Episode 768 | Reacting to Controversial Startup Advice

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you disagree with any of these controversial takes about bootstrapping? In episode 768, Rob Walling unpacks a series of semi-controversial beliefs about bootstrapping from ScrapingBee’s Pierre de Wulf. Rob evaluates each point from Pierre's tweet, discussing topics like rebranding your SaaS, the hidden problem of affiliate marketing, and the realities of scaling a SaaS business. Topics we cover: (1:21) – Pierre’s semi-controversial bootstrapping beliefs (4:35) – Don’t waste time on a rebrand (7:24) – No one cares about your domain extension (9:06) – Affiliate marketing won’t fix your acquisition issues (11:51) – There is no silver bullet for growth (13:42) – Copy what works best (14:59) – Double down on acquisition channels that work (16:53) – Hire specialists (19:34) – Never offer a plan with unlimited features (20:22) – Don’t offer a cheap plan if you can’t support it (20:47) – Don’t add social logins to your signup page (21:27) – Read competitors’ reviews several times a year (21:59) – $10k MRR doesn’t guarantee $100k MRR (22:28) – You will get copied if you share success (23:02) – “Build this feature…” (24:10) – The Mom Test (24:56) – Provide value for your target demographic for free (25:47) – Don’t overthink Product Hunt (26:00) – You’ll never sell your SaaS for 10x Links from the Show: MicroConf Growth Retreat in London Rob Walling (@robwalling) | X Pierre de Wulf (@PierreDeWulf) | X ScrapingBee (@ScrapingBee) | X ScrapingBee Pierre’s semi-controversial bootstrapping beliefs TinySeed Rob Walling.com Rob Walling | LinkedIn SaaS Institute Exit Strategy by Sherry Walling, PhD & Rob Walling Episode 705 | From Bootstrapped to Mostly Bootstrapped to Venture Backed The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your questi...

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Startups for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. Every week on this show since 2010,
0:05.0	I've been showing up, sometimes with a co-host, sometimes on my own, to talk through what it's like to build ambitious SaaS companies.
0:14.0	And in the early days, as SaaS was just becoming a thing, we also talked about downloadable software and mobile apps and even like
0:22.0	sometimes content websites and e-commerce sites because at that time I was running the gamut,
0:27.6	info products, there's all kinds of stuff. But over time, this show honed in on SaaS,
0:33.0	software as a service, because SaaS, especially B2B SaaS, is the best business model in the world.
0:39.7	And that's why myself and the tens of thousands of listeners of this show, as well as the
0:44.8	guests that you hear appear on the show, go all in on building incredible companies that
0:50.7	bring us freedom, purpose, and relationships, and that we can build and create and bring
0:55.6	into the world without sacrificing our health, our family relationships, and the rest of our lives,
1:02.5	because we build businesses to support and to improve our lives rather than sacrificing the
1:07.8	quality of our lives and our relationships for our companies. We want to be
1:11.2	ambitious. We want to build incredible companies, but we want to do it in a way that isn't unicorn or
1:17.0	bust, and that doesn't require asking anyone for permission. So today, I'm going to be digging into
1:23.0	controversial takes from Scraping Bee co-founder Pierre de Wolf. And what I'm going to do is walk
1:30.2	through a tweet that he posted in the middle of 2024, so about eight or nine months ago. And he says,
1:37.9	these are my semi-controversial beliefs I have about bootstrapping a successful product. And he has
1:43.3	15 or 20 bullets that I think are
1:45.3	fascinating, some of which I agree with, some of which, you know, has more nuance. Others I inevitably
1:51.4	will disagree with. The best part of this is I'm not telling him that I'm recording this. Pierre
1:56.3	and I know each other pretty well. He's spoken at MicroConf. He's a tiny seed founder. Scraping Bee is an
2:00.7	incredible business. They've been public about mostly bootstrapping each other pretty well. He's spoken at Microcomp. He's a tiny seed founder. Scraping Bee is an incredible
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