Arvid Kahl: Welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder! Today, I'm
talking to Simon Hoiberg. He shares his strategy for running
two businesses and a YouTube channel without burning out.
We'll talk about business validation, building reusable
processes to stay sane and creating sustainable businesses
while maximizing your founder productivity. Here's Simon.
You're building two businesses and you're operating a huge
YouTube channel at the same time. I think you're a writer,
you're a teacher, you're always part of the conversation on
social media, at least in my sphere. I see you that all the
time. For most people doing any one of these things would be
enough. And you've been doing this for what, five years now?
How do you do all of this without burning out? How does
that work?
Simon Høiberg: That's a great question. I get this a lot. I
think it's something that mainly builds up over time since I
started. It's actually not more than two years ago. I started
this whole thing on social media. I quickly got into an
awareness about making my efforts. Can you say compound
and I've been doing that by focusing on sort of using
building blocks, that's the kind of like the way I'm thinking
about it. So every time I build something, every time I put
something out there, there needs to be something more to it than
just the result that that thing can give me right there and
right now. I always try to do this with anything. So in the
beginning, my first two, three YouTube videos as an example, it
took forever to build. Then I started getting into the habit
of every time I finished a YouTube video, so strip that
video apart and see is there anything in this video I can
turn into a reusable building block that I can use to make the
next video even faster? Or is there anything in this video I
can turn into a process in a checklist I can make that will
make the whole thing go faster? Once you start doing this over
time, it's as if these building blocks and this whole ecosystem,
it's sort of compounds and it makes you way more productive,
then when people see me doing A then B then C then D. They think
about themselves and how much time it will take them to do A,
B and C and D. And it also did for me in the beginning. But I
also didn't start out with A, B and C and D all at the same
time. I built on top of what I already had. And slowly let that
evolve. And now it's I always think of it as like when I'm
working on one thing I'm working on it all. And that way, if
we're putting one thing also reflects on another and enables
me to do a whole lot of things that appears as if it's a lot
that's getting like the output is really big.
Arvid Kahl: That sounds like you have a process for building
processes, you know. Like you approach every activity as if it
were a process in the making. Is that something you just came up
with? Or did you find inspiration somewhere else for
this?
Simon Høiberg: I think I have inspiration for this from the
coding world. Being a software developer for many years, this
is something that you were taught early on that contribute
to open source. If you have something you built, turn it
into an NPM packets or Gradle packets or anything that you can
put online and let other people use that as well. And if not,
use it for yourself. You have that piece of code. You spent
time making that very elegantly and make your future self happy
and make this easier for you. And even in the software world,
I actually saw very few even senior developers with many
years of experience, actually doing this, actually stopping up
every time they built something taking that little bit of extra
time to making it into a modular solution that they can use for
their future self. And that's my inspiration came from there. I
actually in the software world got really good at that. And it
enabled me to produce software really, really fast. I've been
working as a freelance consultant for many years. And
this was obviously very beneficial when I had new
clients. I would never take code from another project with
another client that they'd been paying me for. But there are
certain generic solutions and software that you can generalize
and then use for something else. And it enabled me to produce
results way faster for my clients. And it's the same kind
of thinking that I took and put into my entrepreneur life. And
it's funny because when it comes to content, especially YouTube
and content in social media, there's such a level of
creativity going into that so that I think a lot of people
they don't really think about how operational it actually can
be behind the scenes and how much you can actually streamline
and make processes out of all of this. And that's basically where
my inspiration came from.
Arvid Kahl: Interesting! Interesting to see the coding
mindset translate into something that is immediately useful for
an entrepreneur or a creator. I very much agree. I think I have
the same mindset. And that makes me approach my content creation
that the podcast and my very, very, not yet mature YouTube
channel, you know, like makes this more of an extra structured
approach instead of just hoping for inspiration to strike,
right? If you approach this as a process based thing, then you
try to figure out what steps can I actually take reliably and
meaningfully every time? And then that turns into a process.
You know what you just said? I find that interesting because if
you say many senior developers don't have that mindset, I
think, if I remember my work experience for enterprise
businesses as a salaried engineer, somebody who's paid to
be there, they didn't track for things that are reusable, right?
Like they didn't measure my work in terms of can this be used
again? They measured it, is this useful now? Am I like fulfilling
the scope? Great. And if not, then I did too much work on
this. It's not immediately apparent in many ways that this
could be useful at a later point. I think freelancers they
have that. They have the opportunity to reuse these
components where salaried engineers may not even
understand that this is something that they might be
reusing at a later point. Some might, obviously, it depends on
the position, right? What's your opinion on that?
Simon Høiberg: I totally agree. Now, I don't have a whole lot of
experience as an employed in the software world. I've been a
freelancer most of my career as a software developer, but I
totally agree. And it also makes perfect sense that if you're a
company, and if you are imploring, if your managers
aren't really rewarding you for that effort of because it does
take a little bit of extra effort like pushing something
now that's useful now is one thing. But it does take a little
bit of extra effort to actually polish that up and wrap it up in
something that can be used later. And if you're not
rewarded for that, I totally get that it's not something that the
worst incentive. It's not something as a senior developer
that you would do. As a freelancer, it's not like your
client is paying you for that either. But it just pays off in
the fact that you will be dealing with multiple clients at
a time or from month to month or three month period to three
month period. Yes, so I agree. I never thought about it,
actually. But I think it makes perfect sense.
Arvid Kahl: I think for entrepreneurs that come from a
software background, this becomes very apparent that it's
very useful to build reusable things like this. And
particularly, and you're a serial entrepreneur too, right?
You build one thing and then you build another thing. Let's say,
maybe talk about your software as a service businesses because
I find that super interesting, not only the kinds of businesses
you build because they are very close to what I like to use
being a Twitter creator and somebody who's writing uses
links and stuff. So both FeedHive and LinkDrip are things
that I find very interesting just as products. How did they
come to be? Because I have this distinct feeling that LinkDrip
is a consequence of something that you need it along the way.
Is that right? Like how did these two businesses come into
being?
Simon Høiberg: Yes and no. And it's one of those, to start off
with, back when I started building FeedHive, that's a
little bit more than two years ago now. And this was actually
the same with LinkDrip. I had, just prior to building FeedHive,
I tried to build another tool. It was called Sigmetic. And it
was a tool you could use to integrate with your GitHub
account and let software engineers on teams track the
performance among their team members. Horrible idea. I come
from a background in sales. And I thought that this idea of
having these like big monitors on the wall and sales
performance and everyone wanted to kind of have this like
fireworks going every time someone made a sale. I thought I
could transfer that directly into the software world.
Horrible idea! Software engineers don't work like that.
It was me being polluted from having my thinking, kind of like
very influenced from another industry that I had been in
before. But the essence here was that back when I was doing
Sigmetic, I was trying to innovate. That was my the core
feeling I had. I'm gonna go into the SaaS market and I'm gonna
really try to innovate something. And it went horribly,
failed epically. My second attempt with FeedHive, it was
very deliberate that I wanted to try to go in the complete
opposite direction and then say, I'm gonna try to be going into a
market that is as well established and pre validated as
I possibly can. And there are a few things you can pick from
here, email marketing, social media, marketing, project
management tools and I realized that project management tools
they've been here for a long time and yet, Monday pops up and
then come new like click up pops up out of the blue. There's
still room for having an alternative to some of the other
established tools that are out there. And that was my approach
with FeedHive. So it was actually very little about
trying to come up with a new clever way to solve a pain point
that users have, rather than to give users yet another
alternative. And it's dangerous. It's a risky way to start. And
it's a risky foundation of building a business. But my
thinking back then was that if the market is truly huge enough,
there will be a tiny portion of those many, many, many users out
there that have this pain and need to have a solution for it,
that will prefer it exactly your way with those tiny small
differences that you were told to have. And that was really my
approach with FeedHive. It was also the approach with LinkDrip.
I saw some of my competitors in the social media management
among social media management tools, also building link
shorteners and making more sophisticated versions and build
them into their tools. And rather than building another
system that could give like build UTM parameters and add
upload thumbnails and have custom audios and things like
that. I thought I would try to engineer it a little bit more
and see is there interest in having something that is going a
little bit further down the street of Airtable and Zapier
and these kind of like automation tools where you can
start customizing the behavior a whole lot. And it seemed like
there was a lot of interest in that. And that was the way I
went, but nothing inherently neither innovative or a huge
problem that I had to solve for myself. Back when I was starting
to do social media, there was definitely some things that I
wanted from a social media management tool that I thought
the market was missing. But it wasn't quite frankly, that I
couldn't have just picked Buffer or HootSuite or some of the many
others and just went with that, by the end of the day.
Arvid Kahl: Interesting. So how did you validate then that
people needed it if it wasn't your specific need? But how did
you look into the market and figure out if there was an
audience of potential customer base for these products?
Simon Høiberg: Yes. And it's a great, great question because
this is crucial. When you're building something in a market
that's this well established, it's not that you don't know
that there's a market. It's how to actually fit in there and how
to stand next to some tools that's been around for plus 10
years. I did this on Twitter. I reached out to I had been
building my audience for about six months at this time. And
they were in some closed chat groups on Twitter. I reached out
to a bunch of them and asked, why are you not scheduling your
tweets today? And a bunch of them, they mentioned that there
were this tool and then there were HootSuite and Buffer, they
were bad to use. They didn't like them. They were old and
they didn't seem very maintained. Then there were some
specific tools at the time hype theory, which was like from a
software perspective, really, really high standard. They have
like excellent UI UX, but it wasn't quite what they were
looking for. And there was some things that they wanted in a
different way. I remember back then they mentioned they wanted
a queue. Like many of these social media scheduling tools,
they have like this list of queues, they wanted that in a
calendar view instead. So I thought like, okay, there's like
this tiny little thing that I can jump into the market. And
now when users are going to look at these, like 15 social media
management tools and pick, I'm going to be the one with the
calendar queue rather than a list queue. And let's just let
that be it. That's that tiny little preference things that's
going to win some, like a tiny little portion of users over and
I started building with these users that started mentioning
this. We made a Twitter group chat group for just this. And in
two months or so, I built in secret with these 30 so users
and it was literally fully community driven. I was in there
talking to them daily asking them questions daily, how should
this be? How would you like this? And I was not trying to
guess in any way. I was really trying to say, okay, these 30
people, they're going to be representing a bigger group of
users, yet a small customer segment in the bigger hole,
that's gonna be my future fee type users. And that was my
approach.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that sounds like a very, very specific group
of people that you like, zeroed in from the beginning. Also
makes makes sense that you would do this kind of behind closed
doors, like figuring out what these specific people need,
instead of just pushing, you know, questions into your
audience. Because I see a lot of building in public founders ask
every single question about their product into a very
diffuse audience and then get a lot of different answers back.
So this sounds like a very reliable approach. How did you
get into these groups into these, you know, private
conversations? Because I guess that's what everybody wants to
know. How do you get into these private Facebook groups or
Twitter groups or these LinkedIn things? Like what was your
approach for that?
Simon Høiberg: Well, it actually, this actually started
six months or so earlier when I started being active online. And
at the time I started building FeedHive, I already had around
30,000 something followers on Twitter. So this all started six
months earlier from me being active online. And I think once
you start appearing and showing up and once you start getting
some traction on your profile, you're getting followers fast.
People really resonate with your content. They engage with your
content a whole lot. These small Twitter groups, they form
naturally. I actually didn't start any of these myself until
the FeedHive specific one. But I got invited into a bunch of
these where I saw other influencers. I'm not sure how
much I liked the word, but you know what I mean, like content
creators with a certain amount of followers. They were already
in these groups. And I was invited by these other people.
They saw that let's get Simon in here. It seems like he's got
like a good amount of traction. And he's saying some things that
resonate with the rest of these people here. So it actually
happened quite naturally. I wish I could say that I had to
strategy and I did this and that and this and that. I actually
didn't, it did happen quite naturally. So I think that what
comes before that is really being active online and starting
to build your audience.
Arvid Kahl: I guess that that is the strategy, right? Like
building this opportunity surface by just showing up and
allowing people to invite you into these groups.
Simon Høiberg: Absolutely
Arvid Kahl: I think that's wonderful advice for anybody who
wants to build a community driven or an audience driven
product or service or whatever is to actually go into that
community, surround yourself with those people and then give
them the opportunity to make a connection with you, right? And
then take it from there. That is really cool. One thing that I
found interesting about, let's just talk about LinkDrip for a
bit because I just love the idea of a link engagement tool. I
have an account and I logged into it and it's a lot of
opportunity. I love this no code approach that you're taking. I
think that is a wonderful idea kind of marries the idea of just
pure links, like the technical thing with the applicability of
many, many marketing strategies and tools that come from the no
code field that just plug and play. One thing that I saw in
your process of building this in public and I generally love the
idea that you're doing this, that you're not just building
these things in secret. Now you're also building them in
public and sharing the whole story and the journey. One thing
that I saw is that you're doing early adopter lifetime access.
That is something that you did with LinkDrip. Can you talk to
me about this a bit? What considerations went into it? And
if you set any limits or anything like that because
lifetime access, that is a lot, right?
Simon Høiberg: Yes, it is. And I think that the whole idea behind
selling lifetime deals is it's a bit controversial. There's a lot
of there are these sites like AppSumo and Dealify and these
big marketplaces where you can go and sell lifetime deals. And
to me, I think it is worth underlining that it is something
you should do on a limited basis. I don't think that it's a
way to build a long term sustainable business, especially
if you have ongoing costs, ongoing support, cost, ongoing
server costs and a lot of other things. But that's one thing. I
actually think there's a bigger problem with lifetime deals
right now. And that is that it has a certain reputation, that
if you're selling lifetime deals, you're in some sort of
financial trouble or you're just scraping by. And I think this is
probably the most problematic part of it. Because quite
frankly, when you look at the numbers, like if you spin up an
Excel sheet and start grinding numbers, you will notice that
servers and hosting, it became really, really affordable. You
can engineer your server and your cloud solution to pay
almost nothing. And when it comes to support, you can
continue your solution in a way that is fully self served. You
can do a lot of things to ensure that even though it sounds like
lifetime, you're offering a lifetime deal lifetime users
also churned. They also at some point wants something different.
They leave your platform, they don't stick around for an extra
lifetime. And it's in a lot of cases, I believe you can strip
down the math of this and say like this is even if I was never
selling a subscription, I was just going to go full on
lifetime deal for the entirety of this whole business. I still
think you would come up with a financial model where that was
actually possible and doable. However, I actually think the
biggest problem is the reputation that it has right
now. Selling lifetime deals to me, first of all, my best advice
would be make that Excel sheet first of all to make sure that
your finances can actually support this if you have for
some reason very high server cost. I've seen some lifetime
deals do this with AI and with open AI access and pay. And
that's a horrible idea because it can really become very
expensive very fast. So that will be the first thing to kind
of strip down the finances and see if you can support this. But
I also really think that it's a really important part of it is
communicating while you're running this lifetime deal. You
need to somehow justify. With LinkDrip, I was very clear that
this was an early access lifetime deal that we were
selling and that this was a part of validating if there was any
interest in the product that we were doing. And that we haven't
built it yet at this point. We had like a quick POC to verify
that the things that we were advertising on the web page
could actually be technically done and carried out. I think
that's the most important part of doing a lifetime deal today.
I do think that it's a great option. It can really, really
benefit you in a lot of ways. There's a lot of money you can
get up front and is a great way to validate that there's extra
interest. Nothing beats having people pick up their credit card
and extra pay. But it does come with some considerations. I
would never launch a lifetime deal without very, very
carefully expressing and communicating that this is a
limited time offer and that we're doing it for good reason.
Otherwise, people start talking. That's my experience, at least.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. Mind you, like a lot of the deals that I find
as soon as I see that there's no limit to this, it's like, why
are they doing this, right? Because my mind as an engineer,
I go to well, this will cost them something in the future. So
do they expect me to not use the product after that? Or will they
then try to convert me into something, you know, you have
all these things? And I do wonder for you like a lifetime
dea, that is such a hard thing to even define. What does
lifetime mean to you? Because in my experience, lifetime can mean
lifetime of the person using the product, lifetime of the
business that is offering the product, lifetime of the version
of the product in the business. It can mean anything, right? So
what do you consider a lifetime deal to look like?
Simon Høiberg: It's a great question. To me, I think it's
simply boils down to them having access to the product as long as
the product lives. I don't think that anyone out there hopefully
believes that any product, any SaaS product on the market is
somehow immune to fail, go bankrupt, go down. So I think
most people are aligned with that idea that it's a lifetime
deal that exists as long as the product exists and that there's
not going to be, yeah, I don't even know how that would work.
If you go bankrupt with your company, you're going to somehow
make a version of that product still run somewhere. I think
most people are aware that that's just not feasible or even
technically possible.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that is an interesting point, generally,
for any SaaS business, doesn't even have to do with lifetime
deals. Just like if there is an end of business somewhere, what
do you do, right? And maybe that's something we should talk
about because maybe with FeedHive, not so much that if
that is over, if that ever were over for whatever reason, right?
People would probably find an alternative to deal with their
scheduling needs. But with LinkDrip, I find it it's very
interesting because links are something that is hard to change
in some capacity, right? If the moment they're printed in a
book, you have a problem. You will need to make it happen. And
you will need to be able to transition the data into another
format if people need to. Is that something that you've
actively put into your business model or your service offering
for LinkDrip?
Simon Høiberg: Absolutely, absolutely. And that's a part of
the platform that people can take their links and export it
in a format, either JSON or CSV. It's not something we have fully
in place yet. But that's definitely something that's
going to be available for all our users. It is as you say,
it's such an essential deal a part of the offer that we have
on LinkDrip besides to creating QR codes. And it is something
that people do a lot than they print a ton of QR codes and hang
them offline around the city and in different places just to
figure out that the link is somehow broken. And now they
might have printed 1000s of these and it's a big pain. With
LinkDrip, you can change the destination of the link and it
will in the second start redirecting to a new place. And
you can even automate this to add AB testing capability. So it
goes to two different places on a dice roll. Or you can program
it to change after a certain thing has happened, certain
amount of clicks or at a certain time. All of these things, I
think, to make sure that printed links stay alive in any way, you
need to offer something that is flexible, like the product
itself, but you most certainly also need to give people the
option to export the whole thing and take it to any other link
shortening redirect service that can do the same.
Simon Høiberg: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's a
Arvid Kahl: You know what? I love that. I love the fact that
crucial part. There are certain technical challenges to
as founders as software founders now at least you and me too, I
guess, and the things that I do, we actively allow our customers
solutions like this. In certain cases, exporting data and moving
to leave, which for many customers is something that then
makes them decide to buy the product because they know
there's a way out if I need to, right?
it to other either competitor or into another service is one
thing with LinkDrip, there are certain issues with the actual
domain name of the link, it says are laid out to. We recommend if
you print links in any type, you do it with a QR code because
they can actually be transferred and moved. There are certain
issues with offering to, as you say offering to the user to take
their database with them might be a determining factor for some
people actually signing up for the product. There is some sense
of safety in knowing that the data that you produce in this
tool belongs to you. I totally agree.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I would assume that particularly if you try to
reach out to bigger companies, to enterprise businesses that
have some kind of static links that are printed off or put on a
DVD, you know, those kinds of technologies, you need to have a
guarantee that this will be usable if they change vendors.
So that might just really be a service level agreement on that,
like you provide as long as you can. And if you ever off board,
there's a way out. I find these kinds of things, there are
specifics. I mean, not every business will have to deal with
it. But I think for people who are building businesses, this
stuff is interesting to consider. Because it's a mindset
on how you approach your customer, right? If you think
your customer is somebody that you want to lock into your
business, that's the way that some people do it, right? But if
you give the customer the option to move away on their own
volition, now all of a sudden, you have a very different
relationship with them. And I think more and more as we build
our businesses in public like you are doing and as you kind of
align your business identity with your personal identity,
trust is such an integral part of this whole thing, that you
can't just lock people into your product anymore. That just
doesn't work, right? The balance is off. I really liked that. I
want to talk to you about building in public here because
just kind of came to my mind. You're building, I guess, your
software product in public. And you're creating YouTube videos
around them. This is happening in a very competitive space,
right? Both social media scheduling and link marketing. I
guess they're both very competitive. How do you make
sure you're not oversharing when you're building in public?
Simon Høiberg: It's actually a great question. And I think this
is a matter of being a little bit deliberate on a bunch of
levels with what it is that you want to teach your audience. If
you are the kind of building in public person that run one
particular thing. And you're kind of like all in on one
business, you might even own a brand that you're building in
public from or doing your whole audience building from your
actual brand, I would be a little bit more hesitant. I
think one of the things that come from building a personal
brand as I do myself and having a product offer of multiple
things is that you don't necessarily need to worry too
much about compromising one specific part of your business
or one specific product that you're offering. I see
everything that I do online a little bit as an ecosystem. I
tried to go away from the kind of classical funnel thinking. I
see a lot of a building in public people that still adopt
this idea of I'm going to go online and post and everything
is a matter of moving people one step down a very specific path
that I want them to take. And that ends with them buying this
one specific thing that I'm offering. And it's not that that
can't work. I think the way that I'm doing it, I'm thinking about
it a little bit more like an ecosystem. I try to invite
people in. If people they discover me online, either on
YouTube or on Twitter or everywhere, first of all,
there's going to be hours of content that they can start
consuming. They can go on YouTube and they can literally
binge watch a bunch of things that I teach, the values that
I'm trying to advocate for and a lot of other things that I have
to say. But I actually rarely try to push people down a
specific part or try to kind of think, lock people down in this
kind of funnel sort of thinking. It's an ecosystem. It's a
playground, it's sort of like a museum. They step into it and
they can find various things in here. Like there's a bunch of it
that's free. And then there's going to be some of the things
that are paid. But they will stumble on my products in one
way or another whether that be in FeedHive or LinkDrip or now
we just acquired another small SaaS called Tiny QE. And I have
info products that I sell as well. There's my YouTube
channel, which is free for the consumer, but I still get paid
for that behind the scenes. So there's a lot of ways that this
can work. And this is also what I mean by when I work on one of
these things, I actually work on this entire ecosystem. And I
like this idea. That's why I'm not really that hesitant with
sharing certain things about either FeedHive or LinkDrip that
other more all in type of audience builders, they might be
a little bit more hesitant with sharing something they find
either business critical or that put them in a too vulnerable
position. I don't really mind if something comes, puts FeedHive
or whether that being revenue numbers with our amount of users
put it in a disappointing light. Either those users aren't for me
or they will find another product or something else in
this ecosystem that I'm building that is more for them. And this
is also why in a classical kind of marketing funnel, it's a big
problem when people drops off and people will drop off. That's
like the whole idea about a funnel. And people that drops
off a funnel, they're typically wasted. You don't really do more
of them. You just try to aim broad and then get as many
people down to the very bottom of it as you possibly can. When
people drop off in my funnel, there are other places they can
go. They can stumble upon other products that's more for them.
And I think about this in this way in everything that I do. I
don't really worry that something I say will put any of
my products in a bad light. I also don't try too hard to make
everything about that particular thing. There will be other
things. And yeah, I hope that sort of answered your questions,
just a little bit about like maybe at a philosophical level
how I roll with everything I do mainly.
Arvid Kahl: I think the comparison between the funnel
and what I can only kind of visualize as a web, right?
That's the thing you're actually do. You have a web with all
these different nodes and they're all interconnected. I
think like, not only are we wearing almost the same color t
shirt today, we also have the same approach to business
because I feel I do the exact same. I have my books. I have my
also, you know, tiny little YouTube channel. I have my
podcast. I have my Twitter presence. I have software
products as well and all of them are connected in a way where
nothing is ever pushy. I never tried to push anybody anywhere.
I want people to find my universe where I am in, right? I
want them to find my solar system with all the different
planets that surround me as the sun. And then I want them to
trace back from wherever they found me to where I am right
now. It's kind of I call this like leaving evidence of
ambition and of just being present and allowing people to
trace that back to where I am right now. And then they can
find everything else. And I think you're doing a great job
at the same thing. I found you in many different locations,
right? I've seen you on YouTube, I've seen you on Twitter, I see
your products and all of that creates this whole universe of
Simon, Simon's universe. And I kind of love that. I think that
that is an approach that as a maker, as a creator today is so
much more involving and powering in the community that you're in
than just trying to put people through the funnel. I love your
explanation of people dropping off the funnel because if they
drop off in the web, well, they just go on another strand of the
web. They find you somewhere else, right? And they might be
something even more useful there. That is a great analogy.
I feel this. I love this. The words. That's cool!
Simon Høiberg: I absolutely use that and I love thinking about
Arvid Kahl: This is also why I consider the personal brand that
this as a universe with planets and a sort of web because that's
exactly what it is. And it also comes back to the fact that as I
started talking about earlier that I always think about making
things reusable, they should somehow be giving something else
than the exact result that they're giving right now. But
this is a way of making your customer segments sort of
reusable. So you turn your people the audience into a form
of building blocks as well that if they don't fit in, in
specific place, they can be reused in something else. They
don't just drop off the funnel and then they're never good for
anything. And this is also why not only am I not afraid of
being a little bit putting some vulnerable numbers of my
businesses, but I also try to talk about some things and
include my audience in something that might not actually have a
benefit right now. It doesn't really fit any where in my
ecosystem or in my universe as it is today. But I'm also
thinking a little bit ahead. If my businesses go down tomorrow,
there's going to be no LinkDrip or FeedHive. Is there any way
that I can still include the audience that I have built and
make them invite them into a new branch of this universe that
then can offer them something some value of some sort and then
make me wait list lkely to go out of business just now? It's
at least easier to rise from a situation like that.
you have as a creator, to be the most valuable thing that you
have. Even though you may may have a business, right? That is
making, I don't know, if you're lucky millions a year, right? If
you get it to that size, that is valuable in a financial sense.
But if the business falters, the business is gone. But your
personal brand, that is just going to grow over time. If you
break your business along the way, which many people do, just
learning from that, it's gonna increase your personal brand,
right? So that's a very valuable asset to have.
Simon Høiberg: It is. And just to add on top of that, it also
adds an element of feeling more safe to fail. And I know that
there are many different schools of thoughts, especially in the
Twitter verse with all some indie makers and builders.
There's the kind of classical all in kind of like Andrew
Gazdecki style, like go all in and then there's the super small
bits, the best way to make something feel failed to save is
just making it as small as possible. So it's not really
that much time wasted, the Daniel Vassallo kind of style of
small bets. I understand the idea of both. Mine is a little
bit in the middle. Whenever I tried to put out a bet, my way
of feeling safe to fail is that that bet even if it fails, still
somehow contributes to the ecosystem. So say LinkDrip
failed, I can still make content from that that's still
contributes to my YouTube channel. If I do a YouTube
video, something, it still contributes to the product that
I do if I put out an info product. The whole thing is kind
of intertwined. And here's where the whip analogy was really
great again. Whenever I put out something new, my first question
that I asked myself is, does this fit into a web in any way?
Or is this just going to be completely independent me trying
to shoot something out there and then see if it works? Because it
needs to fit into the web. There needs to be an element of it
doing some kind of cross pollination between that and my
other products. That's, for me, is the best way to not go all in
because I'm not that kind of person. But also to still feel
safe to fail on a little bit more than super tiny bits. It
allows you to bet a little more and still feel somewhat safe.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, there's always something meaningful that might
come out of this even if the bet itself doesn't work out. I love
this. And I think as a creator, as somebody who's sharing that
journey, no matter what you do, if you try and find some aspect
of it that relates to the other things that you've been doing,
there's something in there, right? And particularly for you
as a YouTuber, sharing the lessons learned, also your
strategies and all that. I see you use everything for that good
or bad because that is always relatable, right? People fail a
lot. People succeed a little. They both relate to a failure
and success. And you can incorporate that into your
YouTube channel, which I want to talk about because I'm a big
fan. I'm a subscriber, of course, because you teach
various interesting things. And I often wonder that particularly
as you are an active software engineer, as active software
founder and a YouTuber with a pretty sizable YouTube channel
and a high quality production. I mean, I'm looking at your and
your fancy YouTube studio right now, how do you balance being a
creator who talks about things and being a maker who does the
things that the creator then talks about? Do you have some
kind of balance that you actively seek? Or does it just
happen as it happens?
Simon Høiberg: At this point, it's fairly planned and
scheduled. And this is a matter of, it's time consuming. YouTube
in itself can quickly become a full time job, easily. If you go
down a path where everything becomes too arbitrary, I would
say, there's always an element of me trying to include
something in my YouTube videos that is something first of all
that people can't find anywhere else. So I try not to just take
information read on the internet and give my version of that
because that can be valuable. Sure. But it's super important
for me that this is something that is inherently my
experience, something that people just can't find anywhere
else. So it needs to be experiences from my own journey
or at least what I'm trying to teach should be heavily tied up
on experiences from my own journey. And then I think
there's always, for my YouTube channel, it is a marketing
channel. And that's not something that I'm like I can
easily admit that it serves a purpose of being a marketing
channel for my products and I do actually create a quite
significant amount of leads for both FeedHive, LinkDrip and Tiny
QE on my YouTube channel alone, but by the end of the day not
really the purpose. It is always when I start making content for
YouTube, it is to empower entrepreneurs and people who are
intimidated by the whole idea of SaaS. That's why the things that
I'm preaching on my YouTube channels is so centered around.
You don't have to take VC money. You don't have to go out and
seek investors. You can actually roll a micro SaaS from your own
home. You can do this alongside your work. You don't have to
quit your job. And I truly believe that this is true, first
of all, and that's not to neglect that it's still super
hard and super challenging. But the purpose, the main purpose of
my YouTube channel is mostly to empower people who want to try
to build their own SaaS, but have no intentions or feel
extremely intimidated by the idea of investors, big teams,
the whole Silicon Valley style of model. It do happen to, it
creates leads as I go along because my channel is growing
really fast on this model. And I think compared to other channels
I have seen, again, a little bit too much funneling to my tastes.
And it does prohibit their growth when every single video
they come to this channel and watch, somehow have this
ulterior purpose or motive underlying that they need to go
and sign up somewhere or do something. And when I do it like
this, because that the path of doing entrepreneurship like we
do it here, it just it will feed you with so many lessons
constantly. So for me, it's not ever a problem coming up with
constant ideas or things that I want to talk about. It basically
produces itself. Then on top of that, there's the whole
production, the actual production of it. And I have
quite rigorously nailed down and add a pipeline inside my
companies for for doing this as efficiently as I can. Otherwise,
it becomes very time consuming. But I think the thing with
YouTube that a lot of people struggle with is what should I
talk about and I let this be listened driven 100%.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that's the one of the biggest benefits of
building anything, both just building it yourself and
building it in public. Like there's always this kind of
dynamic of, well, this is useful. I can teach this. I just
learned this. Now I can teach it, right? That is just stuff
happens every single day, that there's this never ending well
of interesting topics. I love that. And I see you very
actively take these lessons and immediately share them. And that
is something that I value as somebody who follows your
journey because I'm invested in your success. I want to see you
succeed. And I also want to see how you deal with challenges
because you have something to teach. So I think you're doing a
wonderful job with that. Just wanna say that as a subscriber,
good job.
Simon Høiberg: I'm very happy to hear that.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. No, it's just something that I love this.
Because you can see this in your videos in particular, they're
very well edited. And they have a very consistent style that is
teaching focused. It's not conversion focused. You don't
want to convert people, at least that's not the message that I
see, to do anything. You just want to teach them. And if they
find anything that you do interesting, they will go there
by themselves, right? They don't need to be encouraged to buy or
anything like it. What I do wonder as a creator myself in
the video space, how long do you plan these things ahead? Like
how long does it take for you to turn your idea your learning
into a video, particularly knowing that you have a process?
So how long does it take you?
Simon Høiberg: Good question because how it works right now
is mainly in bulk. So I script and write for five videos at a
time, then I spent typically a weekend and I shoot the whole
thing along with maybe 10-12 sort. So I just make a video,
shooting weekend out of it. And then I shoot a lot of content.
And then I plan ahead and schedule ahead almost three
months into the future. So going from an idea to an actual video,
it's hard to pinpoint exactly because I'm batching it like I
do here. And sometimes I also do run into problems with certain
lessons that I have been outdated. I have had to kill off
videos in my schedule that I ended up spending a lot of time
producing because I learned something new along the way. And
I realized that this is just not updated knowledge. This is
actually poor advice. I don't want to be the person extra
saying this now. And this can happen sometimes within a three
month period because you learn so rapidly. I think I spent on
average, around 10 hours a week at this moment on my YouTube
channel alone and this includes everything from thumbnail,
researching topics, writing the scripts, filming editing, and at
this point, I do the whole thing myself. I'm still a little bit
embarrassed to say but I still do everything in this whole
production pipeline. But I think around 10 hours a week, but
that's given that I'm batching it and that I have now a huge
library of stock videos that I can just drag in and they
somewhat fit. I have filmed hundreds of small clips of me on
a computer, me with a mouse. I have a ton of these thumbnails
starters that I can just click and then it's a Photoshop
project. And I can start building a thumbnail out of it,
tons of building blocks that allow me to push these things
really fast. I wouldn't expect someone else to only spend 10
hours a week on building YouTube channel like mine, if they're
just starting out. I certainly didn't. It took longer in the
beginning for sure.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you built it. These 10 hours, they exist on
top of hundreds of hours of work that went into it.
Simon Høiberg: Absolutely!
Arvid Kahl: I love this and your stock videos, if we just do
stuff and hold things up or whatever. I love these two
because they just give the videos very nice character. And
there's one particular scene that I really liked. I want to
talk about you about one particular video you made. And
that's called A Day in the Life of a Tech Entrepreneur Without
Burning Out. That was the title of the video. And I really
enjoyed it because it kind of intersects almost everything
that I am about, software entrepreneurship,
entrepreneurship in general and mental health. And these are
important things. And I was very, very happy to see that one
little stock video where you were holding up one of my books.
It was just really adorable to see my work reflected in it. But
it was a scene that where you were like, well, I wanna take in
all this knowledge, but I don't have time for it, right? I have
other things to do. And there was this very dramatic scene
where as a founder, you were just screaming out in horror
over error messages and business problems. And I remember feeling
this myself when I ran a SaaS company before I sold it. And I
wonder how you prevent these moments from happening in your
own life right now because you look busy. So how do you deal
with the mental challenges, the pressure of all of this?
Simon Høiberg: That's a great question. I think for me and it
might kind of it's often when I say this, it comes out a little
bit techie or a little bit like the corner, you know, but the
way I do everything is joy driven. And that's also really
the message of that video that you're mentioning here. I make
sure that passion and joy is on top of everything else. And as
soon as you do that you have, in my experience at least, you will
experience an almost unlimited amount of strength to handle
these extremely difficult situation and where you're
mentally being very challenged with a lot of things. I hear a
lot of people talking about discipline, as if that's the
key. That's what you need to develop. That's motivation comes
and goes. Discipline is what you're gonna fall back on. And
it's not that I'm going to sit here and say that no discipline.
I agree that you should have some discipline. But I try
personally to gamify my entire life around joy. I think joy,
motivation, intrinsic motivation for the things that you do is
the most powerful fuel that you can put into you and it will
give you superpowers in terms of handling certain obstacles that
are super hard. And I have certain tricks that I do in my
life to enhance this sense of joy. First of all, as you
mentioned right now I look busy. And I think a lot of people get
this experience. And it's a long time since I tried to count the
hours I work but it's up there. Now in this video, I say 85
hours that's back then it's probably not 85 hours. Today, I
just became a dad and we're doing a bunch of family stuff,
but it's up there still. However, one thing that you will
notice is that my calendar is empty. While I have a huge to do
list of tasks that I need to fix and things constantly rolling in
and it's never ending. If I wanted to spend 100 hours of
this every week, I could. My calendar itself is close to
empty. We have a podcast right now. That one was scheduled full
disclosure. We didn't just kind of like randomly pop in here. So
there's a few things every once in a while that I do have
scheduled but one of the things that really intrinsically
motivates me and brings me joy is the fact that I can do things
in my own flow, pick the tasks that I'm excited about that day
and do it in as I try to make my task as little dependent on each
other as I possibly can. My entire team, we were five
members of my team right now. We have an excellent culture of
doing async written work. We never have meetings. I don't
ever barge in and take a specific hour out of my team
members time. And I found team members that really love this
way of working as well. I hate that. And I know they hate that,
it's way to interrupt the work and in my experience, there's
never, I guess sometimes I never ever say never. But there's
rarely things that are so important that it can't be
written down and published in a Slack channel. And then my team
will see it at some point of the day and they will address it.
And to me, that's a way of gamifying my life and setting it
up for joy and excitement. And it really does allow me to
handle some really critical situations, like sometimes you
do need to go into firefighting mode. And then I don't have
anywhere else to be. There's nothing scheduled, there's
nowhere that I have to kind of like, I can drop everything, I
can put everything aside and I can jump right on board on
something that's either critical or I can allow myself to feel
tired and exhausted about a certain thing and not continue
doing that by force but just shifting to something else that
I'm more excited about at that point. That's one of the ways
that I do that.
Arvid Kahl: I really like it, like the empty calendar in
particular is something that I very much relate to. Like our
conversation right now is the only thing I have scheduled this
week. That was always my goal, right? To have the calendar so
empty, that nobody else could tell me what I can't do. You
know, because it's not really about them telling me what they
want. That's just how you interact with people, right?
They have their needs, you try to help them and then you render
them with service and they pay you. That's kind of how we live
our lives, right? But to not have them control my time was
the biggest thing that I ever wanted. And I'm fortunately at
this point that having this amazing conversation with you,
that is the only thing where two people are involved. So I'm
really, really happy about this. And I think your mindset that I
hear right now is A, two things. It's like nothing is so urgent
and important that it needs to interrupt everything else. So
you have this very clear focus on prioritizing things in a very
sane way. Because if everything is urgent, then nothing is
urgent, right? If everything needs to happen, then there is
no priority anymore. And I see you having a very, very active
priority since there. And a delayed communication being as
the central mode of a team is also wonderful. I think now that
most people, even solopreneurs that are growing their teams,
like the first employee or first contractor, we mostly do this
remotely. We mostly do this on a global level, right? I have two
people that helped me. One is in Denmark. The other person's in
the Philippines. Obviously, I won't ever be able to talk with
them at the same time because I'm in Canada. So no, we're all
over the world, right? So this needs to be, I've tried to
establish myself, like a standard operating procedure,
like a process based communication and very async,
back and forth emails. Nothing is ever so urgent that I need to
call them. That was always the plan. And that's how I set it
up. I'm happy to hear you're handling this the same way.
Because in many ways, you are somebody I look up to in terms
of being a creator because you handle it in a wonderful way.
And you talk about the things that I care about in a very
aligned way as well. And yeah, that's kind of what I really,
really like about your approach here. And this stopping whatever
you want on the thing that is bothering you and going to
somewhere else is also a great approach. I do wonder now that
your businesses are growing and you have more and more people,
do you see this becoming harder, like to kind of stop doing the
thing that bothers you? Because maybe there is a dependency with
somebody else's work. Have you found a way out of that?
Simon Høiberg: Yeah, sometimes it does become harder. And it's
like playing down, it isn't always possible. Sometimes you
do need to kind of fold and say like, there's something that's
urgent or important enough or there's certain I'm not gonna I
don't wanna put my team through stressful situations. So
especially we have on FeedHive, in particular, because it's
running. It's a social media management tool. And we are
dependent on these third party API's. It's our entire product
and they fail notoriously. It's very annoying. And our users
aren't always aware that this is just the name of the game. It
produces a lot of support tickets. So we have a support
team on board and I don't always want to sit to put them in a
stressful situation handling some users that can be very,
very frustrated, let's just say it like that and downright like
impolite and not very nice to talk to. So there's some times
where it's not always possible. And that's where I as the
business owner, jump in and make sure that their work is nice and
pleasant and not because I think as like it's not their business.
First of all, they're also not entrepreneurs. They didn't sign
up for this. That kind of crisis management and discomfort is
what I signed up for. So sometimes of course I put my
calendar or whatever I'm doing at that time aside and then I
just kind of do and solve whatever problem I need right
there even though it can be a little bit annoying sometimes. I
think the essence of it is that I think people don't burn out
from working a lot. I think people burning out from be
feeling forced to work on something that is either not
clear to them how this would benefit their lives or they're
forced to do it either by their employer or by salary situations
or other. I think that's what burning people out. And I have
tried my very best to make sure that there are a minimum number
of situations where I have to push myself to keep working on
something that I really, really dislike. And every time these
situations happen, I do sit down. I carefully reflect and I
tried to come up with processes to prevent this from happening
in the future, both for myself and for my employees that's
working with me.
Arvid Kahl: That closes the loop. Here's another process to
make the life of your business, your employees and yourself
better, easier and more manageable. I love this. And I
love the kindness that I hear in your voice right now. Because
you're talking about your employees and trying to protect
them and making sure that they get what they sign up for. You,
just an awesome guy. And I'm really, really glad that we
Simon Høiberg: Thank you, Arvid!
Arvid Kahl: Had this conversation today. That was
really nice. If people wanna find out more about you and I
bet they do wanna find out more about you, where do you want
them to go?
Simon Høiberg: I think YouTube is probably the best place to
get like an in depth glimpse of what I'm doing. Otherwise, I'm
very active on pretty much everywhere: LinkedIn, Twitter,
Instagram, TikTok. You can find me around the internet on most
social media platforms.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you are everywhere, which is good. Well,
thanks so much, Simon for being on the show today. That was
really, really kind of you to share everything that you shared
today. That was wonderful. Thank you.
Simon Høiberg: Absolutely. Thank you for being here. It was a
pleasure.
Arvid Kahl: And that's it for today. Thank you for listening
to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on Twitter
@arvidkahl. You'll find my books and my twitter course there as
well. If you wanna support me and the show, please subscribe
to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player
of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to
(http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). Any of this, will truly help the
show. So thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful
day. Bye bye