389: The Founder's First Hire: When to Let Go of Your Weaknesses

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I wanna share something that's been on my mind a lot lately. That crucial moment when you have to look beyond yourself to grow your business, and I'm right at that stage. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, merchant of record that has been responsible for allowing me to reach this stage and get to profitability just a couple weeks ago, almost a month now. Paddle truly is more. That's m o r merchant of record because their product has allowed me to focus on building a product, building a business that people actually wanna pay money for, and that's why Paddle does so much more for you. They deal with taxes. They reach out to your customers when payments fail, when their credit cards bounce or something. They charge in people's local currency, making it easier for you to get conversion. It's all these kind of things that I don't need to focus on, so I can really be present for my own customers and their needs. It's amazing. Go check out paddle.com to learn more. After about a year of building PodScan, my podcast platform and social monitoring tool that I cannot seem to shut up about on this podcast, I finally reached that general area of profitability. And I said break even moment that every founder aims for, everybody hopes for. And now I'm at this point where I really need to focus on things besides building the product. That's a problem because I love building the product, but there's more to the business. Right? Because the product itself is pretty clear. The value prop is fairly clear. I know who my customers are. I know where to find them and kind of how to talk to them as well. So now, what should I be focusing on? And I think it's talking to as many of potential customers as I possibly can. And I'm building this business, the whole business of PodScan as a solopreneur, as a founder of a So to software business. I'm trying to do everything at the same time here. Right? Building the business, building the product, doing the marketing, the sales, operations, customer support, all of this, and figure out where to go next with the business, my business development too, and what the product needs to be for that and what I need to do for this, all of that simultaneously. And over the last couple of weeks, I had a lot of calls with prospects and potential customers. Lots of demo calls, lots of sales calls. And mostly when I talked about PodScan, I was positioning it as to social monitoring and podcast data research platform. These conversations have been very, very enlightening to me because I was talking to the kind of perfect customer for the product as it is, as a platform product. And what these calls have showed me is that there's really two ideal customers …