Craig Hewitt
speaker
318 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard Feb 2025
Craig Hewitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hey, Rob. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Thanks so much for the podcast and for the SaaS Playbook. I listen to the podcast every week, and I've read the SaaS Playbook five or six different times. And each time I extract new information and insight from it, it's just such an incredible resource for Bootstrap founders. So first of all, thanks so much for all you do.
provides an analytics platform to HR teams to help them make data-informed decisions about their talent. So think about things like collaboration insights, employee engagement drivers, predictive attrition. And for this, we use a variety of different data sources, such as HR systems, business systems, and employee surveys.
For MVP, we built many components, such as our data marts and pipelines, but for others, we decided to white-label other SaaS solutions. For example, for the surveys, there's so many great survey platforms out there, we just couldn't justify custom building something given the relatively low expense we would incur by white labeling an existing solution.
Ideally, though, we would prefer not to have these dependencies on other SaaS companies because we would like the flexibility and control over the cost and features within our platform. Since we are a bootstrap startup, however, we found white label components to be a quick and low-cost method of achieving product market fit and launching our MVP. I've got a few questions around this.
Number 1, how would you advise thinking about the mix of custom-built versus white-label components? Does the optimal mix vary based on growth stage? Number 2, is there an inflection point at which we should consider prioritizing a migration away from these white-label components?
And then lastly, if we were to sell the company one day, does a reliance on other SaaS for specific capabilities impact our valuation versus a fully custom solution? Thanks for your time.
Hello and welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host this week, Craig Hewitt. You may have heard me on the show before. I'm the founder of Castos. I'm the host of the Rogue Startups podcast. Been on this show as a guest a few times. And I'm sitting down with Rob this week to talk about his new course.
Rob, let's dive in and kind of like set the stage for why I think there's a good place to start, right? You've written a few books, very active in the community, 730 episodes of this podcast have given so much to the kind of SaaS and startup community. Why a course and why now?
As a creator, you mean?
Yeah.
So I want to ask about your ICP, right? Like we talk about this a lot. You talk about it on the show. I talk about it a lot with my coaching clients. Who is this most ideal for? And I think that the definition here is a whole bunch of folks could buy this and get value.
But in your mind, I'm sure there's like a person and you probably give them a name and they have a little cartoon or something on your desk, right? But like who is that perfect person? person to get the most amount of value from the SaaS launchpad.
Cool. You mentioned the YouTube channel, right? So I know the MicroConf YouTube channel is like really active, this podcast, a ton of content. I think a lot of questions in folks' minds would be like, it's all out there already, right? Like, and not just your content, right?
A bunch of other folks talk about SaaS and, you know, Sastr and Jason Lipkin and Noah Kagan, all these folks are like, why bundle this into a course? As opposed to just saying like, dude, it's all been talked about already. And then I think, why charge money for it? If it's all out there already, why are you charging money for it?
Oh, cool. Yeah. Okay.
Okay, I want to talk about pricing because on a previous episode of this podcast, it will be a few episodes ago. By the time this goes out, you talked about selling 29,000 copies of the SaaS playbook and some of the kind of financials we could all kind of imply from that. I guess one kind of why and what are you charging for the course? And how do you think about this from a business perspective?
Because like... You're a great person and very kind of giving to the community. But but, you know, let's put that aside and put our business hat on and say, like, hey, your time's valuable. You got to get something in return for this. Why charge at all? How did you arrive at the pricing?
What's the plans and structure like both from your perspective and what other folks could take away from this if they were looking to do something similar?
Why not give it away? Knowing all the, I'll use an internet marketing term, back-end opportunities and offers you have, right? They can go buy the book later on. They can join TinySeed. They can come to MicroConf. Why not make this the biggest, best, free piece of content ever? A couple of reasons.
I'm curious about your approach to selecting the platform and the technology to deliver this. Is that something that you're interested in talking about? Yeah, sure. You mentioned Circle platform that I've used. You have a few communities in there. I think a lot of folks default to something like Slack, which is just terrible. For a lot of reasons. So this course is going to live inside Circle.
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