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PODCAST

The Bootstrapped Founder

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

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

19:36

422: The Things Your Customers Don't Care About

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/11/07

When you build a software business as a founder, you have a dream. Building. Features. APIs. UIs.But how much of that is JUST a dream, and what REALLY leads to paying customers?This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comYou'll find the Black Friday Guide here: https://www.paddle.com/learn/grow-beyond-black-fridayThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-things-your-customers-dont-care-about/The podcast episode:

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21:59

421: Why You Should Never Start a Software Business

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/10/31

The brutal truth about SaaS nobody tells you.Here’s the thing: I’m about to share all the reasons why you should never, ever start a software business. And yes, I’m fully aware that I’m talking to an audience of software founders. This is somewhat sarcastic, somewhat ironic twist on the great things about entrepreneurship. And the problems you'll face.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comYou'll find the Black Friday Guide here:

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23:25

420: AI for the Code-Writing Purist: How to Use AI...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/10/24

I know you're out there. The developer who watches their colleagues enthusiastically embrace Claude Code and Cursor, having AI write entire feature sets while you proudly type every semicolon by hand. The founder who sees AI-generated code as a ticking time bomb of bugs and security vulnerabilities. The software entrepreneur who believes that real code comes from human minds, not language models.This one's for you.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comYou'll find

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20:09

419: The Missing Piece in Your Validation Strategy

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/10/17

A lot of early-stage founders have understood—mostly because more and more people are talking about their early-stage strategies—that you need to validate your ideas. You need to make an effort to figure out if the thing you're planning to do is actually reasonable to attempt. Validation is important and absolutely worth doing prior to building.That much, many people have understood.But here's where things get interesting. Often enough, validation looks like checking if people have the

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16:20

418: Why AI-Generated Code Hurts Your Exit

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/10/10

We're living through a fascinating moment in software development. AI coding tools can build features faster than ever before. They can scan entire codebases, spot things we might miss, and implement changes across dozens of files in seconds. It's incredible.But there's something we need to talk about. Something that's quietly accumulating in our projects while we marvel at how quickly we can ship features.This is called comprehension debt.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is

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15:56

417: The Best Tech Stack in the Age of AI

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/10/03

A couple of years ago, I tweeted that “the best tech stack is the one you already know.” To this day, this is one of my most resonating tweets. People keep bringing it back, and founders who've been around for a while seem to particularly agree with it. But AI changes things. Or does it?This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-best-tech-stack-in-the-age-of-ai/ The podcast episode:

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19:12

416: The Ownership Paradox: What Do You Really...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/09/26

As I'm building yet another software service business after having built and sold one back in 2019, I keep wrestling with a fundamental question that might sound simple but has profound implications: What do I actually own in this business?This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-ownership-paradox-what-do-you-really-control-in-your-software-business/The podcast episode:

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20:14

Handling Multiple ICPs as a Solo Founder

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/09/19

This is something I've been wrestling with at Podscan, and I know many of you face the same challenge: you're building a product that could serve two, three, maybe even five different ideal customer profiles. And you're trying to figure out how to keep them all balanced—or whether you should even try.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/handling-multiple-icps-as-a-solo-founder/The podcast episode:

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23:08

414: The Pure Amateur is Vanishing: Why Everyone's a...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/09/12

I was recently reading an article about The Great British Baking Show - or Bake Off, as we fans of this fun TV competition call it. It was written by someone who had been on the show, one of the competitors, and they were talking about how looking at the show from the inside made them realize something profound: there are no real amateurs anymore.Not only is that changing the media landscape, it also affects what businesses are needed to serve what has replaced them. This episode of The

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25:15

413: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Moat

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/09/05

You know that moment when you realize the ground has shifted beneath your feet? I had one of those moments recently. I was watching an AI agent build out a complex feature for Podscan in about twenty minutes – something that would have taken me days to code properly just a year ago. And it hit me: the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/were-gonna-need-a-bigger-moat/

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25:11

The $0.20/Day AI System That Converts Trial Users...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/29

It took me a long while to realize this: AI isn't just something like a chatbot for my customers. AI can work behind the scenes to facilitate getting the right stuff in front of the right people for me, even just to figure out who people are and how I should talk to them. And today, I want to share exactly what I'm doing, how expensive this is to run, and how I believe this can be part of every single software as a service business out there—even if you don't have any touchpoint with

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19:05

411: The Currents of a Founder

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/22

I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: "A stronger current makes for stronger fish."That's it. That's what entrepreneurship is.We're constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish—the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create—or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength depending on where you

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23:34

410: Building for the Age of AI Consumers

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/15

I think we're at the precipice of a pretty significant change in how we build software products. Obviously, the recent ascent of vibe coding and all the agentic coding tools that we find very useful and highly effective shows a difference in how we approach building products. But there's another change - not just in how we build, but in who these products are for.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post:

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59:26

409: James Phoenix — Claude Code Masterclass

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/13

James Phoenix is an expert in agentic coding, particularly Claude code, a tool that I have been using to great effect over the last couple months. I chatted with James just a couple days ago and have implemented several of the tips that he gave me during a conversation, and I'm already almost twice as effective at using this already magically effective tool. So I don't think I can overpromise how much insight into well-structured and highly optimized agentic coding you will get from this

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21:29

408: The Podscan Ideas Vault: Engineering as Marketing

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/08

Today I'll be talking about a successful marketing project within my software business that turned out to be so successful that it spawned a business built on top of that business.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-podscan-ideas-vault-engineering-as-marketing/ The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/408-the-podscan-ideas-vault-engineering-as-marketingCheck out Podscan, the Podcast database that

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49:39

407: Nick Groeneveld — Exploring AI's Impact on...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/06

Nick Groeneveld is a designer and User Experience expert who has been a valued collaborator on Podscan, my own software product. Nick works as a freelancer for a lot of companies that have no in-house design knowledge, and he's been navigating the rapid changes that AI tools like Lovable and vZero are bringing to the design world. With 10 years of professional design experience and a deep understanding of design theory, Nick brings a unique perspective on what happens when machines start

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22:22

406: Making Your Business Sellable (Even If You Never...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/08/01

Today, I’ll share how I’ve been preparing Podscan (and long before that, another SaaS business) to be ready to be acquired at a moment’s notice. This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/making-your-business-sellable-even-if-you-never-plan-to-sell/The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/406-making-your-business-sellable-even-if-you-never-plan-to-sellCheck out Podscan, the Podcast database that transcribes every

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13:44

405: The Friction Paradox: Why AI Might Be Making Us...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/07/25

Today we’ll talk about how AI systems, particularly the ones that do all the work for us, can both massively amplify and hinder our effectiveness. The good get better, and the bad get worse. It's a problem.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-friction-paradox-why-ai-might-be-making-us-worse-at-what-we-do/ The podcast episode:

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27:47

404: The Transcription Challenge: Building...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/07/18

Today we’ll talk about keeping up with an avalanche of audio data and how I built Podscan’s transcription infrastructure.This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-transcription-challenge-building-infrastructure-that-scales-with-the-world/The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/404-the-transcription-challenge-building-infrastructure-that-scales-with-the-worldCheck out Podscan, the Podcast database that

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44:29

403: Amar Ghose — From Non-Technical Founder to SaaS...

The Bootstrapped Founder ·

2025/07/16

Amar Ghose has been growing Zenmaid from idea to market leader as a non-technical founder. Zenmaid is a SaaS platform that's been helping maid service owners grow their businesses since 2013. Amar is one of those amazing founders who truly embodies the bootstrapping spirit—when his co-founder left early on at just $15k in monthly revenue, he could have easily given up. Instead, he stuck with it, and through relentless customer focus and persistence, he's built ZenMaid into a $150k per month

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425 results

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