Rob Walling

Quotes are word for word from the source.

• Breaking the startup loop

  “you break out of this loop by just saying that you're not going to give up until you have something to show people.”

  Our noteRob advises a founder who feels stuck between needing funding and needing traction.

• Technical founder roles

  “Personally, I think if you do still want to stay in the code, I don't think that's a terrible choice if you can find somebody who can be the operations person.”

  Our noteRob discusses the possibility of a technical founder staying in the code by hiring an operations lead.

• Contractual certainty

  “I'm such a more conservative in terms of stuff, and I like to have everything signed and known, but boy, we've been talking to the hotel for months and the odds are pretty good it's going to go through.”

  Our noteRob discusses announcing conference dates before having a counter-signed contract.

• Founder perspective on rewrites

  “If you're a single founder, a two-founder team and you are thinking about rewriting, put on your sales and marketing hat, put on your CEO hat, not your CTO or developer hat.”

  Our noteRob advises founders to evaluate technical rewrites from a business and sales perspective rather than just a technical one.

• Technical debt reality

  “You can have a code that is so bad that you can't add features and it takes you a month to do a day's worth of work or whatever. Of course, that happens, but it's a lot less frequent than developers tend to make it out to be.”

  Our noteRob points out that extreme technical debt justifying a rewrite is rarer than most developers claim.

• Tool vs spreadsheet

  “Yeah, you could model that in Excel, but this is going to take everything into account.”

  Our noteRob compares the efficiency of a dedicated forecasting tool to a traditional spreadsheet.

• Bootstrapped Equity Grants

  “I really haven't seen people who haven't taken any funding. I haven't seen anyone who's done stock options versus just an equity grant that vest over a few years.”

  Our noteRob discusses the rarity of stock options in non-venture funded startups.

• Hiring an assistant

  “I've been thinking about doing this for a couple of years, and really couldn't see a way that someone could actually help and save me time.”

  Our noteRob discusses his initial hesitation about hiring an executive assistant to manage his email.

• Inbox management habit

  “It's cool just to open up Gmail and never look at the inbox. That's been the hardest thing, either on my phone or on Gmail, is to only look at Today tab”

  Our noteRob describes the psychological shift of only looking at filtered email labels.

• Segmenting churn

  “What I've typically seen the most success with is to look at your first 60-day of churn, and then your post 60-day churn, and separate those numbers out.”

  Our noteRob suggests splitting churn data to better understand why customers are leaving.

• Product Pruning

  “I think doing this pruning, especially for folks like us who start a lot of efforts, start a lot of products or own a lot of products, just doing some pruning now and again is a good way to do it”

  Our noteRob advises on the importance of shutting down or selling off neglected products.

• Selling Early

  “if you can kind of step away from it and hand it off to someone who's willing to grow it while it's still somewhat profitable, it's a better time to do it than once the thing gets completely hosed”

  Our noteRob explains why it is better to sell a declining product while it still has value.

• Solving Customer Pain

  “I would wonder, you know, you said you'd basically find the issues and then walk away, but it seems like they're going to want remediation help, right?”

  Our noteRob points out that identifying a problem is only half the battle for a customer.

• When brand starts

  “the moment that your product is being referenced by name, that's when you start having a brand, because what are they saying about you? That is your brand.”

  Our noteRob explains the transition from just a tool to a recognizable brand.

• Helping software entrepreneurs

  “This is the podcast where I help developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products.”

  Our noteRob introduces the purpose of his podcast for SaaS founders.

• Unique selling proposition

  “I would not have thought of that as a unique selling proposition that respecting email would be the big deal.”

  Our noteRob reacts to Missive's strategy of syncing perfectly with email servers.

• Founder skill balance

  “there's danger in having two or three developers as founders is build, build, build, build, build. Somebody has to be driving sales and doing some marketing”

  Our noteRob warns about the common trap where technical founders focus solely on product development.

• Just-in-time learning

  “Reading a business book that does not have a direct impact on what you're going to be working on in the next 1-2 months is about as productive as watching Netflix.”

  Our noteRob warns against consuming information that cannot be immediately applied to one's business.

• Success Probability

  “the odds of you then even achieving that first success just plummet in my opinion, so it's a tough one.”

  Our noteRob explains how a bad attitude and poor management decrease the likelihood of a startup ever succeeding.

• Focus on core goals

  “I feel like it's a distraction from your real goal, which is to stay physically healthy with exercise and to get your business to the place of profitability.”

  Our noteRob supports Mike's decision to stop a reading goal to focus on health and business.

• Founder relationships

  “Founders don't have a lot of time and don't have a lot of head space in general to connect with the person that probably is the most important to them, their life partner, their significant other”

  Our noteRob discusses the lack of mental space founders have for their partners.

• The startup struggle

  “it's always a balancing act, like you're saying. That's like the struggle of starting up from a standing stop and trying to get something to the point that is profitable.”

  Our noteRob comments on the difficulty of reaching profitability from scratch.

• Consumer trust transfer

  “If you're happy with it as a consumer, then you're going to highly recommend it or at least trust it when it comes to backing up your business.”

  Our noteRob discusses how consumer backup services build trust for their professional plans.

• Scaling with growth

  “They really didn't run into performance issues until they hit a really high point of growth, at which point, of course, they could afford the fees for getting a SQL Server license.”

  Our noteRob explains using free express editions of databases until the business can afford licenses.

• Delegating support tasks

  “Typically, I only do that for the first few months that I own a website and then I try to get that off my plate to a virtual assistant.”

  Our noteRob describes his process for handling support emails for new projects before delegating them.

• CMS adoption fears

  “A lot of developers have some trepidation about using a CMS because they feel like it constraints their ability to, say, write some code or make some type of decision that they want to make.”

  Our noteRob discusses why developers are often hesitant to use content management systems like WordPress.

• Value return principle

  “Someone said a portion of the value you put into the world, you get a small portion of that back, and I think that's a really apt and insightful thought, and that has been true in my experience.”

  Our noteRob discusses the indirect benefits of consistently creating valuable content for others.

• Engineering mindset marketing

  “Nowadays it's called growth hacking but this is what we've been doing for ten, 12 years, where it's like applying the engineering mindset to marketing.”

  Our noteRob explains that modern growth hacking is essentially applying technical logic to marketing efforts.

• Data driven comfort

  “Once you get to that point where you have something that's working and you have history behind it and numbers behind it, it's so much more - I don't know, comforting.”

  Our noteRob describes the transition from risky experimentation to predictable growth once a channel is proven.

• Baseline business metrics

  “if you've already started and you have at least a few thousand a month in revenue, you have some numbers and you know your kind of trial to paid”

  Our noteRob explains why having existing revenue makes business model projections much more accurate.