Episode 686 | How Much is Enough?, Outsourcing Marketing, and More Listener Questions

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 686, join Rob Walling for another solo adventure where he answers listener questions. He answers how to evaluate monetary success, combat hedonic adaptation, and how to evaluate the capabilities of technical co-founders. Rob also discusses whether outsourcing sales and marketing is possible and considers some alternative no-code approaches. Topics we cover: 4:20 – Success after stair-stepping, confronting hedonic adaptation 15:35 – Sales funnels, friction before demos, and collecting email addresses 19:24 – Outsourcing marketing and sales 23:54 – Evaluating the technical capabilities of your technical co-founder(s) 29:41 – Reducing the platform risk of developing in typical no-code tools Links from the Show: State of Independent SaaS Survey and Report MicroConf Local in Austin MicroConf Connect Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) | X WP Engine (@wpengine) | X Tracy Osborn (@tracymakes) | X The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup The SaaS Playbook This Took 11 Years to Be An "Overnight Success" - SaaS Exit Strategy Once 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	I remember being stressed in the early days, early days of drip that like, we aren't moving fast enough, right?
0:04.7	But I knew Derek was a baller developer, but I knew he also wrote really maintainable, high quality, scalable code.
0:11.4	And so if it took an extra few days or an extra few weeks on a, you know, on a larger project to ship something, I was willing to live with that because I wanted long term to have a code
0:22.4	base and a company that would scale, unlike some companies that we see where you get this non-technical
0:28.4	founder who hires a dev or has kind of a minority technical co-founder and they drive them and
0:34.5	push them to write code faster and faster and faster and the code is shit.
0:38.0	And then they get to a million,
0:40.0	three million, five million in ARR
0:41.4	and they stop, they lock up.
0:43.4	You can't build features
0:44.3	because nothing is maintainable.
0:46.2	You can't add new things
0:47.5	because you break old things.
0:48.6	There's no unit tests.
0:49.5	You know, there's just low quality code.
1:02.8	I don't know, Just low quality code. Welcome to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us.
1:05.6	I'm Rob Walling, and today I answer listener questions, some text questions from all the way back in January of this year.
1:13.5	So it is at 10 months.
1:14.9	And I sprinkle in some video questions as well.
1:18.7	Before we dive into that, tickets for MicroConf Local in Austin, November 14th of this year, are on sale and they are going fast.
1:27.3	If you're a bootstrap SaaS founder in the Austin area, you don't want to miss out. November 14th of this year are on sale and they are going fast.
1:31.6	If you're a bootstrap SaaS founder in the Austin area, you don't want to miss out.
	...

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