton of companies now where you actually have a really good insight into a market need and there is the opportunity there. And nowadays, you have this thing I call the peace dividend of the Sass Wars, which is it’s so much cheaper, easier, faster to start a software company than it was even 10 years ago, that you can bring together a small team with relatively small amounts of capital, like hundreds of thousands, not 10s of millions, and you can launch a product for This market and it can be the best product they’ve ever seen. You can build an incredible company and you don’t have to just like continuously expand the scope to where, you know, you’re explaining how you’re basically going to take over the world. You can just build a great company. And I think that’s another appeal of com companies is you can sometimes just do the straightforward thing. You don’t have to be the all in one fintech omni platform for a particular industry. You can just build good products and sell them to customers. Can still do that these days. 00:23:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, which again comes back to why explaining it to your family members, where you say, well, we invest in businesses that make good products, sell them to customers, hopefully at a profit. It’s good business, but the software world has these unusual dynamics because of its history, and so it’s in some ways, getting back to the basics of business fundamentals and how capitalism could and should work, but within the new framing of this software and internet world we live in. You mentioned briefly there one thing that was, I don’t know how much it was, probably was reading some of your earlier writings and be exposed to folks in your community, but also it was just something I think was already in my mind, which as I had experienced that don’t charge money too early, you’ll get locked into the wrong revenue, or you’ll actually hurt your fundraiser. Valuations because once there’s an actual number, instead of the investor being able to sort of imagine how much money you’re going to make, they can look at your profit and loss statement and the reality is all companies, no matter how amazing they seem at the start or how much hype they build, the numbers always start small, or I shouldn’t say always, they very frequently start small and they just take time. It takes years to build your revenue, and I’ve been part of startups that do kind of delay charging money and I think there is a discipline of the market, or perhaps it’s just that the product validation you get when someone is willing to pay versus you’re giving them free stuff, you know, here you go, here’s a piece of software that costs millions to develop and we’ve poured our hearts and souls into it and it’s got design and brand and engineering and all these other things, and it’s free. Yeah, you say you like it and yeah, you’re using it, but how do you really know for sure the value of that in someone’s life. We went through this a little bit at Hiroki where we were giving away a lot of free stuff effectively through the way the premium product was set up because we didn’t get the pricing right early on or perhaps. Ever, and what that meant is it was hard to separate people who were getting a huge amount of value over other competing things versus people that just were getting something cheap or free, and they liked that, and that hides the signal of what the value of what you’re creating in the world is. And so that idea of charge as early as you can before you’re really comfortable with it, is something we brought into Muse, and I think we’ve talked about this in past episodes, but basically, when I started pushing for this, when we were 9 months out of the research lab or something like that, at that point we had a pretty solid product in some ways, but when I said we should start charging money for this, Folks on the team, kind of like, wow, I don’t know, you know, I’m used to working on these products for years and you polish, polish, polish, and need to have every feature in the world. Partially, this is a sense of craftspersonship, but frankly, it was kind of a shocking idea if you do come from the tech and software world, but I’m glad we did that because it changed our relationship with our now customers as soon as we did that. You know, if you screw up and there’s a bug and you mess up someone’s data, When it’s free, yeah, people are more forgiving in a certain way, but when they’re paying, they get really angry, and that’s as it should be, I think. So it creates this filter for people that really find value in what you’re doing and force you to sort of get real about the cold hard numbers. 00:26:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s interesting, in part, I feel like the building blocks of our overall worldview are just kind of The non galaxy brain take on all of these things, right? What if we just ask the dumb questions and have simple answers to them, essentially it’s kind of the basic components of this, which is, yeah, like what should we do with these products? We should charge money for them. Yeah, that’s probably it, you know, but I’m curious, how do you think about that now in retrospect? Because I think we’re right to be kind of asking the dumb questions and sometimes proposing straightforward answer, you know, what should evaluations be? Well, they should matter. We should think about like, will we ever make money on this, you know, that sort of thing. But I’m not sure we’re always right. I do think it’s worth actually comparing them rather than what you often see as folks just sort of dogmatically assuming like, wow, no, we don’t charge for our products, sort of thing. Where have you landed right now with Muse in terms of What would be different if you were polishing and polishing polishing for several years, potentially in a positive way, like, what’s the case for not charging right now? 00:27:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m to play devil’s advocate to my own position, maybe play debate team, right? Take the position you don’t necessarily agree with. Charging money brings you into this realm of commerce and transactions. People expect certain things that really brings it down to earth. But maybe in a way, particularly when you’re doing, and for music I make this argument, it’s a really new kind of product. A lot of people aren’t even really heavy iPad users, and even for people that are, we actually use the iPad and super weird. In unusual ways, it’s a really big mental shift to even understand the vision of what we’re doing and then potentially fit that into your workflow. And so the more you can keep that in the realm of mystery and excitement and less in the realm of just base commerce, I think we could potentially have more time to build excitement, build a community. And then of course make a thing that is when it’s more polished and then if it comes out more to a mainstream audience published on the App Store or whatever, it’s further along, and so you’re more able to understand the ways it’s weird and see why the weird things are what make it good and special, as opposed to just this is weird and seems bad. That would probably be my best argument for something like that. 00:29:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I think it’s a no brainer to charge for stuff when the pain point is just very obvious, right? Basically, if your target customers not using software to solve this problem, or they’re using really, really terrible outdated software and things like that, that’s where it’s just smashed. Button right away, of course, you should charge for this, no brainer. I do think it starts to get into an interesting gray area where you guys are, right, where it’s like, OK, you’re kind of trying to get into people’s habits with things, right? And maybe change their habits, like, even if it’s just they have a go to thing that they pick up. To do that kind of process of brain dumping, mind mapping, strategizing, whatever it is, whichever one of those hooks, if there’s bugs, right? Or if there’s one feature that’s kind of lacking that actually would make that hook work, you can make the case maybe that you only get one or two tries at that depending on how intense the pain point is. So I feel like you guys are actually really close in the middle and I think probably makes sense to charge to get that feedback from power users to make sure you’re actually solving something for them. And I feel like you have put together like the team you need to make sure that it’s not shipped completely terribly. I mean, one thing you’ll see in our world, right, is we talked about like we do a lot of investing in vertically focused B2BA, right? So for industries you’ve never even heard of where like they’re using mostly Excel or something like that, literally emailing Excel files back and forth to each other, we’re like, oh we could build some software for that. You can ship something like that with one developer that takes 3 weeks, and it’s gonna be such a massive improvement for their lives that you should charge for it right away. You can pre-sell that thing with a demo. So it’s interesting to sort of identify what exact kind of opportunity is a match for some of these strategies. And the good part is, at least we’re actually thinking them through at this point rather than kind of picking like one playbook and immediately jumping on it. 00:31:06 - Speaker 3: One other potential wrinkle with Muse, and I’m curious if you’ve encountered any examples like this Tyler is individual versus enterprise. So an argument for not charging with Muse could have been give it for free to individuals, get as much distribution as possible, and expect to eventually only charge enterprises, that is businesses because they have all the money basically. And so I’m curious if you’ve encountered a case like that in your world, probably not, but maybe. 00:31:33 - Speaker 2: That is pretty close to the, what’s usually called the B2D playbook, which Hiroku used in GitHub and Tuo and now countless others, which is the idea that you get developers to use and love something, maybe it’s an open source library, maybe it’s a service, and they use it for their hobby projects for free or nearly free, and then they will bring it to the. Their work, but that does require a long game, particularly if you’re doing something open source, you know, you look at something like an open source database or something like that. There’s a very long period of getting entrenched and winning those developer hearts and minds, and then only much, much later then you start getting that pull of like, hey, I’d like to use this at work by my bosses, we need this or that. Access control thing, do you have this SLA for blah blah blah, and that’s when you slap a big price tag on it and start breaking in the box, but it’s a very long game, and the up front of that it’s a big investment, and that is a place where it is an argument for venture money because you need those pretty large investments of capital for many years before you really start to charge money. 00:32:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking of the same thing with mostly being developer focused. I was not really sure if there was a sort of like tool for thought, project management, like that general space of collaboration with an example of it. 00:32:51 - Speaker 2: The best example there would actually be something like Gmail. Gmail spread far and wide with this incredibly generous free plan. And then they added the Gmail for business thing, and that kind of connected to Google Docs, which again, similar thing, people are using it for free, and then they were able to kind of transition that into the enterprise product. But again, same thing, there it was just backed by a corporate parent, they could just say, Yeah, let’s develop this mind blowingly good piece of software and all this infrastructure that runs it and do that for years and years and years and get this really wide distribution, and then we can go ahead and monetize that. But that would be, I think, impossible to do as an indie hacker, bootstrapper, whatever. Yeah. 00:33:30 - Speaker 3: I also think this playbook could be appropriate for certain two-sided marketplaces. So one that I’ve thought a lot about is recruiting. I almost did a recruiting startup, ended up choosing to do music instead, but there you could imagine offering some sort of services to the candidate side to get them in and get some liquidity in the marketplace and then to charge the hiring firms. Yeah. 00:33:50 - Speaker 1: I think one of the core pieces of our thesis is that a lot of spaces are a lot more saturated than they were, you know, 1015 years ago. So if I was to think about this playbook running it from use, it seems to me like the thing that you would want to test, right? I don’t actually know what the answer is I don’t have an opinion, but one thing I we’re seeing is now when you’re talking about, OK, we’re only going to charge when the whole company starts to use this product to collaborate. The friction point there is going to be probably you’re gonna have like one or two power user advocates trying to convince a large number of people in their organization to switch from something and that’s something might be a little bit more orthogonal, like, you know, we get on Zoom and we whiteboard on a literal whiteboard or something, but you need kind of buy in. Whereas like 10, 150 years ago, it’s just like an open field. It’s like, OK, yeah, we’re gonna roll this out as fast as possible and then they’re going to pick this because they’re not using anything and that’s when we’ll start charging. Now, a lot of times what you find is that you are displacing something or you’re asking your customers to switch from something, and I think that increased level of friction would be the key variable, right, whether you should be just straightforwardly charging the power users and not Being reliant on them, convincing everyone in their organization to switch, just like it can be just them as power users or it can be a small subset of their team that really finds it valuable or the whole company loves it. And regardless, you’re sort of gonna have a linear kind of revenue from them versus like, OK, we only really survive as a company if we’re consistently convincing like whole teams or organizations to sort of switch. That would be the big question. For me, that’s something we think about a lot is basically avoiding that dynamic because a lot of the playbooks that were sort of ran a decade ago, sometimes don’t work as well because now you’re going into a saturated market where they at least have some cobbled together thing on Salesforce add-ons or they have some no code solution or they have something that you’re competing against for their time in dollars. 00:36:00 - Speaker 2: It’s an interesting picture you’re painting here, if you can allow me to rephrase or summarize in my own way. It sort of seems like you’re saying on one hand, the software world is way more saturated in certain areas. People are using when it comes to project management tools and other kinds of general purpose software, even just like, you know, Excel spreadsheets that get the job done for them. Most of the productive world is computerized and has their tools and so on. And so if you go in to do something really general. Purpose, like email or a word processor or these businesses of the past that managed to blow up and fill this just totally wide open frontier, you’re actually in a red ocean there. But in fact, there is still a huge amount of uncovered territory that is just in smaller niches, like you said, verticals, some kind of insurance software that you wouldn’t have even specifically thought of unless you’re in that industry. And so on one hand, there’s maybe more opportunity than ever in all of those spaces. But then on the other hand, the classic places that you go, or if you look at the businesses that were successful in the software and internet world in the last decade or two, those are now in spaces that are very hard to compete in. 00:37:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, I think there’s fewer and fewer wide open winner take all markets, basically, I think that we’ve started to fill a lot of the big pillars of software productivity world, and if it still cost as much to launch a software startup as it did 10 to 20 years ago, we would be in real trouble, right? Because you really did have to find those really huge winner take all markets to be able to build a software business. But we’re very lucky through this entire stack of products and services and stuff that’s become much more scalable, that you can now launch these businesses and get them to, you know, not just MVP, you can get them to like very, very high quality software solutions with a lot less capital and time and people. So it starts to make sense to fill in all of these smaller pockets, which can still be enormous, and at the same time, As entire industries have become more kind of aware of software or just open to the idea of software finding some of their processes, those number of pockets are multiplying and expanding all over the place. Little sub thesis of ours is that There’s a whole ton of mom and pop industries that have gotten used to the idea of using computers, the internet, not their phone, not paper invoices, etc. by these venture funded vertical marketplaces, right? So you can imagine lawn mowing businesses. 30 years ago, right, they’re not using computers at all. They’re just literally I mean pen and paper and you know, checks mailed and all that sort of stuff. The thing that got them over the hump of just using technology into their business were things like Craigslist and then some of the more omni channel like thumbtack and things like that, like these marketplaces that were aggregating up demand. But now what you have are these folks who are used to getting down to a computer, and that’s how they generate quotes and that’s how they close business and send their invoices. So now they’re starting to think, well, wait a minute, why am I paying this huge 30%, 60% cut to this marketplace? Like maybe I should get my own software and do that process ourselves. And so that’s creating this new demand for B2BAS for lawn care companies, essentially, and you can basically multiply that across just like every small industry that you can think of. And now we’re very lucky that it’s essentially cheap enough and easy enough to build software to serve that solution that you can’t do it and literally just serve lawn care companies and you don’t have to. Expand to every single home care product that exists. Maybe you can, if you’re good enough. The upside is still there, but that’s not the hurdle. You can just build a really good software business that only serves, you know, lawn care companies in the state of Georgia, and that could be like a pretty awesome business. 00:40:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think an important point here is the enormous size and fractal nature of the economy, especially in the US, and so you can go down several branches of the classification tree and still end up in a huge node. So lawn service, organic lawn service in Austin, Texas, I bet that’s still a huge market, right? And you can imagine all the other variants of this, and so there’s corresponding software business to be built at many of those junctures. 00:40:28 - Speaker 2: Fun, relevant anecdote there is many years back when I was doing consulting to pay my bills in between ventures, had a really good client that I worked with for a number of years that is windows and doors. Which is a whole huge branch of the construction industry, and they needed very specific things in their software. Windows not only have their size and the type of glass, but they just break a lot. They break in transit, and there’s a whole service process related to that, and there’s the way you manage the breakage, the little breakage in your inventory, and you kind of account for that. I don’t know, maybe there’s some firm now, perhaps funded by Calm, I don’t know, that makes Turkey software for that, but yeah, we built really comprehensive, complex software for managing all that, and it was a real, at least the owner of their business felt it gave them a real competitive advantage to have all of this computerized in this way. 00:41:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there’s just endless examples. Sometimes I get a little nervous because a lot of these are businesses that don’t really want to shout from the rooftops, what a great business they are, but. Yeah, there’s just more than you can think of examples like this that are just comically one little industry only serving Belgium, right? And they’ve built a phenomenal business with like 7 people just raking in cash, you know, and yeah, you can just sort of copy paste that everywhere, yeah, countertop installers and window washing services and all this sort of stuff. It’s amazing. The economy is big. 00:42:01 - Speaker 3: I’ve always enjoyed speaking with these small business owners because they have a certain down to earth and grounded quality, you know, cause the way you’re successful in that realm, it’s like you just kind of sweat it out and you provide good customer service, you make a high quality product, and you get referrals and do that for 10 years. And one of the things I love about the commund is it’s bringing more of that sensibility into the software world. You know, there’s a place for the Galaxy brain stuff, and I’m glad we have all that, but I’m also glad we have some of this so-called small business mentality in the software world. And by the way, these are small businesses that are worth like 10 to $100 million right? So it’s, yeah, still a very good business. Yeah. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier was that you were building Earnest and then calm out in the open, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, like, was that a deliberate decision, how has it worked out for you, so forth. 00:42:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it definitely was a deliberate decision. One of the early risks that I kind of identified in the plan was that the target entrepreneur that we were gonna try to Build for historically has a really strong distrust of any kind of investor, right? Either they’ve had first or secondhand experience with somebody who had a great business and then raised money from investors that came with board control and then they got kicked out of their own company. There’s a whole laundry list of reasons, but the idea was that one of the first things we had to do was build trust to say, hey, look, we’re legitimately trying to do this in a different way. We’re not just trying to trick a bunch of bootstrappers into taking our money. And I sort of tell people that I’m kind of a one trick pony when it comes to marketing, but it just turned out to be the right trick for this market, which is just really authentically building in public, talking about our thinking, soliciting feedback. And engaging the community has the benefit of being really good marketing and also a way to sort of build trust with that group. So that was why it’s been that way from day one for us. So literally the very first hello world of Earnest Capital at the time was we had designed a new funding structure, basically a substitute for convertible notes and safes and this general toolkit of early stage investing called the Shared Earnings Agreement and Basically just published it and said, hey, you know, we’re about to launch this fund in a couple of months. This is the term sheet that we are thinking of offering. What do you guys think? And literally just wrote up a blog post explaining our thinking, put the term sheet in an open Google Doc with comments turned on, like open comments. Yeah, and just blasted it out to every like community of entrepreneurs that we could find on Twitter. Etc. and we got like several 1000 comments. It turned out to be like really difficult to start to work through, but it was really fascinating to see the way that the folks would engage and they would say, oh, I wouldn’t like this as an entrepreneur and somebody else would pipe in and say, I think you’re not thinking about it the right way. Here’s what this means and all that sort of stuff and just that level of saying like, here’s what we’re doing and we’ve got nothing to hide from day one was pretty valuable. And then from there, I think it’s sort of continued to be a conscious strategy for building trust and engaging with folks, but it really has turned into a full-on kind of community driven strategy where we kind of view or I view my job here is to essentially like. Aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is sort of overlooking, despite the fact that in aggregate it’s a huge, huge group of of entrepreneurs, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. So we do that in small ways. With our portfolio, at first we took this very hands-off approach and then we started to get feedback from them that said, hey, we want a little more structure in terms of how we engage with folks in our mentor group and with you guys. So we said, OK, well, what if we took the idea of quarterly board meetings and we made them calm, we like did it our way and so here’s how we’re gonna. And do that and the folks like that. And as we think about the future, it’s like maybe there’s going to be different financial products and everything just kind of comes from building this community of folks, explaining our strategy, explaining our challenges, explaining what we’re trying to do, listening to what comes back, and then trying to make it happen for them. 00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Nice, yeah, I think there are a ton of benefits to building out in the open like this and building a real community, not just of loosely affiliated fans who are really invested and active and providing a lot of feedback and support. One of the things that we talk about with building in the open for a traditional commercial venture is that when you go to bring in new customers or new hires, they kind of already know what’s up, you know, they’ve read your blog and they’ve self filtered in, and they might even be familiar with your lingo and so forth, and we experienced this both as Potential I guess customers of your firm as well as LPs, where I had been following stuff on Twitter and I’d read the school doc and I had seen your spreadsheets of how the seal works, and I’d run all my own simulations. So when we were talking about does it make sense for com to invest in Muse, and when I was deciding should I invest in the fund, I basically knew all the parameters already. I knew you, I know your work, I knew the fund versus having to start from scratch. That was awesome. 00:47:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’re in an interesting market position where there’s a large but dispersed group of folks who 100% get it and then the vast majority of the kind of centralized gatekeepers completely don’t. So for example, like on the fundraising. I mean, we’ve taken like a completely decentralized approach to raising capital for the fund, and we basically have raised from our next fund, we’ll have 249 individuals in it, and that’s almost all entrepreneurs and folks like you guys and basically just people who Read what we’re about and get it and want to support it. We just closed a crowdfunding campaign. We had over 1000 investors join that from the unaccredited space and we’ve basically just built a whole process. Like if you go to our website and you’re interested in investing, you can fill out an email and you get this like 10 part essay series that just lays out with. Really nothing held back, like exactly what our strategy is, exactly what we’re trying to do. You could absolutely just like copy paste a clone of our fund, at least in terms of from the strategy perspective, because we just put it all out there. And what that does is it creates these flywheels of folks who show up, they get it, they want to support it, and we have, I mean, I would say probably. Even before the 1000 crowdfunding campaign, probably 60 to 70% of people commit to investing in the fund before I’ve ever met them, you know, and usually later at least try to have a meeting at some point, but there’s enough out there that they can put the pieces together to join and support it. And now, I mean, with the crowdfunding campaign, I don’t even know, probably 90% of those folks I’ve never met either. It’s a different way to sort of bypass the gatekeepers, which would be like large institutional investors that normally back funds like this, you know, we didn’t want to kind of run into the same issue that I was talking about, where like you have a good idea and you pitch VCs and then you change your idea to try and get money from them. Like I felt like we were setting ourselves up for the same dynamic, basically because we’d be pitching the people who fund the venture funds. So we kind of knew we had. go a different way and that community driven approach was essential for raising the fund. And then we also see the same effect on the portfolio side where we have a lot of folks who show up and say, look, I’m interested to raise money from you guys, or I’m just gonna bootstrap. This is not a process. I’m not pitching 30, 40 funds, like I know what you’re about. It resonates. I want to either raise money and work with y’all or I’m just gonna do my own thing, so. Again, like the one thing I know how to do reasonably well is just like explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it from just kind of like the only way to get it off the ground to like a real flywheel, I would say of competitive advantage or just making it sort of self-sustaining if that makes sense. So yeah, it’s been cool. 00:49:57 - Speaker 2: As you explain all that, it reminds me a lot of, I guess most of the business ventures I ever do, I usually feel like there is much about, I have something I want to say about the world or I want a product to exist that is weird and different in some way that I think will be good and special, that’s up for the market to decide. But it’s essentially breaks convention or breaks status quo in a number of ways, and two elements of what you’re describing for calm very much strike me as similar to what I went through with Hiroku, what we did with Think Twitch and what we are now with Muse, which is, first of all, once you start questioning some of these base assumptions that Cascades and you kind of end up reinventing everything in a way, like you were mentioning like your board meeting style is going to be different because once you change those base assumptions, everything else kind of has to change. But then you end up with something worse, this whole kind of weird universe into itself, where everything you do is different from what people are used to. And so then the explaining is so critical, right? And so, in Hiroki’s case, I ended up writing tons of blog posts, but also ultimately this manifesto called the 12 Factor, and that’s when things really started to click for people. For years, I’d basically heard people come in and why is this Things so weird, it doesn’t work like how I expect with other hosting it’s like this. Why can’t I write to the file system? Yeah, exactly. Why can’t I ask to say, etc. and we would kind of one off try to explain, well, actually, if you start from those first principles of what we’re doing differently, that is a consequence or a detailed downstream consequence. You know, it takes time to be able to fully articulate that philosophy, but once we did manage to articulate that philosophy, it’s much easier for someone to come in, download all your thinking, and then they come in and see that the product works in a weird way, and it may or may not fit with what they want, but instead of just comparing it to the status quo and being confused, surprised, or even angry that it’s different, they see why it is different, and then they can decide whether that’s right for them or not. 00:51:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really good insight. I mean, there’s this magical thing right about building software is that essentially you just have to write like clear directions and you build a product, essentially, like if you really distill it down, you’re writing this code and explaining very clearly how you want this thing to work and that’s your product, and I never really set out to be in finance or to be an investor per se. It wasn’t like, oh if it wasn’t this, it would be something else. This is the one idea I have for how to build a fund, but I really like it now because it even is like reduced down to just zero steps like clarity of thought is like the whole product basically, essentially just explaining the thesis to both sides of the marketplace, essentially people who want to invest and then people that you want to invest in. That’s basically the entire product. I mean, there’s some ancillary things around controls and processes and stuff like that, but you really do just have to produce clear thinking in a way that’s consumable, and that’s the product, which is kind of a cool business to be in. 00:53:02 - Speaker 2: I’m not gonna lie, so clarity of thought could not possibly be more on brand for Muse. 00:53:08 - Speaker 1: So I’ve got a question for you guys, which is around the idea of how you align and incentivize folks who are on the team, basically employees. I think that for founders, everything about calm companies and a general approach makes a ton of sense. You own the company, you want to build a profitable, sustainable company that lasts. Forever and has great lifestyle for you and your team and as long as you have this nice ownership and maybe you have some nice dividends, you’re not super concerned, but one thing I think is sort of an unsolved problem, both for companies that we’re investing in and a lot of folks in this space is employees. How do you Incentivize them, how do you think about the spectrum of options, profit sharing, sharing in the proceeds if you ever sold, you know, all that sort of stuff, and how do you do it at the early stage when it’s very risky to make sure they have some upside and then how do you do it over the long haul when maybe liquidity events, selling the company is not on the near term road map. Yeah, I’m just curious how you’re approaching that or thinking about that with Muse. 00:54:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, and we’ve thought about this a lot. I would say first that I think a lot of the benefits or the appeal of being a staff member at a com company come from these degrees of freedom. It’s like you’re basically able to offer an employment experience that is at least different and we believe for many people better because you have this flexibility. So one thing is remote work, which even a few years ago was not super common, obviously, it’s. Much more common now. But another thing is just like general flexibility in terms of how you work. So we have a partner who really likes to travel the world and work all over the place. So sure you can do that. We had someone who wanted to go to 4 days a week instead of 5, which if you were at a thing would be like a whole thing with HR, right? Or maybe probably not even possible. But here it’s like, yeah, sure, basically, seems good to us. And you have more degrees of freedom to shape the work environment to be however you want. Now more on like the financial and compensation side. That is tough. Our approach has been to try to make all full-time staff members partners in the business. That’s the title that you have title Adam and I have and all the other partners have. And by that, it’s someone who wants to act like an owner, we expect to act like an owner and is in fact a very substantial owner in the business, much more than you would be in a typical venture backed startup. Now, the mechanics. How you actually convey the ownership are very tricky. And we could do a whole podcast. I was actually going to do a workshop at the original Thunder summit on this, like basically the legal and tax mechanics of partner compensation. It’s a huge mess basically because of US tax law. But the kind of spirit of it is that we’ve tried to make the partners substantial equity owners in the business, so that if we do issue dividends, they participate in that. And if we do sell the business, they participate in that, and so forth. 00:55:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe part of where that works for us, certainly because we have a small team, you know, 5 or even if we were to add a 6 or a 7th, I could see that scaling. It wouldn’t go to 25 partners probably wouldn’t make sense. Then you do probably need sort of two different classes, that’s similar to those kind of professional partnerships, like an attorney’s firm or something where there’s partners, and there’s kind of everyone else who are employees. And maybe going back to business fundamentals. It’s OK that we don’t need to waive this lottery ticket of some options that might be worth something. It’s like your salary, that’s your compensation, and it’s not a crazy work environment, that’s all about we’re inventing a platform to change the world, we just, we make a great product, we sell it, and then, you know, employees get paid a fair market share. I feel like there’s precedent from the non-software world for profit sharing plans and things of that nature potentially as a chance to again create a little bit of that upside without the complications of having absolutely everyone be an owner, or I don’t know, maybe there’s stuff we can draw. From co op models, maybe everyone should be an owner of a small amount, but it’s not the startup options. OK, we’re going to pay you less because you have this lottery ticket that might be worth something if we exit someday. It’s like almost the internal worth is very clear because you’re paying dividends. Which is something certainly we will be excited to do if we get to that point where, and I’ve done this for past businesses in my pre-startup life, it was just, yeah, at some point when the business is profitable, you