TB The Bootstrapped Founder

Podcast

The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses, how to build an audience, and how to build in public.

Website ↗ Last published 3 April 2026 300 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on The Bootstrapped Founder

“It's not a happy path, it's a happy traveler that you care about.” — Arvid Kahl, The Bootstrapped Founder
Arvid Kahl · 12 Jun 2024 Listen →
“I think the real misalignment is that entrepreneurs want optionality… When there's misalignment, investors are usually trying to force you to give up your optionality. They're saying, 'We want to structure this company in such a way that you really have to go all the way to IPO or bust.'” — Tyler Tringas, The Bootstrapped Founder
Tyler Tringas · 12 Jun 2024 Listen →
“The cost of fine-tuning was $3. And then when they saw my tweets where I was sharing my revenue that I was making so much money with this, they said, sorry, we need to increase the price to $20 per training. And I was selling them for like $25 or $30. So for like a month, they got all the money. And I couldn't switch. … You're dependent on a supplier who can, when they see you're successful, they increase the price.” — Pieter Levels, The Bootstrapped Founder
Pieter Levels · 25 Oct 2023 Listen →
“The downside of sharing is potentially someone online tells me that I'm wrong or makes fun of me. It's like, okay, sure. The downside of staying quiet is, do I reach the end of my career wishing that I had lived my life differently and exposed myself to more opportunities? That's a heavy and totally imbalanced equation.” — Aaron Francis, The Bootstrapped Founder
Aaron Francis · 11 Oct 2023 Listen →
“I've realized that the game of building in public, or the game of sharing, is so unknowable, but it's so cheap to play that the only answer is to play more… The ones that I thought were winners were losers. And the ones that I thought were nothing are the big winners. That's why your job is to share things and not to pre-filter or pre-judge, because you'll miss your best stuff if you're pre-filtering.” — Aaron Francis, The Bootstrapped Founder
Aaron Francis · 11 Oct 2023 Listen →
“You're hiring people that specifically are better than you at that function so that that function becomes better than it currently is. If you don't, then the company will never get better than you personally are at every function, which is a complete failure of leadership.” — Jason Cohen, The Bootstrapped Founder
Jason Cohen · 19 Jul 2023 Listen →
“I call privacy the political equalizer because both sides care. I mean, we've had political parties, and we've not worked with any of them, but political parties contact us because we have that privacy thing.” — Jack Ellis, The Bootstrapped Founder
Jack Ellis · 17 May 2023 Listen →
“I have no doubt in my mind that engineers at these hosting companies… are better than me. Those DevOps engineers, the people that update the servers, all of that stuff, they're better than me. And I'm not going to be able to compete with their level of knowledge. So we actually pay a premium for the most highly available services.” — Jack Ellis, The Bootstrapped Founder
Jack Ellis · 17 May 2023 Listen →

Recent Episodes

  1. 3 Apr 2026

    439: The Increasing Risk of Building in Public

  2. 20 Mar 2026

    438: AI Liability: The Landmines Under Your SaaS

  3. 13 Mar 2026

    437: Data Is the Only Moat

  4. 13 Feb 2026

    436: When Long-Term Investments Finally Pay Off

  5. 6 Feb 2026

    435: How to Actually Use Claude Code to Build Serious Software

  6. 30 Jan 2026

    434: Follow Your Passion (But Not Like That)

  7. 23 Jan 2026

    433: The 1% Improvement Myth

  8. 16 Jan 2026

    432: Don't Give Up... Your Assumptions

  9. 9 Jan 2026

    431: Many Heads, Not Many Hats: The Founder's Identity Crisis

  10. 2 Jan 2026

    430: The Case Against Vendor Lock-In: Why Easy Exit Means Better Retention

  11. 26 Dec 2025

    429: The Dead Internet Theory: Are We Building Machines That Only Talk to Other Machines?

  12. 19 Dec 2025

    428: Marketing for Founders Who Hate Marketing

Guests

Aaron Francis (2 episodes), Patrick Campbell (2 episodes), James Phoenix (2 episodes), Tyler Tringas (2 episodes), Brennan Dunn (2 episodes), Nick Groeneveld (2 episodes), Brian Sierakowski (2 episodes), Moritz Dausinger , Yong-Soo Chung ✈️ , Amanda Natividad , Damon Chen , Danny Postma , and 98 more.