Episode 700 | Playing the Long Game

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 700, Rob goes solo to celebrate another milestone of Startups For the Rest of Us. He reflects on playing the long game and doing so publicly enough to create larger luck surface area. He also emphasizes building skills in the process, and highlights several founders who have done this well. Episode Sponsor: Is your outsourced development team dropping the ball? Maybe you’ve worked with a team that just couldn't grasp your vision and needed constant oversight because they weren’t thinking strategically. Or maybe you ended up wasting hours micromanaging, often needing to jump on late-night calls across massive time zone differences to get alignment. And in the end, they delivered a sluggish app with a frustrating UI that didn’t come close to the solution you had envisioned. If any of that sounds familiar, you need to reach out to our sponsor - DevSquad. DevSquad provides an entire development team packed with top talent from Latin America. Your elite squad will include between 2 to 6 Full Stack Developers, a technical product manager, plus experts in product strategy, UI/UX design, DevOps, and QA - all working together to make your SaaS Product a success. You can ramp up an entire product team fast, in your timezone, and at rates 75% cheaper than a comparable US-based team. And with DevSquad, you pay month to month with no long-term contracts. Get the committed, responsive development team that your business deserves. Visit DevSquad.com/startups and get 10% off the first three months of your engagement. Topics we cover: 2:41 – Balancing short vs. long term thinking and decision making 7:30 – Examples of founders leaning into the long game 12:18 – Putting in the time, and doing it publicly (enough) 16:42 – Lucky or smart? 21:22 – How do I know if I’m playing the correct long game? 23:54 – Acquiring skills as you play the long game 27:13 – Cheers to 700! Links from the Show: Apply for TinySeed Spring 2024 MicroConf TinySeed Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling Gather TinySeed Tales S2E1 | Introducing Gather Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody 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 |

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is your outsource development team dropping the ball?
0:05.0	Maybe you've worked with a team that just couldn't grasp your vision and needed constant oversight because they weren't thinking strategically.
0:12.0	Or maybe you ended up wasting hours micromanaging, often needing to jump on late-night calls across massive time zone differences to get alignment.
0:20.0	And in the end, they delivered
0:21.6	a sluggish app with a frustrating UI that didn't come close to the solution you had envisioned.
0:26.8	If any of that sounds familiar, you need to reach out to our sponsor. Dev Squad. DevSquad provides
0:31.8	an entire development team packed with top talent from Latin America. Your elite squad will
0:36.4	include between two to six full-stack
0:38.4	developers, a technical product manager, plus specialists in product strategy, UIUX design, DevOps,
0:44.7	and QA all working together to make your SaaS product a success. You can ramp up an entire product
0:50.5	team fast in your time zone, and it rates 75% cheaper than a comparable U.S.-based
0:56.0	team. And with DevS. Squad, you pay month to month with no long-term contracts.
1:00.5	Get the committed, responsive development team that your business deserves.
1:04.5	Visit devsquod.com slash startups and get 10% off for the first three months of your
1:09.7	engagement. That's devsquad.com slash startups.
1:15.1	Welcome back to startups with the rest of us.
1:17.1	I'm Rob Walling, and I am your host for this momentous 700th episode of this podcast.
1:23.8	Today I want to talk about playing the long game.
1:31.3	And what's interesting is it's a thought that I had three, four weeks ago that I threw into a Topics Trello board that I maintain. And it hadn't
1:37.3	occurred to me that episode 700 was so close. But instead of having my friends send audio into the podcast,
1:44.8	having my son interview me,
1:46.1	which I actually think someone suggested.
	...

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