Arvid Kahl: Today, I have the incredible privilege of talking
to Rob Walling, a pioneer in the SaaS universe. We're diving into
the ins and outs of scaling SaaS businesses, the shifting
landscape of software businesses in general and how to run one of
them, and the role of AI in SaaS projects in the present and the
future. You will gain firsthand insights into Rob's famous Stair
Stepping Approach and so many challenges owners' face. We'll
talk about competition, customer service requests, white
labeling, and the essential role of networking and support
systems for entrepreneurs. We even talk hiring, oh, and we do
talk about exits as well, which is great because this episode is
sponsored by acquire.com. And that's a place where SaaS
founders can eventually sell their businesses for life
changing amounts of money. I will be talking more about that
later. Now, get ready to harness the magical power of someone who
not only listens to podcasts at 2x speed, but also seems to
think and speak that fast. Here's my friend, Rob Walling.
One of the most impactful things that you teach is the Stair Step
Approach. And it starts with small bets on someone else's
platform, then you establish reliable revenue stream from all
these offers. And then in step three, you build a standalone
SaaS business. Now is your podcast or conference organizer,
writer and investor life, the secret step four of the Stair
Step Approach?
Rob Walling: You know it's my step four. I find that to each
their own. Some people, their step four is launching another
SaaS app. You know, you look at David Cancel. He's had, I
believe, five exits. So I think his step four is just rinse and
repeat. Other folks become investors. And for me, it's the
whole ecosystem you just mentioned.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you seem to diversify a little bit. That's
what that is. So you're saying diversification is not the next
step? Because I always feel like when I look at successful
founders in the space, a lot of them, significant amount of them
and maybe that's just confirmation bias. They put
themselves out there and they talk about stuff. They bring
people together. But as you set this just now, I'm like, yeah,
okay, obviously, these are the only people I get to see in this
space because everybody else is just doing their own thing. But
let's talk about diversification a little bit, right? Like, it
feels like something that too many people is the reason they
exit because they need to financially diversify. And for
some people after an exit, they just want to do multiple things.
So how long should you stay laser focused as a SaaS founder?
Rob Walling: I mean, who? That's an interesting question. For me,
I wanted to be as focused as possible until I had enough
money in the bank that I never had to work again, till I had a
few money in the bank. I don't know that I would say everyone
should do that. But kind of, if that's your life goal, like the
moment you become not focused like I am, for example, I do
think you're less effective at each individual thing. And if
you're driving SaaS is so draining, right? You and I both
know this, like the amount of focus and time and energy it
takes to grow, it is a grind, like even the best founders I
know. Even if they raise funding and even if they're on their
second, third, fourth, they still. I talked to them and
they're like, I forgot how hard this is. I forgot, it is so much
harder. It is harder than podcasting. It is harder than
for me running MicroConf. It's harder than writing a book. It's
harder than running accelerator, period.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've experienced the same
thing with my little SaaS experiments that I do on the
side, just to even stay in the developer space. Because it's so
easy not to do this, right? It's so easy to talk and go in shows
and communicate, which is still fun and has impact just not the
same thing. So it sounds like, yeah, it's the harder choice,
but it's probably also a very rewarding choice still, right?
Rob Walling: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Running SaaS
Rob Walling: Yeah, it's harder and it can be, it can get
boring, it can become a grind, where it's like, oh, I need to
do this for five years in order to sell for 10 million. You
know, I'm kind of making stuff up. But like, if that is your
goal, it's like you get two years in and you're like, boy,
it really would be fun to start a new thing because that's fun.
Isn't launching on Product Hunt, on Hacker News really fun? It
is. It's the dopamine. It'll be way more fun than slogging day
to day, but the slogging day to day seemingly making progress
actually can get you to that, you know, the goal. Again, I'm
assuming your goal is multimillion dollar SaaS company
with a multimillion dollar exit.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, and maybe it is not, maybe it's just like
being a reputable person in your community to get all kinds of
opportunities beyond that, you know, the SaaS exit. We'll get
to that, we'll get to audience building because I've read your
book and I know you're not the biggest fan of that or not
necessarily the of the opinion that it needs to be a thing but
I still want to stick with stair stepping for a while because we
looked into this just a couple of weeks ago as of this
recording, I think and we looked into the history of your blog
post around this. Right? And this has been around for now 10
years like you wrote this in 2013. The article that is very
famous, I guess in our community explaining the steps towards
building a SaaS. Is it still the same? Is it still a way to build
a SaaS or has the environment changed?
Rob Walling: Oh, that's a good question. So I will admit, the
original incarnation of the article and the original talk
that I gave at the Dynamite Circle at DCBKK event was not
SaaS focused, per se. I had to generalize it to like step one
was like, launch a small product. Maybe if it's software,
then you do it, you know, with a single marketing approach
usually in an ecosystem. But I also included like, a small
ecommerce store, an info product, a course. And I think
those are totally viable. Like, if you're not a software person,
maybe don't try to build software in the early days, you
know. So I did go back maybe five, six years ago. And I
actually changed. I updated the blog posts. And that's the
beauty of it being a blog post was that I realized I wanted it
really to be more focused on SaaS. But given your question,
which is have things changed, they've changed but not in a way
that I believe makes the Stair Step not work. Meaning I still
see people doing it today. We have TinySeed founders, who are
in the process of doing that. And then I talked to folks all
the time, I'm going to be honest, who are on that step
one. I mean, someone just wrote into the podcast. The rest of us
and I was reading their question and they basically said, I have
stairstepped over the last like, two, three years. He now has two
products. One is doing like, 5200 a month and one's doing
3000 a month. And he's like, I'm just like, he's on step two.
He's just about to buy out his own time. And so do I still see
it working? Yes.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, good to know. It's also good. It must be so
Rob Walling: It's what keeps me going, man, honestly. I have a
much fun for you to be like the end of the funnel, where
people's journeys all leads where people tell you about
this, still work.
label in Gmail, it's called thanks. And it's all the thanks
that I get. And it means so much. I'm you know what this
feels like when people say you impacted their life. I mean, my
mission, like the mission of my life and of MicroConf and
TinySeed is to multiply the number of independent self
sustaining startups in the world. And you could replace
SaaS or whatever, you know, you can focus on SaaS because that's
really what I'm doing. But I'm just, I just want people to find
their freedom, their purpose in there, you know, and have
healthy relationships.
Arvid Kahl: I love that. Independent self sustaining, I
Rob Walling: Yup
Arvid Kahl: The idea of stair stepping is still a thing that's
like this phrase because it kind of brings me to my next point,
platform risk, you know, the opposite of independence and
probably not very sustainable.
around. A lot of people start with building like a Shopify app
or plugins for like WordPress or you know, something. You build
on somebody else's platform, which is extremely beneficial in
terms of, you know, how the marketing and distribution
works, but you are inviting a lot of risk into your business.
Is that something that is harder now than it used to be? Like,
there's also this kind of predatory thing that platforms
occasionally do, where it's something that works really
well, all of a sudden ends up as a platform feature and there's
not a plug in anymore that kind of cannibalize their developer
base. Is that risk that is still something that people should
just take?
Rob Walling: Yeah, I think so. And that's why well there's a
couple things. Number one some platforms are really bad at you
know, at cannibalizing their own apps so Shopify is terrible and
Twitter is terrible and Meta really doesn't give a crap.
They're not as bad as Twitter, but so know that going in if
you're gonna build on any of those. Most of the other ones
are better at it, right? Salesforce, HubSpot, you know,
what? Zoho, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom like, it's pretty rare
you hear about someone one of those ecosystems smoking someone
you know who's on them. And the other thing is, I view the steps
of the Stair Step as temporary stages. Right? I was in step one
and two for like, a few years. That's it. And so am I willing,
its risk tolerance, right? Am I willing to have some modicum of
risk for those few years? Yes. Because by the time I get to
standalone SaaS, I've, you know then I'm starting to diversify.
Now, we then get into the conversation isn't every app or
platform is to some extent, yes. But to me the risk of being
uneasy to or the risk of sending through SendGrid or Twilio, of
course, you have some platforms, but it's a lot less than if
you're building an actual app in a Heroku or Shopify app store.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, if it's infrastructure, there are these
other platforms. It's this kind of Lindy effect. They've been
around for a while, they probably will be around for a
long time. And their business model is depending on retaining
you as a customer, so that's fine. But that's also a platform
risk that I personally see a lot of people ignoring. Like they
jump at new technologies, new frameworks, new whatever, right?
Implemented into their business and all of a sudden that
purchase falls away implodes and poof, they're standing there
with a business that is just not sustainable because an integral
part of dismissing. Open AI like that was, I was just reading on
Twitter. Josh Pigford was talking about like his
experience with Baremetrics when Stripe implemented their own
analytics back in the day and how it hits Baremetrics, even
though people came back and figured out oh, yeah, actually
Baremetrics is the much more in depth analytics tool. And Open
AI has done this with PDF introspection at this point,
right? Lots of PDF startups are now in the balance and it feels
this stuff just happens much more quickly now. Like you're
around for like a month and all of a sudden, all your feature
set is copied by the platform. Is that just a perception thing?
Or is it just a reality of building SaaS?
Rob Walling: I think it's the edge cases that we hear about
because we're on Twitter. And because open AI specifically is
moving very, very fast like AI. When was the big reveal? Was it
less than a year ago? Like it's
Arvid Kahl: Like a couple of months ago
Rob Walling: It's moving way fast. So AI I could I mean, I've
been saying like ChatGPT wrappers for the last nine
months. You're gonna get mowed over get the money while you can
because anything you do is going to be steamrolled by a bigger
player. That's been pretty obvious, versus, you know,
again, if we start running through Heroku, Atlassian, Cloud
Arvid Kahl: Right
Flare, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, you know, these
all have app stores, like, are they steam rolling their apps
that's fast? No, they're not. And the Josh, I mean, Josh
Pigford with Baremetrics. I mean, that was something that he
knew that was coming, like I had talked to him within six months
of him building Baremetrics. And when was it 2012, maybe 2013.
And we were at a MicroConf. And I was like, dude, you know,
Stripe is gonna build this eventually. You know, it took
Stripe a lot longer to build it than I thought. I figured they'd
Rob Walling: But then I have some stocks and some metals and
build it the next year or two and it took ages, you know, but
yeah, it's a risk we all have for sure. I think the more the
further I got along in my entrepreneurial journey, the
more I wanted to have fewer of those risks. And that's what
Stair Stepping attempts to do. And at a certain point, my de
risking was much like yours. I was running drip, I was not
diversified. I had millions upon millions of dollars tied up in
this asset and my de risking was to turn it into cash. And now
that's derisk
some cryptos to theirs, you know, that's its own platform
risk in a way.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And the Beatles record, don't forget
that
Rob Walling: And the gold record. Abbey Road, baby.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I get that. And I think derisking is
genuinely the thing that most people want, like in economic
times such as this in particular, right? Like, you
want to make sure that there's a fallback or like an alternative
and I think AI is the topic where this is extremely hard,
building business on top of AI. Right? I would like to hear like
how nuanced you think about building on top of AI like
building on top of open AI as a platform and using AI as a
feature in your existing non AI based startup? Like, what's the
difference there in terms of risk and reward, I guess?
Rob Walling: Yeah, I like that. And there's a third actually,
right? It's to use open AI or chat GPT to just to make your
internal processes better. Like I'm doing cold outreach. I'm
gonna personalize. So there's actually three different things.
The third one that I just mentioned, is pretty low risk, I
think, because let's say I'm doing cold outreach and I'm
using Chat GPT. I mean, what's the worst? They've raised the
price, they kicked me off. And now I have to go back to the, I
mean, the risk, it's not existential, it's just like,
well, that kind of sucks. Obviously, building a Chat GPT
wrapper or building on Chat GPT yes, there's platform risk. The
big thing that I think a lot of people, I think misunderstand,
is if you build a wrapper and you do the obvious things, which
is like chat with a PDF chat with a CSV, you know, import a
CSV and have clean up the data or whatever, these are obvious
and they are going to get built by Chat GPT or by just a bigger
player, like by a Salesforce or buy a Google, you know, Google
Docs or something is going to build a CSV importer. Any of
these things is gonna get done. And so don't be shocked when
that happens. If you can make a bunch of money in the meantime,
it's opportunistic. And if you can make 20 grand a month for 50
grand a month for a year until they build it, just be like,
hey, don't count on that being valuable, count on a cash in
hand, right? That's what I think about building on top. Now,
there are some exceptions. I think, in general, people who
build on top of open AI, you're either gonna have a tiny little
niche product that no one notices and you're away in a
corner, much like the Start Small, Stay Small approach,
where you just don't get noticed. Or it's going to be the
big funded competitors that are going to come in and just stomp
on you, you know, like the again, like a Google Sheets or
just some big player that does it. I feel so that's, I guess
what I'm saying is, yes, there is risk there building on top of
AI because it is changing so quickly. Think about remember
when Facebook apps and games were all the rage? And there was
Farmville and I forget what the company was, but they had a
bunch. And man, the valuations and everything went up and it
was obvious this was not going to last. But they went in and
you know, and they made a I think they made a ton of money.
They raised a bunch of money, but it wasn't going to last.
This is the same thing with these AI kind of AI wrappers.
Look, let's just let's be honest, it's not gonna last.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Just know that this is
not a tenure business.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. That's a funny one like the farm wall
situation. I think it was Zynga. There's a company, I remember
back in like 2012 I was in San Francisco. And the Zynga
building was this massive building, like towering over the
Adobe building right next to it. And then a couple of years
later, right? Everything just imploded, tells you to not over
index.
Rob Walling: Same thing happened three years, four years earlier
with iOS apps. And where the App Store started, same exact thing
happened. There's huge gold rush. Yeah. So Facebook apps,
there was a time when it was Twitter apps, although it was
never that big a bunch of Twitter clients. A crypto web3
was one of those, AI is another. And so look, these are all
waves. And if you catch them and you hit them at the right time
and you exit or you make a bunch of cash on it, great. But if it
is, again, this is not a five or 10 year business in the way
we're talking about it, you need to be a different. The durable
competitive advantages of just having a SaaS still apply, AI
can augment that, but AI is not itself an advantage because any
of us can use it.
Arvid Kahl: That's a good point. And if you have an AI based
business where you know that like your days are numbered,
right? Does it make that less or more sellable? Because I could
imagine that somebody a bigger player that wants to integrate
that functionality into a much bigger suite of products would
find that interesting, like as a strategic acquisition, kind of
not a financial one. So what do you think about like the
solubility of these short term, intentionally short term
businesses?
Rob Walling: I think that revenue buyers, whether it's
micro PE or just people buying through Quiet Light and
acquire.com, they will discount it heavily. They know the risk
involved. So if you're truly selling on a multiple of net
profit or whatever, you're not going to get great multiples
because the risk is huge. If you get lucky, extremely lucky and
you find a strategic or strategic finds you. Yes, you're
right. You could probably get aqua hired. I mean, I'm thinking
of someone doing 20 grand, 50 grand a month, you know, this is
not a $10 million exit, but will someone give you, you know, half
a million or a million bucks and then some stock and this and
that? I totally think that's feasible. I just think it's
going to be the one in 100 or you know, one in 500.
Arvid Kahl: Funny, it's kind of VC odds for bootstrap businesses
once again.
Rob Walling: It feels a bit like it, yeah.
Arvid Kahl: Oh, that's funny. Yeah, I guess. I've seen a trend
in these AI centric startups. A lot of them, they kind of stop
using the subscription revenue model. And they go a lot of,
they front load a lot of their payments, like one time payments
or like yearly things, knowing that there will be around for
less than a year. Maybe it's a bit creepier that way. But
that's how it works. Is there is that just because these things
are time limited? Or is there also this overall subscription
fatigue that exists? Or purportedly exist somewhere in
the world?
Rob Walling: Yeah, huh. I think that there are certain tools and
tasks that really shouldn't be subscription. You know, just
because SaaS is the best business model ever doesn't mean
everything should be SaaS? And, you know, I don't know if you
saw, was it BMW? Yeah, they have the hardware in your car, but
you had to pay a subscription in order for them to enable it. And
people were so mad that they just stopped because it
shouldn't be that. It feels like you're ripping them off. And
same thing like to chat with a PDF, for example, I know I can
come back to that. But like, that's an example. Or let's say
I want to convert dirty data to clean data, right? Or I want to
convert an mp3 to a wave or I want to, these are like one time
things unless I'm an editor and I'm doing this on a weekly
basis. Like, it really should just be a one time charge,
right. And so when you try to force one time into
subscription, that's when you see this really high churn. And
so I don't know, I think people say subscription fatigue. And
when I look at, you know, the Tiny Seed dashboard with almost
150 companies in it now, I'm not seeing subscription fatigue in
those areas because
Arvid Kahl: That's interesting.
Rob Walling: You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, I'm
just up into the right as a general rule, it's not everybody
but I mean, SaaS is still very much alive.
Arvid Kahl: Is that like B2B SaaS that you're looking at
almost exclusively? Okay.
Arvid Kahl: This has nothing to do with SaaS, but do you think
Rob Walling: Pretty much. Yeah. B2C, there's fatigue. Dude, I
cannot believe. I think it's like Hulu Plus, with no ads is
like $18. I'm like, No, I mean, I'm not like one of the least
that's going to be a consolidation alongside the
price sensitive people you'll meet with because I just want
streaming stuff? Like we had it in the beginning then it kind of
stuff to just go. And when I was like 18, I don't watch enough on
Hulu. So I actually cancelled that subscription. So yes, on
the B2C side, which is something I don't like to plan for exactly
this reason. I definitely think there's subscription fatigue. I
hear people talking about it all the time.
split up now? Will it be consolidated?
Rob Walling: Yeah, I think because now so yeah, in the
beginning it was land grab as many subscribers as possible and
then we saw in the last six months, price increases.
Everybody's doing increases and all this coz I'm on Netflix and
Amazon Prime and Hulu and HBO and Disney Plus and I'm on
Peacock right now because I like Poker Face, you know, there's
like two shows that I like. And yeah, then the next phase will
be consolidation. This happened with TV networks. You know there
were like three in the US, you known as ABC, NBC, CBS, but at
one point, there were a kajillion of them and they
consolidated. Same thing with radio networks. Same thing with
car makers, like how many American car manufacturers are
there now? Let's put Tesla aside but it's basically Ford and GM
has been for years. Now Chrysler at one point and then Tesla came
up. But there were like 100 or 200 in the 1920s and 30s. And
then they consolidated. So they will do the same thing with
streaming.
Arvid Kahl: Hopefully, because I cannot handle more. I mean, I
can handle the subscription. I just think there's still
logistical overhead of even understanding where I show is
because that also changes over time. Right? The one that I dive
too much into TV, but I'm a Star Trek nerd. I want to watch Star
Trek, where is it now? Paramount plus, is it on Netflix? Like
where do I go?
Rob Walling: I have this app on my phone, I this app on my iPad,
it's just watch.com. You ever gone there? Just watch, type in
a series, it'll tell you where it is. And it'll tell you, you
can stream it for free. Or you can buy it or rent it. I'm in
that twice a day or not twice a day, twice a week trying to find
shows
Arvid Kahl: Is that a bootstrap business? That sounds like
Rob Walling: I have no idea. I don't know. It was one of those
B2C things that kind of where it would be fun to own that. But I
bet it's a nightmare keeping up with all the changing stuff.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you need a lot of people like really at the
pulse of what's going to happen in these broadcasting services
and stuff. That's fun. Yeah, but let's maybe get back to SaaS,
let's get back to product market fit, which is one of the most
central things that you talk about in your book. And I like
that this is the first thing you talk about, like in terms of
chapters, there's teams later and there's pricing later and
all that stuff. But product market fit is one of the biggest
things. And as I read the book, I agreed with a lot of stuff
obviously from my own experience. But I found one
thing that I really want you to dive in a little bit more. You
talked about competing on three different potential levels. You
say competing on price is a thing you can do, competing on
sales model and competing on product. Now, price and product,
I understand. I can be cheaper. I can build a better different
more diversified product. But sales model was something that I
found really interesting. And we already kind of touched upon it
just now. So which is why I want to bring it back in. How can you
compete on sales model with bigger, different, richer, more
capitalized players in the market?
Rob Walling: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So what you
have to find is a company or companies where the standard
sales model is a pain in the ass for customers and they don't
like it. But they've been forced to do it because there's a
monopoly or an oligopoly, right? So Salesforce, have you ever
tried to buy a Salesforce subscription? It is terrible.
Never, never do that. And because you have to you just
they will not even talk to you unless you jump on a call with
them. And they do this demo. I remember, I was just like, how
much is it? How much is it? And they wouldn't tell me. How much
is it? They just wouldn't tell me. They were gonna force me to
do a frickin zoom call. That sucks, man. So isn't there
opportunity to disrupt that? Anytime there is friction or
there is something that customers don't like, sometimes
it's like price, oh my gosh, there's way to expect. The
cheapest version of this thing. Marketing automation is the one
that comes to mind. Of course, because I compete in that space.
The cheapest version of marketing automation was like
$400 a month when we started drip. And it was obvious, it
didn't need to be $400 a month. It was that much because the
margins were huge. And their sales model was very time
intensive. And we were like if we build self serve, I know we
can charge less. And make it self serve. No one else was self
serve. Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop, like they all
wanted you to do a demo and do the big sales grind. And look,
that's great. You can make a lot of money doing that. I'm not
disparaging that. But I am saying where there is
dissatisfaction where you're making folks jump through hoops
and there is friction, there is opportunity to compete. And
that's really what I mean by sales model.
Arvid Kahl: Okay, would you say this kind of switching up the
sales model is a moat for you at that point?
Rob Walling: I don't think so. I think moats are durable. You
know, like moat is like once you have a brand where you are one
of the two or three in a conversation where it's like oh,
what are the like the really good marketing automation
providers? Oh, it's like the most popular ActiveCampaign,
Infusionsoft and Drip like at certain point that became the
conversation. Once we have that, that's kind of a moat unless we
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, of course!
screw it up by having the founder leave and then raising
your prices so much that you piss everybody off. But you
know, that's just a hypothetical.
Rob Walling: But you know, so sales model someone else can
just do the same thing and it's kind of like competing on
features that it's like false moat you know, it's a temporary
moat. False may not be the right word but like a temporary moat
because they can just build the features or they can just change
the sales model.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. That's something that I really liked
when you said about translating the interface, that kind of
stuff. That's also something that doesn't really, it's not
durable. I like the phrase of durable moats. I think white
labeling was the thing that surprised me because I mentor a
couple software businesses and one of them has been thinking
about white labeling their product. So they are in the SEO
space and you know, they think of how I'm using their product,
giving it to other agencies and having them use it or offer it
to even their customers and clients. And you say that's not
a good idea. Why is that not a good idea?
Rob Walling: Yeah, just for listeners. We've switched for
moats, two common mistakes that I see people make, right? Like
translating your app too early. I'm at five camera, I've typed
up my market. Now I'm going to translate to Spanish, German,
French. And it's like don't do that. It's a waste of time. So
to your point, white labeling, here's the thing, it's white
labeling too early. Oftentimes, you will launch and you'll get
to 5 to 10K MRR and you're just starting to build a good
business. And this happened to us where I got five requests in
the first few months of people saying, I really want to like,
take drip and white label it and then sell it to realtors or I
want to sell it to mortgage brokers or I want to sell it to,
you know, insert another vertical here. And it's super
appealing to be like, well, this person will do the sales and
like we'll get customers without even try, you know, it's all
that stuff. But the problem is most people, they're wasting
your time, like unless it's a big company and you know that
they are bringing the thunder, meaning they have a lot of
customers that they can sell it to. You're going to spend too
much time hashing out legalese, signing docs for someone who's
going to sell two copies of it. You know, it's like that's
usually the issue. Now, if I was doing seven figures ARR and I
saw it as an actual channel to where it was using agencies
could, you know, could reuse it and white label it. I've seen
some folks do that. I don't think it's the end of the world.
But it's not, it wouldn't be my first choice of marketing
approaches. It's one of many. And I think the siren song of it
is dangerous, especially when you're early because you just
don't have. The amount of code you have to write any amount of
legal contracts, you have to go through and sign, it is
significant to enable white labeling. So make sure that if
someone is going to do it, they pony up upfront, like I want a
minimum commit of, you know, 50 grand upfront or 100 grand a
year. There's some numbers. If they can't or won't do that,
then they aren't committed to it. Why would you commit all
this time and money to it?
Arvid Kahl: That makes sense. Somebody should build this white
labeling as a service. Wouldn't it be cool, another little meta
layer on top of that, but yeah, I think like sharing development
cost, great idea. And I think generally a good idea for
sizeable customer feature requests, right?
Rob Walling: Yup, it's pretty common. Yeah, I see folks do it
more common than folks might think.
Arvid Kahl: So let's keep in this wheelhouse here with the
customer feature request because that's also something that you
have very strong opinions on, right? Like when to say no
pretty much to them. So how do we deal with all these things
that constantly flood us? A lot of small SaaS businesses have
this, I don't know if it's a user voice or some widget where
people can put up their ideas and they are just inundated with
all these requests that people want. Why should we listen? What
should we listen to? And when should we just say no?
Rob Walling: Yeah, I mean, you know this. It's hard. And it's
harder in the early days because the more mature your product
gets and the more revenue you have, the more kind of your
vision of what your product is solidifies. And eventually,
you're kind of like making tweaks, you know. By the time
your software is a teenager, meaning let's say, 50k, 100k a
month, you know, it's like, oh, I kind of know what this is.
Now, we might make a strategic decision to add an entirely new
aspect to it. But unless we do that, we kind of know that if
we're an email service provider, I'm not going to add affiliate
management. That's a whole other categories. You know what I
mean? You just gotta get there. But in the early days, man, it
is so hard, especially if you're still trying to build something
people want. You know, you haven't done that yet. And so
every feature request that comes in, you think to yourself, oh,
if I build this, will this get me closer to product market fit?
Like, that's the real kind of crux of it. And so I feel like
there's some feature requests that come in that are just
obvious knows. And then there's some that are obvious yes. It's
like hell yes. Why didn't I think of that? Or it's already
on the roadmap, right? Unfortunately, yeses and noes
are maybe, I don't know, what do you say? 20, 30%? It's the
minority 40%. You know, some number, that's not the majority.
The majority are ones that you kind of have to agonize over.
And usually what I would do is ask myself, alright, what's my
vision for the product today? And do I feel good about that
vision? Or do I need to alter that vision? Because if I
implement this, it means it's a different thing, right? So I've
kind of run it through my founder gut. I would also, I
know some people, I never did this, but they have like
customer advisory boards, where you have depends on how far
along you are. But it's like, who are my best customers? Who
are the customers who stick around for a long time, give us
a lot of good feedback, whatever. And I used to just
kind of email. I would email like Brennan Dunn, right? Or
Ruben Gamez or Jeff Epstein, founder of Ambassador, you know.
There were a handful of people who were like, my friends and I
was like, what do you think about building this? What do
you, you know, would you use this? And have you seen this
another tool, you know, kind of get a sanity check on it. But
the bottom line is, you have to say no to the vast majority,
right? But by the time I left Drip in 2018, I believe we were
getting 175 feature requests a month. And that 150, 175, that
was from sales support success and directly from customers. And
you have to say no to 90 plus percent of those. And so
figuring out a way to filter those is kind of what I tried to
talk through in the book. It's hard, right? There's no direct
to say I can't tell you yes or no but it's like, here's the
mental framework of how would I think through it.
Arvid Kahl: And that's also kind of like an identity thing for a
lot of founders, right? They want everything to appeal to
their customers. They want the prospects that are out there
that don't yet use the product to every single one of them to
feel like this is for them, which is obviously folly in so
many ways. But on another level, there's also a problem, like,
once you have this advisory board of customers that you talk
to, how do you avoid this typical, you know, Rob
Fitzpatrick Mom Test problem of people just wanting to encourage
you because they really like you. They really liked that
you're building this for them? And they say yes to everything.
How do you get out of that?
Rob Walling: I never had that. I don't know because I never,
usually I would say, here's our current roadmap, here then it
is, again, a private conversation. So like, here's
the next five things we're building. We got a request for
this. Do you think I should bump into these? Because then there
is it's not just yes. They can't just say yes, they have to bump
something else, right? So they have some loss. Now, you can
also I mean, there's dangers to this. You can get in an echo
chamber. If you only have three in your customer advisory board.
And they're all the same use case and you have other use
cases you need to support, you know, you need to get some more
diverse thought in your advisory board. But you get the idea.
It's helpful. I mean, to me, the Advisory Board or any of these
are all just signals. I have my founder gut. I have the category
that we're currently in that I define a SaaS. I have my vision
for the product. I have an advisory board. These are all
just signals. None of them makes the decision. You have to put it
in a stew. And being founder is making hard decisions with
incomplete information. This is a great example of that. You
will never at best, you'll be like 50% certain you need to
build something, you know.
Arvid Kahl: Yup, sure sounds like the regular founder life,
quite anxiety inducing. Maybe that's also one thing from my
own personal experience having like a couple of mental health
issues along the way. Do you think just being a founder just
has to be stressful?
Rob Walling: You know? Yes and no. So it depends. So these
days, I'm a founder of MicroConf and Tiny Seed. I'm not a SaaS
founder these days, but I do run companies. They are startups
with teams of people. And we are doing big stakes, high stakes,
things that impacts a lot of people and you know, all that
stuff. And I'm not stressed. And I used to be stressed all the
time. And so I think that's where I say yes and no. I think
in the early days, most of us are not equipped to deal with
the uncertainty. And that's a huge part of being a founder, as
you know, hard decisions, incomplete information.
Everything is uncertain, especially in the early days. I
think certain people are either naturally or perhaps there's
nature or nurture, like did their parents teach them better
coping skills? Because I didn't have any. I'm like a high
anxiety person. And I have no coping skills to deal with
uncertainly. So for folks like us, it's just stress, stress,
stress, stress, burnout. I do know some folks who are better
equipped at dealing with it and who actually take a grain of
salt, like I'm launching the startup. And realistically, this
is not that bad. Like, I'm not digging a ditch somewhere. And
if it goes under, I can go get a job. You know, for me, I was
like if it fails, the end of the world as we know it, so I'm a
catastrophizer, right? So I think so much of it is mindset,
like the actual risk to us as founders pretty is not a lot.
The actual risk is usually minimal unless you make dumb
decisions, like putting money on credit cards and such, which is
something I never did.
Arvid Kahl: Do you ever do fear setting as like a conscious
exercise with where could this go wrong? And would I still be
fine?
Rob Walling: Yeah. What's the worst that could happen, is the
phrase that I use. What is the worst that could happen? When we
were starting Tiny Seed, we were struggling to figure out what
the terms should be right? Because it's like, well, we're
not VC but we don't want to do the revenue based financing. How
do we be in your, you know, in your court for the long term and
have terms that are both investors agree to invest in and
that will give a return such that the fund can continue and
not implode. And the founders will agree to it and that was a
very, very difficult. It's kind of like setting pricing. It's
just hard, right? Because you don't know what the answer is.
And there were some major setbacks where we were screwed,
right? We had like six different versions of our terms. And I was
running them by founders. And someone told me yeah, I just
wouldn't take that money. And here's why. And it was
devastating to me. And I remember I was like, oh, this is
never gonna work. We just can't do this. You know, I got super
catastrophizing. And Einar was like, dude, we're smart. We'll
figure this out, you know. That's my co founder and that
helped me level set of like and then he said, what is the worst
can happen if we don't figure this out? We just don't do it.
And so you go back to being retired, right? I came out of
retirement to do this. So I go back to playing my guitar. I
guess that is the worst case, that's not a bad worst case. You
know?
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that's why I said like step four of the Stair
Stepping approach because you already had all these other
things figured out, right? You were in this kind of post
economic situation already. You didn't have to think about where
the next like mortgage check is gonna come from.
Rob Walling: It helps. It helps a lot.
Arvid Kahl: For sure. Well, most founders are unfortunately not
in that position. Right? And a lot of founders too. You said we
a lot, which is something I really notice here because my
experience in many things before I co-founded Feedback Panda with
Danielle was, it was just I. It was just me all the time. And I
kind of in retrospect, I was almost in a constant solo
founder of funk kind of felt like it, like a lot of looping
thoughts, a lot of just spiraling all the time. And I
was talking to a Dickie Bush on this podcast a couple of weeks
ago, about how writers have the exact same problem, right?
There's a surprising similarity between writers whose product is
good writing to appeal to people and impact their lives and SaaS
founders, solo developers whose product also is writing just,
you know, code for machines, not for people. And they also don't
know is it going to work? Is this whole thing going to work?
How do you get out of this kind of solo founder funk? Do you
have any ideas?
Rob Walling: Yeah, I do. So there's a few opportunities or a
few options. One is obviously to get a co founder. But that's a
big decision. Masterminds, mastermind groups were hugely
impactful for me and have been. I mean, I've been talking, I
started this mastermind in 2010, I believe and it's gone through
a bunch of iterations. And it was four of us then three then
now, it's just two of us. And it's been two of us once a month
since 2010 now, 13 years. I mean, it's just with this one
other guy. And we talk once a month. Now we do it in VR
fishing. We don't even get into. We literally get in VR, we fish.
And we talk about you know, startup stuff. Masterminds are
huge. I used to be in two masterminds because I wanted,
you know, and they were every other week. So I pretty much
every weekend, someone to talk to. That was such a big deal. I
think that's the best way. The other thing, of course, is to
join a community, get little less than that. But you know, a
MicroConf Connect or if you wind up getting into Tiny Seed or
whatever, the Dynamite Circle, you know, there's all these
indie hackers. Right? There's online communities. It's less
interpersonal, I think, you know, than masterminds. That's
probably my number one, to be honest. And then of course, I
mean, the other one, too, is going to in person events, like
I wound up going to a lot of MicroConf, of course, because I
host many of them. And I'm fired up when I come back, you know,
and I think that that can be motivational for folks as well.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that was a big learning for me as well, like
the in person events in particular. That was something
oh, okay. I'm doing all right. Everybody else is constantly
just knowing the nails over their own businesses and that
kind of stuff, it's perfectly fine. And in commiseration,
there's a lot of elation, right? You find a way through
masterminds. That's the thing that for most of my life, I had
no idea about. So it is very important to understand that
this is a feasible way to connect with people on your
level, on your journey too, right? And you facilitate them,
right? In the community?
Rob Walling: Yeah, we do matching with MicroConf. That
was something I resisted for a long time because we would get
people say, how do I join a mastermind? And I'm like, go to
MicroConf and find somebody you know and it's just like,
eventually producers Anders was like, I think we just start
matching people. And I'm like, but what if we get it wrong? But
what if, but what do you know that was and it's like, let's
just try it. Let's try it with get 50 people to apply, match
them up and see how it goes. It's been one of our most aside
from in person events, it is the most successful offering we've
ever offered at MicroConf. And so we match, it depends. There's
like $250 up to 2000. It's a one time fee right now, although
we're talking about going subscription and actually
facilitating. Right now, it's just a one time match and
depends on your revenue level. And then I think we guarantee it
for a year, like if it just falls apart, you know, you can
get rematch but wildly successful. We've matched to
close to 1000. I think that's the number 800 or 1000, you
know, founders with one another collective MRR or ARR of you
know, 150 million or something huge number across 30 or 40
countries. So, that's a big deal. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl: What's the churn and retention metrics on that stuff?
Rob Walling: It's not subscription. Right? It's one
time.
Arvid Kahl: So I mean, like, on the community or like the little
groups of people themselves, like, do they?
Rob Walling: Stick around? Yeah, surprisingly high number. I
don't know that I know the exact numbers, but it's like the vast
majority. I'd say that at a minimum, the majority, which is
only 51%. I think, like the super majority wind up, I guess,
depends on what timeframe we're looking at. Right? Exactly six
months or six years. You know, there's only a handful, it's
going to be kind of a, I think a bell curve or, you know, kind of
degrading curve over time if people stop.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, because people probably also graduate from
certain groups of people into new ones, right? As their
business improves, as well. Well, I certainly love the fact
that you're facilitating like actual relationships between
people. And that kind of brings me to the point that I said I
want to get back to ,which is audience building and you know,
the building in public, doing stuff like in front of people.
In your book, you say and I think you're right, that for
many foreigners, it's not a necessity for many SaaS
businesses building in public or building an audience. It's a
nice to have, but you don't need that necessarily to build a
business that serves people and solves that problem. But it
could and I think where you mentioned that building an
audience is actually useful isn't hiring. I found that
really interesting too. So are you still like pro or are you
like against building an audience? What's the nuance
there? I want to know.
Rob Walling: So I'm glad you asked because there is nuance.
I'm not pro or against. I am opinionated about it because
almost every week, I see a tweet of like, steps to build a
business, build an audience, then ask them what they want,
and then build the product. And it's like, great and I always
chime in. Great for info products, not for SaaS
Rob Walling: Not for B2B SaaS, specifically, right? If you are
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
marketing, if your audience, if you are marketing to other indie
hackers, guess where indie hackers are? They're on Twitter.
So yeah, go hashtag build in public and sell them your chat
with PDF thing or whatever it is. That's great. But the vast,
vast, vast majority of companies, in fact, Tiny Seed we
funded 131 companies actually, almost 150. A couple weeks from
now, it'll be over 150. But like I did, I ran the numbers and it
was like 4% or 4 and a half percent had any kind of
audience, I mean, any type of social podcast, YouTube,
anything before they built their businesses and similar numbers
even now. Like where we have a lot of companies doing seven
figures and we've had exits and they just don't need it, right?
Because SEO, content, cold outreach, integrations, in
person events, affiliate programs, you know, all this
other stuff can be done without an audience. So my thing is, you
and I both built audiences. I've been building audience since
2005 when I started blogging, 2010 when I started the podcast,
you know, 20 whatever, when we started the YouTube channel.
It's a fuck ton of work. It's way more work, way more work for
the reward than SEO or called average or you know, these other
like, staple B2B marketing. That's what I see. If you're
gifted at it or if it's what you need to do. Arvid people like
you and I, I had to do that. I was blogging to no one for like
a year. I was podcasting to no one for like a year. Right? You
and I do it because we have to. It's part of like Stephen King.
At one point, he said, he told the reporter. He said, yeah, I'm
gonna retire from publishing. And this was years ago. And he
said, oh, you're gonna stop writing? And he said, no, I'm
retiring from public, like the dude has to write.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Rob Walling: I have to, like, I have this curse that I need to
talk in front of, I need people to hear my every thought, right?
And so most people aren't that way, though. And so I'm doing a
disservice to entrepreneurs, if I'm telling people where it's
not their natural gifting nor their desire to go do something
where pound for pound, hour for hour, it is not as effective as
the 20 B2B SaaS marketing purchases, you know, that I put
in this book. That's where I fall down. It's the common
narrative and same reason I strike out against. There is no
always, you should always bootstrap, you should never
bootstrap, you should always raise funding, you should never
there is, none of that. So I get annoyed with that. You should
always build an audience like no, you shouldn't. You should
really know what you're getting into. An audience is a tool,
know what it takes when you should use it.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And there is also a pretty notable difference
between like building a massive audience and just having a
presence as a founder.
Rob Walling: Yes.
Arvid Kahl: Right? Because that is something that I would
recommend to everybody just having a presence for people to
know there's a person.
Rob Walling: I don't disagree with that. Yep, and
Arvid Kahl: Good
Rob Walling: So look at people who are tweeting. I mean, I
didn't, let's say Twitter, for example. I didn't build a
Twitter audience until the last five years, maybe like before
that I had people who followed me, but I never pushed them
there. I wasn't tweeting anything that interesting. And I
see a lot of folks on Twitter who are not like Ruben Gamez or
earthling works. You see him on Twitter. He's not building an
audience. Yeah, but he is on Twitter and being around and
he's learning and interjecting. So I like that distinction that
you're saying just being being in public or you know, building
in public can be even like these days. Derek Rhymer is a good
example of this. He used to. He was building an audience when he
had to order product podcast. And he was building in public to
the point where he was publishing screencasts and
publishing stuff to get people on YouTube and on Twitter. And
then he hit a point where it just didn't move the needle for
him anymore. And it was more time than it was worth. And he's
not, I would say, as far as I know, from the outside, he's not
building an audience anymore, you know.
Arvid Kahl: But it's certainly, it can be an intentional thing.
Or it could just be a consequence of you just being
yourself, which is I think, the most authentic thing, right?
Like you, you mentioned, Derek, I think like Jason Cohen, also
an example here. And he's just blogging, talking about stuff
he's interested in, that is building an audience without
being like, here are the 10 browser extensions for whatever,
right? You don't need that kind of stuff just to attract people
that are genuinely attracted to what you have to offer, what you
do because you have insights into something. That's the best
kind of building in public is the one that is not forced.
Rob Walling: That's right. And to your point earlier, you
mentioned in the book that I say building an audience just to
find customers for SaaS is just really an uphill battle. But
when you go to hire or when you need to build when you need to
find people who can promote you, like let's say, sorry an
affiliate program and I need affiliates who are influencers
in this space. Or I need investors like that's when an
audience suddenly comes in. Like when we started Tiny Seed, the
fact that I had an audience was a huge advantage.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It really depends on what
you want to do. Right? And there might be a point in the future
where it just becomes a necessity because you're adding
some new component to your business that requires that. But
it's not a starting point for everybody. I know a lot of
founders and a lot of SAS developers really like just
coders who really don't want to do this. They just want to go.
They're technical people and they end up being solo founders.
That's one thing I wanted to ask you too, like, do you fund solo
founders? Or do you focus on teams? Like, what's your
position with that?
Rob Walling: The majority of companies that we have funded
are solo founders. And I think, so state of independent SaaS
survey is and report is a MicroConf thing we put out every
other year right now. And I believe the numbers are one
person. Teams are like, what is it 60 or 70% of our kind of
ecosystem. It's somewhere in there. And then one and two
person teams combined, I think is like 90. So whatever the you
know, if it's like 70 and 20, you know, one and two, something
like that. It's like 65, 25, 70 and 20. That's about how the
Tiny Seed founders work done.
Arvid Kahl: Wow
Rob Walling: You can, yeah, it's very similar and just a sliver
of three person and four person teams. I find that there's, it's
actually a little bit of an anti pattern for me to be
bootstrapping up for founder company like that's, yeah, yeah,
it's a little weird. So yeah, that's where venture capital
says no, you know, Paul Graham came out and said, I want two
person, three person teams. We have found, I mean, how many
examples do you and I know of single founders who've built
incredible multimillion dollar?
Arvid Kahl: Thousands at this point?
Rob Walling: Tons and tons
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Rob Walling: So we have no bias. If anything, I have no bias. I
think one and I'm biased towards one and two person teams, to be
honest.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I guess for like a laser focused business
that is solving one particular problem really well, like it's
the whole thing about cooks, you know, too many cooks. And that
makes perfect sense. So can you hire too early then? Is that
something that exists?
Rob Walling: Hire too early?
Arvid Kahl: As a sort of founder
Rob Walling: If, yeah, it depends on, yeah, you can. I
mean, let's say you have $20,000 in the bank and I hire my first
out and I go through all my 20 grand. You hired too early,
right? To be honest, when you're building, finding, I say finding
product market fit like it's some destination, it's not. You
and I both know, it's a continuum. It's not a binary.
So, you know, as you're finding, as you're strengthening product
market fit. If you're too early and you hire a salesperson to go
sell it and you don't have a product market fit, you just
churn everybody. Either no one signs up or you just churn
everybody out. So yeah, you can hire that too early. But I don't
think, I think if you have budget, these days, like I would
hire for almost from day one. But it depends on which role you
hire, right? It's like, oh, well, I hired enough. I will
hire another developer to accelerate or usually need more
features to get to product market fit in the early days.
And then at a certain point, you kind of hit it and or you know,
get enough of it that then you need more marketing and sales.
And so that's kind of it kind of switches over time. I actually
have a matrix of this of like the most common first, second
and third hires of depending on your founding teams make up.
Arvid Kahl: That, among all the other wonderful things in the
book, is probably one of the most impactful things you could
have put in there. Because that is something that I as a solo
ish founder, never really understood. Who's going to be
the next person or the first person to hire. Right? Should
they replace me? Or should they augment what I do? It's really
nice that you looked into this. And I think you draw this data.
Well, you drew this data from like real companies and their
hires as well. Right?
Rob Walling: That's right. Yep. And I asked, again, this is
where Tiny Seed is an asset for me because I have access to
these 130 to 150 companies. And I was able to do my mental
model, you know, you're like an archaeologist where you're like,
alright, here's been the experience I've had and the
experience of memory from all these founders. And then I went
into Slack and actually posted I said, this is a matrix. Who here
followed this? Who here didn't? And do you disagree with, you
know, it wasn't good or bad for you? And do you disagree with
any of these? And it was like, so if you're a single founder
and you're a developer and you're in low touch sales,
usually your first hire is support because it's low touch
and there's high but you know, it's that kind of stuff, right?
So people were saying, yes, I did it. And in general, I call
it like, maybe 90% accurate, it's not 100%. But it's at least
something because before you have this matrix, you're like, I
don't know who you know, I don't know what I should do, to your
point. Just guidance, you know.
Arvid Kahl: And if you don't have a mastermind or like a
group of people like Tiny Seed that have this knowledge that
just have the experiential insights, then you just kind of
struggling. You're doing random experiments that can cost you
and can, you know, derail you quite substantially, too.
Rob Walling: Yeah, hiring is a big one, right? It's so
expensive and time consuming.
Arvid Kahl: Hiring is also something personally that nobody
taught me. I get a lot of technical skills, you know,
people teach you how to code and all that stuff. But hiring is
like, yeah, okay, just hire people. But what does it mean?
Rob Walling: It is hard. This is actually where I've talked about
this on my podcast before working a day job and being like
being a developer on a team where you're involved in a
hiring process or if you become manager a team lead and you're
actually making hiring decisions, invaluable. Like I
did that for many years, as much as I hated every single one of
my day jobs. You can learn skills that your day jobs that
will help you as a founder.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And that's the thing, if you know that you will
need it eventually, you probably will look out for these kinds of
insights. And you will ask people questions. Something I
didn't do because when I was a dev, I was like, I'm just gonna
be a developer forever, right? Not for me. I'll learn that
later. Well, I should ask questions back in the day.
Rob Walling: Absolutely. And, you know, I used to go talk to
our marketing. I worked at, it was a credit card company and I
would go talk to the marketing people and just be like, how do
we? Do we add for? Like, I don't know what marketing was, almost
20 years ago. Do we add for time? They're like, yeah, we do.
And well tell me about that. And I was just trying to learn
something like at every company, you can learn there's hiring,
there is managing, there is getting better at, you know, at
technical side, there's business just operations like what is it
like to run payroll and do your books and marketing and sales
and all this stuff is you have to, you know, you have to do it
all when you're the founder.
Arvid Kahl: The earlier you understand as a founder that
you're an active generalist and you cannot just be a specialist
in the thing that you already do. The earlier you will build
this into your routine, right?
Rob Walling: Yeah, yeah, you really, if you want to be a
specialist, there are rare exceptions. You just have to,
you have to limit your growth of your company to do that. And
it's possible and that maybe it's bootstrapping. You're a
lifestyle bootstrapper. You can do what you want. But if I'm a
developer and I want to keep developing, great, but I am
going to hamper the growth of my company, you know? That's just a
decision you get to and have to make at a certain point.
Arvid Kahl: We all got to learn these things. And we got to
learn from amazing people like you. So, let me pivot. If people
want to follow you on social media and want to see what
you're doing, the conferences you run, the podcast you host,
the books you write and I could list more stuff for a couple
hours. Always super impressive. Where do you want people to go?
Rob Walling: I think @robwalling on Twitter, might be the number
one, podcast The Startups for the Rest of Us and if they're
listening to this podcast, they may want to hop over and
subscribe to that in any podcatcher that exists.
Arvid Kahl: You're gonna hit 700 episodes with that in a couple
of weeks
Rob Walling: I know. What should I do? I've already done all
this, you know, at 100 we like had people send in audio clips
and at 200, we reflected on at three like we've already done
it. What at 600, I did almost nothing. I didn't even say it
until the end of the episode. I was like, hey, by the way that
was 600. Here, it just happens to have two zeros at the end.
I'll see in 601. You know, is there anything I could do at
700?
Arvid Kahl: Oh, man, you could do a live show like with a live
audience somewhere. Like
Rob Walling: Done that a couple times.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Rob Walling: It's fine. Those shows don't turn out as good.
Like, have you listened to podcasts where you listen to the
live one? And you're like, the show sucks? It's not as good. So
I think we've done two or three. We did them at Microconf's and
we recorded them with a live audience. So I'm going to ixnay
that idea.
Arvid Kahl: Well, I guess that's up to the listeners of this
episode to send you, to follow you on Twitter, give you some
kind of idea. I think that would be nice because that's kind of
where your podcast impacts. It's the community, right? It's the
people in the community that learn from it. And I bet they
want to give back. So hey, cool idea. Send it to Rob. Thanks so
much for being on the show and sharing these 1000s of insights
and nuggets today. That was really, really nice. Thank you
so much.
Rob Walling: Amazing, man. Thank you for having me.
Arvid Kahl: Absolute pleasure.
And that's it for today. I want to briefly thank my sponsor,
acquire.com. Now, Rob sold Drip and a few other SaaS businesses
which massively impacted his life. First of, few people ever
sell a business. I mean, few people ever build a business to
begin with. So if you're starting one or are already
running a profitable SaaS, I think it's important to think
about the next step to use Rob's Stair Stepping terminology here.
Selling my own SaaS certainly changed my life. I wouldn't be
sitting here. I wouldn't even be talking to amazing founders and
teachers like Rob if I hadn't built a sellable business and
then sold it at some point. No matter where you are on your
founder journey, I recommend always thinking at least about
your eventual sale of the business. You don't have to sell
it, obviously. But you can. And acquire.com is the platform to
do that on. They've helped hundreds of founders list,
negotiate and sell their businesses from 1000s to
millions of dollars in sales prices. They've seen it all and
they can help you sell your SaaS business. Go to
try.acquire.com/arvid and see if selling your business is the
right thing for you right now. It doesn't hurt to be prepared.
It doesn't hurt to dream either because a well run business is
always a more sellable business. So setting it up, getting it
right, that is what you want to do and acquire.com will help you
get to the point where selling is a great choice.
Thank you for listening to The Boostrapped Founder today. You
can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. You'll find my books
and my twitter course there too. And if you want to support me
and this show, which I would really appreciate, please
subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast
player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to
(http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). That will make a massive
difference because if you show up there, then the podcast will
show up in other people's feeds. That's where I would like it to
be. That's how we can help each other learn from people like
Rob. Any of this will help the show so thanks so much for
listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.