Episode 750 | Making Your First Hire, Testing Prices, And More Listener Questions (with Laura Roeder)
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You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. In this episode, I have Laura Roeder, founder of Paperbell, join me on the show to answer listener questions. We talk about making your first hire, testing prices, and a bunch of other questions related to mid to later stage bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders. Before we dive in to today's questions, I wanted to let you know about something that my team and I at TinySeed have been working on for at least six months in the background. And it's a premium private coaching community designed for B2B SaaS founders making at least $1 million in ARR or more. It's called the SAS Institute. And if you want to find out more, head to sasinstitute.com, enter your email address. We'll be trickling out more information in the coming weeks and over the next few months. We are keeping the initial group very small.
So if you're interested in applying to potentially be part of the first cohort to get expert coaching, mentorship, and community for high-level SAS founders, head to sasinstitute.com. If you've been watching what we've done with TinySeed over the past five or six years and thought to yourself, I could really use some community and mentorship and advice, but I don't necessarily want to raise funding and or give up equity, that's why we're launching the SaaS Institute. And with that, let's dive into listener questions with Laura Roeder.
Laura Roeder, thanks for joining me on Startups for the Rest of Us.
Yes, for the third time, apparently. Fourth time. The fourth time.
Yeah, so back in 2013, episode 143, How to Hire Like a Bootstrapper, with special guest Laura Roeder, and then two episodes in 2019, where I interviewed you about, it must have been Edgar. Yeah. Yeah, it was about Edgar, because it's seller growth, platform, risk, layoffs, and powering through roadblocks. That sounds like the summary of Edgar.
That sounds like Edgar, all the things, all the things.
And then you sold Edgar in 22, I believe, right? A couple years ago.
Yeah.
You have a good blog post about that. We'll link up in the show notes. And then December of 2019, you came on to answer listener questions. So today you are working on Paperbell. Is that paperbell.com? Do you have the .com?
Yes.
Very nice. You want to tell folks what it is, the history of that, how long you've been working on it?
Yeah, so Paperbell is a bootstrap SaaS that's been around for four years. We're in the seven-figure annual reoccurring revenue range, and it's a tool for coaches, like life coaches, to run their business. So it has their website, their scheduling, their payments, client comms, all that stuff.
And how big is your team?
Very small. So we operate on all, like mostly freelancers and part-timers. So we basically have two developers, two customer service people. I have a project manager that works with me in marketing and freelancers.
Very nice. So you have a lot of experience across the board, bootstrapping, hiring, all the things. We have some good questions for you and I to bat around today. First one is from Ryan King. And Ryan says, hey Rob, Thanks for your advice on selling my company at the end of 2022. The sale didn't happen in the end, but I found my feet and I'm working on trying to grow again. I have an intermediate startup question for you. I'm trying to transition from a one-person company where I do everything to having a team. Your book, I think it means a SaaS playbook, explores the idea of who should be your first hire. But I'm interested in that in-between phase where you have some excess profit, but not enough to make a full-time hire.
My SaaS produces in excess of about $2,000 annually. month at the moment it's not much but i've been trying to use it to hire freelancers to work on the project expecting it to buy me time to work more on marketing and sales but it's been a very frustrating experience and i'm not sure i can find someone reliable at that price point i'm looking to try something new and i'm interested in hearing how you would utilize a small amount of funds to help grow the company if you were in a similar situation well laura i think both you and i have been in this situation so what what's your advice for ryan
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