Startups For the Rest of Us

Mike and Rob answer listener questions about when to pivot, gaining trust from early adopters and how to handle credit card expirations.

Show Notes Dan’s 7-Day Startup Book Transcript [00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I have Dan Norris on the show and we talk about five startup rules to live by. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 183. [00:09] Music [00:18] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob. [00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike. [00:27] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike? [00:32] Mike: I’m experimenting a little bit with some various bio hacks to help improve my overall health. Some things are just basic things like just going to the gym on a very regular basis but some of them are I’ll say a little bit out there and so far though it seems to be working. There are certain things that I’ve noticed for example. I’m working less hours and it feels like I should pull back on spending time working out but at the same time I recognize that if I do that then what’s going to happen is I’m going to spend those additional hours working on my products and stuff but at the same time, my productivity is going to drop. So it’s this weird state where I know in the back of my mind that I really shouldn’t do that but it’s like I want to. [01:16] Rob: I’m a little confused. You’re working less hours by choice and that makes you feel like you should workout less? [01:21] Mike: No. I’m working less hours and I’m spending that time instead working out. [01:26] Rob: I see. [01:27] Mike: So in the back of my mind I’m like I wish I had more time to work on this stuff. Where can I get that time from? and the natural place to get it from would be to stop working out. [01:37] Rob: Exercise. [01:38] Mike: Exactly. Exercise. But I know that if I do that, it’s going to negatively impact my productivity when I am working. [01:42] Rob: When you are working, right. [01:42] Mike: And the other thing, my wife’s a fitness instructor so she actually put together one of the workout routines for me and I tried it out and afterwards I gave her a call and I was like I think you’re trying to kill me because that was really rough. And she’s like it couldn’t have possibly been that bad and then she tried it and she’s like sorry. [02:00] Rob: Nice. She was trying to kill you. [02:04] Mike: I think so. [02:06] Rob: Hey, I have a couple things this week. The first is a congratulations to a three time MicroConf attendee, his name’s Robert Grzesek and he writes software that controls mills which are little wood – well sometimes they’re very large but sometimes smaller, things that cut wood to make cabinets and to do really intricate cuts and he said that they take in the software, he’s been doing it full time for years. They’ve taken it as far as they could so they decided to actually launch their own mill to build some hardware. So we launched a kick starter and they wanted $30,000 and it was funded the first day. They’re now a $61,000 and they have 29 days to go still as the recording of this podcast. We’ll link it up in the show notes or you can also search on the Nomad CNC mill. So check it out for sure and congratulations to Robert for getting that up on kick starter. [02:56] The other announcement from the community is Brennan Dunn is going to be on Edinburgh in Scotland in June. He’s going to be talking at the Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. disruption and publishing conference on June 20th. Brennan’s also looking at putting together a workshop about online marketing and starting a business so if you’re interested, if you know Brennan and you’re in the Edinburgh area, I would recommend that you drop him an email at brennan@planscope.io and let him know that you’r[...]

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