Episode 680 | Problems vs. Solutions, Doing What it Takes, and More Listener Questions (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 680, Rob Walling goes solo again, covering a wide variety of topics including listening to customers, but not necessarily their solutions. He also cautions against making decisions based on one customer's feedback, but listening to the crowd. Finally, Rob highlights the importance of doing whatever it takes to succeed as a founder. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 1:52 – Paying attention to customer problems, not customer solutions 6:52 – Don’t listen to a customer, always listen to your customers 9:42 – Finding product market fit with limited information 13:01 – Identifying the appropriate time to grind out the work 19:18 – Don’t be above “taking out the trash” Links from the Show: MicroConf Connect Ruben Gamez (@earthlingworks) | X Ruben’s repost of @sequence_film ComicLab (@ComicLabPodcast) | X Dave Kellett (@davekellett) | X Brad Guigar (@guigar) | X The SaaS Playbook If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Google

Transcript

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0:00.0	It works this way for products, too.
0:01.8	Pay attention to the problem customers describe, not so much the solution they propose.
0:06.8	This is an encapsulation and a really intelligent rephrasing of something that Derek Rimer and I started talking about probably, I'd say, 2014, 2015, which is your customers will come to you with feature ideas.
0:21.0	Don't build those features.
0:22.4	Dig in and find out what is the job that feature is trying to accomplish.
0:37.4	Welcome back to another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us.
0:40.3	As always, I'm your host Rob Walling, and this is the podcast, where we dive deep into building real companies for real customers who pay us real money, where we're not constantly on the venture treadmill, needing to raise money every 18 months or go broke. We're not anti-funding.
0:56.3	We're just anti-the-narrative that the only way to build an incredible software company is by
1:01.3	raising funding. Today's a Rob Solo adventure. I'm going to cover some topics that have been on my
1:06.4	mind lately, including listening to problems, not solutions, listening to your customers instead of a
1:13.3	customer, doing what it takes, and maybe a few more topics based on how the time winds up. And one more
1:19.5	thing. We've recently reopened the doors for our online community, MicroConf Connect. MicroConf Connect
1:25.0	is our virtual hallway track. It's a vibrant community of SaaS founders helping each other and discussing wins, challenges, and frankly, how to grow faster. A couple months ago, we paused new signups to improve the platform based on your requests. With MicroConf Connect 2.0, we're rolling out three membership tiers packed with new perks, like weekly co-working, exclusive discounts, a searchable content library, and more.
1:48.4	Whether you've been a member of Connect or not, you really should check it out.
1:51.7	MicroConfConnect.com.
1:53.5	My first topic of the day comes from Twitter.
1:56.7	I just refuse to call it X. I'm sorry.
1:58.9	I saw a tweet from Ruben Gameomes, Earthling Works, and he was
2:02.5	quote tweeting Sequence film, Sequence underscore film. Sequence was quoting comedian Bill Hater on
2:09.7	receiving feedback. And there's a little video clip that's, I don't know, a minute long,
2:14.5	and it's pretty insightful. But the quote that they post in the tweet is,
2:18.5	when people tell you something is wrong, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it,
	...

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