Audience Building in Public with Arvid Kahl

Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:00:00]   Hey there and welcome to episode 13 of We Can Do This. Now I'm really stoked for today's episode with Arvid Kahl. Now if you're not familiar with Arvid he recently wrote and launched a book called The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now this was really interesting to watch unfold because what he did was he wrote and launched this book in public. Now, if you're not familiar with the term "build in public", this is something that Arvid wholly embraces.  With this book, he shared all the meaningful details and thought processes, and information related to the book with his audience on social media. 

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[00:00:45]Now in this episode, we talk a lot about what that means. He essentially shared his entire book with hundreds of people to offer feedback, comments, criticisms. Before he even sent it to the editor.

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[00:01:00] Right? So he had really built up an interest in this book. A lot of like buy-in right. People felt like they were a part of this thing and they were practically co-authors with him. He really invited his audience into the journey of launching this book. And when he ultimately launched it, they were a hundred percent behind him, literally helping him get to the top of Product Hunt on his launch day, sharing with friends on social media, being the first to order the book, people just showed up for Arvid.

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[00:01:33]Now, in this episode, we're going to talk about what this book was about: The Embedded Entrepreneur. And essentially this story zooms in on a particular part of his journey and in the wider journey, we learn about how him and his girlfriend started a company called Feedback Panda in just a couple of years, grew that company and then sold it for what Arvid says is a "life-changing amount of money."

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[00:02:01]Now, since then he's been in the writing and sharing online about how he did it. And The Embedded Entrepreneur really zooms in on this idea of identifying an audience before you build a product or a solution for them.

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[00:02:15]Now if you are considering starting a business or creating a new product or launching something new into the world, this is must listen to information. It's a completely different approach to what people traditionally think about when they launch a product or launch an idea. And Arvid has some of the best perspective around this idea and some of the best things heard from anyone. And I really I'm excited for you to listen to this episode. So let's jump into this episode with Arvid Kahl.

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[00:02:58]Hey welcome to the podcast. I'm here with Arvid Kahl. Now Arvid is a software engineer who turned into an entrepreneur. He co-founded and ran Feedback Panda, an online teacher productivity, saas company, with his partner Danielle. They sold the business for "a life changing amount of money" in 2019, two years after founding the business.

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[00:03:20] He has written the bestselling books, Zero to Sold, and now The Embedded Entrepreneur. And in over a decade of working in startup businesses of all sizes, Arvid has learned a thing or two about what works, what doesn't, and how to increase the chances of building a successful business. So, Hey, Arvid, welcome to the podcast. 

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[00:03:40] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:03:40] Hi there. Thanks so much for having me looking forward to our chat today.

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[00:03:44] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:03:44] Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this interview. And one, I mean, I feel like I've been able to  see this live update of your release of your latest book on Twitter, because you've really been building in public. Like we'll talk about in this episode, but you've been really transparent and really open to sharing everything, your whole process  behind writing and launching and releasing this book.

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[00:04:08] So why don't for our audience today who, you know, they might not be familiar with you. Would you mind sharing with us a little bit about what did life look like before writing your first book and  how that brought you to where you are now?

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[00:04:23]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:04:23] Well, directly before I started writing the book, I guess I was still running Feedback Panda with Danielle. We had started that business in 2017, pretty much as a consequence of her being an online teacher and having a problem. The business was a solution to a problem that we felt for ourselves, namely, that she had to do a lot of student feedback, a lot of writing, a lot of administrative stuff after hours and hours of teaching every single day, like online teaching in particular. Now I think with the pandemic, everybody knows what it is, but even in 2017, there was already this big wave of particularly Chinese companies who figured out, Hey, if the people in the United States want to have some money.

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[00:05:06] And we have a lot of kids here who want to learn English, can't we just use this technology called the internet to connect them. And they did at scale, they hired thousands of people who just needed a second and often third job. And had them teach those kids English online. And Danielle was one of them.

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[00:05:24] She had a leg injury and she couldn't go anywhere. And she's a, she's an opera singer. She's a trained opera singer, meaning that you can really sing opera in an apartment. And definitely not do, do any  appearances. So she needed to find a, another way of making some money. Long story short, she started teaching English online.

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[00:05:41] And with her, we noticed there was thousands of other teachers out there who were doing the exact same job and had the exact same problems, namely student feedback. And we built a little tool, me being a software engineer, I built a little tool for her to solve her problem. And then we quickly turned it into a software as a service business, a saas that those other teachers could use.

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[00:06:03] And we only ever really, we never hired for the, for their whole lifetime of the business, which was two years, right. Just under two years after we started the business, it was a $55,000 monthly recurring revenue. And it was still Danielle and I. And we had five and a half thousand customers. That was a lot.

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[00:06:20] Now that was, that was a really alot. And, and when you, when you asked me about what was my life like, just before I wrote the book, I can only say chaotic and super stressful. If you don't hire. And that was a big mistake on my end. I guess, if you don't hire anybody to help you then all the work's on you.

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[00:06:35] So the, the reason why we sold at least partially was that I was close to burnout and that there was an opportunity to sell the business for life-changing amount of money, which, which is great. And we definitely wanted to diversify our income streams anyway, because at that point, the company was the only really valuable thing that we owned and we, you know, wanted to make a, make a change there.

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[00:06:55] But yeah, I was really in the middle of running an ad tech business and education technology business, helping thousands of online teachers all over the world, mostly United States and Canada, because, you know, if you want to find a native speaking English speakers, then you go to these countries. But a lot of ex-pats a lot of people in Thailand, Vietnam teaching online to make some more money.

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[00:07:14]And it was really interesting and it was one of those industries that is extremely underserved. And underpaid at the same time, like teachers that, you know, every single culture out there, at least the ones that I know teachers always get really the bad end of the stick.

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[00:07:33] They really don't get much money. They don't get much appreciation, but everybody needs them. And nobody wants to like improve their lives much. It's just really bad. So it was a good market for us to go into and help people because they really needed help. And that, that was where it was that at that point,

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[00:07:47]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:07:47] Yeah. Well, thanks. Thank you so much for taking a step back and  sharing that with us and really for our listeners, if the story that Arvid is talking about this whole startup journey for him and really Zero to Sold, that book covers that whole journey. And there's a lot of intricacies and, you know, the, the tool he built, that's super interesting.

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[00:08:07] So I'd really encourage you to check out h is book or, you know, follow him online and, and really get the gist of the story. What I find that really interesting about it, knowing that story is prior to this point, right. You had, I think probably about a decade where you were involved in other businesses, other things you were getting going, and, you know, found a varying amount of success to that in this, it seems like this one was really all right. I think I figured it out.

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[00:08:32]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:08:32] Yeah. Varying amount of successes of good, I guess, a very positive way of phrasing it because I failed horribly a lot of times, many, many times, because I try to, co-found a couple of bootstrapped businesses with friends or colleagues, and we didn't talk to our customers or we didn't know what marketing was and thought we didn't need to.

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[00:08:53] You know, if, if you build it, they will come  logic. Of course they will never come, so they didn't come and we build it and nobody wanted it. So we had a lot of, I personally, and with other people, we had a lot of experiences learning how stuff didn't work. I also worked for. I worked for like a Silicon Valley VC funded business.

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[00:09:12] So I got a little glimpse of that world and saw what's happening when venture capital is in play. I worked for a couple of German companies, really traditional German software companies, like as German as you can possibly imagine. Yeah, very traditional in their approach to business, very traditional in their approach to how to work with clients and how to structure a project.

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[00:09:30]That was interesting too, because I also saw there what I didn't want to do in my few shares. So I had a lot of experiences in seeing how things didn't go the way I wanted them to. And I also on the other hand took a lot of time to learn from people who were doing the things that I did want to do.

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[00:09:47] So my, my last actual job that I had prior to starting Feedback Panda in 2017 was as a software engineer for a rather modern internet of things, company in Hamburg, in Germany. I was living in Berlin, in Germany and Hamburg and Berlin, and like two and a half, three hours by train from each other. And I commuted to that to that city three times a week back and forth.

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[00:10:08] And if you, if you take five hours a day, Three times a week, that's 15 hours a week that I needed to fill because it was sitting in a train. And I was, I was listening to podcasts as much as I could. I was like reading books, listening to audio books, as much as I could blog, I put them on my laptop because in Germany, between towns there's no wifi for some reason, the only good connectivity is in major cities.

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[00:10:30] So if you ride on a train, there's nothing you could do other than reading or listening to something that you've prepared. So I was really absorbing all this information, just stories, podcasts, recounting the stories of what they did, what worked for them, what didn't. Yeah. And I absorbed all of this and that was after my failed attempts.

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[00:10:46] So I had my personal knowledge of what not to do. And then I had this  external, yet internalized knowledge from people who shared their story while it was happening, which was the first time I read it, got in contact with the whole building and public movement, even though it may have been called that at the time, people sharing their story. And those things together, I just ruminated on it in many ways. And then moonlighting built Feedback Panda while I still was on my, my job for a year, I guess was just really a side project. And then once it made a solid amount of money, both Danielle and I, we quit our jobs. Like she stopped teaching and I stopped being a software engineer and we've been full-time on the business.

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[00:11:22] So that's really where it came from that that the success is many, many failures and the added knowledge of people who share their successful path and in the form of advice or just stories, just their own adventure. And yeah, I think it's it's one of these overnight success stories, 10 years in the making.

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[00:11:42] That's, that's how I look at it. Cause there's no overnight success. There's always this often hidden, but extremely important stuff that comes before.

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[00:11:49] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:11:49] Yeah, which is interesting. I know we'll get into cause a lot of people don't get to see the hard work beforehand and there's a reason people don't see the hard work, right? Cause we typically are pretty closed doors. Right. We don't share the failures. And one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the podcast is knowing that you had this, you know, this decade beforehand, you have failures to actually talk from.

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[00:12:11] And I know we hear a lot from the successful stories and we tend to not hear what comes before or what were the hard lessons learned. And so really excited to dive into this today. And even you sharing that story of you on the train, right. And you're listening to podcasts or reading books. I know that there's people that are listening to this podcast specifically who they're doing the same thing.

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[00:12:34] Right. They're listening, they're reading. They're trying to like. Gather all of this knowledge. And I think it's really important that they hear both sides of these stories and hear the actual experience of someone who found this level of success and reverse engineered and said, how did this work and how can I actually extrapolate a lot of teaching from that?

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[00:12:55] So I think this is a perfect point to jump into a little bit about what you've been writing about recently about your recent book. And would you yeah. Would you share with us, like, cause I know people are probably listening to this and dying to know like, what are these necessary steps to building an audience around your business?

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[00:13:14] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:13:14] Right. So, so when I wrote Zero to Sold, my first book, I really wrote about everything from, from the start, from your first, I want to build a business stage in your life where you feel like, okay, now I'm done with this full-time job  thing. And I want to see, can I start a side project or what, whatever you want to do, right.

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[00:13:30] Do you always have this initial decision up until our last moment owning the company? That's the whole book and that's 500 pages is a lot of stuff and people read it and they told me, Hey, this is all great. And here's a question. I, I read all of it and it makes perfect sense, but how do I start? What is this initial 

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[00:13:47] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:13:47] What's step one.

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[00:13:48] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:13:48] Yeah, what's step one. And how can I do this in the book? I  talk about how you shouldn't start with an idea, but you should start with an audience. You should start with a group of people that you want to serve and empower, and then look at what problems do they have, how can I even help them and then figure out through which medium, what, what means can I help them with what's the solution to their problem, their most critical problem, and possibly, and then the only then do we start building anything, right?

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[00:14:11] Then it comes to product, but it's not like that you started with the product and then you try to stuff it into our market. I see that too much. I see that way too much that people are very solution driven. They're very product driven. As much as it's probably fun for if you're a software engineer to build yet another thing, because you can.

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[00:14:27] And because also, because you've been taught that everything is a solution waiting to happen, at least as a software engineer, myself, that has been my experience, but we were always focused on okay, solve this problem. What is the problem? It doesn't really matter. You know, that, that, that has, that's always been a, like a mindset problem.

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[00:14:43] And I've been shifting that to what, okay, who do I want to help? And then I'm just going to listen to them. And then once, once I figure out what their problems are, I'm going to talk to them and other scary thing for software engineers and figure out, okay, so how critical is this really? What have you currently been doing and how do you have, you can have money to pay for a solution.

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[00:15:01] You know, the, all these questions that are actually super important. If you want to build a business, because if you just build a product, you have not built a business. It's one of those big, big mistakes that people make in this field, which is why I've not just written one book about it. But now a second one that really only focuses on the parts that it doesn't even involve the product.

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[00:15:21] They involve oldest steps before. And. If you build a product just really quickly, you have not validated if the product actually solves the problem. And even if it solves a problem, you haven't validated that it's actually critical enough for people to have a budget for. And even if it has that, you don't know if there are enough people out there to actually sustain your business.

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[00:15:40] So here are three things that you have not validated by just building your product and the business needs all three, and you need to be really sure that all three work, particularly if you want to bootstrap your business, if you want to use your own money, if you don't have like millions of venture capital, because people think, oh, this can be the next Uber.

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[00:15:58] Or, you know, if it's just a little tool for people in a particular niche market, well, you better figure out if there's enough people in the niche that can support you building a business for them. So the whole idea of the second book that I wrote The Embedded Entrepreneur is to understand your audiences, your target, and future audiences by embedding yourself in their communities.

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[00:16:19] That is, that is the, the main concept of the book. And it starts with what I call the audience discovery process, where you figure out who are the people that I actually want to help, because we, we always have this this notion that we are supposed to help the people that were professionally involved with software engineers, they write tools for software engineers, writers.

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[00:16:39] They write books for writers. You know, there's always this , oh, I know this group best. So I'm just going to produce the content for this group, marketers market to other marketers. And you have the so much, if you ask somebody particularly people who are entrepreneurial, what  product, what  business are you going to be building that was going to try to stay in their lane?

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[00:16:57] This, they believe that this is their comfort zone, which it might be. But it's actually not that clear as a person, as a human being, you are part of dozens of things, hundreds of groups and communities of people, many of them you are aware of in my case, that would be, I'm quite sure that I'm a software engineer because I can code.

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[00:17:16] I'm quite sure that I'm a writer because I've written stuff today and people have read it. So  suggests that I'm a writer. I'm also an, an entrepreneur because the stuff that I have out there pays me money and I don't have to give it to anybody else, but the tax man. So that makes me an entrepreneur.

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[00:17:30] And you know, I, I like dogs and I like fish. So I know that I'm in the pet owner

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[00:17:34] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:17:34] You're a podcaster yourself, right?

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[00:17:36] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:17:36] Exactly and, and that's podcasting. And and I love listening to podcasts. I love watching people on Twitch. So I'm a fan of online gaming, you know, there's all these communities that I'm part of consciously, but then there's this whole other group of potential communities that you can build for that you can build a business for that you're subconsciously a part of.

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[00:17:56] And that is just go through your day. You wake up and look around, what do you see you're going into your kitchen and what does the first thing you do? Do you get a fine tea to get like loose herb or loose leaf herbal tea? Cause you're like a tea aficionados and you have like this whole thing where you do spend 20 minutes on your tea and you have the perfect temperature.

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[00:18:16] Or do you just share that and go to right

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[00:18:19] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:18:19] that's me with coffee. That's me.

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[00:18:21]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:18:21] No. That's exactly the example that I wanted to talk about. Like people who really spent a lot of energy and focus on getting just the right coffee, like you have the perfect setting for how fine the beans should be ground. And like all of that.

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[00:18:34] Well, you're not alone in this. There's literally hundreds of thousands of other people out there who do the exact same thing in the morning. And all of them very likely have shared interests and maybe shared problems and maybe even budgets for solutions to that. And the more you are aware of that and to which communities you're already part of or you could easily join because you know this stuff that they're interested in, the more opportunity you will find. And that's  why I started figure out what this audience. Then I have this little guide in the book that just allows you to rank them by how much affinity you have, how much opportunity is in that community, how much appreciation do they have for paid solutions?

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[00:19:11] And then how big is the market? And once you rank them, all of course a book goes into detail, but don't want to bore you with those particular details. Now, once you rank them, you have a couple of really interesting potential audiences. And then you go, there you go to the Facebook group stay and you go to the Twitter community, to the LinkedIn groups, to the online forums, to their clubhouses, is that still a thing to their clubhouse chat rooms.

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[00:19:32] You know, you go where they are. And you stop talking. You don't even start talking, you just stop talking and you, you start listening. You observe what people are talking about, what language do people use, what problems do they talk about? Where do they ask for help? Where do they seek recommendations?

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[00:19:48] Where do they wonder what alternatives to existing products are? And you start tallying those things and writing them down, like meticulously doing a data-driven analysis of your community. And a couple of days, weeks, months, depending on how active your community is later, you will have a pretty solid list of critical commonly shared problems that people have tried to find solutions for.

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[00:20:11] And that you are just yearning to find something, or somebody, who does that for them who helps them with this. And sorry for only now getting to the audience building part, but from there, you start becoming an expert in the community, you interact with people, you talk to people like you would, if you were, I don't know, a chess fan and you would join your local chess club.

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[00:20:30] If you are not good, if you don't have a high rating in the beginning, you look, you watch, you see how other people play and you might play against the lower ranked or lower rated players and talk to them and see what they can teach you. And then you ascend people, see you like everyone say when chess chess club meets.

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[00:20:46] I don't know if they still do that now, but you know, you can do it online as well. And there are lots of communities there. It's an interesting, interesting space. You, you, you become a regular, you become a person appear one of the tribe and any tribal community. Respects people who put in time and effort to, for work the goals of the community.

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[00:21:06] So by showing up and by playing with those people in your chess club, you become somebody who helps the chess chess club exist. So if you then as an entrepreneur at some point and talk to people about maybe building a tool for them that could help them, or writing a book, an info product for people at a certain stage, you know, like it doesn't have to be a software tool.

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[00:21:24] It could be anything else, make a course on, you know, how to, how to grow as a chess player. People would start listening because they respect you. Not because you're marketing to them, but because you're actually helping them with something that they. You get them, literally, you get what they want. And that, that act building a reputation as a peer, as a person in there in group, trying to help them further their own personal and the community's goals.

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[00:21:49] That is what marketing should be and has been subverted into people, just yelling at each other. Right. But really not what marketing is, but that's what I always thought marketing was, which  why I never did it. But now that I'm in the community and I actually seeing that when I post something from my book, just a little excerpt or a chapter from the book, I put it on Twitter.

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[00:22:07] And then I have dozens of people telling me that this is exactly what they needed. That validates everything for me, because I know, okay. I wrote something that not only is actually meaningful. It is also valuable. These people wanted this and by buying the book or buying, I don't know, like if, if I had a paid newsletter, but if I had it, they would buy access to this information.

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[00:22:31] So it's valuable to them. And this is marketing is showing people the value of allowing them to purchase it from you. Right. Which, yeah, that's what audience building is about. So it's not about marketing, not saying I make this, but it's about what I call selfless self promotion. When you say I make this for you and then giving to other people and building up this  almost involuntary reciprocation that people really have to give back to you at some point, if you've given them so much over the weeks and months, and haven't asked them to pay for anything, the moment you put something out there that they could help you with that.

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[00:23:06]You to, to give them they will be on it and they will support you in your efforts because they want you to succeed. You're one of them they want to succeed. They want you to succeed the community. They will make sure that you succeed, which is why there's such a, such an incredible value in an audience that actually trusts and believes in you.

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[00:23:23] And yeah, that's , that's how you build it. You just show up.

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[00:23:25]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:23:25] Arvid there's such good stuff right there. We could talk, man. We could really unpack some of those. But I think, I mean, what stands out here for me is. That this can often be a stumbling block for a lot of people who they say, Hey, I want to serve blank audience. And in the back of their head, there's already maybe this imposter syndrome, or what do I know about teachers, for example, or what do I know about this other industry, right.

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[00:23:51] That I have the right to tell them, or, you know, there's, I can see that in the back of people's heads. Right. And to use myself as an example is I'm like very, not formally trained in a lot of the things I do in the communities I'm involved in. Right. I was a, I was a philosophy student, you know, like nine years like I work in very different industries.

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[00:24:10] I do a lot of different things now. Right. And a lot of the people that I talk to they'll ask me, you know, where, oh, where did you study marketing? Or where did you study a, B or C? And I just, I have to laugh. Right. Cause I'm not.

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[00:24:22] I don't have the formal training and a lot of the people experienced me. Like you said, talking the language, right.

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[00:24:30] They're like, oh, this person understands. They must have some sort of formal experience. And it's, it's just not the case. Right. 

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[00:24:35] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:24:35] Sorry. But when you're saying, where did you study marketing? Well in the communities, studied marketing in reality where it happens,

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[00:24:42] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:24:42] Yeah. It just wasn't in the way that most people would imagine that training or that studying, being done. Which is so interesting. And so I think, like you said, and just because I'm familiar with some of the other things that I've heard you say in the past is you don't want to get stuck on this step either.

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[00:24:56] You don't want to do audience discovery for two years. Right? Cause then you'll never get around the building something the amount of time that it actually takes to embed yourself in the community. May not be a four year education, right? It might be, it might look a lot different. It might be joining specific Facebook groups.

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[00:25:11] It might be having conversations with certain people. It could be less intimidating than it sounds right.

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[00:25:16] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:25:16] Yeah, it's also very, self-directed like, there's nobody who can tell you exactly where to go or exactly who to talk to. That that itself is almost a self-discovery process because you need to understand how to understand you go into a Facebook group, and then you just look at what happens, which is why the beginning is usually good, just to observe and see, who's talking a lot who is quick to respond, who is already an expert in the community who are the people that I could follow to learn from the quickest and to see like who they respect and who they interact with most just to build this little knowledge graph, right?

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[00:25:50] We all have this. It's it's, it's so funny to me that they say you're a philosophy student. Cause I am a philosophy student too. And I dropped out of university twice, once for computer science and wonderful philosophy, sorry for that. But I still learned a lot of stuff. I didn't go the full nine years, but I certainly went a long way.

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[00:26:06] And just to understand, but knowledges like the, the actual structure of logic and of knowledge, that itself was incredibly interesting.

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[00:26:14] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:26:14] Yeah.

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[00:26:15]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:26:15] Because the moment you go into a community You see, like literally see knowledge being accumulated and dispensed and distributed within a community. And you know how it is, every every message has the sender and the receiver.

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[00:26:30] So the message is interesting. You have, the sender is interesting because they have certain qualities, but also the receivers are interesting, but because they also have certain qualities and if you just look at a whole community and how do they communicate, there's so much incredible insight in there about just really, what does their day-to-day life look like?

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[00:26:47] What  problems do they have? What challenges do they have? How often do they surface? What are things that people talk a lot about, but really don't care. It's just like a, one of those topics, you know, that everybody talks about, but really nobody wants to change anything about it. And then there's these little things that barely get noticed, but they're really critical.

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[00:27:02] You get this by just watching, by observing. And that, that alone is really an interesting thing that you can do. A long time before you actually start building a business, because like, most of us, like I said, are already part of many communities. If you were to talk to me about, I don't know, Twitch, like the online video gaming streaming platform.

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[00:27:23] And talk to me about specifics, psychosocial behaviors in Twitch chat, which is a whole ecosystem of how people communicate. It's super interesting. And I could go into detail for hours on this, but, and, and that's not because I studied it. It's just because I've been part of it. You know, I've been in this ecosystem so much that I could tell you, like what  streams attracted, which  people and how they communicate, how much respect or disrespect is in those communication channels.

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[00:27:52] And, you know, like all of this is very interesting once you actually try to solve problems for people. And for many of us, we have this innate knowledge, just sports fans like, you know, how the fans of a certain club or a certain sports interact with you. If you like hockey, hockey fans are different from like football fans or from like volleyball fans, you know, that they all have a different approach on how to socialize and how to communicate.

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[00:28:17] And this is innate knowledge cause you just grew up with it, but it's also knowledge you can actually leverage to reach them and talk to them in their language. Once you actually have something that you want to share with them. So that behavior you can do. And you probably have been doing in many ways for, for many, many years now.

​

[00:28:33] It's just the time to actually put that into data points that you can meaningfully use to validate or invalidate business assumptions. That's the only difference here. It's just targeted.

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[00:28:44] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:28:44] Yeah. So help help me with the pace here, because there's a certain point where it's okay. Once you've embedded yourself into these communities to begin speaking up. Right. And there are certain points, I imagine that it's time to begin identifying possible problems.

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[00:28:59]And let's say problems that this community is experiencing. And I imagine you have to, there might be multiple, right? So you're like there's three to five critical problems I'm noticing that are experienced by this specific audience. Now, how do I choose which one of them do I want to really tackle? Like once you're in these communities, when is it okay to begin really speaking and Bringing up some of these things that you're hearing and dialoguing about.

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[00:29:27] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:29:27] This one central thing here with the most important thing, it doesn't really matter. At what point you start talking about it. It's the only, only really you need an entry point at which people already know that you're part of the community, right? Who you have to have chatted with them. The people need to know your name in this certain way.

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[00:29:42] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:29:42] Yeah. You're not an outsider just popping in and

​

[00:29:44] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:29:44] You're you're an inside of a human, maybe a newbie. You're maybe a learner, but you still are part of the community. Once you're there. You can talk about almost everything as long as you contextualize it within the community and within the actual experience of the people in the community.

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[00:29:59] So let's say, you're talking about you want to build a business. You don't go in there and say, Hey guys, I want to build a business or you can pay me money? That just doesn't work. And nobody, no sane person would do this yet I see this so much in, in communities where people just ask, Hey, what's your most critical problem?

​

[00:30:14] Well, the business idea is nice. The execution is the worst because you know, like that's not how you get people to trust you. 

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[00:30:22] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:30:22] And the first 

​

[00:30:22] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:30:22] how you.

​

[00:30:22] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:30:22] The first impression is huge.

​

[00:30:24] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:30:24] You want to involve people. You want to be involved in people's lives and you want to involve them in what you're doing. So you reach out to people and you really ask them.

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[00:30:33] So, so you've been talking about this, I'm quoting myself here, I guess, like you say, Hey, I saw you your complaint about X, whatever you, you had a problem that you, every two months you have to fill out the sheet or something and it takes you a week. Wow. W w why is that? Or why does it take you this long?

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[00:30:50] Do other people get, do it faster or does everybody do this? You just involve people and you start talking to them about their lives. You know, people love talking about themselves. And they love sharing things that they care about because, you know, we that's our life. We only know our own lives. Everything else is projection or hearsay, whatever, all we know is us.

​

[00:31:09] So when somebody asks us to talk about us amazing, now I can tell you the truth that I know. And I will tell you the truth that I know, because you just asked me, you show interest in what I have to say, and people will tell you, they will tell you, oh yeah, I have to do this report every two months. And it's super complicated because I have to pull data from like five different data sources.

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[00:31:27] No only three of them have some sort of export function for the other two. This is just a completely made up example here. But the other two have to click like four times here and then I have to send this to my email. And then, you know, that it's this whole story about how complicated it is to get to a certain goal.

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[00:31:44] And you have all this rich information about the current status quo and the workflow of a person that you can easily. If you're either technically inclined or you have a co-founder or want to find a co-founder that is a technical person, or you want to use no code tools or just whatever it is, however you technically solve the challenge.

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[00:32:04] You can probably quite easily solve that particular challenge by just using the right tools in the right ways. And you talk to people about their challenges and you start helping them, you start saying, okay, so this part is complicated. Have you tried this? And then they will tell you, yes, I have. And it sucked.

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[00:32:22] Or they will say, no, let me look into this. And then a week later they will say, Hey, I played around with this. I didn't really understand how to do it, but thanks for the idea. Thank you. Start helping them, like literally trying to get their problems solved with them. For them, you become the agent of change in their lives.

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[00:32:39] It's not that they need to change. To to use your tool, you help them change themselves and change their own workflow. And it becomes an interactive thing. You actually build a report with real people having real problems. And if you either you do this for direct messages or like in a, in a public way in a forum, I don't know.

​

[00:32:58] You can do it in Facebook groups and replies and stuff. The medium doesn't really matter. What matters is the connection between people that have a problem and you who wants to solve their problem. So that is what it is. The context of people's real experience that needs to be there all the time. Don't just talk about your wild business aspirations, which you can always have.

​

[00:33:18] It's fine. It's fine to want to make a business for money. That's how the world works. And even if you want to make a business, that is, that is a non-profit. It still needs to make money to sustain itself. So money is not a problem. Right? Money is a solution in many ways, it's a necessity. So what you really want to focus on. Figuring out who you want to serve and try to serve them in the, in their presence as much as you can. And that will do two things. First. If you've got to find a solution to the problem, which at some point you could turn it into a business and a business is nothing more than a repeatable process of selling a product over and over again.

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[00:33:52] Right? So once you find a solution, you can sell it over and over again, there you go. You have a business, but what it also does, it attracts like-minded people to you. And your product. And I say explicitly to you as a person, as a, as a helper, as a supporter, as a person that is empathetic and shows that in a public forum where they help other people solve their problems.

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[00:34:14] That's incredibly powerful to build this brand as a person that is helping other people. And that will attract people that like to be helped. And that will attract people who like other people who help other people. There's a lot of benefit in this. And yeah, you can do this over time and you will do this over time because you should never stop talking to your audience or your customers.

​

[00:34:32] So by working in public and just extracting information and extracting people's problems in public, you get to, to have these feedback cycles, feedback loops that are incredibly tight because you're right there. It's not that you're the CEO of a business, with millions and millions of dollars. And you hire like a head of marketing and the head of marketing, hires a VP of marketing and the VP hires, a team lead marketing.

​

[00:34:57] And then in the marketing team, somebody is doing customer discovery. It's like five levels of indirection and whatever they talk to customers about, we'll never reach the CEO. If you are one of those people that is in the community, you will hear everything at all times. You're going to be right in there and you'll be able to understand people's problems as they occur when they change, you know, all of this stuff, which is so important to have a close feedback loop with people that can only happen when you're part of their communities.

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[00:35:27] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:35:27] Absolutely. And I think this is a perfect segue really into this topic of building in public, which I know that you are a huge proponent of right. And you do this so well online, and that's really how I've been able to really see you on the internet and experience what you what you've been building, what you've been working on over these past couple years as I follow you.

​

[00:35:47]So tell us like, what exactly is building in public if someone's never heard even that phrase before, right? It's called different things. People have been doing it in different ways for awhile, but we've seen this phrase, this hashtag right. Building in public for, for a while now. So what is that exactly? And what does that mean to you and how have you been able to do it throughout the cycle of your business and the release of your books?

​

[00:36:11] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:36:11] Okay. Well, so building in public is sharing your entrepreneurial journey every step along the way. That's  what it is. And I I'm, I know it's really not the best definition. I'm still working on a better one internally, but as you are on a journey, you want to help people and you want to build something that helps people.

​

[00:36:29] So instead of just building it and then giving it to people, you share the whole journey in a sense of that, you share every decision that you find interesting or that other people might find interesting. Other founders or your audience, your particular customers, you share your milestones of your business.

​

[00:36:45] Like when you reach certain goals that you want it to reach, or when you have certain failures, which also milestones, like we learned from everything, right. So anything that happens to you and to your business, any choices you make, any interesting progress. Or items of progress that happened in your life you share. An example for me would be with the book, with The Embedded Entrepreneur, I chose to not just talk about the book in public. I chose to write it in public, which is the ultimate building in public, I guess. So when I announced a book, I think it was in October of 2020. Cause I had yeah, two or three months earlier, I had released my first book and people really liked it.

​

[00:37:20] And there was a lot of feedback. Like I told you, people were telling me, Hey, talk to me more about this audience stuff. I decided, oh, well I guess my audience has spoken. Yeah, I'm going to talk more about audience stuff. Right. They wanted to know how to build an audience and how to build an audience first business and audience centric, audience focused business.

​

[00:37:38] And I was just like, okay, if that's what most people want me to write about, apparently my readers would really like that. So I said on Twitter, Hey, I'm going to write this book called audience first. It's going to be about how to build an audience, how to find your audience and how to find the problems.

​

[00:37:53] Here's a website where I've outlined everything that I want to see in the book. All the questions that I will ask myself and respond to in the book. If you have anything that is not there yet, just tell me, and I'll edit into the book. People read the like that, because first off they, they saw the beginning of something new and you know how it is when we started watching a movie, we're excited.

​

[00:38:13] We know that there's a. We know that the journey is very likely similar to the journeys we've heard before, but it's still going to be uniquely interesting to us. And there's this  initial, so  hope the initial, wherever you want to go, just remember Lord of the Rings right, we get to get the ring.

​

[00:38:28] It's a Mordor and there's this whole thing in front. That was well, that's interesting because you know, whether he needs to go, you know, where you are not, which is Mordor and you know where you are, which is to Shire. So now, like who, who it's got to go there and which  adventure are they going? And that's is essentially what building in public is about. You share your adventure as it happens. You share which other hobbits join you. You share which mountains you would walk over and it's  cities you visit along the way, just because it's interesting to people because either they are on their own. And they want to see what can I learn from this other person's journey?

​

[00:39:01] And which is usually a lot because we all teach each other in the particularity of the entrepreneurial community. But even if that's just your potential customers, they want to see, Hey, is this person trustworthy? Who is this? Why are they building this? And these questions are completely immediately alleviated and answered the moment you share your journey, because if you want to build something that changes the world for a particular audience, and you talk about it and you can not stop talking about it, you have been talking about it for years.

​

[00:39:27]It's not too hard to see that you're actually trustworthy, which is what building and public is. And I've been doing this with the book. Like I said, I started with this outline. Then I invited people to tell me what they wanted me to write about, and a lot of people did this, I invited people to, to edit the book with me, essentially, I wrote them a manuscript and the month of January, 2021 from January 1st to the 31st, I wrote the manuscript, which was.

​

[00:39:53]50 some thousand words or something. I don't, I don't really know it was a lot of writing. And then I took this and put it online and invited people and told them, Hey, look at this, I wrote this for you. You wanted me to write about this now, please take a look at it and tell me where it sucks. Tell me where it doesn't make sense.

​

[00:40:08] Tell me where something is repetitive, where it's slow, where it's not clear. Just please look into it. You're not going to get access to this book for free before anybody else gets to see it. Just please tell me where I can make it better for you. That was, that was the idea. And I, I think I had 550 readers, alpha readers who went through this book and gave me.

​

[00:40:30]A lot of insights, a lot of often conflicting, but still interesting ideas and, and responses. It was great and essentially collaborated with all those people in editing the first draft. And then it wasn't 550 at the beginning, it was like 50. And then I invited 50 more to the next version of the draft.

​

[00:40:47] I think I did four or five rounds of this collaborative editing. And then I sent the book to an actual editor that went through and did some proofreading and some more contextual editing and another proofreader, which was also professional. And they all, both came back with 3000 changes each. So that was fun. what, what was the result? Was it book that was extremely actionable and contained to this day? Zero typos because a couple of hundred people read it and looked into it. It really, it made, it made a big difference because people told me, Hey, remove this whole chapter. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't help me.

​

[00:41:20] I want a book that helps me from the start. So everything that you find now in the book has been vetted by hundreds of founders who were exactly where the reader that I want to reach is and told me that this helped them or So that's, that's where this whole process came from. So building in public, isn't just sharing how much money you make this month, which I also do.

​

[00:41:40] It's also part of it, right? I just, a couple of days ago, I told people that for the month of June 20, 21 from Amazon, I think Amazon, I made like 2,500 euros in book sales. I share this because I want to encourage other people to write and tell them how hard it is to actually make some meaningful amount of money as a writer from these platforms.

​

[00:42:00] But also to show the people who are invested in my journey that it's starting to pay off. Right? Because people like with Lord of the RIngs, if you watch these three hour movies or I guess all nine hours or ten-ish 10 and a half hours of the extended edition, which I highly recommend. 

​

[00:42:16] Couple of times you're invested, you're invested in the Frodo.

​

[00:42:19] You're invested in the people in the movie, maybe even the narrative itself. But if for, for a building public persons, you invested in the founder, you want to see them succeed and you will help them succeed. Because when I launched a book on Twitter this year and, and must've been May 19th, I think I launched just a tweet with a little video and a couple of tweets following on explaining what the, how the book came to happen and stuff.

​

[00:42:42] And thousands of people helped me out. They retweeted it. They, they liked that today. They shared it with their friends. The next week I did a Product Hunt launch, and it went to number one for the whole day. People helped me, shared, upvoted it, the amount of people in my community that wanted to see me succeed was incredible because they've been along for the ride.

​

[00:43:01] They wanted to see the happy end, right? They wanted to be part of the, the, the group of people that made the happy and. And that's what building public really allows you to do?

​

[00:43:09]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:43:09] I mean one. I think that was a great explanation of building a public. I think it's a good 101 course for anyone who this is a new topic for them. And just a few episodes ago on this podcast. Talking about some of the loneliness that comes into being a founder, being an entrepreneur, especially if you're working on these projects in this like solo fashion.

​

[00:43:28] Right. And that, I think what you just finished with right there is such a good realization for people is knowing that people want you to succeed. Like people actually care, like get this: strangers on the internet that have never spoken with you. They don't know you. They don't know your family. They don't know you outside of, Hey, you're working on something that alleviates problems for people.

​

[00:43:52] These people want you to succeed. And by opening the book a bit, sharing what you're doing, sharing the problems, the struggles, the successes, all of these things, people are willing to come along for the journey and they actually want you to succeed and specifically seeing your launch of The Embedded Entrepreneur and launching on Product Hunt.

​

[00:44:13] And you know, this essentially tweeting a lot about this process, right? Personally, it was so amazing to see the community support around you and around this book, knowing that this is something that you really care about you're coming off the success of the company being sold the previous book and knowing that this isn't just like a money-making scheme for you, right?

​

[00:44:37] Like opportunity. It is something that you deeply care about and you're actually writing, like you said, for people you're writing for people that you know, are ready to read. 

​

[00:44:47] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:44:47] Yeah. And with, with people with people too, sorry for interrupting, but I'm writing for and With 

​

[00:44:52] them. And I think, and that involves them. That makes it contextualizes it for them, which makes it a whole different product as

​

[00:44:58] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:44:58] Yeah, and you correct me if you're wrong, you self published the book and I'm thinking I have some friends that have written books that have gone through publishers and things.

​

[00:45:09] And I understand some of the expectations that these publishing companies are really looking for in their authors and the books that they're distributing and the things that traditional publishing and publishing houses think about like your community is doing on your behalf.

​

[00:45:23] Right? So I'm imagining these publishing houses receiving a book that is like, oh, this has been edited by, well, how many people, oh, how many people are waiting for this book to come out? No typos. We haven't found the typo yet. Like this is just like a dream come true for like a traditional publisher.

​

[00:45:38] And then you were able to  circumvent that process and do it yourself. And from the looks of it, I love your screenshots of your phone when these notifications are coming in through not just Amazon, but these different, these other platforms as well.

​

[00:45:50] And people are purchasing this book. So it's very, very cool to see how this building and public journey has both instructed. People, taught people about these things, but also led to the success of this book because you're doing it with people. You're the author, but you have a whole team.

​

[00:46:06]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:46:06] Yes, exactly. And, and, and I, I feel that they are a team. I, I feel like one of many, I'm a peer and I want to be a peer. I don't want to be standing on a soapbox, telling people what to do. I really don't enjoy that. I mean, I love going on, on shows and talk about what I want to talk about, obviously, which is  soap box ish, but I don't want to talk down to people.

​

[00:46:29] I don't want to talk at people. I want to talk with people. It does, to me, for me, there's a big difference to be in the conversation. You're dominating the conversation. I want to have a conversation and I want to see how I can bring myself into the conversation. And that works best with a big community of people that I care about, obviously.

​

[00:46:48] And it's interesting that you mentioned other platforms, you were mentioning those, those screenshots Gumroad for example, is one of these platforms and Gumroad does what Amazon does not in being available everywhere, essentially. So Amazon, you only really have a couple countries. You have like the European countries.

​

[00:47:06] If the United States, Canada and New Zealand, India, maybe the us Mexico, still Brazil. And then you have a problem because if you have a person in Kenya who wants to buy your book and you self-published through Amazon, they don't have a print on demand system in Kenya. So if you are Kenyan and you want to buy a paperback copy of my book, you don't have a problem because again, so if you are in Kenya and you want to buy an ebook v s a Kindle. You also have a problem because they only sell them in other stores in the U S store or the German store, French store, but none in the Kenyan one. So for these people, you need to have alternative methods because I want to re reach a global community. I know that I have I've literally had followers in hundreds hundred 50 some countries.

​

[00:47:53] I have people who bought through Gumroad from, I think, over a hundred countries and Amazon has only like 13 or 14 of them. So knowing that means I actively need to make sure that what I want to have reached what I want people to be able to see and consume needs to be both affordable, which is why the book is only 10 bucks.

​

[00:48:15] So that even in India, where 10 bucks is quite a lot of money for people, particularly if they want to start a business. And, you know, don't have much money to do that. It needs to be available. So these, these platforms both Gumroad and other print on demand services that you can order through bookstores, I think it's Ingram spark is one of those things.

​

[00:48:33]These are really important to the journey. And as a, as a self-published person, you need to be aware of these things and you need to learn them to be able to reach all the people out there. If you had a publisher, they would likely take that work off your shoulders. But funny enough, I've been talking to a lot of people who've been publishing through regular means for actual publishers turned out.

​

[00:48:54] They still had to do all their marketing because the publisher is what they say. They publish a book, they create it, they turn a tree into your book. And then they shipped that dead tree somewhere to a store and put it on the shelf. But I know that most of the people that I want to reach, they don't even go to bookstores.

​

[00:49:12] They have a Kindle and they sit in front of the computer all day, building a business. They don't have time to go to a bookstore. So my audience is not a traditional books audience, even though it would be nice to have the book on a shelf somewhere. I don't need that. I don't need that distribution that necessarily, I want it to be where people need it.

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[00:49:30] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:49:30] Yeah. I love it. And I, I love that. You mentioned, like, let's say for example, Gumroad specifically is online payments and e-commerce has traditionally been  like a glows closed gate thing, right? You need to be someone like yourself, like a software developer to accept payments and fast forward, you know, to this  era that we're in now where Stripe and a lot of these other tools allow us to build these platforms specifically Gumroad makes it very accessible to people all around the world to accept payments. There's a big theme of no code actually really empowering and creating a lot of accessibility for people to actually create solutions to people's problems. Right. And if you're one person, you know, maybe a solo founder and you're embedding yourselves in these communities and you've listened and you're like, I think I'm onto a problem that they're experiencing.

​

[00:50:26]And traditionally, again, there's usually some complications in the building solutions, right? There's typically a technical problem, knowledge problem, typically a resources problem, right? Funding or people or access to developers and things like that. But no code actually really does provide this opportunity for people that have identified a problem, the ability to have more leverage, to use some of these tools, to empower them, to actually create these solutions.

​

[00:50:58]Maybe not the final product necessarily, but maybe just a minimum viable product that they can even share with this audience that they've been discussing with having conversations with. Right. And say, is this something that would solve that problem and gather that feedback? So share with us a little bit about that.

​

[00:51:15] Cause I know you're also a very strong proponent of, of no-code and to create solutions like this. So talk a little bit about that.

​

[00:51:22] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:51:22] No code is wonderful. Like no code really it's still code, right? It is, it is tools that are built with it's just that they're usable to create more tools that are built with code without needing to know how to build with That's the wonderful thing about no code instead status. That's actually not, it's been around for a while.

​

[00:51:40] Like Beckon. What I remember when I was young, there used to be, I think, called Microsoft front page and I think Macromedia Dreamweaver or something like tools where you could just click together a website, obviously back then the web, because the technology wasn't as interactive. As it is now, but you could still create a website very easy

​

[00:51:59] without knowing HTML St.

​

[00:52:01] Francis. It's just, we need drag drag and drop, like put something together, essentially how you would write a word document or design an Excel sheet. You're just like it was sorts of stuff. And then it would be a website. Those tools exist now in the much better form. And they're much more interaction based and a much more data centric way.

​

[00:52:17] And they're called nocode tools. And the one great thing. Well, two great things. One great thing is they're usually very cheap and because people who built them understand that people use them as prototyping tools. So there's always this initial tier for any pricing, which is usually free or extremely cheap.

​

[00:52:34] They think of maybe five bucks a month for tool. That way you can have up to 200 paying users until you need to start paying money. Like that is the  logic. And usually once you have a paying user, they probably pay you more than five bucks a month. So, you know, it turns out to be a positive situation.

​

[00:52:49] So most no-code tools. Very easy entry tier. They are always easy to use. That's the whole idea behind no-code is that they are usable by people without a technical background. There is often an interesting community around them. People who help each other learn how to use these tools, or at least very well-designed resources.

​

[00:53:08] Again, because they understand that the target customer is not software engineers, but people who have other things to do, you know, like people who have a different come from different backgrounds we'll do on a technical part are interested in building a technical product. That's one thing. Cheap access, tiers, easy access tiers.

​

[00:53:23] And usually well-documented second thing. And that's maybe the more important thing is that all no code tools that are successful in the market are highly connectable. They are highly interconnected with each other, either directly where you can integrate one no-code tool into another. And they, they usually have I don't know, tutorials to do that.

​

[00:53:42] I'm just thinking about like member space, which is a tool an OCO tool, which allows you to have people sign up for accounts and immediately charged them to pay you money through a credit card. You know, like having a membership system, a plug and play membership system that you could plug into any other no-code tool.

​

[00:53:58] So it's just a little tiny snippet of code that you need to copy from one place and paste it into another. And it's done and it will work forever because they take care of that. What you copy and paste. It is always correctly working with all these tools. So that's one way of integrating stuff with each other. And then there's these in-between glue tools like Zapier, or if this, then that, or I don't Integromat just a couple of names here that are literally tools that have an input and an output, and you can connect anything to the input or an output.

​

[00:54:28] Let's say something changes in my Google sheet and you row gets edit. It sends a zap and Zapier. And then on the output is I'm sending an email to that person. , send this message to that name, to that email address, all completely automated.

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[00:54:45] And that is something you can connect all those tools for each other. You can say, oh, an email. Add aligned to my Excel sheet, or, you know, like somebody clicks a button on a website start this like email chain or redirect to this thing. It's, it's highly interconnected. And these tools are, and allowing you to interact any tool with any other tool, super powerful.

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[00:55:09] And that would have been something that even for a seasoned program couple of years ago would have been extremely complicated.  And often you would have to pay money. I need to even be able to access them, but with those no-code tools and those glue tools like snappier, you could just plug and play. Now, put them all together. And then you have a system that is highly automated, highly.

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[00:55:28]Resilient, because it uses these tools that you didn't have to build yourself, but somebody else did. And that, that in combination allows you to build websites, mobile apps just info products, courses, you know, all these kinds of things, just from a website where you just pull, pull it all together and then you're connected.

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[00:55:50] It takes some time to figure out how to do this. Right. But you know, any meaningful, valuable product takes some time to build. So at least you don't have to learn how to code for three years. How about that? Right? Or even more for certain kinds of technologies. 

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[00:56:05] It's, it's, it's an amazing 

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[00:56:07] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:56:07] does

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[00:56:08] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:56:08] pay. Thousands of dollars for somebody who might know it's not even built the thing you wanted.

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[00:56:12] Cause you don't even know how to phrase it

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[00:56:14] for the 

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[00:56:15] technical mindset. 

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[00:56:15] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:56:15] it.

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[00:56:16]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:56:16] Oh, no code is a great way of building your initial prototype or even the actual tool itself. There are tools out there that aren't exclusively, no code making millions a year. It is it's out there. So it's a great tech. It's a wonderful thing.

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[00:56:30] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:56:30] Yeah. And I love it. So to connect that, to what really this idea of The Embedded Entrepreneur is, like, you touched on obviously the affordability and accessibility of these tools but also like the speed, right? Like the ability for you to create something that didn't exist. And let's say one week, two week, four weeks later, depending on whatever solution that says right

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[00:56:54] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:56:54] Yep.

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[00:56:54] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:56:54] now, you have something that didn't exist and now it does, and it works.

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[00:56:59]And you can share that with someone on the internet or in these communities that you're talking with. And they can say, just like you offered your book up and say, Hey, tell me all the things that are wrong. They can do the same thing. Hey, it works great. Or. This is actually pretty close, but if you fixed a, B, C, or 

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[00:57:15] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:57:15] Okay. 

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[00:57:16] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:57:16] I'd pay money for this, then that is this validation idea that we're talking about, where some people, they have that thing that exists, but they skipped all these steps.

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[00:57:27]And now they're like, it exists. The product's there. I don't know who needs this or no one might need it now. What are the gymnastics I have to do to make this something that I could convince someone to you? 

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[00:57:40] Arvid Kahl: 

[00:57:40] It's just a lot of 

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[00:57:41] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:57:41] yourself, right? So this, so you've  outlined for people. Let's say, if you're a listener of this podcast, you're like, I've had an idea for actually a long time now, but I haven't really known how do I, I need someone to tell me if this is a good idea or not, and I need the right people to tell me if this is a good idea or not.

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[00:57:58] Who are those people, how they communicate with them. And once I have maybe some time. Validation is product market fit idea. That's audience fit, right? Now what, oh, maybe I can actually build this thing and get it in into their hands. So a lot of really, really good stuff here over them. I'm really excited for your book.

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[00:58:17]I know it's going to really help. A lot of, a lot of people maybe save people, like you said, this decade of frustration of saying there are things that they were going to try and it might've fell flat, but actually this book actually allowed them to course correct a little bit. So I'm really excited about that.

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[00:58:32] Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you'd like to share before we close?

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[00:58:38]Arvid Kahl: 

[00:58:38] Oh hundred thousand things. Well, maybe one thing. When I, when I sold a business, like I, I said earlier I was stressed. I was anxious. There was a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of mental health challenges that I was facing because I was just a working myself and I didn't have any backup. And it was also like we were living in just the two of us here in Berlin and family was far away.

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[00:59:01] It wasn't a stressful time. And I felt that it did some damage to me that it took me a long time to repair. And that's some physical consequences that I'm still sometimes suffering through. I have a slight PTSD whenever I hear this little chat bubble sound on websites, because that reminds me of support tickets that came in when, when we had trouble with our business.

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[00:59:23] So that there's still something that on occasion comes through. What I want to want to say here is that. When you are on your entrepreneurial journey, you're not alone. If you feel alone than that is your mind tricking you because there's so many people out there who are willing to help you willing to listen to you.

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[00:59:41] You just have to go to where they are. You just have to join their communities. Start talking about yourself, go to them, communicating with them about their journeys and bringing yours into the conversation you're not alone. And you definitely can find people who can help you because they've been through what you're currently going through.

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[00:59:59] No matter if it's good or bad, like people will always be willing to help because the entrepreneurial community, we know that bootstrapping is impossible by definition, right? You cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps. There needs to be a support system. And the community is that support system. If you want it to be, make sure to be with people, talk to people.

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[01:00:19] If you feel like you can't handle it mentally, because it's stressful, reach out and talk about it, do not eat up this stuff. Make sure you're mentally healthy because your journey as an entrepreneur needs you to be aware of your mental health and to be healthy both in mind and body. So make sure mental health is not a thing on the sidelines.

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[01:00:39] It's a central thing. I just want people to be aware of that and talk about it. The good and the bad that's important.

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[01:00:44]Sean Pritzkau: 

[01:00:44] Thank you so much for sharing that it's really, really important. And I know that is something that gets left out of the conversation too often. So I really appreciate that. Arvid, thanks again for coming on the podcast. Very excited about your book. If anyone wants to get in touch with Arvid follow over then Twitter you, you're not gonna have a hard time finding him you know, search for the books, search for him on Twitter.

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[01:01:06] You'll you'll do okay. We trust, but I'll also include those links in the show notes. And also on your upcoming move to Canada you'll become never on my side of the ocean. So I'm excited to have you over here when that comes, but again, thanks so much for being on the podcast and hope to talk to you soon.

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[01:01:23] Arvid Kahl: 

[01:01:23] Thanks so much. Was really great. Thanks for having me.

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[01:01:25] 

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[01:01:39]Sean Pritzkau: 

[01:01:39] Okay what an awesome episode with Arvid. Man I've been able to follow and connect with Arvid online for probably the last couple of years. I've kind of seen this journey unfold with him writing Zero to Sold, and then now The Embedded Entrepreneur. Now he really is as thoughtful and as genuine as he appears online in real life. That was just such a really great conversation and interview. And I know there's a lot that we can pull from this episode and really begin implementing. I mean, the idea of identifying who you really want to serve, who you care about, what kind of community you really want to embed yourself into, and then taking a step back and just listening.

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[01:02:22] I mean, that is something huge right there, right? Just what it really takes to get involved in the community enough to build trust with them before you begin to pitch or sell something to them. Right. Really, really great stuff here. 

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[01:02:37] Now, if you enjoyed this episode, I highly suggest you go and purchase The Embedded Entrepreneur, either on Amazon or Gumroad all these links are in the show notes and then definitely follow Arvid on social media because he really practices what he preaches. Right? You'll see this often in real time, this idea of building in public. 

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[01:02:58]Now if any of you begin to jump online and start practicing this idea of building in public, let me know. I'd love to hear about your experience beginning to share about your ideas and be a bit more open with your audience, as you continue to build it, be a little bit more transparent and kind of pulling back the curtain and letting people see what you're working on and what you're really excited about, I know this is something I need to do better in sharing about the things that I'm working on, the things that I'm building and building an audience around that.

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[01:03:30] And really this podcast is a big part of that. I want to begin to share with you what I'm working on as I build this podcast and build this community, that's the thing I need to practice better. So Arvid is a big inspiration when it comes to that. 

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[01:03:44]Now, thanks again for listening. And if you want to support the show, the best thing you can really do is rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or iTunes. Let us know what you thought of this episode, and I would love to hear from you. So thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week.

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