Rob Walling
Bootstrapper and investor. Founder of TinySeed and MicroConf, host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and author of several books on self-funded software startups.
Rob Walling did not write this page.
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Their wordsI think about startup success as requiring three things: hard work, luck, and skill. You need some combination of all three, but the mix varies.
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Their wordsProduct-market fit is a spectrum. You move through stages, and each stage requires different focus areas to keep progressing.
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Our reading
After a first success, it is difficult to know which specific factors drove that success.
Their wordsHere's the uncomfortable truth: after your first win, you don't actually know which of these three factors drove your success. You think you do. But you're pattern-matching on a sample size of one.
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Their wordsIf churn is 10% or higher per month, you're effectively pre-PMF regardless of your other metrics.
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Their wordsThe patterns only emerge after you've done it more than once-and even then, you might be wrong about half of it.
- 7 years earlier
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Our reading
More than half of what it takes to be a successful founder is managing your own psychology.
Their wordsI believe that more than half of what it takes to be a successful founder is managing your own psychology.
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Their wordsIf you're putting anything interesting out into the world, you're going to have people get mad about something at some point.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsWhile these things happen, they are much, much less common than speed bumps.
- 4 years earlier
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Their wordsThe strategy that seems to give people the best chance of success is creating a simple product, with a simple marketing plan - one that only requires a single traffic channel.
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Their wordsIt's much easier to sell an add-on to an existing ecosystem like a WordPress plugin, a Shopify app, a Heroku add-on - they're usually small things to build, relatively inexpensive for customers to purchase, and you have built-in discovery through the plugin repository or app store.
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Their wordsBut the other side of the SaaS coin is that there's a long ramp to any kind of substantial revenue, which is why I recommend you complete steps 1 and 2 before moving to this step.
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsThe more gambles you take, the better you become at reading the tea leaves and figuring out if your next gamble is going to work. You also gain confidence in your ability to execute when your back is to the wall.
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Their wordsA high churn rate means you haven't found a market that really needs your product, or, worse yet, that you've built something no market wants (yet).
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Their wordsTracking customers from website visitor to marketing subscriber to trial user to customer, and being able to tailor communications the entire time is insanely powerful. In fact, it's the future of email marketing.
- 4 months earlier
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Our reading
A transfer-friendly payment processor makes a SaaS business more universally appealing to buyers.
Their wordsTo avoid this, opt for a transfer-friendly payment processor which will make the business universally appealing to buyers and save considerable effort post-transaction.
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Their wordsWhilst a personal touch can help with humanising the marketing approach and selling services, it makes the transfer of ownership and ongoing operation more of a risk to new buyers who can't continue the same approach and will likely affect sales price or mean you have to stay on for longer post-sale.
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Their wordsAs a general rule of thumb, any passive income stream in an online business will attract a premium valuation.
- 20 months earlier
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Their wordsThis experience taught me one of the most important lessons of my startup journey: that ideas are cheap, and that execution is all that matters.
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Their wordsEven if you don't spend as long as Dennis Crowley thinking about a problem and space, I've seen a general trend that really successful startup founders are super passionate about the space they're in.
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Our reading
New competition can be beneficial because it helps educate users about a new way of doing things.
Their wordsThe most interesting thing here is that any new competition out there is probably more beneficial to us than if it didn't exist, because they can help to educate users and make them aware of this new way to do something.