Startups For the Rest of Us

In episode 644, Rob Walling chats with Dan Martell about founder productivity, delegating, and the difference between being effective and efficient. Dan also shares the key frameworks from his first book, Buy Back Your Time, which was released this week. Topics we cover:  2:40 - Dan’s process for writing his first book 7:56 - The Buyback Principle 12:31 - Hiring and delegating to an assistant 18:02 - The Buyback Loop: Audit, Transfer, and Fill 25:19 - Why no one does it right, and I can’t afford to hire are limiting beliefs 30:53- 131 hack Links from the Show: Dan Martell @DanMartell) I Twitter Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire The SaaS Playbook  If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher Transcript: Rob Walling: Welcome back to Startups with the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and this week, I talk with Dan Martell about his new book, Buy Back Your Time. I read most of Dan's book in preparation for this interview, and it's really an interesting combination of productivity, of being effective rather than being efficient, and also a healthy dose of delegation. And if you've read books like The Four Hour Work Week, where Tim Ferris had the first part about being effective and delegating, and then the second part was about starting a business using AdWords and doing smoke tests and stuff. Buy Back Your Time is more of a fully fleshed out model with a bunch of frameworks. Really well done diagrams too, by the way, the book is gorgeous. Obviously, Dan hired a good designer to put this together, but I was impressed by the depth and the uniqueness of these frameworks that Dan uses in this book. In fact, when I got done reading it, I actually told Sherry that she should read it because she's right in the midst of hiring a chief of staff and getting a lot of things off her plate, and I felt like there's a lot in this book that she could learn from, a lot in this book that I learned, and I think if you're someone who has trouble delegating, has trouble feeling like you're being effective, it's obvious that Dan has spent a lot of time thinking about this. And this is from a founder's perspective, so it's highly applicable to folks like you and I. And if you're looking for another book to read, just a couple weeks ago, I was able to get my book website live. It's my fourth book. It's called The SaaS Playbook; Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital, and it's at saasplaybook.com, if you want to see all the ringing testimonials and endorsements from folks like Jason Cohen, Dharmesh Shah, Noah Kagan, and so on. And read a little more about what's in the book. See the cover, see a few picks of the inside. The designer right now is working on all the diagrams, and this is why I noticed Dan Martell's diagrams in Buy Back Your Time and how nice they are because I've been looking at my own for the past few weeks. But anyways, head to saasplaybook.com, enter your email if you're interested in hearing about the Kickstarter, going to be doing that in a couple months. But with that, let's dive into my conversation with Dan Martell. Dan Martell, welcome to the show. Dan Martell: Rob. Thanks for having me, man. Obviously really excited, big fan. This is cool. This is exciting. Rob Walling: Yeah, it's going to be fun. We're going to talk about your experience and about your new book, Buy Back Your Time. If folks think shut up and take my money already, buybackyourtime.com. The book came out today, as this episode goes live. You told me offline, two and a half years to write this book. That's a lot longer than a lot of people take. What was that process? Why did it take so long? Dan Martell: It took a while because... It's funny, Buy Back Your Time