Starting a business vs. staying in business

`0:20:34`

But they should know that that's actually not the hard part. Literally tomorrow, I can start a new business. You can come up with a name, and you can make a thing, and you can put in the app store, and you can sell it for two bucks, and you've got a business going. But, are you going to be there in two years? Are you going to be there in five years when competition rushes in? When you have employees, are you going to be there? Staying is harder than starting. So I'm here to celebrate stay ups. Plenty of other people are here to celebrate startups. I feel the same way. I always say this about newsletters, and it's also true for podcasts. Easy to start a newsletter, hard to keep it going. Totally. I've seen your newsletter fly. We have a newsletter and it's been pretty flat. I'm like, "How does he do it?" It's hard. It's really hard.

`0:21:19`

It's hard to build a podcast audience. It's hard to build a newsletter audience. So yeah, starting something is really easy, but then most people end up in this plateau area, 'cause they get some initial growth, the word gets out, and they end up with 6,000 somethings, and then you're stuck there. Then it's like, "Well, do you want to keep doing this? Or, are you just high on the growth? Or, do you actually like the thing?" If you want to do the thing for a long period of time, you've got to like the thing because you're going to have to endure these moments of plateaus, which is what staying up is all about. Sometimes those go down. We've had wavy years, always been profitable, but our profit's different every year. Sometimes it's more, and sometimes it's less. Sometimes our margin is more, sometimes it's less. If you compare yourself to the previous year, you can get demoralized to some degree.

`0:22:07`

But I just, "What do we want to keep doing?," and then we're in it to stay in it. Speaking of enduring, you've been at this for almost 25 years now, I believe? Yeah. Have there been periods where... I like that sigh that you just had there. It's a long time. So maybe along that path, one, is there a point at which maybe you started going off track and you realized, "This is not what I want to be doing. Why did I do this to myself?" Then two is just, what have you learned being at this for this long? I would say, over the past few years, I've had more thoughts of, "How long should I do this for?" I go back and forth. I can tell you, what's interesting is, right now, I'm probably more excited than I've been in many years. But, a year ago I was not so excited. I think that after you've been doing this for a while, you do tend to just compare,