Rob Walling

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Rob Walling

Rob Walling

@robwalling

Helping SaaS founders for 15 years via @startupspod. Educating and investing in startups through @microconf and @tinyseedfund. Wrote https://t.co/I5PVb459LT.

Minneapolis, MN Katılım Ekim 2009
1.1K Takip Edilen39.6K Takipçiler
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
The TinySeed Millionaire Rate is 43%. Definition: Of @tinyseedfund companies no longer in operation (sold OR shut down), 43% of those founders are now millionaires.💰 This % will obviously change over time. It's still early, and the numbers are still small (~2% of companies have shut down. ~4% have sold). But this is yet another reminder of how resilient and insanely valuable SaaS companies are. Personally, I find this number incredible. Much higher than I would have expected, and it brings me nothing but joy knowing the lives that have been changed through entrepreneurship. (cc @einarvollset)
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
@mynameis_davis This is great info, thanks! I’m going to include it in a future episode.
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Davis from Youform & OneUp
Davis from Youform & OneUp@mynameis_davis·
thanks for the Youform shoutout @robwalling In regards to the one-time payments, I would say overall it was a success for us, but I think it only works in certain circumstances. Some things that worked in our favor: - I already had a decent following on X - I had a large email list from our other product (OneUp) - I had a successful track record, and OneUp's revenue meant we basically had inifinite runway to keep Youform alive forever, which helped with trust (on the flipside, most lifetime deals I see are people's first product, so it takes a lot of trust from a customer in someone who has not proven that they will stick with it long term) I think it made us $30k in the first few months, and helped us get a foothold in the early going, and TBH provided some validation. We also had/have a free plan, and there isnt really any additional cost or support burden that a pro plan user causes that a free plan user wouldnt also cause. We had both a lifetime deal and monthly plan running simultaneously for a while, but then eventually dropped the lifetime deal once we hit $5k MRR. The upfront cash was nice, but recurring revenue is definitely the healthier business model. Would I do it again the same way? Yes. Is it easily replicable? No (in fact we saw many Youform copycats come and try to do the same with lifetime deals, and basically all of them are now shut down)
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Jordan Hansen
Jordan Hansen@JordBHansen·
@robwalling 's latest episode: Listener: "How do I build and market this $24 LTV product?" Rob: "Don't" Ha
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
@zuhasb @BedrYusf We surveyed any SaaS founder we could find with at least $1,000 of MRR. So it's people from Twitter, people in TinySeed, and folks in the broader MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us community.
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Bedr
Bedr@BedrYusf·
Where do SaaS ideas actually come from? Ask online and you'll get a million different answers. If you're like me, you'll dump them all in a spreadsheet, run an analysis, feed it to an LLM... and end up more paralyzed than when you started. So here's actual data. @robwalling surveyed 200+ SaaS founders making $1K+/month: 48% Finding a Problem at Your Day Job 16% Scratch Your Own Itch 10% Copying an Existing Idea/Product 10% Discovering a Problem Through Freelancing 8% Solving a Problem for a Spouse, Friend, or Colleague 4% Building on an Existing Product 3% Finding a Problem Online 3% Taking Advantage of an Emerging/Fast-Growing Technology 9 days ago I committed to building in public and actually shipping. I'm working my way down the list, placing a small bet in each category. Day job: talking to old colleagues about a B2B SaaS. Own itch: I built bedryusf.com and proteinfriend.com. This week, category #3: sifting through real shipped products for an idea worth copying. I'll share what I find.
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Stan Tokman
Stan Tokman@stantokman·
How do I exit the loop of 'public builders', 'solo founders', 'vibe coders' etc? It seems to be a community of people trying to sell each other this idea of getting rich on their own, which obviously doesn't work. I want to see posts from real entrepreneurs
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Juraj Milcak
Juraj Milcak@jurajmilcak·
@stantokman I find @robwalling an amazing source. His podcast (startups for the rest of us) is the first podcast that really sucked my in, i think 100 or so episodes in the last month.
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
@JakubXIndie If you work incredibly hard at any of those approaches, you'll make your own luck.
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Jakub Czerwiński
Jakub Czerwiński@JakubXIndie·
@robwalling I was hoping for a process I could initiate at any time. one where I could work incredibly hard without leaving anything to luck.
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Jakub Czerwiński
Jakub Czerwiński@JakubXIndie·
As a fan of @robwalling I’m struggling to find across facebook, discord, or reddit groups a burning problem that would make a group of, say, 20–30 people say, "Yes, build that app! it will solve our problems."
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
@JakubXIndie And here’s a video where I walk through all of them: youtu.be/6sgCo6fMSGY?is… FWIW, I’ve never found an idea online, but it can be a decent way to find people to talk to once you do have a problem you’re trying to solve.
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
@JakubXIndie I don’t condone looking online for problems. Only 3% of founders in the bootstrapper community find their idea that way according to our state of independent SaaS report. Full report, with all the ways to find problems, is here: microconf.com/state-of-indie…
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Seren
Seren@agentclawjames·
@robwalling @tinyseedfund If we don't waste time on social media, then where should we spend our time for the purpose of cold start?
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David Kaufman
David Kaufman@DavidGigawatt·
@hrishio @robwalling @einarvollset Plus One to this! I know you said no Early Stage stuff, but… should I? Must i? When should I switch my smllc taxed as an s-corp into a Delaware C-corp? Yesterday? When I hit 7 figures? Somewhere in between?
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
What should I talk about at MicroConf Iceland this fall? I’m looking for ideas for a 35-minute main-stage talk. A couple constraints: • No early-stage validation or “how to launch” topics • No AI talks, I’ve covered that ground plenty What are you thinking about these days? What’s a topic you’d want me to unpack? (Even if you’re not attending, the talk will be on YouTube a few months after the event.)
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Einar Vollset 🇳🇴🇺🇸
Einar Vollset 🇳🇴🇺🇸@einarvollset·
@brianatheroux Interesting. Which one did you pick?
Briana Theroux@brianatheroux

We’ve known each other for 11 years now. Started dating 8 years ago. Married 6 now. And I can’t remember a life without you. This year held both loss and revelation. Things fell away that couldn’t come with us. It wasn’t an easy year… but who are we kidding. None of the years have been easy for us. One year after we started dating in NYC, I was diagnosed with cancer. What a cruel Universal joke it is to find the love of your life and be served with your mortality at the same time. It’s been trial after trial since. I’m accepting this as we are only given what we can handle. We are resilient, and as such, we are served more growth opportunities than most. What I love most about us now is the steadiness. The traditions we’ve built. The rhythms that belong only to us. The way our future is never questioned, never bargained with, never used as leverage. We move forward knowing who we are to each other and what we’re holding. And then there is our son. Our heart beating outside of us. A soul tie made visible. A reminder that some bonds aren’t conceptual. They’re eternal. Watching us become parents together didn’t dilute us. It anchored us. It gave shape and gravity to everything we already were. Love stopped being abstract and became something lived, daily, and irreversible. I love that we don’t ever rely on nostalgia or fake ass promises. What we have is deeper than that. Built on knowing, not hope. On roles that fit, choices that repeat, and a shared knowing that doesn’t require reassurance. So here’s to another year married. Rooted. Aligned. Certain. As always. Still choosing this life with you without question. I love you mostest.

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Briana Theroux
Briana Theroux@brianatheroux·
Most women must decide between 3 men: 1) A man she is intensely physically attracted to, but who destabilizes her life because he’s chaotic, impulsive, and probably addicted to something insane. 2) A man she feels safe with, but who does not sexually excite her at all. 3) A man she loves, but who energetically feels more like another child than a leader. ***there are rare exceptions of course. Men who create real sexual polarity without bringing chaos, dysfunction, or emotional instability with them. But most women never meet one.
asparagoid 🐂🀄️@asparagoid

Every man must decide between 3 women: 1. A woman he's 100% physically attracted to, but who psychologically destroys him 2. A woman he's at peace with, but who he doesn't feel primal lust around 3. A woman he loves, but who energetically feels more like a mother than a lover

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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
Palantir didn’t become a $100B+ company because Alex Karp does YouTube interviews 🤦 They built world-class data integration software, spent 20 years winning government trust, embedded engineers with customers, created enormous switching costs, survived years of criticism, expanded into commercial markets, and were perfectly positioned when enterprise AI arrived. Let’s do less cargo-culting and more of looking at the decades-long grind it takes to build a company like this.
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Ihtesham Ali
Ihtesham Ali@ihtesham2005·
Marc Andreessen says Alex Karp almost never talks about Palantir in interviews. He calls it the single best marketing strategy he has ever seen and then revealed the number that proves it works better than anything else in the history of investor communications. Every founder makes the same mistake. They think inside out. My company, my product, my story, out into the world. It feels natural. It is also why most founder content is indistinguishable from every other founder's content. Karp does the opposite. He talks about the future of the US military. He talks about superintelligence. He talks about whatever is genuinely interesting to him about the world right now. And because he is the CEO of Palantir, the company just sits there attached to all of it. Then Marc dropped the number. What percentage of Palantir investors have read the S1? Practically zero. What percentage have seen Karp on YouTube? Close to 100. A Edelman B2B study found that thought leadership content drives purchasing consideration more than product marketing does — by a factor of nearly three to one among enterprise buyers. Karp did not read that report. He just built the playbook it describes. Palantir's lawyers spent thousands of hours on the S1. It explains everything the company does with full precision. Nobody read it. Karp spent those hours talking about things that interested him. Everybody watched. The most effective investor communication Palantir ever produced was never filed with the SEC. Watch the full video on @a16z YouTube channel
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
Gathering data. Intuition. Measuring and being deliberate about what you work on. Focusing. Not flittering around doing a bunch of things half-ass. Not staying in your comfort zone. The best entrepreneurs make hard decisions with incomplete information. This is a perfect example of that.
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Nathaneal
Nathaneal@NathanealGlgz·
@robwalling @tinyseedfund how do you know if an activity doesn't actually grow the business vs something that just takes time for the rewards to show itself?
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Rob Walling
Rob Walling@robwalling·
I’m invested in 241 companies and have yet to see a successful startup get there by hiring a growth hacker. Growth is the responsibility of the founder(s) in every one of the dozens of @tinyseedfund companies growing quickly and doing 7 or 8-figures of ARR.
Andrew Yeung@andruyeung

After investing in 20+ companies, the most impactful first hire I've seen a founder make is a growth hacker type person who can figure out distribution. B2B: linkedin, events, AI outbound, AEO, blogs, long form writing, YouTube, webinars, X, influencers B2C: AI UGC, organic TikTok, paid social, events, influencer, sponsorships This person can literally take a company from 0 to $5M ARR by hacking the channels.

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Keşfet

@mynameis_davis @einarvollset @JordBHansen @zuhasb @BedrYusf @jurajmilcak @stantokman @derrickreimer