Episode 841 | One-time Payments, Growing a Step 2 Business, Positioning, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
This is Startup for the Rest of Us, I'm Rob Walling. In this episode, I answer your listener questions, really good listener questions today about one-time payments versus subscriptions, the positioning and pricing of a Shopify bundle, question about a step to business, and more. I'm really excited to get back on the microphone today after an almost three-week break as my wife and kids and I went to Japan. We had a great time, it was our first trip there, and this is my first episode back recording. Before we dive into the episode, I want to tell you about Tiny Seeds SaaS Institute. You've heard me say that being a founder means making hard decisions with incomplete information. But for most founders, you're running a company this size for the first time. And as the decisions get bigger, so do the consequences. That's where it helps to have a sounding board. Someone who can tell you whether you're on track or about to waste six months on the wrong thing. And that's why we've built SaaS Institute. You get a dedicated coach who's scaled B2B SaaS to eight figures, a mastermind of other founders at your stage, and direct access to experts in growth, sales, product, and finance. Everything you need to help break through your next plateau. Just ask James Rose, the founder of ContentSnair. Here's how he put it. Quote, When I joined, we were at around 10 people, and the biggest problem was just trying to work out what was next. When you're so close to the business, it's easy to get stuck in your ways and develop blindspots, so I needed fresh eyes. My coach helped me solve that. Every month, we'd work out the next most important thing. And when you've been going at it alone for a long time, it's amazing to have a peer group whom you can ask questions of, who've already solved this exact problem before. End quote. If you're doing a million or more, and whether you're B2B or B2C, we love to work with you. If you're feeling a bit stuck like James was, head to saasinstitute.com to learn more and apply if it's a good fit.
Let's dive into my first listener questions from James Gafer. And James actually responded to an email that I sent out to my list, robwalling.com/emails, if you're interested in getting a weekly, a mostly weekly essay on thoughts that I have, a lot of which don't appear in the other formats, right? Don't appear on YouTube, don't appear in the podcast. And it's just deeper thought pieces around aspects of building, launching, growing a startup. And this one is, it does have a B to C element, but if you listen through it, you'll realize why I decided to answer it.
James says, hey Rob, long time listener of the pod. I love it and I've learned so much. The biggest problem facing me these days is determining how far to take my current business. I run a Discord bot called Apollo, which helps online communities organize events. And that's at Apollo.FYI.
In a lot of ways, this has step two written all over it. B2C slash prosumer, with perhaps a handful of businesses using it. Freemium, relatively high churn, about 6%, and a low price point, $6 a month, soon to be $8 a month. Despite all that, COVID was kind to my business. Demand for online events was way up. I had about 200 people adding the app to Discord a day, and the app has strong virality built in. He put that in quotes, if you read SaaS Playbook, I have strong and weak virality. I appreciated the nod. James says, everyone who signs up for an event is interacting with the app, and that's the viral loop. He tells me his MRR, I'm not going to disclose it here on the show, suffice to say, it is more than a full time income in the United States. Usually that mark I put at $10,000 a month, and he is a bit north of that. And he says, with a price hike next week, it should result in another 30-40% increase in MRR, as I am raising on my existing customers. Price increases for the win.
James continues, I have more ideas for growth. I believe there is a market for a higher tier plan at $25 a month, and I know what I want to build for it. Expanding into ticketed slash paid events is another idea. Reducing the value of my free plan is another. At the end of the day, I'm making more money than I would in a day job, and I'm primed to increase that even more thanks in no small part to your excellent advice on navigating pricing. But there's a not-so-quiet voice in the back of my head that's always whispering to me about platform risk, consumer churn, and the fact that this vertical is never going to be a massive business. In other words, it's not B2B. I think a lot of this comes down to managing my own psychology, which he also put in quotes. Sometimes I like it when people quote me back to myself. Other times it's unnerving when I'm like, oh, did I say that? But James continues, I think a lot of this comes down to managing my own psychology, and there's a good chance I'm experiencing a lot of grasping greener elsewhere, but it still weighs on me. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer this. James and I had a little back and forth via email, and I got his permission to use his name and the app name in the show. Normally, I would anonymize it if he and I hadn't spoken about it in advance. Here's the reason I wanted to answer this on the show is I have a pretty strong opinion about this. A lot of kind of B2C prosumer questions I get are about how to market it and it's things that it's just like, don't, just don't do it. But James is onto something here. And so I wanted to take just a minute and give him and you my thoughts so you can hear how I would think about this as a founder.