Episode 347: Rob Walling – Building and Selling Drip, The Stairstep Approach, and TinySeed

The Fizzle Show

fizzle.co

Entrepreneurship, Business, Careers, Freelancing, Marketing, Small Business

4.8 • 648 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

https://fizzleshow.co Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur. He founded, built and sold the email marketing platform Drip. He is also known for his podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us as well as his conference for independent startups called Microconf.

In this episode of The Fizzle Show, we talk with Rob about how he got started, and how he built and sold Drip for a “life-changing amount of money.” Rob also shares his “Stairstep approach” to entrepreneurship and explains why starting big is a huge mistake for most business builders.

Finally, we talk about Rob’s new project TinySeed, which is the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to The Fizzle Show. I'm Corbett Barr, and this is our podcast about
0:09.2	earning a living, doing something you really care about. And our guest today is somebody who
0:14.2	knows a lot about that. Our guest has done everything from info products to building and selling a
0:20.3	massive SaaS application.
0:22.5	He's also known for his conference, microconf, his podcast, startups for the rest of us,
0:28.1	and just an all-around great guy who I think shares a lot of the same philosophies that we do here
0:33.4	at the Fizzle show. So welcome today, Rob Walling.
0:36.7	Thank you, sir. It's my pleasure to come back
0:38.9	on the show. I was on it in the previous incarnation, I believe. Yeah, it's been quite a while. It's
0:44.8	been a while since we chatted. I think the last time that we chatted not in the context of the show
0:49.0	was when you were building drip. And I remember you were out there shaking the bushes and rustling up
0:56.0	customers doing sort of one-on-one sales. For people who aren't familiar with your
1:02.7	entrepreneurial journey, do you think you could distill it down for us in a nutshell?
1:08.3	Yeah, I mean, I think the nutshell is software developer turned entrepreneur. And to do that,
1:13.6	I had to learn how to market. Like a lot of us do, you know, so many of us think that marketing is a dirty
1:17.4	word or sales is a dirty word. But when I wanted to leave the day job, it was like, how else can you
1:23.3	make money? You have to learn how to spread the word and to sing the praises of, you know, whatever it is that you're building. And so I built some projects on the side, made it very much
1:33.0	lifestyle oriented. I've never raised funding for, you know, a startup. And I launched these tiny
1:39.7	little $1,000, $2,000 a month projects. I built up enough of those to eventually have a full-time income in California.
1:46.6	That was about $8 or $10K a month.
1:48.5	And then I use that to start a slightly larger one or I acquired one at that point,
1:53.3	a SaaS app.
	...

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