Episode 685 | 7 Things You Should Never Do (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 685, Rob Walling goes solo to share his insights on 7 common mistakes that SaaS founders make. Be sure to listen to the end to hear Rob’s spicy take on launching a portfolio of products to see what sticks. Episode Sponsor: As a founder your plate is full. So when you have to hire devs, there’s no time to search for that perfect culture-fit, get-things-done developer. Lemon.io’s new product, Lemon Hire saves founders time by connecting them with a pipeline of 80K+ senior engineers. Each dev is filtered through a 4-step vetting process, available to interview within 48 hours of choosing, and backed by a 30-day replacement guarantee. Find your great-fit candidates fast with Lemon Hire. Claim a special discount for our fans. Visit https://lemon.io/hire/, sign up, and mention “Startups” to receive $2000 off your first hire. Topics we cover: 1:29 – Sign the National Association of Manufacturers Letter, Section 174 3:52 – Compiling a list of things founders shouldn’t do 6:49 – B2C applications, “the worst of all the worlds” 9:42 – Don’t build a second product if your first has stopped growing 10:40 – Defining a new category of software is usually a bad idea 19:59 – Avoid multi-language support 24:13 – Dig deep to find root causes beyond the symptoms 27:41 – The portfolio approach Links from the Show: The Small Software Business Alliance MicroConf Remote The SaaS Playbook Dan Andrews (@TropicalMBA) | X Episode 681 | Why Launching a Second Product is Usually a Bad Idea Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah 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	And I've always wanted to avoid the lottery ticket approach, the big promise of you can be a millionaire tomorrow.
0:07.5	Here's an example of this person who did just that, and I'm going to teach you how to do that, when in fact that's bullshit, when in fact it's survivor bias, when in fact that's one person out of 100 who each launched five products and this one person got
0:22.5	lucky and so it's not repeatable. And I fucking hated that stuff when I was coming up.
0:35.1	It's another episode of startup Up to the Rest of Us.
0:37.8	I'm Rob Walling, and today I'm talking about seven things you should never do.
0:43.7	And I want to caveat this with, it's for the most part you should never do.
0:47.9	I use never in the title as a way, of course, to get you intrigued.
0:52.1	But I'm not the person who puts never in all caps on social
0:55.5	media and says things like, in your designs, you should never have buttons with rounded
1:00.4	corners because I say so and you never should. We used to get these comments when we were building
1:05.3	drip. It was just insane. The confidence with which people would proclaim their opinion as fact.
1:12.4	So I'm not going to do that here today.
1:14.4	I use never kind of tongue in cheek.
1:16.7	I think it's for the most part.
1:17.9	You shouldn't do it.
1:18.6	It's a best practice.
1:20.0	It's probably 95% of the time you shouldn't do these things.
1:24.2	And some of these are things you've heard me talk about before,
1:26.5	like bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace, or going B2C instead of B2B. This entire episode was
1:34.0	inspired by a listener voicemail that I'll play in just a minute. But before we listen to that,
1:40.3	on this very podcast, we've talked about how in the U.S. Section 174 is really destroying our ability
1:48.8	for software companies to write off expenses for software development, and instead having to
	...

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