Episode 522 | Revisiting Castos, One Year Later

11/10/20 • 44 min

Rob welcomes back to the show a frequent guest, Craig Hewitt for a "Where Are They Now?" syle episode. Craig is the founder of Castos and has appeared many times on Startups For the Rest of Us. In this episode, they reconnect and talk about the latest with Castos, from hiring a growth marketer, merging brands, private podcasting, and so much more.

The topics we cover

[3:54] Reflections on hiring a growth marketer 1 year later

[6:92] How did the free trial without asking for a credit card experiment work out?

[8:92] Merging brands and moving into enterprise offers

[19:91] Private podcasting

[23:44] What's new and exciting at Castos

Links from the show

If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned.

Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode.

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

The topics we cover

[3:54] Reflections on hiring a growth marketer 1 year later

[6:92] How did the free trial without asking for a credit card experiment work out?

[8:92] Merging brands and moving into enterprise offers

[19:91] Private podcasting

[23:44] What's new and exciting at Castos

Links from the show

If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned.

Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode.

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

Previous Episode

TinySeed Tales S2E9 | Playing the Long Game

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather, an interior design project management app.Join Rob as he chats with Brian & Scottie for the final episode of Season 2 of TinySeed Tales. In the last year, Gather managed to double their revenue and overcome most of the challenges they faced along the way.It's been about a month since we last spoke and during that time, their recent cash crunch has started to resolve itself.In this episode, we reflect on the past year and their success (and struggle) with moving upmarket.

The topics we cover

[01:01] Gather's recent cash crunch

Cashflow is not our biggest concern anymore, which is a great relief.
Since that time growth has been either sorta normal steady when you average it out or maybe a little slower the last month and a half.
Small Business Association loan and PPP loan changed things for us,.
One was the loans, the other was that Gather landed a bigger enterprise client who was...

Read more... »

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Next Episode

Episode 523 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Entrepreneurship for Kids, Common Bootstrapper Mistakes, and More Listener Questions

In episode 523, Rob hosts a rapid-fire lightning round of listener questions ranging from whether to focus on one or multiple businesses, finding the right amount of customer research, breaking through slow growth, and teaching entrepreneurship to kids.

The topics we cover

[4:38] If you were starting a business today and you were earlier on in your career, would you try multiple business ideas at once or go all-in on one?

[8:11] If building your first tiny product, like a WordPress plugin, what level of customer research should you do?

[10:56] What advice would you give to someone entering a somewhat competitive market?

[15:55] What questions would you be asking yourself if you had a slow-growing 12k MRR B2B SaaS?

[18:22] How would you go about offloading tier-one customer support?

[20:28] How do you feel about entrepreneurship being taught to children?

[22:24] What are things you noticed that bootstrappers commonly overlooked that are preventing them from achieving their goals?

[23:18] What are some of the biggest takeaways you can see across your portfolio of early-stage SaaS companies?

[25:01] Have you ever built a business that got a fairly large portion of its revenue from services instead of products, but not just you consulting?

[26:56] How do you prepare financially or otherwise for your retirement?

Links from the show

If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned.

Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode.

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!