
Laura Roeder is the founder and CEO of MeetEdgar, a social media scheduling platform tool with over 7,000 customers.
As a founder who bootstrapped her company to $4MM in annual recurring revenue in 2.5 years, Laura shares her biggest leadership lessons around letting go as a manager.
Claire Lew: Hi everyone, my name is Claire Lew and Iām the CEO of Know Your Company. And today Iām really honored to have with me the founder and CEO of MeetEdgar, a social media scheduling platform tool, Laura Roeder.
Laura is someone who Iāve definitely admired from afar. She bootstrapped her business, in its first year originally to $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
And theyāre now, I think theyāre three and a half years into the business. They have over 7,000 companies using the products and customers using the product. Just a really incredible story of sort of staying true to what her vision was, staying independent as a company. Theyāre also a remote company, so, really excited to have you here today, Laura!
Laura Roeder: Thank you Claire.
Claire: Laura, I have this one question that Iāve been asking a lot of different leaders that Iām gonna ask you, which is, āWhatās something you wish you would have learned earlier as a leader?

Laura: Iām guessing other people might have given you a similar answer, too: Really letting go and letting the people you work with have ownership and make decisions without you. I feel like for me thatās been the constant process of leadership that Iām still definitely working on and still learning.
Stopping yourself from being a bottleneck in the companyāāāI think it can be very subtle. I think you think, āI donāt tell people they have to get approval from me,ā so Iām not blocking things up. But then, if everyone runs everything by you for your opinion or advice, theyāre getting approval from you without you explicitly stating it, right?
It can be more subtle than you saying, āOh, I donāt have to check on everything,ā and I think to be a great leader, you really have to be deliberate in saying, āI donāt need to see this. Donāt show this to me.ā You know, āMake this decision without me.ā Which can be a hard thing to do.
Claire: Oh my goodness, yeah, I couldnāt agree more. I think itās the biggest challenge especially for leaders who transition from being an individual contributor to becoming a leader. Because usually, when you become a leader, whether youāre promoted or whether youāre a founder, itās usually because youāre good at doing the job, right? Youāre good at doing āthe thing.ā
And now, all of a sudden, when youāre a leader, itās all about letting go of doing āthe thing.ā For you, personally is there a particular sort of instance where you realized, āOh my gosh, I am the bottleneck and I had no idea and I am caring too much about ādoing the thingā instead of just letting go?ā
Laura: In some ways, itās hard to think of a specific example because there are so many! So, right now Iām in the CEO role and Iām also heading up the marketing team. Marketing has been the area thatās been the hardest for me to step away from, because that is my, like you said, individual contributor background, is doing the marketing side.
Sometimes, I find myself shooting down ideas that I donāt even mean to do, because Iāll sort of just, at first brush, be like, āI donāt think that strategy is really as strong as some others weāve been looking at,ā but I havenāt let the person even tell me what the idea is, what the whole strategy is, right? And it can be easy not to realize how powerful a side comment from me as the leader/CEO/founder going āOh, I donāt know about that,ā to someone else can read as āLaura has vetoed this, this will never happen,ā when maybe I mean like, āWhy donāt you flesh that out more?ā But I need to say that explicitly.
Claire: Definitely. I think there are so many founders and CEOs and managers who I talk to where they inadvertently realize that their word, all of a sudden, has become the law of the land, and that a casual comment like, āOh, I donāt know if I really like that,ā means āOkay, we will never, ever bring this idea upā when thatās not what you meant at all!
As a leader, having learned those lessons the hard way as we all have, how do you compensate for that? What things do you now to try to do to let people know my way is not sort of the highway?

Laura: So part of it just like constantly, explicitly saying things like, āThis not urgent,ā because thatās another thing that Iāve learned. People think that if it asks and comes from me, that means itās at the top of the priority list, which is I mean literally, neverthe case with how our company. Weāre very big on not having false deadlines, not having urgency. We want to complete things at the right pace.
So, Iāll just think of a random like, āIām curious about this report,ā or Iām curious about this statistic, so if Iām asking someone for something like that, Iāll say, āTHIS IS NOT IMPORTANT! THIS IS NOT URGENT!ā in all caps in the email, just to really be clear and I find that, I can say like, āJust because it comes from me, itās not urgent,ā itās just a lot more helpful for the other person if I go ahead and put that out, itās just a lot clearer.
Claire: Oh my gosh, absolutely! I think yeah, I think in previous jobs that Iāve worked out, whenever the boss would say, āOh yeah, get this thing done,ā itās like that gets moved to the top of the list when in many ways, thatās not the case.
At MeetEdgar, you definitely have folks who are managers and who youāre growing and coaching as well. How do you, if you try to at all, teach them this? If this is for you the biggest thing you wish you would have learned, are there different things that you try to suggest to new managers as you grow them and bring them into the company, around this?
Laura: Something that we do that I think is kind of unusual for our size, so weāre about 30 people is to really have very little execution time for managers. Which is something, I donāt know, I read a lot from the Basecamp founders, I know they love to spend a lot of time coding. I love a lot of their ideas. They probably would not resonate with this one.
But for us, we really just want to make sure that a manager, who we call āadvocatesā at our company, have the time and space to be there for their team at large, which means theyāre not spending a lot of time on individual work, some, but definitely not the majority of their time.
I think that sort of helps ⦠If you are just leading and managing, I think that can make it a little easier to take a step back from being so bogged down in execution and letting your team be the ones who are really bogged down in execution, because I can imagine thatās even harder if someone is like the leader of the team and theyāre programming right alongside next to ⦠I can imagine that would just make it more challenging as the other programmer to feel like theyāre not really scrutinizing all the work thatās being done.
We find that having that space, having that separation, is pretty useful.
Claire: Definitely. Itās interesting, it reminds me actually. I spoke with Michael Lopp, whoās the VP of Engineering at Slack, and asked him this question a month or so ago. And he said something really similar about how delegation is really for him, the thing that he hires for in managers and he looks for and what he talked about in particular is that, as a manager, you need time to manager and let that, like you said, that space.
And he was saying that if youāre too busy doing the actual work, actually as a manager, thatās a huge mistake. You should not be busy. I mean, would you agree with that? Do you find yourself as a CEO, trying to be in many ways, less busy?
Laura: Yes. I mean, I have very little what I would call deliverable work that I do, actually something I do as CEO is promote the company, via podcasts and interviews like this.
Thatās actually one of the few things on my list that are really like things that I have to complete. Things that I have to do. I try to spend most of my time really on strategy, on coaching others. Even my role in marketing, even though Iām heading up marketing right now, I donāt write copy. I could, but Iām not doing the hands-on stuff.
And thatās how itās always been. Iāve never written copy or done like the actual marketing for this company. That was something very deliberate for me because I wanted to have time and space for the other parts of my job.
Claire: Definitely. Iām curious, Laura, I mean youāre saying the company is now 30 people. Has that evolved as the company has grown? I know originally, before starting MeetEdgar, youād run your own consulting practice. So, from that transition, boutique consulting practice to large early-stage SAS company, did you find yourself, when you were a lot earlier sort of on your path, feeling like, āOkay, I have to do the work?ā
Do you remember the moment when you switched and you started realizing like, āThis is a different stage now,ā or do you think itās not? Or, have you from the beginning have you always tried to just purposefully let go as much as possible?
Laura: This company is by far the largest. My training business before this one was like, four people. This is definitely the largest. This is the first company Iāve run where we have a true leadership/management structure in place.
It sort of is like an epiphany moment and a gradual transition. I did have a moment where I realized that I was operating under the assumption that I was the greatest person in the world at doing everything, because when youāre in that stage of being a solo entrepreneur or freelance, and you think that you canāt let things go, you often get this idea, āI have this special way that I reconcile the PayPal downloads and nobody is capable to figure out my system that I created.ā
You realize that what youāre really saying is āIām the only person in the world who can do this and Iām the best.ā I am the greatest at reconciling PayPal downloads that this world has ever seen. And thatās really absurd. And that realization helped me realize well, of course, one, just due to my age alone, right? Iām 33 now. Thereās people that are better than me at everything just because theyāve been doing it for five years longer or more, if nothing else. That reason alone disqualifies me in a lot of ways.
So, obviously thereās people that are better at everything. That realization ⦠a longer time ago, definitely helped me to start this journey of really building a team, really moving towards a business that could run without me and then that has built a reality in MeetEdgar. It is a business that runs well without me.
Claire: I love that. I think it is a humbling truth that we as CEOs, leaders, donāt like to think about, that we are not the best, probably, at what we do. And whether itās reconciling PayPal statements or writing posts or other things that we feel like, āOh, only I can maybe do this,ā and itās funny because we never really say that out loud. I love that you said it out loud.
I feel like that should be a mantra for a lot of CEOs to almost repeat to themselves, āIām not the greatest.ā Iām not the best at what Iām doing here. And in many ways, your job is to hire find folk and coach folks to be better.
Thereās something really interesting that you said at the very end, which is around this idea that the company for you to be sustainable, right? And for it to grow is it needs to be able to run without you.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean by that or why thatās important to you?

Laura: That was a very deliberate goal of mine with this company, so the company that I ran before was a training business where I was a trainer, so it was the type of business where Iām the face of it. Iām creating the content, people buy from us but know and trust me, so it was leveraged in the tense that it was online training, it wasnāt one-on-one consulting, but it was not a business that I could step away from six months ⦠it was not a business that could ever be sold.
It was really tied to my time. Like, in the sense ⦠it was more leveraged, hours for dollars, but at the end of the day, kind of, it was still hours for dollars, because Laura Roeder needed to show up to make that business work.
So, I was like, āWouldnāt it be cool if I had a business where I didnāt have to show up to make it work?ā And what I love about having a software business is Iām not a programmer.
So I cannot help, if it breaks, like at all. I donāt know what to do. Itās a really great constraint because it has just forced me, in this really major way, since the beginning of the business, to be like, āObviously, this business doesnāt depend on me, because other people have to build and maintain our actual product that weāre selling.ā So I know Iām not going to be the linchpin going in and saving everything if it breaks.
I also had an unusual situation. I was pregnant when we launched MeetEdgar and I knew I would go on maternity leave, so I went on maternity leave I guess about six months after launch. For six months, I was totally off. I knew that I was pregnant, that the baby was coming, when we launched, so I had that kind of structure in mind right from Day One. I need to build a company that for that three months, I mean minimum, right? Isnāt gonna fall apart.
I want a company thatās going to grow while Iām gone, and it did, significantly.
Claire: That is incredible! I had no idea that you were pregnant during starting the company. I mean, starting a company by itself is hard and just being pregnant and having a kid is hard, separately, so the two together blows my mind.
I feel like you should be getting so many awards just for that alone. Thatās incredible, Laura. Thank you for all of your insights, I am sitting here taking them all in. I know everyone whoās watching really appreciates all your wisdom as well.
So, thanks so much for being here and yeah, we appreciate it.
Laura: Thank you!

I really appreciated this interview with Laura Roeder. I had no idea she was pregnant. She is a great role model for upotential.org! Similarly, after launching Untapped Potential Inc. locally, one of the ways to test if it could scale (run in new cities), if it could run without “Candace Freedenberg”, I took on separate full time engineering role and let my team run it.