I just released a 2-hour audio documentary of building and launching my most recent SaaS startup

While building my most recent startup, Drip (a self-funded SaaS app), I recorded more than 9 hours of Skype conversations and edited them into a nice, 2-hour audio documentary (complete with music and an epilogue).

From the honeymoon period of “green field” development to the sleepless nights of database failures, it captures the often downplayed, but very real angst of building a startup.

Hope you enjoy it :smile:

http://www.startupstoriespodcast.com/podcast/the-complete-saga/

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This is awesome. It’s not I would watch in video (too long to commit watching it), but as an audio it’s something I can listen to while I do other stuff. Will definitely listen to it this week. Thanks for posting this!

This is pretty cool! I’m intrigued, are you planning on turning it into a regular podcast, with different people submitting their own mini documentaries? @mikeaag & I record our Skype conversations whilst working but that would take a lot of effort to edit!

This is such an awesome idea. I was like wow how did he have the presence of mind to think about recording this while in the midst of all the craziness of building an app. And then I was like oh ya this isn’t his first rodeo.

Really enjoyed listening to it. I think that I probably might have liked for it to dive even a little bit further into some of the technical detail. I know that you tried to stay away from that on purpose - but assuming that most of your audience is somewhat techy who knows maybe they would be into that.

I know that you like to keep your audio content short and to the point though. :slight_smile:

And it may just be that I have an app in a similar vein as yours so I’m interested a bit more in the detail.

Anyways, this was just really awesome to listen to. To basically be able to hear product market fit being created before your ears over a period of weeks and months condensed into two hours. All the ups and downs.

And then the funny thing is that the entire time I was listening to it I thought that it was this year that you guys were referencing. And when you mentioned microconf europe I was like oh yeah I know that happened a month or so ago. And then at the very end when you fast forwarded a year I was like wow that was a whole year ago!

Anyhoo thanks again for this great resource.

I hadn’t planned on publishing additional mini-documentaries, but if someone else compiled something similar it would make sense to publish it.

But no joke, it’s a ton of effort to edit it into a listenable format. I made many passes through these files to compile the finished product you listened to.

Yeah I can imagine it’s no easy task. Could make an interesting podcast though, quite different to others. I don’t know how many other startups record their Skype conversations (if they use Skype at all) or who would want to spend the time editing it all down, but if you vetted them and did an intro on each one it would be a very interesting podcast.

I’m not sure whether I’ll ever edit our recordings, it was mainly for future reference as to how things panned out. If I ever feel crazy enough to edit it down I’ll drop you a line to see if you’re interested.

Wow, this is an awesome idea! Downloaded this and will listen to it on the road.

Were you inspired by Alex Blumberg’s Startup Podcast?

No, we started recording these almost 2 years ago, well before Alex launched Startup.

I like to think he got his inspiration from me :smile:

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Awesome! Just listened in to it, it really does feel like that :wink:

@robwalling - really enjoyed this. Great lead-in with the “is this thing on” bit. It sets the tone nicely and tells us it’s going to cover the real, not-pretty parts of launching a business.

I’d love to hear your thinking around starting Drip with a business partner (and in a way, an apprentice?). Is there a podcast episode or interview where you talk that stuff?

So we’re actually not business partners, Derrick is taking a salary.

I realize that some of our discussions sound like co-founder discussions, that’s because we’ve known each other for several years and both really bought into the idea of Drip. So we each have strong opinions about what it should, and should not be.

Ah! Yes, some of those bits did sound like cofounder discussions. Thanks for clarifying. If you’ve codified your thoughts on business partnerships somewhere, let me know. I’d be interested to read or listen and learn more. I’ve chosen both paths at different times, and I currently favor the solo founder model, but you know… it comes up as a question once in a while.

I have, but not in an easy-to-find podcast episode or blog post. I’ll make a note to discuss it in the future.

The short answer: though I have done both, I prefer the solo founder approach.