Episode 771 | What Changes As You Grow, AI Agents, Patents, and More Listener Questions (with Craig Hewitt)

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years. And whenever I set up a new account, I'm reminded why traditional banking feels stuck in the past. When our previous bank faced solvency issues, we needed to spin up new accounts quickly that could handle millions in funds across multiple businesses. Mercury had us up and running almost immediately. I manage half a dozen different Mercury accounts across a wide range of companies from my personal single member LLC to MicroConf, our 7 figure global events and education platform, to TinySeed, our venture fund and accelerator. Mercury easily handles them all. The interface is elegantly simple for daily banking, paying invoices, and sending and receiving international wires, yet powerful enough to handle the multistep approval processes we needed to put in place when funding founders with large transfers. Anytime founders ask me who they should set up their accounts with, I send them to Mercury dot com. Check the show notes for more details, and note that Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. It's another episode of Start Up for the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I welcome Craig Hewitt back to the show, and we answer listener questions on topics ranging from what changes as you grow into a multimillion dollar SaaS company, whether AI agents will be the death of SaaS, whether software patents are worth it, and more listener questions. Before we dive into the show, MicroConf Remote is coming soon. It is focused on sales. The date is May 21. It's an online event. Microconfremote.com. Speakers include Nick D'Sabto, Steven Spears, who spoke at MicroConf in Atlanta couple years ago, and another speaker that we'll be announcing soon. We'll also have our founder by founder sessions, which are like the digital hallway track for our virtual events. The date is May 21. For all the details and to get your ticket, head to microcompremote.com. We try to make these events accessible to everyone, so we keep the ticket prices low. I believe the early bird pricing for this event is $65. It takes place all online on May 21 from 10AM to 1PM eastern time. That's microcompremote.com. And with that, let's dive into listener questions. Craig Hewitt, welcome back to the show. Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on the show, man. I'm excited to dive into some listener questions. Our first today comes from Amar, and we'll dive into that here. Hey, Rob. Amar here with SendMaid, longtime listener, first time first time caller. Heard a lot of advice from you over the years about startups and the early stages and sort of that David versus Goliath battle. I had a quick question for you on how things change within the company and how you might approach marketing and sales and product differently when you begin to become a little bit more of …