Startups For the Rest of Us

In episode 641, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure as he answers more listener questions. Topics covered range from dealing with high churn when your tool is project-based, what product feedback to listen to in the early days, and when to hire project-level thinkers vs. task-level thinkers. Topics we cover:  3:18 - Dealing with high churn when your tool is project-based 8:38 - Going upmarket 9:42 - Who to listen to in the early days to improve your product 15:47 - Should I worry about people copying my business idea? 24:26 - Should I join MicroConf Connect if I’m still in the idea validation phase? 25:54 - Hiring project-level thinkers vs. task-level workers Links from the Show: The SaaS Playbook MicroConf 2023 Accountability Challenge  MicroConf Connect  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 | Stitcher Transcript Rob Walling: Over the past probably five, 10 years, I've done a bunch of work to get better at that. So I worry about a lot fewer things, even though those are possible. So is it possible I'll get struck by lightning? Is it possible I'll get in a car accident? Is it possible I can go out of business next week or get sued, or have something terrible happen? Yes. All of those things are possible. Should I be worrying about those? That's the real question, right? Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And today, I'm going to be answering listener questions from bootstrapped and mostly-bootstrapped startup founders who are thinking through things like dealing with high churn when your tool is project-based, who to listen to in the early days to improve your product, and many more topics than that. I did want to let you know that the website for my new book is live. Title of the book is The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital. So it's not solely focused on bootstrapping, but it's bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS companies, as you often hear me say on this show. So head to saasplaybook.com if you want to check it out. You can obviously sign up to the email list so I can notify you when the Kickstarter for the book begins. And of course, if you're on other email lists of mine, you'll hear from me as well. But I'm excited about this. It took me a lot longer to write the book than I would've liked. I had a bit of writer's block in the midst of it. But in the end, I'm really excited about the end product. And I've had, I don't know, a dozen people, maybe 15 people whom I trust who are SaaS founders ... some really experienced, some still in the early days ... read through it. Gotten a lot of helpful feedback that allowed me to improve it, and then a lot of positive feedback telling me that I'm on the right track, right? Because this, like anything we do ... I call products art. SaaS products are art. Music is art. A book like this, it's art. It's our product that we're putting into the world. And anything like that in the early days, before you've had tens, hundreds, thousands of people consume it, it's very fragile and it's hard to tell if it's good or not to be honest. And at a certain point, you get so close to your own art that it becomes difficult to tell if it's valuable, if it's going to be helpful for people, if it's too obvious, if it's not obvious enough, if it's too deep, or not enough. So all that said, I'm super excited about the book. More excited than I've been about shipping a product like this in a long time. You can find out more about it at saasplaybook.com or, of course, I'll be talking about it on this show in the coming months. Before we dive into that, if you want to get a headstart on your 2023 goals, join us for the MicroConf Accountability Challenge. The difference b