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Arvid Kahl

Being your own boss isn't easy, but it's worth it. Learn how to build a legacy while being kind and authentic. I want to empower as many entrepreneurs as possible to help themselves (and those they choose to serve).

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The Art of Productive Procrastination — The Bootstrapped Founder 354

Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, As I sit here writing this newsletter, I should probably be doing something else. Something more impactful. Something that actually moves my business forward. But here’s the thing about being a solopreneur: nobody’s going to tell you what to do or in what order to do it. If I don’t keep myself accountable, nothing will happen. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. Being your own boss both means having no boss and having to be … a boss. To yourself. I’ll be...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, I want new prospects to receive the maximum possible value the moment they register for Podscan, so I treat them as customers before they even come to the page for the very first time.Here's the Podscan Dream Customer strategy — from idea to execution. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. A few months ago, I started thinking about preparing data on Podscan for people who would be ideal customers for what the product currently is — a social listening tool. The...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Yesterday, I shrunk the size of my production database from four terabytes to just under one terabyte. Still ginormous, but very impactful for Podscan, in several ways. Something interesting happened last weekend that made me realize I needed to change how I think about scale. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. While checking my monitoring dashboards, I noticed a pattern in Podscan’s data ingestion that would significantly change how I approach orchestrating...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, When a Podscan user got a bit "too general" with their keywords, all of a sudden, my email provider stopped sending emails.Whoops.Let's talk user error and founder foresight. As founders, we often find ourselves in situations that test our foresight and adaptability. This week, I experienced one such moment that served as both a wake-up call and a valuable learning opportunity. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. It’s a story that highlights the importance of...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, We SaaS founders find ourselves in a peculiar position. We're simultaneously tenants and landlords, renting the tools we need while offering our own services for a subscription. It's a world where true ownership seems increasingly elusive, yet understanding its nature is crucial for building lasting value. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. The Rental Economy of SaaS Nearly every component of our businesses is rented. From virtual servers to error tracking...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, Before we dive into this week's topic of bootstrapper constraints, a quick just-in-time mention: Next Tuesday —on the 8th of October— I'll be on a live workshop with Castos founder and CEO Craig Hewitt, where we'll talk all about effectively Building in Public. If you want to join a masterclass on building an audience around yourself and your work, this free event will be for you. In recent podcast episodes, I’ve been discussing constraints and how I deal...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, “I didn’t see it coming.” I had to admit that to myself a few times recently. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been experiencing several issues with Podscan that only came to pass because I didn’t really have any observability on my system. At least that’s what I know now. 🎧 Listen to this on my podcast. Because it always takes a while to see the bottom part of an iceberg. With Podscan, most scaling issues only show themselves in a delayed fashion; the...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, As a software entrepreneur wearing many hats - from coding to marketing to customer service - I’ve found AI systems to be game-changing tools in my daily work. Today, I want to share how I use these systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, to —hopefully— inspire you to benefit from similar approaches. This isn’t just about the tools themselves, but about how they’ve transformed my workflow and expanded my capabilities as...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, As founders, we often focus on scaling our businesses in terms of customers, revenue, or team size. But what happens when the data your business relies on scales faster than anything else? That’s the challenge I very recently faced with Podscan.fm, and it nearly brought the entire system to its knees. Nearly! If you’re building a business that deals with large volumes of external data, buckle up – this story might save you from some sleepless nights. 🎧...

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Podcast, YouTube, Blog Dear founder, With my podcast data scanning business Podscan, I’m constantly scraping the web for terabytes of audio and metadata - but now I find myself in a wild cat-and-mouse game, trying to protect my own valuable data from aggressive AI companies doing the exact same thing. It’s a bizarre tightrope walk: I need data to be freely available, but I’m also setting up defenses against scrapers, all while wondering if I could turn these digital intruders into paying...