Episode 768 | Reacting to Controversial Startup Advice

You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. Every week on this show since 2010, I've been showing up, sometimes with a co host, sometimes on my own, to talk through what it's like to build ambitious SaaS companies. And in the early days, as SaaS was just becoming a thing we also talked about downloadable software and mobile apps and even sometimes content websites and e commerce sites because at that time I was running the gamut. Info products there was all kinds of stuff. But over time, this show honed in on SaaS, software as a service, because SaaS, especially b to b SaaS, is the best business model in the world. And that's why myself and the tens of thousands of listeners of this show as well as the guests that you hear appear on the show go all in on building incredible companies that bring us freedom, purpose, and relationships, and that we can build and create and bring into the world without sacrificing our health, our family relationships, and the rest of our lives because we build businesses to support and to improve our lives rather than sacrificing the quality of our lives and our relationships for our companies. We wanna be ambitious. We wanna build incredible companies, but we want to do it in a way that isn't unicorn or bust and that doesn't require asking anyone for permission. So today I'm gonna be digging into controversial takes from scraping bee co founder Pierre de Wolfe And what I'm gonna do is walk through a tweet that he posted in the 2024, so about eight or nine months ago. And he says, these are my semi controversial beliefs I have about bootstrapping a successful product, and he has 15 or 20 bullets that I think are fascinating. Some of which I agree with, some of which, you know, has more nuance. Others, I inevitably will disagree with. The best part of this is I'm not telling him that I'm recording this. Pierre and I know each other pretty well. He's spoken at MicroComp. He's a tiny seed founder. Scraping Bee is an incredible business. They've been public about mostly bootstrapping it to millions of dollars in revenue, and they've done very well and and grown very quickly. So an accomplished and successful founder and also a prolific ex Twitter user. And so I look forward to, diving into his thoughts here in just a second. Before I do that, I wanna tell you about our micro conf growth retreat that we're gonna be holding in London this May 2025, May 14 through the sixteenth. There are only 60 tickets available, and by the time you hear this, there will be less than 60. We will sell this event out. And this is a new type of event that we're trying. MicroComp growth retreat where SaaS founders connect, recharge, and grow. With the size we're planning it at 60 people, it's …