Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnerships, Planning Your Next Quarter, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)
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You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. My name is Rob Walling, and I am your host this week and every week on the show. Today, I welcome back Derek Reimer, and we talk through some really interesting listener questions. How to delegate as a perfectionist, how to organize and think about SaaS partnerships, and planning your next quarter as a bootstrapper, as a super small team. We'll jump into those questions in just a moment. If you haven't checked out my new course, the SAS Launchpad, head to saslaunchpad.co. This is the first course I have created in 14 years. It is incredibly in-depth. It's a video course with transcripts and worksheets and quizzes, and it's all about early stage.
It's all about going from zero to one, going from finding ideas to vetting them to getting them launched successfully. saslaunchpad.co if you want to check it out. questions Derek Reimer thanks for coming back on the show pleasure to be back So I have some really good questions today continuing on this topic of more intermediate to advanced questions. The first one is from HelloIt'sOli on Twitter. Oli asks, we're at $32,000. I'm going to assume that's MRR. And we've done it through long hours, endless experimentation, and a lot of good luck. Hard work, luck, and skill sounds like it. My question is, how should co-founders with perfectionist tendencies delegate work? And what qualities should they look for when hiring?
And then Ali actually goes on to ask two or three more questions, which we can take in due time. But as someone with perfectionist tendencies... We laugh because you and I are both that way in certain areas.
That's the name of our band. Co-founders with Perfectionist Tendencies.
Just Perfectionist Tendencies for short. What are we, like a third wave ska band?
Perfectionist Tendencies.
I think that's it. You're the guy just dancing on stage. You know I love to dance. Tuba? No, drum major.
Drum major, yeah.
And sax. And sax, I forgot that. Everything's in B-flat, people. You have to play it all in B-flat. Okay, so back to Ollie's insightful question. Perfectionist tendencies, which I think a lot of founders... not all, but a good chunk of founders become founders because they really want control over things, right? They don't like a day job because they're ordered around and they work with people they don't want to work with and they can't hire and fire and they, but whatever, you know, and I want to control because if I can control everything, it will be better. And oftentimes that's true, but it doesn't scale. You can't run, I say can't in quotes, you can't run a million dollar, $2 million error SaaS company with just you. At some point you have to let some stuff go. So To that point, how do you think about hiring people to do stuff that you're a perfectionist about and what qualities do you look for?
So I think there's, as I was thinking this through, there's kind of like two buckets, two different kinds of delegation, I think. So there's like the mindset or the task before you of, you know, I have some less skilled work that's not worth spending my valuable founder time on. And when I could be working on higher leverage things. So maybe bookkeeping or scraping some data to build a cold email list or even support, which I think is something that a lot of founders hold on for way too long. So there's kind of that bucket of things that's like, okay, my time's valuable and this stuff is potentially not worth my time. Then there's the stuff that's like, the business needs certain expertise in order to keep moving forward.
And though I want to hold on to this thing, like, Actually, I'm not the best person for the job. So then that's delegating stuff that's really not in your zone of genius. And a lot of times when you're just starting out, depending on what your resources are, how much funding you may have or may not have, you just got to... roll up your sleeves and do it. But I think that, you know, that ends up holding you back at a certain point if you're, if you're just holding on too tightly onto something where you're, it's not actually in your zone of genius. So, you know, for that, I'm like, it feels like an obvious answer, but it's like, look for someone better than me at the job. You know, someone who has that particular specialty.
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