411: The Currents of a Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold. The sentence was a stronger current makes for stronger fish. And I thought, wow, that is it. That's exactly what entrepreneurship is. We're constantly finding these currents that either help us, they facilitate what we want to accomplish, businesses we wanna build, the lives we wanna create, or they oppose us to trying to sweep us into more dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength, and that depends on where you are in your journey. And I guess they're mostly invisible until we learn to actually feel them. And somebody on Twitter asked me what my top three currents were after I shared this thought and this quote. And it turned out to be quite a revealing exercise going through this, trying to assess what I'm exposed to, what I'm dealing with and how I'm navigating these forces. So let me share with you today what I've encountered and discovered about the currents that are pulling at me as I'm building PodScan. The biggest current that I felt over the last year and a half as I've been building the software business is the rapidly changing technological landscape. As a software entrepreneur, I think we're just permanently exposed to new technologies here. And that's always something that you might want to learn, always something that could give you an edge if you figure it out or leave you behind if you don't. And when I was a salaried software engineer back in the day, it was so much easier to get really good at the craft of engineering. All day long, I was dealing with that one particular tech stack and was optimizing my approach to it, understanding it better, implementing everything that needed to be built in that stack. But now as a founder, there's this fleeting nature of projects and the volatility of early stage software businesses. That means pivoting from one stack to another is actually quite easy. And it's not just easy. It's often necessary. And speaking of navigating new technologies and finding the right tools for growth, if you're an app business and you're seeking growth channels and strategies beyond traditional app stores, paddle.com is sponsoring today's episode. And they're offering something really valuable, a five part series filled with actionable strategies for app developers who want to drive revenue beyond the App Store, which is always a good idea if you think about the walled garden nature of these things. It's essentially a blueprint that they present with modern web monetization for app companies. This series is limited. So if this sounds like something that could help you, register now at paddle.com to secure your spot. Link is in the show notes. Now back to those technological rapids that we all face. Think about it. When you're building a business, …