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, and has been responsible for allowing me to reach this stage and get to profitability just a couple of weeks ago, almost a month now, Paddle truly is more. That's MOR, merchant of record, because their product has allowed me to focus on building a product and 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 it's that 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, was positioning it as the 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 for the platform that are quite distinct. The first is that there are people who actually use the platform as a tool in their tool belt to research where to place somebody that they wanna have featured on a podcast. So maybe their boss or coworker or somebody they've been tasked to put on a show or maybe to check what the audience size of a particular podcast is because they wanna sponsor it or place an ad or something like this. Right? Podscan becomes one part of their workflow.
But there's also another type of customer that's actually interested in providing the data itself to their own customers, the underlying data that Podscan provides. And that is a different kind of user. It's a data user. Right? They don't necessarily need to use the UI.
They don't need to search and query stuff and field lists or whatever. They just want access to my API and get the data that their own customers and clients need. So I have platform users, and I have data users. The data users are technical founders, people who run technical businesses, people like me. These are founders.
These are tech people. These are developers, or at least people with the kind of data developer mindset that I share. The platform users, now they come from all kinds of backgrounds. It could be PR departments, marketing departments, government institutions, agencies, general agencies in the space that look at social media or media in general for all kinds of opportunities and are now starting to add podcasts to their repertoire. I have realized that I'm really good at talking to founders about Podscan.
I'm really good at talking to other technical people, business owners who want to integrate podcast data into their business. I kind of vibe with them because I understand what their needs are. I know how APIs work. They know how APIs work. We know how to talk data, how businesses work, and how data integration works.
Usually, it's very easy for me to have a conversation with these folks. It's something that comes easy to me. It's almost like this nerd to nerd exchange whenever that happens. It's enjoyable and and simple thing. But my challenge is these technical founders, they are more like a rare occasion in my customer base.
The most potential customers out there, and I mean this both in the sense and the most potential customers out there and the most potential having customers out there, they are right now for what Podscan is without the need for many integrations or anything on top of it, of the PR departments out there, the marketing departments out there, people who really care about knowing what's going on about a particular topic, a particular person in the world of podcasting. And these are the people that I don't necessarily speak the same language as because I'm a developer, they work in PR. It's just a very different approach to using tools, using software, understanding even what tools can do and all that. And my outreach to those people has been kind of self limited really because I always believed that I don't really know how to speak to these PR and marketing people. So I didn't speak to them at all.
I kind of tried to focus more on the developers, people I know how to talk to. But I'm realizing that obviously, these are wonderful customers for the products. Right? The demo calls that I had and the onboarding calls that have been going on for the last couple weeks. In those, I've seen that the platform is really, really good at solving these people's problems, like helping them overcome the challenges.
And, sure, there are a couple of kings here and there and a couple of things that might need to be changed or added. In most of these calls, left with a somewhat short list of features that when implemented would immediately make a particular job to be done much easier for that customer because they shared with me exactly what their process was, and I could kind of pull things together or build something very quickly that would do it for them. And I've seen these things actually be useful for the customer base at large outside of that particular customer. So these conversations, these demos and and onboarding calls have been invaluable, but I still struggle in those calls demoing the product for nontechnical people. Like, it from a kind of benefit analysis point of view, not just from telling them what the product can do.
It's easy to tell a founder, here's the API, here's what it can do. A founder can immediately translate this into their own understanding of what to do with that data. Right? If I tell you the PodScan API has endpoints to search for podcasts, search for episodes, search for topics, search for entities, for people, and then list them or show related data. For a founder, it's immediately an opportunity to think about, okay, what can I do with this data?
Okay. What could I kinda pull this together? Maybe I have my own data to kinda add to this, and then I can present this to my customers. But a marketing department person may not think like this. They may think about it like, I need to build a list of potential podcasts to place a person on.
Can this tool do it? Not is there an API that when I connect to it, I could then pull this data and throw it into my aggregation system or have some kind of AI analyze this data. That's not how they think about these jobs. At least most of them don't. So that is something that I cannot assume in these conversations, and I do not have much, if any, sales experience with nontechnical people leading with that challenge, explaining that the product can help them and then getting them to subscribe or getting them to try it out.
It sounds easy, but it's really not. And I found there are two options for me right now at this point, and I think these options exist for everybody who is a founder in a business, maybe with a technical background, who's kinda facing this challenge of marketing and sales. One option is that I just keep doing what I'm doing. It's always an option. And I try to become better at it.
And that is an option that my friend Tyler Schringes introduced me in a call recently that I had with him last week surrounding the current status of POTScan. Right? It was a catch up call because Tyler runs the Com Company Fund, which invested in POTScan, we occasionally exchange stuff. He said, well, you can always keep doing it. But second option that he suggested is a more interesting one is that I either find somebody who can mentor me, gonna be a guide, a guardian along the path of me learning these things, guide me through sales conversations with people from those particular industries, or that I finally hire somebody to do this work for me, with me maybe, but for me.
Someone who understands the market, who understands podcasts too, and also understands the needs and requirements of marketing departments and PR departments. So somebody who's not me. And what Tyler suggested and what I'm thinking about right now is that since Potscan is at this stage where there's a lot of experimentation to be done when it comes to outreach, there are many things when it comes to sales that are completely untapped. Even when it comes to marketing, I should consider a part time hire for that particular activity. I need to find someone who's capable of selling to people in these particular markets who understands, like, what podcasting is about and how they can benefit from podcast data and what Podscan can do as a tool and as a product, as a solution for somebody's job to be done.
I think I'll hire them on a part time basis because at this point, I just cannot afford a full time hire. That's kinda where I'm at. Or and I think this is something that I might need to actually start experimenting with, hire them on a commission only part time basis. And the commission based sales is a kind of a thing that irks me, but I think there are many ways how somebody could do this work for me, and commission based sales is an option, one of the many that people can choose to do. I think it's interesting because for me as a founder, paying somebody only if they can convince somebody to buy the product is quite the reliable outcome.
Either the salesperson convinces people to buy it or they don't. There's no downside really for me as the operator of the business. I am struggling with offering this to somebody, though, because to me, hiring somebody means paying them no matter what. I think that is just my employment history talking here, not what I actually need to do right now as a founder of a business that's on the verge of profitability with the arrow pointing up into the right, like, in this potential space of let's just get across this particular kind of threshold. You know?
But there's a a lot of my personal backstory where I want only the finest for the people that I hire and not paying them if they don't make a sale feels wrong, but I believe that a really good salesperson can kill it on commission sales, particularly with a mostly untapped sales pipeline at this point. So what I'm gonna be doing over the next couple weeks is to tap into my network. And if you're listening to this or reading my new Stutter, consider yourself potentially tapped. I'm trying to find somebody who's really good at sales, who really gets podcasting, and media monitoring in general beyond it, like social monitoring, all that kind of stuff, and who's interested in reaching out to people from the PR companies, marketing agencies, anybody who has this vested interest in tracking mentions on podcasts and finding meta information about podcasts in the world out there for whatever client or data needs that they might have. It's very data focused.
It's very impact client focused. And if you're interested in that, well, let me know. And as a founder, you always wonder who's gonna be your first hire. Right? There are a lot of options out there.
Most people hire a customer service person if it's kind of a a low touch business. And I believe for Potscan as it stands right now, because it's a b to b product and I'm not a b to b salesperson, this will be the person that I'm going to be looking for. And obviously, this role will grow over time when it becomes more effective and more financially sustainable for me as I can put more resources into this and scale things. But that is going to be my first hire, and it has to be my first hire because customer service load is fairly low, still can handle this. Product is straightforward.
Nothing really needs to be done there. Product development load is very low because it already has everything that people in this industry need. And the last couple months of working with my customers has shown me that. It's all there. They can really use it, and that doesn't need anything on top of it.
Don't need a developer right now. So business, marketing, and sales are the fields where I'm lacking. Sales is the one that I need to deal with right now. So that's gonna be my first hire. And I always struggle with hiring, and this is no different.
I'm glad to have capable people in my network to both help me with finding the right person for this job and guide me towards knowing what to focus on. So big shout out to Tyler Tranges for suggesting to look into this particular role right now after listening to the state of the business. And, yeah, if you know somebody who's really interested in working at this intersection of sales podcasting in the world of PR and marketing, let me know. I have a commission based sales position for Podscan ready to go. And sometimes the best thing we can do as founders really, and I'm trying to do this right now, is to recognize our limits and find others who excel where we struggle.
For me, that's sales to nontechnical customers. So if you have a similar challenge as a solopreneur, you are not alone. And you should really think about who could be the complementary person in your business, who could be your first hire for that particular thing that you need to get done. Could that be the solution to your problem? I think so.
And I'll see how it works out for me. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootswap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at avid kahl, a r v a d k a h l. If you wanna support me in this show, please share Podscan.fm with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of brands, businesses, names, anything on podcasts out there.
Podscan is a near real time podcast database with a stellar API, so please the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem. Thank you so much for listening. If you need a job as a salesperson, you're good at it. Let me know. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.