Thinking about shutting down

When I decided to pursue Microstartup Stories, a big part of why I did so is because I thought it wouldn't be too time consuming. That is turning out to not be the case, and so I'm thinking about shutting it down.

This is going to sound silly, but one thing that proved to be a bit time consuming is setting up my microphone. I bought a Blue Yeti years ago when I was working on a different podcast. You'd think it'd be easy enough to set up, but I'm just a little confused by the process. As a software developer I'm supposed to be good with technology. I'm not sure if it's me or them.

Another silly thing is struggling with the video and audio editing. All I really want is to trim from the beginning and the end. You'd think there'd be plenty of good free resources for that, but if they exist I haven't found them. I like to think I'm a good googler too. Most want you to pay for files over a certain size. And even those are hard to use (you can use them until you actually hit "download", for some it isn't until that point where you realize you have to pay). One thing in particular I've found is that in their UIs it's quite difficult to get sub-second precision, like if I want it to start at 00:30:40.

Those things wouldn't be reason enough to quit though. The big issue I'm having is finding people to interview. At first I thought it'd be easy: just go through the various places where people post their startups and send out some emails. Being on a podcast is free marketing and fun and people will be eager to do so. However, that hasn't happened. Here is where I am at.

First I went through every listing on https://www.microstartups.co/ and emailed all the ones I thought were sufficiently cool. I did the same for the ones I could find on https://microfounder.com/ without paying. I emailed seven people and that lead to one interview.

For my next round I looked through every listing on Indie Hackers' product page that has an MRR between $100 and $5,000. That lead to me sending another eight emails to ones I thought were sufficiently cool. Almost a week later none of those have materialized. Well one said they were interested but never followed up after I responded.

"Sufficiently cool" is probably an important phrase there. I don't mean it in a pretentious sense. I just think it is important for me to personally think the business is at least sorta cool/promising/valid. Otherwise my pessimism would probably shine through in the interview.

Where else can I find microstartups to interview? Product Hunt and Beta List don't let you filter by MRR. Angel List is more for "macrostartups". Same with Crunch Base. Open Startup is interesting, but there are only 23 listed between $100 and $5,000 MRR.

I can't really think of other places to look. I'm sure if I hustled hard enough I'd find interviewees, but this podcast doesn't seem like a promising enough thing to pursue if it involves hard hustling. Not because I don't want to hustle, but because I think my hustle is better applied elsewhere.

I'll mull it over for the next few days I think but more likely than not I'll end up deciding to shut down Microstartup Stories.