Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 435 | The Value of Startup Accelerators, Better Onboarding, Liability Insurance, and More Listener Questions     00:00 /   1X  

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Show Notes

In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer a number of listener questions on topics including the value of startup accelerators, onboarding, liability insurance and more.

Items mentioned in this episode:

• AppSumo
• MicroConf
• Clocr.com
• Founder Shield
• Sports Tracker App

Transcript

Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about the value of startup accelerators, better onboarding, liability insurance, and answering more listener questions. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 435.

Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

Mike: And I’m Mike.

Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week sir?

Mike: Well, I wanted to give a congratulations to Ty Wood. He was the winner of the AppSumo contest last month and he won a all expense paid trip to both MicroConfs.

Rob: Nice.

Mike: That was courtesy of AppSumo. I just wanted to say a big shout out to those guys and say thank you to them for sponsoring that. We’ll see Ty Wood at MicroConf.

Rob: Yeah, Ty, please come up, introduce yourself. It would be good to meet you. Thanks to AppSumo for that. Speaking of MicroConf, I believe this episode goes live just a couple of weeks before MicroConf. I’m guessing we might have a few tickets left either for Starter or Growth. If you’re interested with hanging around with a couple of hundred other serious SaaS software startup founders, you should head over to microconf.com, take a peek at it and hopefully, we’ll see you in Vegas.

Today, we’re going to dig into some listener questions after we’re down to absolute zero a couple of episodes ago. We got a nice little influx, we got a few voicemails, but I wanted to kick us off with first a thank you from James.

He says, “Hi, Mike and Rob. I’ve been listening since 2014. I’m a solo entrepreneur living in Central Africa, in Burundi, Rwanda. Here, we don’t have angel investors. Instead there are people with cash but most of the time, they aren’t people who share my same values. There’s a lot of financial corruption here. I decided to go solo, train another developer. Now we have two main products that can serve two different niches locally. The wisdom on your podcast has helped me so much during my journey. We have different realities, but I regularly find motivation to continue on and a clear understanding during the journey, so thank you so much.”

Thanks so much for that, James. I really appreciate it. We started the podcast, both to find other people like us because it was like, “Hey, you and me, are the only people doing this,” and then to find a handful of others that were doing it? Along the way, I’ve really seen it as an amazing by product that we’re able to help people whether it’s directly or indirectly, whether it’s us just talking and giving motivation or tactics or through the conference that we started and the community we’ve built. I love getting emails like this. these kinds of things make my week.

Mike: Yeah, congratulations, James. It’s hard enough to put one product together but you’ve got two that are serving two different niches and both helping out underground where you’re living. It’s fantastic to be able to help out the local community and be able to make a living from it as well. Really appreciate hearing from you and best of luck with that.

Rob: Our first question of the day is a voicemail on the value of joining an accelerator if you ultimately want to raise institutional funding.

“Hey, Rob and Mike. This is Sree, cofounder of clocr.com, it’s short for cloud locker. We are an early stage startup company based out of Austin, Texas. CLOCR empowers you to manage and protect your family’s most important documents and enables you or your loved ones to have instant access in case of financial, personal, or medical emergencies. We are currently in a pre-launch stage and we’re giving away about 1000 lifetime subscriptions for early adopters. I found you guys about four months ago on the podcast and it changed my life forever. Seriously. The amount of guidance you both provide is invaluable. I wish I had found this podcast about a year ago. Please do keep up the good work. I can’t wait to meet both of you at the Micro Conference.

I found several co-founders for CLOCR and that is [inaudible 00:04:20] our LinkedIn and angellist. I’ve been self-funding CLOCR for about a year or so—less lower than a year. I’m getting ready for the launch in the next four weeks. My strategy is to seek a small amount of funding, $200k-$300k for the next 18 months or so to a kind of a workable debt. Our plan is to aggressively bring in users before going in for institutional funding. I denied a few requests for funding. Here are the questions: Now that I have a few advisers joining CLOCR and I continue to add advisors as we go, is there a value in going down the accelerator path? Will that add any value in terms of the buzz and visibility or will it be a distraction? Will these accelerator programs help set-up for funding, or will they help me grow the user base? My main goal is to increase the user base and set-up the [00:05:17] vision thing and folks to build the company. Second question, I do like the participate in a startup innovation competition, do you have a short list of companies that we can participate on? Thank you.”

I kind of took three questions away from that. He said, “Is there value in joining an accelerator? Will it provide buzz or visibility?” Second question is, “Do accelerators help grow the user base?” and will it help him get set-up for funding or will it be counter to that, will it be a distraction. The third one is about innovation competition.

I think I’ll start with the innovation competition and say, I don’t know, I would probably just Google it. There’s one called 59 Days of Coding in Fresno. That’s really the only one I’ve been involved in that and that’s the only one I know off the top of my head.

Mike: Going back to Sree’s first couple of questions, is there value in going through an accelerator in terms of buzz and visibility. I would think that for some accelerators you would get some buzz from it but for something like CLOCR that is more B2C oriented, I suspect that the buzz you get from it is probably not going be to nearly as helpful. They may have PR outlets that could help you generate more publicity and get in front of more consumer type of users. But I think the main value in joining an accelerator—I guess there’s a couple of different things you can get out of it—but the first one would be the mentorship.

It’s not necessarily about growing your user base directly by virtue of joining an accelerator but rather you get mentorship to point you in the right direction and helps guide you in terms of what other people have done before you, what mistakes they’ve made, what things they’ve done that’s gone really well, people they can introduce you to, the network. Those are the types of things that are going to grow your user base. It’s not like you just join and you suddenly get a magic ticket that pumps 5000 new users into your app. It’s not how it works. You have to basically go through the program and talk to people and figure out what it is that you’re supposed to do that’s going to have the most impact and then go do it. That is going to grow your user base.

The other thing that the accelerator’s going to do for you is if it’s coupled with funding of any kind, it’s going to help give you runway and allow you to focus on working on the business as opposed to working on it as a side venture. Because if you’re trying to do something nights and weekends, that’s great and all, but you only have so much time to do that, and a lot of your time is probably going to be spent on your main job trying to make ends meet for you and your family. Getting rid of that as a distraction is going to be one of those main benefits of that accelerator.

The other one is if you’re looking to raise money down the road, an accelerator, going through a program like essentially gives you validation, and to some extent, trust from other investors that, “Oh, this accelerator invested in me and the business because they believe what we’re doing.” By virtue of that, that’s transferred to other investors. There’s a lot of credibility that you can gain in your business just by virtue of being attached to them. But because they have presumably vetted you in some way, shape, or form in order to accept you into the accelerator program.

Rob: I would agree with that. I imagine someone gets 900 applicants and they pick 10 and you’re one of the 10. There’s some signaling there. There’s some halo effect—I don’t know what you want to call it—but you were chosen. It’s different but it’s like getting into Harvard or getting into Yale; you make it through a selection process and that does lend some type of credibility.

I think like you said, it’s going to depend on the accelerator. I mean, there’s hundreds of accelerators and some of them are going to be really good, like helping you grow your user base. But you can either contact prior companies who have gone through it or you can look at the people who are running it and who the mentors are and think to yourself, “Do those people know how to grow a user base? Do I think that their advice or their network, whatever it is that they have can help translate into that?”

I have seen accelerators where I’ve looked at the list of mentors and I don’t know who any of them are or a lot of them are business coaches or college professors or people who maybe have not run a business directly. That’s always a question in my mind of like, “Are they going to give me MBA advise or are they going to be boots on the ground and really dig in to what’s going?” That’s one question I would ask about how to do that.

Certainly, a top name accelerator like YCombinator or TechStars, I think that gives you buzz and visibility. Obviously, the elephant in the room is I run TinySeed which is a startup accelerator designed for all community. I think that there will be a certain amount of buzz and visibility given within our sphere when we announce. I think that as time goes on that buzz and visibility will get bigger and bigger as we become more successful, and as our alumni, do more interesting things.

Our answer is probably the same, yours and mine. It’s like, yeah there is value, but I also—you’ve probably heard this advise of like, “If you’re going to get an MBA, you do it for the network and you do it for certain things.” There’s advises I don’t bother getting it from bottom tier school because it’s not the information, it’s more about the prestige of having Harvard on your diploma or whatever. I would think similarly of there are going to be accelerators that I’ve heard that don’t bring a ton of value. This is not a blanket answer for all accelerators. There really is a vetting process that you’re going to have to go through.

I think his second question was kind of like, “Do accelerators help set you up to raise subsequent funding?” My understanding is pretty much unequivocally, yes. That’s actually the goal of most accelerators, to provide you enough money to get to that demo day to have a product to raise funding. TinySeed in particular, that’s not our end goal, but there’s nothing in our terms or even in our goals for our companies that say you should or should not raise subsequent rounds.

One example is some of the angel investments that I’ve made in the “bootstrap space” most of them have not gone on to raise subsequent rounds but one or two have. I’ve been super encouraging about that because the founder saw the opportunity, wanted to level up, the money was there, and the choice is something you evaluate when you get there. I guess the answer to, do startup accelerators help set-up for funding, I think across the board, yes. I don’t know of an accelerator that won’t help you do that, that won’t connect you to angel investors or VCs down the line should you want to raise that money.

Now, one thing I would say is that there are some funds that are offering money to the bootstrapper space that do have clauses in them that will make it hard to raise funding later on. Just be sure you have a good lawyer, or you really look at the terms, or read. There are comparisons of these alternative funding approaches, the non-traditional VC stuff. Do your research and figure out, “If I did want to raise the $2 million later on, is this basically a poison pill?” Poison pill clause doesn’t allow me to do that. As I’ve said, we do not have that in Tiny Seed. We’re going to make it very easy to have [inaudible 00:12:37] investments. I’m thinking most will but there are some that whether intentionally or accidentally do have some clauses but those are not, as I said, they’re not accelerators.

The last thing I realized, innovation competitions. Since he’s a B2C, you should try to go on Shark Tank. It’s not a competition per se. I don’t think Shark Tank is the [00:12:58] all of anything but I do enjoy it for the entertainment value and that’s why B2C companies go on there, is to get that exposure. In addition to potentially getting a high-profile investor, but just going on there is going to drive some interest.

Mike: I’ve seen stories of people who’ve gone on to Shark Tank and whether they got a deal or not, sometimes there’s stories that circle back on those companies afterwards. There is that exposure piece of being on there whether that investor helps you or not doesn’t matter because people will see you. They see your business, they see your company, and you’re getting exposure that you probably would not have gotten otherwise.

Rob: Thanks for the question. Super interesting one. It’s good for this community to be thinking about it and talking about this. our next question is super interesting. It’s about how to better communicate to users who should be connecting to an existing SaaS account. Basically, they’ve been invited as sub-users but instead, they’re signing up for new trials over and over and over. Let’s listen to this one.

“Hi guys. It’s Jarrod from sportstrackerapp.com here. We run a website that helps teachers and students organize their track and field and swimming needs. We’ve been really successful watching it grow. At certain stage, we introduced the feature that will allow admin staff to welcome sub-account access to their students so that they can login and register themselves into different events.

It’s dramatically cut down the workload of the admin staff. However, we’ve noticed that since opening up this feature, some students—regardless of the communication that we make available to the admin staff—students are coming through and signing-up to the website as an admin user and starting trial accounts and obviously, that’s not something that’s even remotely close to what they need to do.

What actually happens is the admin staff are given a piece of print out paper or an email that they pass onto the students and it sends them to a different URL [inaudible 00:15:13]. However, regardless of that communication, we still can’t get past the few students signing up on a daily basis. What thoughts do you have around making this as clear as possible without making a trial require a credit card, because obviously that would stop students. I look forward to hearing what you think about it. Thanks!”

Should we start by saying how we would design the ideal flow just to make sure, because I know he said no matter what the communication is, the students still come in sign-up for the trial. But could we walk down the steps of how we would do it. What would the ideal flow to at least communicate to them so that maybe there’s one or two things that he’s not doing that they could try then actually get to his question.

Mike: I think that there’s a couple of assumptions that you need to make or at least clarify as part of this while we’re going through this mental exercise. Are we assuming that this app is design explicitly for colleges, universities, schools, etc., and then the students that are part of it? Or is it like a general-purpose app that can be used outside of that system because it seems that this is a very specific situation. I’m not clear on whether or not the app is geared that way.

Rob: I think it’s focused on the niche of sports, managing sports teams. I’m guessing it’s more like junior high high school.

Mike: Okay.

Rob: Let’s make that assumption.

Mike: I guess based on that, it sounds like that the fundamental problem is that there’s confusion passing the information onto the teachers as to how to invite those students. If they’re getting forwarded to a particular URL, that’s fine, but if they’re printing something out and handing it to them and then the student comes to the website because they see that on it, that poses something of a problem.

I think that one thing that does come to mind though is if this is such a serious problem and it comes up constantly then I would take a look at the sign-up process itself and ask people when they go to register, are they a student or are they a teacher/coach or whatever. By that, you could basically interject yourself into that sign-up process and say, “Well, if you are a student coming in here, chances are you’re not going to be signing up for an actual trial of the product, you actually want to be attached with a sub-account.” How do you direct them to that?

Obviously, that’s going to depend on whether or not they’re signing in with an email address that is part of the school system for example. Because with this, you can match them up and let them select stuff, but I don’t know how much privacy controls or concerns are around that either. I think that the very first thing that I would look at doing is seeing whether or not you can differentiate between a student signing up and a teacher/coach because that right there should tell you whether or not they should be actually creating a trial or not.

Rob: I would agree with that. I think that what you could do is sign-up for trial and it’s like, “Are you a student? Are you a coach or administrator?” If they say student, then you default to saying, “You should’ve received an invite from your whatever. Check that email or check the flyer. But if you really are trying to sign up for a brand-new account for your school, then click here.” Make it like really have to opt in. you have to double opt in if you’re a student where you have to click that and then click another thing whereas if you’re a coach or administrator or whatever, then make that the default.

The other thing I was thinking about—I’m trying to think how to make this work. What I’m imagining is that I’m a coach, I have my account, I log in, and it says, “Invite Users.” I can enter some email addresses of students. Then it either gives me a PDF to print out and physically hand to them, he said, the physical paper, or it sends them an email. What if on that PDF and the email that goes to the student there is no mention of the name of the URL? It does not say Sports Tracker. All it says is, “Your coach so and so is inviting you as an administrator on the thing that organizes your sports team. Go here to sign-up or to accept this invitation.”

That URL could feasibly be just a totally different URL. Just pick whatever, a random one, thesportstrackersignup.com or even just signupfortheapp.com—just pick something. If they go to the homepage or if they go to the full URL, because my guess is it says like right now, it’s sportstracker.com or .com—I don’t even know what their URL is—but let’s say sportstracker.co/ a bunch of stuff to accept the invite, and people are just typing in sporttracker.co and then hitting trial. Don’t even allow them to do that. Just give them a completely different URL and the homepage is something that says, “You need a special code. Enter the code in the URL,” or whatever. You can figure out a way how to do this intelligently but not let them get back to your main URL in anyway because you can control the message. You have this PDF and this email that go directly to them. What do you think about that?

Mike: I think that’s fine. Unless you have a situation where the professor or the coach or whoever is telling them, “Hey, I use this app. Here’s the name of it.” Because if they search for it and I think that that’s the problem he’s alluding to is that if they go online, presumably they’re web savvy enough to go online and search and then they come to the website. The one thing I would think about is giving somebody a sign up that is literally just a single field that says, “Accept Invitation,” or something along those lines or as you said, give them a PDF that they can print out.

I don’t know the mechanics of how it’s currently being done because do you want to just print something out that’s exactly the same for all 30 people on the team or do you have individual ones for all 30 of them? I would imagine you would want the former rather than the latter so that you don’t have to plug in 30 different email addresses. You print the exact same thing, hand it out to everybody in the team and say, “Go here and do this.” And then they basically join. Maybe it’s like a 6-digit code or a 10-digit code or something like that. They just go to, as you said, the URL, plug it in, and that’s the end of it. I think hiding the name of the product is probably the best bet because that way, the kids won’t search for it.

Rob: To be honest, Sports Tracker, when I go to just search for that phrase in Google, there’s a bunch of iOS apps that come up. I can’t find the app that he’s talking about in Google right now. There’s sports-tracker.com, there’s SportsTrackr with no E, there’s all these things and I don’t think any of them are his app. I actually don’t know that even hiding the name, I really think it’s just the URL. You know what people could do is if it says Sports Tracker on the PDF and they go to Google and type it in then sign-up for the first one, it’s going to be the wrong app. Maybe they should just hide the name and the URL and try to get them there.

Like I said, it’s an interesting problem—user behavior thing—to have but I think there are probably some ways that we’ve thrown out. Hopefully, those are helpful to him. Thanks for the question.

Our next question is about liability insurance. It’s from Z and he says, “Hey guys. Could you talk about what types of liability insurance SaaS companies should get? It’s very confusing, there’s not much information out there. What type of insurance should founders get for their companies depending on the stage they’re in and to protect themselves and the company?”

We have talked about this in the past, right, Mike? We’ve talked about getting an LLC and maybe worrying less about the insurance aspect of it because you have the liability protection there in the early stages. Obviously, we’re not attorneys, we can’t give legal advice and really, you should not take advice from two chuckle heads like us. But in the early days of a product, I would tend to have any type of E&O insurance. When you have 10 customers or something unless you’re in a particularly litigious niche.

Mike: I think the question here is different though. He’s talking specifically about liability insurance versus the liability of having things under a company. To his point, this is very confusing and there’s not much information out there. The reason it’s confusing is because insurance is one of those old industries where they profit based on your lack of knowledge and them being able to be kind of opaque about stuff.

If you go to, let’s say, two or three or five different insurance companies and ask them for a quote for liability insurance for your company, they’re going to say, “Okay. Fill out this form and give us a bunch of information.” Every single one of those forms is going to be different. It’s not like going to a sandwich shop and ordering a ham sandwich. That’s going to be basically the same between 30 different ham sandwich shops.

But with insurance, even liability insurance, it’s different for every single one of them. They’re going to have different questions, they’re going to want to know different things, and each of those forms is going to be different. Then they’re going to plug it in their back end of the engine and they’re going to say, “Okay. Here’s the risk profile, etc., and these are the things that we cover.” If you compare the output of each of those plans, there are going to be differences between them. It’s not like there’s a standardized liability insurance. There’s going to be some like Plan 1 from Company 1 might include XY and Z and then the same exact information that you gave to Company 2, they’re going to say, “We cover X and Y,” but they’re not even going to mention Z because it’s not covered but they cover QR and L.

It’s complicated and the reason you’re finding it that it’s confusing is because it is confusing. It sucks. It’s weird when you have to go through those things but really, there’s the umbrella policies. You have to be careful about what you’re doing in terms of what access to customer information you have, what your access level is to your on-site software or databases, or level of access that you need in their environment. All those things are going to be questions, are beyond those forms. Every company is going to quote you differently.

Rob: Yep. Insurance—not fun. I think that to protect yourself from personal liability, you can of course get an LLC or an S-Corp or whatever is the equivalent in whatever country you live in. I tend to say, when you’re young and you don’t have a lot of money or what’s called judgement proof, no one’s going to sue you because you don’t have any money. When you get to the point where you have some assets, I recommend getting a personal liability plan. I shouldn’t say recommend, this is what I have done. [inaudible 00:25:43] recommended to me and this is what I did, and it’s to get a personal liability coverage.

You can get $1 million or even a $2 million coverage for literally a few hundred dollars a year protects you from personal liability if you get in a car accident and someone sues you because their neck hurts or whatever. I think it protects your personal wealth and I don’t know all the details. It’s going to depend on your circumstance in the policy you get as to whether or not someone piercing a corporate veil. You don’t come in through an LLC after your personal asset. It’s going to protect that or not.

And then if you really want insurance for your company, personally, I would go to foundershiled.com, that’s who I use. I’m trying to think of some type of E&O or some insurance when we had to deal with a big Fortune 500 company and they required us to have, of course, crazy stuff that no one else requires you to have. I went to foundershiled.com, had a great experience with them when they were first starting out. They’re much further along now and really can’t recommend them highly enough for folks like us who really don’t want to deal with all the nuts and bolts of it but kind of need to get some [inaudible 00:26:49].

It depends on your risk tolerance how soon you want to do this but those are our general thoughts. Thanks for the question, Z. I hope that was helpful. Our next question is from Hamish and it’s about outsourcing development and NDAs.

He says, “I’m a new listener. I’m catching up with previous episodes. I’ve a question. I have a website which at the moment is no more than a hobby. I want to outsource some development to see if I can take it to the next level. I’m presuming NDA is not worth much for a small website. Should I be at all bothered about giving access to the code to a third-party developer? Are there any basic steps I can take to protect the copyright and the ideas?”

What do you think, Mike?

Mike: It goes back to the standard disclaimer: We’re not lawyers or insurance agents. An NDA is probably not going to be worth the time. The one thing I would be aware of or at least pay attention to is it when you are having somebody else build the code for you or write anything for you that you want to have a contract of some kind in place. If you’re hiring them through something like Upwork, that is generally taking care of it for you, but otherwise, you’re going to want to have something that says that it’s essentially a work for hire and that you own the output of that. That is probably the most basic thing that I would do. That ensures that you own whatever it is that they write for you. Beyond that, I don’t know. I wouldn’t worry too much about it because at this stage, it’s just an idea and it may or may not go anywhere.

Let’s say that they build it and you start making a couple of thousand dollars a month from it. The chances of them stealing it and trying to do the same thing, I would say are probably small. But even if they did try to do it, it’s not the app itself; it’s all the marketing and the sales engine and the sales funnel and emails—all the stuff that you do alongside of it—that is going to make that much money, it’s not the code itself and the app.

Rob: Yeah. I’m not sure how much I have to add there. There’s always risk with this kind of stuff. I would say that I’ve had dozens and dozens of developers that I’ve hired, some for really small projects, some for really big ones. As far as I know, none of them have ever stolen my code and gone off and tried to compete with it. I mean, maybe here’s a chance that I had a class in something that interacted with Stripe or with Twilio and they took it and used it in another project. How would I possibly know? But I have not had that experience.

I think that it’s easy to be bothered by this stuff. I think it’s easy to be overly concerned with it. It does depend on risk tolerance, but I would really air on the side of just hiring someone good and interviewing them to the point where you trust them and letting them do it and trust that they’re not going to steal your code because most people frankly, want the paycheck. It’s just so much effort to steal your code and try to do something with it. The odds of it happening I think are pretty slim.

Our next question, Mike, I pulled off of Quora. It was in the startup section and it said, “How much should an MVP cost?” What do you think about that? I love the premise of the question. It’s just like, “Oh boy!”

Mike: How much should an MVP cost? This seem like a trick question.

Rob: I would say that an MVP should cost zero.

Mike: Zero, yes.

Rob: I mean, not in all cases but remember, an MVP really shouldn’t be a software product, if at all possible. It should be me strapping a Google spreadsheet to Zapier, to a VA, to me peddling a hamster wheel that makes the thing go on, and to make give the appearance that I have a product but in fact it’s just all human-powered. I mean, that’s just one example. But I think an MVP should as little as possible. Take the number in your head and remove a zero or two.

Mike: I think the interesting thing about this question and maybe is because it comes from Quora, there’s people who are not necessarily as experienced in understanding exactly what a minimum viable product would actually be. But really what you’re looking for there is, “What is the least amount of work you can do to answer a particular question?” And you have to start with the question. If you don’t start with the question, you’re really not doing the whole MVP process correctly.

That’s kind of the core of the issue here I think is if you don’t understand what an MVP actually means, then asking how much it should cost is almost irrelevant because it really depends on what the question you’re trying to answer is. Like, “Will people pay for this?” “Well, just go online and do a Google search and see if there are other products out there that exist that solve that problem. If so, then yes.” That’s a very simple thing to do and it costs you absolutely nothing more than a few keystrokes. But if it’s a lot more complicated like, “Can you get $1000 or $10,000 people to your website in order to validate that you can acquire that traffic in order to potentially sell them something?” Well, that’s a very different question that you’re trying to answer. The amount that it’s going to cost is going to be different.

I would actually differentiate between how much time it’s going to cost you versus how much money and over what time period because all three of those things are very different. You might be able to find out a piece of information, but it could take three months. It might only take an hour or a week for the three months but the total time span that it takes is going to make a difference. If you’re trying to validate a couple of different ideas against one another or answer several different questions, it can become difficult to answer all of them in a time frame that is appropriate to whatever your current life situation is.

Rob: Yup. I think those are good points. Like I said, I think it should cost, frankly, as little as possible. You should be able to strap together a lot of tools and not have to actually build software if you’ve validated to that point or you get your 10 or 20 buy-ins, your purchases, pre-purchases, commitments, or whatever you’re going to do. I agree with you. I think I like the different dimensions you put on that words like there’s price, there’s hours of your time, and then there’s duration–is it 6 months or 12 months or 2 months or whatever.

I would love to get an MVP done in less than two months for, I don’t know, less than $5000, less than $10,000. It depends on who you hire. If you hire in the States, it’s going to be more expensive. It’s kind of hard to say, I think but I do think it’s an interesting thought experiment. It’s like, “Are you building an MVP of an email service provider or are you building an MVP of a little form app, like something that compete with Typeform or Google Forms or something.” That’s a totally different use case.

Again, if you’re going to give people Type Form, you just build the form UI, have it go straight into a Google spreadsheet so you don’t [inaudible 00:33:48] have a database and then to actually build the UI to build the form, you manually build that directly with your customers, you don’t build any type of form builder. You know what I mean? That could literally be like a weekend project of just displaying a landing page with the forms that you plug into some XML file or some database or JSON thing. That’s pretty minimally viable but it would be a product if you’re trying to test something out.

Anyways, I think that probably wraps us up for the day except for our final question of the day, Mike. The Star Wars Holiday Special marked the first appearance of which Star Wars character? There are four choices: Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, Jar Jar Binks, Lando Calrissian. Do you know the Star Wars holiday special? Have you heard of it?

Mike: I’ve heard of it.

Rob: It’s from the ‘70s. It’s awful. Go to YouTube and look it up. It is really not good. There’s this thing called life day and there’s wookiees and it’s really not canon.

Mike: I sort of vaguely remember hearing about it or seeing it. The question is which of these four characters shows up for the first time in that?

Rob: For the first time in the Star Wars Holiday Special that came out in ’78. It’s Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, Jar Jar Binks, Lando Calrissian.

Mike: I’m thinking Boba Fett.

Rob: You are correct.

Mike: Yes.

Rob: It’s in an animated segment of the show.

Mike: Oh!

Rob: Yup. This has never been released on video but as I said, you can hit YouTube or other places to find recordings of it.

Mike: Oh, that is shockingly nerdy.

Rob: It is. It is nerdy. I couldn’t get through it. I watched five minutes of it, and I had to scrap it.

Mike: Is it that painful?

Rob: It’s awful.

Mike: It’s painful as a podcast and our jokes.

Rob: Yes, it is indeed.

Mike: Oh, that’s terrible. Well, on that note, if you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number 888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

• Episode 451 | Stellar Growth, Platform Risk, Layoffs and Powering Through Roadblocks with Laura Roeder
• Episode 450 | Founder Hotseat: Matt Wensing of SimSaaS on Making Consistent, Needle-Moving Progress
• Episode 449 | Two-Sided Marketplaces, How Much Testing is Too Much, and More Listener Questions