Episode 474 | Overcoming a 40% Decline in MRR with Brian Casel
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Brian Casel of Audience Ops, about recovering from a 40% decline in MRR. They start the story back in 2016 and work through the decline, audience ops rebound, the start of Ops Calendar, and Brian’s decision to learn how to code.
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Transcript
Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on this show, we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious yet sane and sustainable startups. We realize that starting a company is hard. More than half of being a startup founder is managing your own psychology and much of being a founder is making decisions with incomplete information where the right answer is impossible to find through math or data.
This week’s episode, I talk with Brian Castle about overcoming a 40% decline in MRR and rising from those ashes. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 474.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome in building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth startup, or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob and today with Brian Castle, we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome back to the show. Thank you for joining me again this week on Startups for the Rest of Us. We have many different show formats. This week is a conversation with someone you’ve likely heard of, Brian Castle. He hosts the Bootstrapped Web podcast with Jordan Gal. And I’ve been listening to that podcast for many years. Hope you enjoy our conversation today.
But before we dive into that, I want to let you know about a MicroConf announcement we’re making this Friday, December 13th. It is by far the biggest we’ve made since launching the conference a decade ago. I really encourage you to go to microconf.com, make sure you’re on the email list. If you’ve attended a MicroConf in the past or you have tickets now, you’re already on the list and you’ll hear about it. But it really is big news and I’m not just saying that to try to sensationalize it or encourage you to go over there. But there’s a lot that’s been going on in terms of the planning of MicroConf for 2020 and we have a lot of new things coming and would love for you to be in the loop on all that’s going on. There’s a lot that’s going to be announced. microconf.com, make sure you’re on the email list.
I enjoyed the conversation I had today with Brian Castle. To set a little bit of the stage, Brian is a frontend designer and UX guy by trade, and then he learned to do some frontend development work. He had been doing a lot of consulting and eventually started dabbling and building products as many of us do. He started at a SaaS app called Restaurant Engine which was originally designed. His vision was for it to be Squarespace for restaurants, but really it evolved almost into a productized service where he had to do a lot of hand holding with the restaurant managers. I think that probably got his gears turning on its software plus service. That offered more value than just straight up building another website builder.
In early 2015, he sold Restaurant Engine for a tidy sum. He talks about that. He said it wasn’t life changing money, but it was enough to go towards a new home. We joined his story at that point where he sold Restaurant Engine and he’s about to start a new productized service. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Br
