42: The Power of Omission: Killing Features for Fun and Profit
Arvid talks about removing features, the risks & advantages of pruning your product.
41: Made to Stick: Shaping an Extensible Product
Arvid talks about extensions and integrations, how FeedbackPanda benefited from them, and which obstacles they encountered.
40: Standard Operating Procedures: Managing Your Future Self
Arvid talks about how SOPs make your business more sellable, and how they worked at FeedbackPanda.
39: Roadmaps and You: Building a Future Together
Arvid talks about roadmaps, how they can be used to build trust, and where the risks lie.
38: Customer Retention: How to Keep Them Around / The Zero to Sold Launch
Arvid talks about ways to build lasting relationships with your customers and shares the learnings from his book launch.
37: Customer Exploration: Seeing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
Arvid talks about how to talk to customers to continuously validate your business. He also talks about platform and dependency risks.
36: Being Small Is a Benefit: How to Leverage Being a Bootstrapper
Arvid talks about how you can use being a bootstrapper to your advantage when dealing with prospects and customers.
35: Spreading the Word: How to Do Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Arvid talks about how you can leverage tribes, water-coolers, and word of mouth for your marketing efforts.
34: Seller Beware: Pricing Models That Can Break Your Business
Arvid talks about the risks of Freemium and Lifetime accounts and how to keep an open mind as a founder.
33: Offer Yearly Plans from the Start
Arvid talks about the benefits of offering yearly subscription plans from the start.
32. How to Deal with Plans That No Longer Work / Profit Sharing
In a dual-topic episode, Arvid talks about delicately removing old plans and profit-sharing for your early employees.
31. Price Is Not Set In Stone: Strategies For Increasing Your Revenue
Arvid talks about pricing strategies, how to find a good initial price, cost/value/aspirational models, and more.
30. You May Be Barking Up the Wrong Tree: Re-Evaluating Your Audience
Arvid talks about the kinds of misalignments that can trouble your business.
29. Build for Value, Not for Applause: Product Management Under Heavy Constraints
Arvid explains how to make your service noticeably better for the majority of your users without making the product harder to use.
28. First Things First: Feature Prioritization Frameworks
Arvid talks feature prioritization: Scoring, the Kano Model, and Story Mapping — how and why they work.
27. Forget Goals, Create Systems: Foundations of a Sustainable Bootstrapped Business
Arvid talks about how to create repeatable, reliable, and resilient processes and systems for your business.
26. The Boring Truth of Successful Products That Survive
Arvid explains the core attributes that make products stick around: focus, simplicity, and extensibility.
25. Making Tech Choices: Don’t Add Risk to an Already Risky Business
Arvid talks about how you can make sure you pick the right tech for your business.
24. Not in House: On Reinventing the Wheel
Arvid shares an actionable framework for deciding if you should build or buy (and the mistakes he made in the past).
23. Surviving a Recession as a Bootstrapped Business
Arvid shares the actionable steps you can take right now to recession-proof your business.
22. How to Release as a Bootstrapper: Often, Early, and Safely
Arvid explains how to release software effectively and safely.
21. Scaling Your SaaS Without Scaling Your Anxiety
Arvid talks about how he dealt with anxiety when running FeedbackPanda.
20. Too Many Eyes: Why Bootstrapped Companies Stop Being Transparent (Eventually)
Arvid talks about transparency, open data, and why bootstrappers usually stop sharing information about their businesses.
19. Continuous Validation: Staying in Touch with Your Market
Arvid talks about how you can make sure you're still solving the right problem for the right people and if you still enjoy it.
18. The Do's and Don'ts of the Minimum Viable Product
Arvid explains what an MVP is, how to scope and time it, and what should go into a successful product.
17. So You Got an Offer: How to Do Due Diligence on Your Potential Acquirer
Arvid talks about how you can find out if your potential acquirer is a good candidate, and what the red flags are.
16. Churn, Retention, and Revenue: What Makes Customers Stick Around and Why That's Important
Arvid talks about the kinds of churn founders will encounter, and which ones are actually welcome.
15. How to Do Maximum Customer Support with Minimum Effort
Arvid talks about the FeedbackPanda customer service system allowed them to run the business with 0 employees.
14. The Bootstrapper’s Plight: The Social Headaches of Building a Business
Arvid talks about the weird conversations you will have as a founder, and how to deal with them.
13. The Myth of The Finished Product
Arvid talks about why software products are never finished, and which kinds of changes you can expect to make.
12. Real and Imaginary Responsibilities of a Bootstrapped Founder
Arvid explains the kinds of imaginary responsibilities he encountered in his business and how to deal with them.
11. Your Initial Pricing Will Never Be Right, But Try Anyway
Arvid talks about how to price aspirationally, underpricing, overpricing, and how much initial prices really matter.
10. Do You Need a Co-Founder?
Arvid talks about what to look out for when choosing a co-founder and his experience with his co-founders, good and bad.
9. Finding the Most Painful Problem in a Market
Arvid talks about what makes a problem painful, what kinds of pains there are, and what questions you should be asking your prospective customers to find them.
8. Solution Validation Doesn’t Happen In a Vacuum: How to Talk To Your Future Customers
Arvid shows how you can discover the risks your solution poses to the workflow of your prospective customers.
7. Determining the Size of a Market
Arvid talks about how you can find meaningful numbers to help you pick the right market for your bootstrapped SaaS. For B2B, B2BC, and B2C markets, he shows you how you can get the most accurate figures.
6. Finding a Market to Build a SaaS
Arvid talks about the right kinds of markets for bootstrapped businesses, what qualities they should have and how markets can change for better or worse.
5. The Power of the Niche
Arvid talks about niche audiences, what makes them special, and how you can build a business around them.
4. Finding the Critical Problem: How to Work on The Right Things
Arvid talks about how to make sure you're solving the most important problem of your audience. He explains what properties make a problem critical, how it's valued, and how you can find it.
3. Make It Sell Itself: On Referral Systems
Arvid talks about the referral system of FeedbackPanda, how referral systems work, the benefits and risks that you and your customers will be exposed to, as well as how and when to start building a referral system.
2. Problem Validation: Making Sure You’re Talking To The Right People
Arvid explains how to prepare for talking to prospective customers, which kinds of customers to avoid, and how to best learn of their problems without asking leading questions.
1. The FeedbackPanda Story
In the first episode of The Bootstrapped Founder podcast, Arvid talks about starting, running, and selling FeedbackPanda, his crooked career path, and what listeners can expect from future episodes of the podcast.
Join the Bootstrapped Founder Newsletter
Delivered to you every Friday, with news from the bootstrapped world and what I think about them.