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Without any preparation, Tyler and Arvid dive right into getting started.
They talk about the Calm MBA, becoming internet friends, how to tackle an educational project, what steps need to be taken to make it happen, and then share their decision-making process right on the show.
Want to take a peek at how "somewhat established" professionals tackle their work? Tune in —and while you're at it, help us find a name for the show.
00:00:00 Introducing ourselves and the podcast.
They talk about the Calm MBA, becoming internet friends, how to tackle an educational project, what steps need to be taken to make it happen, and then share their decision-making process right on the show.
Want to take a peek at how "somewhat established" professionals tackle their work? Tune in —and while you're at it, help us find a name for the show.
00:00:00 Introducing ourselves and the podcast.
00:03:47 What is a Calm MBA?
00:08:20 Building virtual relationships
00:12:31 Housekeeping for beginners
00:17:44 Getting it launched
00:22:47 The importance of recording in the moment for builders-in-public
00:25:50 Scope, Audience, and Format
00:30:58 SaaS or Software?
00:40:09 Do we want a community around the Calm MBA?
00:44:59 What kind of community?
00:50:35 Actionable items for next week
Creators & Guests
Host
What is Arvid & Tyler Catch Up?
Tyler Tringas and Arvid Kahl build the Calm MBA in public. And they'll catch up.
Arvid Kahl
Welcome to a podcast that has no name and no purpose just yet. Now, we were starting a new podcast here. So we are in the wonderful position to build the whole thing from scratch in front of those people who hopefully find it interesting enough to tune in. Maybe we should introduce ourselves a little bit, you know, just for anyone listening, figure out who these two wonderful people are, that are starting this thing that has no name, and no purpose as of this point.
Tyler Tringas
Although if somebody finds this first episode and doesn't know, either of us, I'll be very impressed.
Arvid Kahl
I was I was just thinking about this too. Like anybody who finds this probably knows its name, the thing is gonna have a name, it's probably going to have a highly polished production behind it at this point with like, a logo, and a fancy jingle and everything. And we're just sitting here not having any clue whatsoever. Yeah, so I'm just gonna start, I'm Arvid. I'm a writer, thing, software engineer and Twitter person is gonna newest news job is being present on Twitter all the time, helping founders empowering founders building businesses. And that's what I do. What do you do? And who are you?
Tyler Tringas
Yeah, I'm Tyler. The main thing I do right now is I run the calm company fund. We're an early stage investor. You know, we do a lot of the same stuff that you expect from an investor in terms of providing capital and community and mentorship. But our special spin on things is that we invest in what we call calm companies, basically a more sort of bootstrapper minded approach to building companies. And then if if Arvid is a professional Twitter person, I'm a semi pro, Twitter person as well.
Arvid Kahl
But you're doing a good job at it. I can say that, like, I've always been a big fan of your work and the things that you talk about. And obviously, we've done stuff together in the past. We I don't think we ever really met, you know, like in person. It's just crazy. Yeah. I guess it's normal now. Like,
Tyler Tringas
I think that's a COVID thing. I think it without COVID, we for sure would have met in person in last several years. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, it's the whole conference circuit that we probably would both have been on at some point, and then would have intersected at some point. But I'm glad that we that we're doing this because I'm excited to first of all, work on things with you. And then talk about the things that we work on independently with you here as well. I think that that is how this all came to be right. The idea for this podcast that has as of this moment, no name just yet is that it's a it's an accountability regimen for the both of us to do the things that we want to do commit to the things that we want to commit to and keep pushing forward in our efforts to get these things done both the things that we want to work on together and the things that we work on independently. And it's also a way for us to just chat, like that's one of the things that I love about this horrible post COVID world where everybody's just used to talking to people online at this point. And that's how accurate relationships are accepted to be like, that's it's now Okay, to have a podcast and be friends through that medium, something completely unthinkable a decade ago, at least in my world, I might have been different for for other people in other capacities. But I'm just happy that this is something we can do and something we chose to do.
Tyler Tringas
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think one of the one of the things that's improved my life the most in this, I would say phase of my life, maybe the last five to seven to 10 years has been the idea of sort of meeting people on the internet, through their ideas really like primarily through Twitter, but but actually, it's more like, not because you happen to be somewhere together. But you just meet someone through their ideas, and you like their ideas, and you exchange ideas with them. And then it becomes friends with them. And then later you like meet up and you have a meal or you have a beer together or, or you end up in the same city together and you become really great friends. But yeah, it's awesome. Anyway, let's talk about the podcast. What are we doing here? Why are we here?
Arvid Kahl
Well, that's that's the thing that this this podcast that kind of pierces the filter bubble that we're both in? Yeah. You know, it allows us to actually relate on an audio human speech level. But yeah, what what is this for? That? Yeah, what is this for? Whatever we're doing,
Tyler Tringas
maybe, Okay, we can share the basic premise here, which is like so, you know, we have been, we've been internet friends for a while, we're also kind of working on really interesting sort of complementary things where a lot of the topics that we're working on overlap, and then we're bringing kind of a very different lens to things where I was, you know, basically, I've been really focused on the investing side of things and building a fund that can actually invest in entrepreneurs. And you've been super focused, I would say on the more like the teaching side of things, basically helping entrepreneurs build the right kind of mental toolkit to say seed as an entrepreneur, irrespective of funding, you know, maybe with a focus on bootstrapping, and all that sort of stuff, and, and we kind of both identified like, hey, there's a real opportunity here to, to kind of formalize some of this educational stuff, right, take a bunch of the lessons that we feel we've learned, and try to step into a space where we can help entrepreneurs move down this, you know, we call it the calm company path, right, you know, and sort of point them in that direction. Because, you know, I think I think I first came to you and I was identifying this problem, which is, you know, we're investors, and we're kind of downstream of this decision, right? Where founders have already kind of decided to go down this calm company path, despite, let's say, seeing, you know, the, the Silicon Valley path as a one of the others there several paths, but that's one of the clear paths, they've already kind of decided decided to go down this path, and we're just waiting for them somewhere down that path to kind of join, and I came to you and I was like, Are we we need to like, we need to get further down in the path before the fork in the road to help people understand the difference between these two paths. And you're doing really fantastic work on that already. So it was like, can we sort of collaborate on something where we give folks the toolkits at their earlier phases of the decision tree of maybe they're thinking about just being an entrepreneur, or they kind of have an idea or a hunch that they're starting to shape up? Or they're ready to build their first version? And, you know, do I want to go to an accelerator, I don't want to apply to TechStars? Or do I want to kind of go down a different path. And we started pulling that thread and kind of came on this sort of codenamed Project of like the calm MBA, right of, of giving folks that that business toolkit to to build a calm company and to feel sort of empowered to start down that path versus other paths. And so we both basically like high fived on that idea. Immediately, we're like, Yes, this is a fantastic idea. And then, yeah, no, nothing happened. You did a great job of like, you know, firing ahead with some of the core topics and starting to like sketch stuff out and doing the, you know, the process you have right of like, you tweet about stuff, and you get feedback on it. And then you turn that into like a newsletter or blog post that's a little more refined, you know, and you're kind of refining these ideas. And you did, I mean, in some ways you already have been, well, we both kind of have been doing that part of the process. And then we haven't really stepped into like that next phase of refinement, where it's like, Okay, this is going to be real material that we can kind of call a, a course or real, you know, solidified product that that we can help people choose that path. And so then we kind of stumbled a bit on that. And I think like many entrepreneurs you struggle with, you have a lot of great ideas. And it's hard to, it's hard to know which ones to double down on, it's hard to properly prioritize them. And so I have probably maybe like six months have gone by since we both like i Five minutes is a great idea, and very little kind of progress happen. So he said, you know, you're the, you know, one of the biggest proponents of building public in part for the accountability loops that that creates. So he said, Alright, let's do that. So let's just start a podcast and hold ourselves accountable to actually launching this thing. And also, we can just hang out along the way.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that's That's exactly why I immediately said, Yes. And yes, yes. Yes. And yes, because I, first of all, I just wanted to have a chance to chat with you about all kinds of things. But yeah, then making it about getting further with the project itself, which is something that I've been Yeah, like you said, working on for half a year, on off, right, and just writing about topics that kind of fit into it. I felt like yeah, it's time to kind of professionalize this and D professionalize it in another way, right? Because it's become less of a just a project if there is a relationship involved. And I love this about building and public. I'm obviously I'm a big fan, and I try to do it in everything I do. And I would love to do this for the coming weeks and months and years, if that ends up being the running length of this very show. Yeah, that is that is exactly where I'm at to like I'm I've written I counted earlier. 30,000 words, just from the articles that I wrote about all the things right, the the fundamental misconceptions of con businesses and the stages, right audience building or figuring out your market and understanding your your product and what to build and what a good solution looks like. And all these tech stack things I've been writing about him all over the last half year, but now we have a 30,000 word corpus of something that now can be translated into a myriad of other things. And that is exactly what is the hardest part about educational work and in particular, and it's how I feel like there's so many ways this could be a video series. This could be a, just a full length book. This could be anything, right? A cohort course it could be, whatever new thing that isn't even invented yet. And it's nice to I think take it in an iterative fashion and just go step by step into this whole potential world and make choices, which is what this format will allow us to do. Yeah, I love the idea of today's episode, the very first or I guess, the zeroeth Episode Episode before, you know, the the first structurally complete episode to be both about the calm MBA project that we have, and the hopefully soon to be named podcast about the project itself, right? Because I think for many people who would like to start a podcast or would want to communicate more with like other experts, or professionals or other beginners in their field doesn't really matter. Setting up a podcast in itself is scary, particularly if it's if it's with somebody else. And I mean, you're extremely accomplished in your field, and I consider myself to be slightly accomplished in mine. So we, you know, we have to kind of navigate our other professional commitments that we have. And then we have to figure out like, what do we really want to talk about? How long are these episodes going to be? Right? This is going to be video or audio, all these questions, and I think we can just go through them, decide on them. And both commit to what we want to do and show other people have to negotiate these things with other people in the field. Because if there's one thing I love, it's when two people, hopefully diverse in many ways, from different industries, different backgrounds come together and share a journey. That is something that I've as a podcast listener have loved in our field in the indie hacker bootstrapper world, this has been like the social of the software, social podcast, right with Michelle Hanson collegiate metal that has been great. They just talk about everything that's on their plates, and what they do about it and what they've done last week, what they're going to do next week, the projects that are kind of looming over their head, or the things they want to do the things they have to slog through, all of this feels like you're just part of somebody else's life in a way that the Big Brother show on TV was never meant to be. You look into it, but from a professional angle, not from a social drama angle, but from Okay, these are people figuring things out, and I get to be there for the decision making process. And that's why I love these kinds of podcasts, which is why I'm part of it, and why I want to keep this going. And the thing is, I tend to go on tangents a lot. So we'll have to kind of learn how to communicate without getting into these, you know, rather sight tracked stories, or we'll
Tyler Tringas
just go on tangents, it's fine. You know, maybe that's maybe that's the chart,
Arvid Kahl
or whatever we want to do. Yeah, so have you considered? Let's go through like the maybe the structural parts of the podcast first, just Sure. So we make a couple choices here? Sure, have you considered an average length that you would want us to be knowing that there are people out there who love our long things, and there are people out there who can only commit 10 minutes at a time? Have you ever considered where you would like to stand up?
Tyler Tringas
I mean, my initial thought, you know, so I mean, I've I have run zero podcasts, I've been a guest on quite a number of them, and I listen to a lot of them, but I don't have a lot of you know, personal experience, or I would say like raw data. So I would actually defer to you, my intuition on this would be that something in the 40 minute range would be kind of ideal, I feel like, you know, if you're gonna have a super dense, really tightly edited thing, you really want to keep it shorter, but I kind of feel like, you know, people are gonna maybe tune in to this, and then tune out when they're done right, and not really feel like they have to be sort of completionist with every episode that we produce of this. So if it goes a little longer, because we want to talk about something, and then it ends up being cool content that we want to chop up because like, you know, at the 41st Minute, we have a nice little rant about some topic that comes up. And that turns out to be a great piece for Twitter or some kind of short form content. I think that's fine. I think more than an hour is probably excessive, you know, but I think trying to keep the two of us under significantly under 30 minutes is going to be a challenge. So I don't know, what do you think about that?
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I very much agree. And I think that I love what you just said about this, you don't have to be a completionist that's one thing that I really don't like about certain kinds of podcasts where you have to listen to the whole thing because it only makes sense. Like as a package. It's like, I would rather treat it like a TV show that you can tune in and tune out and you will always find something or maybe that is maybe better or not as good for whatever you need right now. But at least you know it's going to be there every I don't know which day of the week is going to share we have to discuss that. But you know, like the kind of it doesn't have to be episodic will and it doesn't have to have an overarching narrative. Because whose journey whose real life journey ever has an overarching narrative right? That does not exist like your day just happens to be the way it is. You don't have the big story of the day if at all. It's a retrospective on on like you look added from the like in the past Oh, yeah, this turned out to be a day like this, but you never know. So I think that's 40 minutes is wonderful. I think we are almost halfway there with this episode. That's that's an interesting thing already. Right? We're barely scratching the surface at this. Yep. That is yeah, that's definitely something that I would like to do. Because it's also a question of how much commitment can we as people who have other things in our lives put into this, which is another building public thing, right? Building the public is both building and communicating and in public. And if you only spend your time communicating, you have very little to build, which makes the things you can talk about very uninteresting, because you haven't done anything. So, you know, like, under an hour is good, because it leaves more hours to actually do stuff, which is, that's important, too. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Love it. So that that would set the length? We talked about cadence already. Right? We wanted this to be a weekly show. Is that still the thing? Still Okay, for you? Yeah, I
Tyler Tringas
think weekly is great. I mean, I think that's the right cadence for, you know, like, weekly. But, you know, maybe we don't stress if we miss a week, right? You know, we strive for weekly, I think doing it in the middle of the week, we're recording this on Wednesday, makes sense. I think I want it to be thoughtful about not doing kind of, like Friday was like sort of natural thing in terms of like my energy levels. And I was like, That's too frequently going to get interrupted by travel and vacations, and especially when summer comes around. And people want to do summer Fridays, and stuff like that, like, so I think like afternoons on a Wednesday, strive for weekly, but don't stress if we miss a week that feels like a great cadence, you know, for me, but
Arvid Kahl
yeah, mid week is generally nice. Like, I found that in my own work, like my my interviews, which I released on Wednesday mornings, usually get more views immediately, because people just have the time compared to Friday, where people already kind of zoned out a little bit, you know, and it stretches into the weekend, which is also nice. But it's just a consumer behavior in terms of when people listen to things, or watch things. Yeah, option coming up soon. That is usually in the middle of the week is more interesting, because people are busy with things and they want something to kind of, you know, relax and pull them pull themselves out of whatever kind of funk they might be in and just have a be part of a conversation. So weekly is fine with me also love the idea of not stressing a release, which is I guess, a two sided kind of, you know, double double sided blades. Is that is that the phrase? I don't know, yeah. That could be problematic for people who really want to listen to this every week. Yeah, then again, it could just cause anxiety in us, which is not conducive to the further existence of the podcast. So I guess, whenever we find time, we try to make it right. Yeah, I would like to see like an 80 or 90% uptime over the year, that would be great. But
Tyler Tringas
if there is, yeah, I think it's important, though, because one thing you'll hear, you know, in the advice on launching a podcast, like everybody who gets interviewed, you know, that has, like a really successful podcast is, what are some of the like, key things that you give people and they say, you know, you have to be consistent, you have to be every single week, same time, same day, Saint, you know, because becomes embedded as part of people's routine, you know, like, and I think they're probably right about that. But also, like, the most important thing is that you actually do the podcast and you do it for a while. So I think you can take take that advice and then be like, right, once we have like a snowballing momentum, and this thing is really important, then we'll get there, you know, but like, we're not going to say like, we're going to absolutely, like re architect our entire lives around optimizing for this one podcast before we even know if it's interesting to people. Right, you know, so
Arvid Kahl
generally a good idea with any projects that you tack, right like to the whole small bets approach. It's like, look at this, for what it is don't over commit resources to any one idea. And if it shows promise, like if we get a sponsor, which right probably the only need for this, right?
Tyler Tringas
rambles, love
Arvid Kahl
depends, but I'm treating this this wonderful coffee. It's like, we can highlight a lot of things that keep us going
Tyler Tringas
athletic greens, if you're listening. We're available. Yeah, yeah. For SIG Matic, actually,
Arvid Kahl
it's what I'm drinking, not sponsored. But no, but once we have a sponsor, that will be different, right? Because somebody else's money is kind of locked up into you having to commit to this day and time. But if it's an accountability thing, then accountability should be something that is at least fed by an internal need to do it. And it shouldn't just be an external pressure for you to keep going. Because that's kind of, I guess, that's why most of us go into entrepreneurship to begin with, is not to have that pressure, or at least not the same way you had to perform. Yeah, so that's great. I, I like this. I would love to do this as often and regularly as we can, because that is the whole point, right? We want to keep our projects going but Not having to be happening probably makes it more likely that it will happen in some weird reverse psychology thing that's going on there. Cool. I don't have that many questions here. The only other thing that is maybe really critical to this is, is this going to be an audio or a video show? You think? What are your preferences for this? Do you want to do hair and makeup every every Wednesday? That's kind of the
Tyler Tringas
nice studio lights. I mean, I bought that, that course that you recommended and all that sort of stuff. You know, I mean, I'm happy to be on camera. Yeah, no, me too. I don't care there. I mean, let me ask you, I mean, is that really like a difficult decision? I feel like, so you so just so people know, you're sort of manning the logistical side of things in terms of, you know, setting up the recording, and then whatever happens with the recording after that, I'm obviously happy to pitch in, but I'm deferring to you because you're already running stuff. Is it not the case that like, basically, we can just export the video file and put it on YouTube? Yeah, Okay. That's
Arvid Kahl
exactly what it is. And even even if it were, like requiring an edit or something that that doesn't really take that much time. The question is, like, it's usually it's twofold. Like it's an equipment thing, obviously, we both have a camera and have a good microphone, so that that is not a problem. And it's also a focus thing, because I've noticed one thing, like doing audio only allows you to kind of focus on your thoughts more, because you don't have to look anywhere, it's, you know, it's like zoom with the camera off. Yeah, makes you behave differently. And makes you do things differently, compared to you know, having to perform which this can be, or it doesn't have to be, I'm still going to be myself here. But it's a, it's a choice that you make, I think we can, we can definitely keep the video, it's also kind of a cannibalizing thing I've noticing, I'm noticing that with my own podcast, because I have it as an audio show and a YouTube video, and they used to be the same content. So depending on where a person would consume it, it would kind of cannibalize off the other platform, because you know, somebody who listens doesn't watch the video, and vice versa. So number three, be hacked. And not that those numbers really matter for an accountability thing between the both of us, right, but you know, if it turns out to be spectacularly successful, then this becomes an issue. And generally, I think the advice is to that I hear a lot is start with one and then add the other chair instead of kind of cutting back down, but we're gonna record it anyway. We don't necessarily have to release it. That's kind of the idea. Right? The audio part is the most important one, because that's what keeps people engaged when they are walking their dog or doing the dishes, both activities while you shouldn't be watching the screen. Yeah, it's kind of Yeah,
Tyler Tringas
I think that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think, I mean, you know, you probably have a better way of articulating this in some of your built in public canon, but something I'm kind of constantly nudging folks on my team to do is just, you know, make sure that you do the recording part of things as you go. And then you can, you can do the, you have to decide to build to record what you're building. And then later, you can decide how much you want to build in public, right? In the sense that, like, we're often doing really cool stuff. And I'm like, you know, folks, make sure that you record like a really quick loom of just how you did that, and how you decided about that, because then we're going to throw it in a podcast later, when we launched the product, we're going to give some behind the scenes about how we built this, and it's going to be so cool. But if you don't record in the moment, then you never get around to going back and like re recording that sort of stuff. So I think that's a useful insight throughout a lot of folks businesses is like, if you're doing something interesting, and you probably are, just take a little bit of extra time to make sure that you kind of capture it. And then you can later decide, you know, if you want to publish it in this format, or that format, or edit it, or don't edit it, or you know, whether it's a blog post or a single tweet or whatever, but just like make sure you take a moment to kind of capture some of the In Progress work, because I think that's so powerful when you share it later to give that behind the scenes look. So you know, it's kind of obvious the whole purpose of this podcast is to do that. But I think that's a little bit more repurpose will and a lot of folks businesses,
Arvid Kahl
I very much regret not taking enough screenshots in the last decade of all the projects that I was working on. And that is something that is so easy, particularly with tools that just, you know, allow you to take a full screen screenshot and just save it somewhere in the Dropbox forever. And you just have it. Like all the projects that I've been working on as a bootstrap software engineer, I only have like the end results, which is great, right? You know, like, it looks cool and all that. But all the little experiments along the way that the stick the meat of building and public the meat of building and public is decision making and the things you didn't do the things you didn't do, how they worked out, or how they didn't write all of this is part of the story that you can tell that actually interest people who are on the same journey. And if you don't have any recordings, and the screengrab is nothing but a recording and maybe a very static one, but it is one then you have nothing we need to share because it's so hard to communicate things that are visual in a non visual medium like on a podcast, right? That's that's kind of three ever worked to share screenshots we would have to explain a lot, even though you know, it would be so easy on video, but audio that the narrative the human capacity to love and tell stories that needs recordings, that kind of artifacts and time and space and great advice. Like always take screenshots. I take screenshots. So deliberately now of everything. I know that I'm not going to use maybe 90 95% of these things. But I don't care. I have them. And if I ever need to go back into something that I did in the past, I can't, it's always easy to add more. Like, oh, it's always easy to have enough and takes just some then to add things later that you didn't take before. Right? It's kind of
Tyler Tringas
I think it's never, you just always hear like, oh, well, I wish I had taken those screenshots. I just never go back and recreate it.
Arvid Kahl
But we'll see what AI tools will allow us to do, right. So like, there will be like a mid journey fake history generator that will just generate pictures of you when you were a kid and it would look authentic. That's scary stuff. But it's very likely already here. And so
Tyler Tringas
Darby, what do you think about switching gears a little bit and doing a little bit of our accountability work and actually talking about some companies, please? Yeah. Okay. Thank you
Arvid Kahl
pulling me back.
Tyler Tringas
I thought that was good. That was that was reasonably it succinct, you know, meta analysis of the of the podcast. So I think, you know, I think we could kind of this is a little bit rehashing some stuff that we've already talked about, but I think maybe we can, I'd be curious. And I think folks would enjoy hearing you talk about how to think through, like, we have this kind of this obvious stream of content in the sense that, you know, we're constantly getting questions about how to build like this. There's constantly discussions going on on Twitter, and, and we have these point of views, and, you know, you started writing articles. And so, you know, there's kind of this process where when you have this open ended exploration, you can just sort of take a topic, write about a ticket topic, write about it, then when you want to kind of package it up into something a little bit more consumable. Tell me if you agree with this, I feel like the three decisions that you have to make that occur to me are scope, audience and format, right? So to change from like a stream of stuff into something that's more packaged, you decide what's in scope, and what's out of scope, like where we're covering or not, who's the target audience? And then what's the format? And so like, we had talked about, you know, in terms of the scope, right, in terms of, you know, how, how global are we going to go? Are we going to talk about like everything to do with entrepreneurship, or we're going to kind of assume that you're mostly focused on like SAS and software entrepreneurship, right. And we talked about, who's the target audience? Is it people who are ready to build right now who are like ready to get going on their idea? And they want accountability buddies to go? Or is it people who are more entrepreneur curious, right? Who could be like a much wider top of funnel? Who, you know, are just want to learn about entrepreneurship, but maybe have no idea what they want to build? Or if they even ever want to do it? And then like, what would the format be, you know, kind of, like, cohort based course or your you know, at your own pace course, or some other hybrid thing like that? Does that sound right to you like the three key questions, or is there?
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, no, I think I think these are exactly the three that we need to answer, there's probably going to be more that will come up along the way too. Because, you know, I can already think of a couple things beyond these things that might be interesting to us. probably think, isn't it? Right?
Tyler Tringas
But is it like,
Arvid Kahl
price? How much how much this product would be or like, foot language even starting that to that, but these are other things? Let's talk about the three. You just want to have like a quick where we are with this? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So in terms of scope, I found one thing very interesting in writing about all these things, and I'm just going to like really roughly named the things that I've written about just so that it's clear, I wrote about the fundamentals of a common business, I wrote about the fundamentals of a calm SAS business that was my next article, because I noticed a bit of a general scope let's go deeper. And that's already kind of that's the theme that I want to talk about here like zooming in then I talked about business model for business models for a calm SAS business then entrepreneurial strategies like how to set up a business like this then infrastructure the tech choices of a calm SAS business, market analysis, problem discovery, figuring out what people need done solution exploration, how can I solve this and then product development for concepts business then pricing for concepts business and finally, operating a concepts business. These have been the articles that I've written altogether, roughly two to 3000 words each, and I found that scope this is already a lot, every single one of these things to serve as a multi, multi hour so we're going to measure this in hours but like a deep dive in some capacity, right? You could easily talk about pricing with experts and panels and all kinds of examples for half a day and touch most of the points but not all, even just in the confines of the this calm, says, bootstrapped business that we want to talk about. And I feel that's kind of where we should be. Because common businesses wonderful. SAS businesses, great bootstrap businesses also great, but the intersection of them is where we have the most impact with what we can do. And because SAS is what we both know, commerce, what we both know, and the you know, the bootstrap role is also where we want to be and where I guess it's, it's both useful for you and me. Because I don't talk to a defunded founders much and your business interest is aligned with bootstrapping. So these, these things kind of need to be considered. So I think our scope can easily like focus in on this
Tyler Tringas
shall we say, software, or is SAS an important distinction?
Arvid Kahl
That's interesting. I think we should not necessarily limit ourselves to SAS, even though I'm finding my thought, again, the thing is always easier to extrapolate a generic idea from a specific one than the other way around. As a student, right? As a student, I can see Okay, this is an example of a larger theme. Okay, the theme is obvious. But if you have just the theme, it's kind of hard to figure out the example without any prior knowledge. So I think we could well focus on SAS and other software founders would just understand that maybe it's not recurring revenue. But I have like, equivalent to a lifetime deal in a SAS, it's just a single price model, right, you can get find these equivalents easily. But it's probably better for the comprehension to keep it more detailed and focused on a SaaS business. Again, just a thought, not necessarily a decision at this point, what do you think about this,
Tyler Tringas
I think I think I, I liked the principles you're applying there in terms of, we have to start narrow, just to even get to the finish line, right? If you don't get like kind of ruthlessly narrow, you, you will just find yourself in this ever expanding, you know, scope creep, right. I do think, I think if we were doing this, like a few years ago, I would have said, easy choice, just call it SAS and everyone can extrapolate from it. One of the things I'm now thinking about it's making me a little bit hesitant is, I think there's a huge opportunity coming for things that are fundamentally solving the same jobs as SAS, but that are actually kind of like tech enabled service II type businesses, right. So I think a lot of opportunity set for the next wave of entrepreneurs. Whereas six years ago, you might have said, I'm going to start a, you know, a specific industry focused kind of help desk software, right, and it's going to be SAS, very clearly SAS, I think a lot of opportunities are going to be, I'm going to use some sort of blend of services, offshoring AI and in house technology to provide customer support for industry. And I think we could sort of tackle that with almost all the same answers. Except for maybe the literal like tech stack, even though even that would be pretty similar because you, you would just be using it yourself instead of kind of exposing it to your customers. So I'm a little inclined to sort of say something a little closer to like software. You know,
Arvid Kahl
all my articles. It's just, like, find the replace SAS and just put software in there. I like it. Yeah, I like I like this idea because we should maybe just rebrand what SAS means. Maybe it's not software as a service, but service and a software. Something. Take the acronym Sharon's coming
Tyler Tringas
out of this is SAS is over. Right.
Arvid Kahl
Dad, but yeah, I think software software was still kind of encapsulate who we're talking to, which are technical people, people building tech enabled or tech producing businesses. That makes make sense. I like the idea of not kind of pigeon holing ourselves into something at this point, because people will know that SAS is a software term, but people who built other software things might feel excluded that and that kind of leads us like from scope right into audience, right? Because this is kind of where well, who is this for? It's just for all these mass founders that have a recurring revenue software business that you guys like to invest in? Or is this for people who are building things that might create recurring revenue like situations or just revenue, you know, money in the first place that is not as investable made but still empowering them to go from financial insecurity into financial security? Where along those kind of the spectrum, would you like to see your yourself or the project itself?
Tyler Tringas
So for me, one of the whole reasons to introduce this project among the various priorities and ways that, you know, I'm spending my time and our fun to spending our time is to break out of, you know, just our sort of narrow investment thesis, right. So, you know, everything else that we do is targeted at investable companies. And the goal here is to be a little more wider, top of funnel right to sort of capture folks attention and nudge them in this general direction, even if they're not necessarily, you know, headed directly down a fit for something we can invest in. So I'm, I view a goal of audience here to be wider than, you know, strictly something that I'm curious to be invested in. Or that's, you know, very likely to be that. Yeah. What do you think about what else we need to consider about audience I feel like audience had format is something that was sort of, we went back and forth, and like, these two things are kind of intertwined. Like there's no right answer to them. It's like, the audience defines the format, or the format defines the audience and vice versa. It's like, yeah, really wide, you obviously can't do like a cohort based thing. Or maybe you can't, I don't know. But, you know, you tend to be more like, you need to do it at your own pace thing. If you're not filtering people down by they have an idea ready to go, you know, sort of thing, right? Yeah. Do you think
Arvid Kahl
these two fields intersect very much also on the accessibility level, like who is allowed in there, right, because the moment you go into a cohort situation, you have some kind of exclusionary requirements, you need to want it down to a smaller group, which isn't necessarily bad, because it increases the chances of adoption of the knowledge and actually seeing things through which is conversion rate, I guess, for an educator, how many of your students actually get to the point where they can apply the knowledge that they have, which would be nice to see. But then again, the knowledge itself might be helpful beyond that one particular iteration that you're doing. Right? So how accessible Do you want it to be? How globally accessible Do you want it to be? Do you want to charge hike kind of limit amount of money that only allows certain people with a certain budget in their existing businesses already revenue producing businesses or something? It's complicated on my end can only tell you what I would love to see is to make it as as accessible as possible. Yeah, in the first iteration, and then have a funnel into something that allows people who are really willing to commit into something that then takes them by the hand and leads them more in a more guided way. Yep. Throughout our through the journey. That's two parts, I guess, which makes us an interesting two part of it. That's what I would like to see you do like to be the top of the funnel to be as broad as possible, also, like globally accessible that people not just in the States and Canada or the UK can afford that product, but also in India, Malaysia, China, wherever, right and every single part of the world because we have things to share that are kind of generalizable into almost any kind of economy.
Tyler Tringas
Yeah. Like PPP base pricing stuff. Have you like dynamic pricing? How's that worked out?
Arvid Kahl
Worked out super well, I it has, it has two effects. First of all, you make more sales, not necessarily more revenue, but more sales. And in the info product world, or the educational product word. The revenue of thing is important, but the amount of reviews and feedback that you get on it is equally important. And that obviously is way higher, if you have more people taking the thing. And I got so many positive pieces of feedback from people telling me, You're the first person that ever did this. And this is the first thing I can afford to two ideas here. Yay. Right? First thing they can actually afford. And often it was this is the first thing I don't have to steal, which is a whole other level of making things accessible, right? I come from the Napster generation, I know what it means to potentially not committing to any admittance here, download things that maybe people shouldn't have downloaded back then. But as a creator, it is great to see that people will take their hard earned money and particularly in third world economies debt is really hard earned and put it's put it towards something that is an investment in themselves not just a necessity, but an investment. So PvP has been wonderful for me and the people in my community because I have a pretty huge following in the non western world because of this. And because I also talked to people like appear, right? Like I try to engage people on our level, like try to be one of everybody else and that that kind of helped with that too. So yes, we should Definitely do that, if that is possible on the platform slash using the solution that we ended up using for this. Yeah.
Tyler Tringas
Cool. Okay, well, I think it feels like we're on the same page here. And in a sense that, you know, we should at least as a starting point, we should start first with the sort of widest audience that we can in terms of, you know, folks who we just want to say, oh, you know, this is a way of doing entrepreneurship, you might just be someone who's never, you know, never started a business before, it's just generally thinking about it, you know, maybe feeling a little bit like, you heard about the kind of Silicon Valley way of doing things. And that didn't resonate with you, but you want to be an entrepreneurs looking for a toehold into some other way to get started. You know, and that's it, right, all the way up to people who are ready to go. And then the format kind of necessarily needs to be accessible, open, probably, you know, probably at your own pace sort of thing. Right. So, you know, I think we're looking at more of a traditional, you know, series of videos, kind of course, format there. Maybe with a community attached to it, but a lightly, you know, kind of, maybe not super, super curated community, right? Because, you know, that, in and of itself is a lot of work. Actually, I'm curious about actually. Now, let me ask you that, like, let's say we go very wide, right? It's a course it's very affordable, you know, we have we have 1000s, or 10s of 1000s of people that sign up for this thing. Is it opening Pandora's box to even add a community element to that? Or should we only have a second stage of the funnel, that that has a community aspect to it?
Arvid Kahl
That's an interesting point. And we've crossed the 40 minute mark, just saying yes, to point this out. But still, let's go because we can do whatever we want. Yeah, I recently talked to Rob Fitzpatrick, about this, because he's been busy investigating and doing research on purpose driven communities, like communities that, you know, have a goal that have a an outcome, I think his phrase is outcome oriented communities, I would have to check this. So I'm not prepared to talk about this topic, because I have not edited our podcast episodes. But he has been been thinking, Well, if we build communities, we might just as well build them towards the goal that everybody in this community wants to achieve. So we create these kinds of synergistic effects within the community. And I think for something like this, if that was the case, if we wanted to build a community that gets kind of driven towards that point of building your own common business, which is kind of what it is, then a community from the start, even with a large user base can help because people will find each other in the community and hopefully, with the right guidance and the right kind of structure, encourage each other and motivate each other to keep going answer each other's questions, because everybody is at a different stage. So they can, you know, have multiple perspectives for both from I've done this, and I have not done this yet. On to the same question. Super helpful. The only thing that comes with it is the necessity to moderate the community. Because any community on the internet completely derails into people talking about Hitler all the time, if you don't have people in there, making sure that there is some kind of order and structure to the base, which incurs costs, either in time for the two of us, if we ever want to do this are the people we hire to organize this community for us? So I think that's the thing. Right? It becomes a
Tyler Tringas
Yeah, I think I think you're you're dead on. And I think, I mean, we manage a community, it's a much more tighter knit community of basically all of our portfolio founders, and then about 200, folks who are mentors in our community. And one thing I've learned from doing that for a couple of years is that it's very easy to underestimate just how challenging it is to, to run a community and how, how skilled of a professional, you need to do it. Well, we've been very lucky to have really, really good people in that role in our community. But it's these folks are not like a dime a dozen, right? It's not like, you know, I mean, I don't want to disparage any particular industry, but like, it's not like you can just like throw up an ad and you get, you know, a dozen excellent candidates who are just gonna hit it out of the park. And it's a lot of work that I don't realistically see either of us having time to do so I think like, either almost pre finding that person, right and saying, like, you know, the decision of whether or not to have a community is going to be dependent on whether we actually ahead of time find the perfect person to do it, is maybe a good way to think about it or just taking it very seriously and, and saying, you know, this thing needs to generate meaningful revenue such that we can, you know, hire a really great person because I think that if you just sort of like try to hire some, you know, junior person fresh out of college with no experience and say you're the community manager now go it just doesn't work basically.
Arvid Kahl
And we're a I will find the AI Community Manager, we build the AI Community Manager. And then we have another SAS product right on our hands right there. Now, obviously, it would be nice to have a person right to have a human being that also cares, not just about, like maintaining a community, but also the topic itself, which is, that's the hard part, right? The hire is going to have to be somebody who, like software businesses, who wants them to be bootstrapped, and self funded, independent and calm, and loves people, and loves telling them to shut up and not talk about Hitler all the time, you know that that is, that is a lot in one person that you have to find. So you're right, it should not stop us from doing the thing we want to do. Right? The community itself is not the central part of the educational program, it can be a great extension, which is probably why universities work so well, right, you have the educational part, and the camaraderie among the students and the projects that they do with each other and stuff. And once we build a community, that could be part of it, or, again, second option is do that later, in a second kind of installment of this that is more small community centric, like more pods of people, maybe 2030 people, we can have classrooms really, and have people go through the whole journey in this cohort that they would be in, but I think what whatever we choose, the educational content itself needs to be present for us to build a structured community around it. Do you think so too? Or am I maybe putting the cart before the horse here?
Tyler Tringas
I think I'm I think I'm on the same page. I mean, I think one thing that we've figured out is that this is a sort of independent variable, right? It's like, we don't have to make a decision on this. You know, we have to decide some of those other things, right scope audience format. This one, I feel like, you know, we can start to feel it out, as we get towards the later phases of getting ready to launch it to make a decision on what kind of community there's going to be. Probably we can even get some feedback along the way, you know, as we're sort of publishing this, I mean, the absolute best thing would be literally sourcing the right person to run the community through this build and public process, which would pretty much make the decision for me, I think. But yeah, I think we can, we can probably, like cross that bridge a little bit later. Because I think it would work either way, right? If it was just started off as a standalone thing with with no embedded community except, you know, organic discussions and places like Twitter and stuff like that, like that would be totally fine. And a great starting point.
Arvid Kahl
This is one of those things where adding something later is a possibility, because you have access to the people who take the course, if you have email addresses, you have them on Twitter, and you probably can find other means to engage them through whatever kind of community notion document or whatever we're going to put in there as well. So yes, I think that this is going to be one of those cases where somebody's listening to a podcast and gets a job. And I love this, this is cool.
Tyler Tringas
Like sort of like meta, you know, one of the reasons why I like this is I think, you know, we have a decent amount of experience in terms of navigating projects like this. And you know, just the sort of meta process of looking for things that you can kind of kick decisions down the decision tree is like a really useful skill for entrepreneurship, because it's just so easy to get bogged down with a bunch of stuff, like really aggressively looking for like, this is great, we have a pretty good idea of this, but we don't need to decide it now. Like boom, kick it down the road. And only focus on the things that are truly kind of path dependent, you know, non reversible decisions that have to be made, is kind of the only way not to get overwhelmed in in projects like these. So I liked that we went down this road, and we kind of arrived at have a good sense of it don't need to decide now let's tackle it later.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, talking about baby steps, right? That's kind of what it is. And well, maybe let's let's end this very first episode of the loving podcast, with maybe an actionable Er, yeah. And actually the item for both of us. Until next week, I kind of always like to, to know what's going to happen. You know, do you have anything particular that would bring this closer to fruition? on your end?
Tyler Tringas
I think maybe we can take the scope, audience and format questions. And I can take a first pass at like, basically, I think that should be like a sort of central document that we can refer back to over time and we can edit it, it's not written in stone, you know, but like actually having a little bit more of a written out kind of thing. And we can basically have that for the next time we chat. And just make sure that we have that set in stone. And then it feels to me like the next phase of this would be taking kind of some of the material that you've written. And we already did an outline, but I think you did the outline before you started the article series. So it feels like it's time to go back to the outline question and say, Okay, you know, everything that you've learned from that process now I'll in light of these firm decisions on scope, audience and format, what do we really think the outline should be? It's specifically within the context of, you know, scope. Right? So really not just saying like, topic, topic, topic, topic topic, but sort of saying like, this is going to be a one hour video on topic, right? And so we can sort of say, like, Oh, now this is 37 hours, we have to a fraction of that phase where we can kind of start to spec out the topics within a realistic scope and format. Do you think so?
Arvid Kahl
Yep, I agree. And I think I can, I can dive into the data that I already have on the things that I've already written and published, because there are reader numbers, there are listening numbers, and there are cliques and all these things that I have on these topics. So we can, you know, impact impactfully choose the things that people resonate with the most already. So I'm going to dive into those numbers and have them ready next week when we talk again. So we can
Tyler Tringas
see immediate step, actually just analyzing that results. Before we dive into outlining. I think that's good.
Arvid Kahl
If we have like, people's votes with their feet already, I might just as well use them in our decision making process. Again, building a public right feedback is central to the whole thing. So take the data that you already have, and make choices from there. Wonderful.
Tyler Tringas
We have this hasn't been before we hit one hour. So I want to ask one last question, which is what are we going to do with this recording? Are we tweeting it out? Like an hour from now? Or what do you think? Yeah,
Arvid Kahl
sure, why not? Maybe if for anybody who makes it through this now 51 hour and 51 minute and 45 seconds recording them suggestions. So how about that? Let's outsource this a little bit. I like anything that has the name column in it. That's That's what I like. But hey, if anybody has an idea, and if anybody listens to this to this point, well, might just as well let us know. And see what you find a fitting name for what this is already. What do you think about that?
Tyler Tringas
Yeah. Oh, and one more thing. I think in future versions of this, we're going to carve out some time to talk about whatever not just quite so focused on we'll skip the whole meta analysis of the podcast, we'll talk about common VA, and then we'll talk about some other stuff. If there's some stuff that you would love for Arvid and I to riff on, also throw that at us.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I will be talking a lot about my dog, because that is my constant companion throughout my day. And there will be a lot of things about writing and building and probably World of Warcraft is going to be in there too. And photography. I've been taking up that as a hobby, so we will have a lot to talk about in the future. This has been a wonderful, wonderful conversation already. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what people think about it.
Tyler Tringas
Super.
Arvid Kahl
Well done. Talk to you next week.
Tyler Tringas
Yes, yeah, next week.