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:
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
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 between crushing your goals and falling short often lies in the tiny habits and wins along the way, and sticking with those habits can be tough while you’re working solo. So we’re running our second annual January Accountability Challenge inside MicroConf Connect. You can head to microconf.com/accountability-challenge. That’s microconf.com/accountability-challenge to sign up and get your 2023 off to an amazing start. And with that, let’s dive into our first listener question from Alex.
Alex:
Hey, Rob. My name is Alex. Love the podcast. You said recently that anything above 7% or 8% churn is “company on fire” level churn. And by this metric, our startup is very much on fire. The major conundrum is that a lot of our churn is due to people’s projects finishing. For example, we have grad students who use our tool for their dissertations, but they stop using it once they graduate. They love the tool, they use it for a couple of months, but then they just don’t need it anymore. Luckily, our top of funnel is large enough that we’ve built a company that is solidly profitable, which is nice. But the churn is causing our MRR to plateau.
We’ve settled on a strategy of capturing the lower end of the market and then trying to grow upmarket from there. We have some really old, hated incumbent competitors. So we believe there’s a market there for the taking, and we’re hoping that the upmarket users will have lower churn rate and a higher monthly spend. We were curious if you had any thoughts on this strategy or had any ideas of other things we should be thinking about. And also, if you have any advice or examples for how to grow upmarket, we would love to hear it. Thanks so much. And also, I’ll be at MicroConf Europe, so I will see you there.
Rob Walling:
Thanks for that question, Alex. This is definitely something that I’ve seen founders face before and it is challenging. And there’s a few ways to think about this. I can’t tell you one way that’s going to be right without you probably experimenting with it. But one way to think about it is maybe you’ve built a one-time use product. Not every product should be a subscription product. As much as we, as the business owners, love subscriptions, if the use case doesn’t match it may be time to think about just one price for a year. Instead of $30 a month, it’s $300 per year. And if a student only needs it for a project, they have to pay for a year and that’s it. There’s just no other option. And then those who do use it ongoing will pay annually. So that’s one way to think about it.
Another is to make it a one-time perpetual license. That feels a little odd to me. If it’s not just something they download and then can use on their own laptop without needing to phone home to a server, like if you’re running a web service, Any type of lifetime or perpetual deals are dicey. They’re dangerous to say the least. So that doesn’t make as much sense to me, unless you do make it that downloadable thing that people can run on their own without needing your servers. Another option is to essentially almost have a pay-as-you-go model. SparkToro tested this out. And in their early days, since they could also be a project-based tool, they actually had project-based pricing in essence. I think you got a week’s worth of access. And in the end, they stopped it. The idea was to reduce churn because the churn is troublesome when you’re a business owner. But in the end they decided, “Nope.” They were okay with the ins and outs and the complexities of that.
MailChimp has pay-as-you-go pricing. Loadster, which is at loadster.app … Similarly, it’s project-based. That’s a TinySeed batch one company. And you can imagine load testing your website. There are some people who need to do that once or twice a year, and there are some people or businesses who need to do that on an ongoing basis. Big companies, agencies who are rolling out a lot of websites. And so the founder, Andy, actually toyed with several different models. Tried it without pay-as-you-go, tried it with pay-as-you-go, tried it with pay-as-you-go plus pay-as-you-go subscriptions. There’s all different stuff he toyed around with, and he’s found his optimal model. And if you do wind up offering pay-as-you-go, it should be a lot more expensive. Like 3X, 4X the price of the monthly equivalent. So that’s an interesting one to think about. It adds complexity to your pricing, but it’s definitely a design pattern that I see people use.
And then the other way I thought about it is maybe if the people doing it project-based are all students, maybe there is just a student price. I’m making numbers up, but if your tool’s $30 a month right now and a lot of students use it for two or three months, maybe the student price is $99 for a year and everyone else is either monthly or annual. I don’t know if that’s the case, if there are non-students also using it on a project basis, but that would be another way to approach it. Lastly, you could just leave everything the same, but segment your churn based on folks who you think are using it on a project basis. If anybody cancels within two or three months, “All right, they were project-basis,” and that churn’s going to be outrageously high versus people who use it ongoing.
You figure out a way to segment the churn so that you can see what your, maybe, true monthly churn is versus your project-based churn. Thinking of them as two separate numbers. That last one’s a little dicey., Obviously it’s going to be imperfect. And if you ever go to raise funding or to sell the company, if your churn is 10%, 15% a month, you’re going to have a real headwind towards convincing any outside investor, or acquirer, that your business is not on fire. Those numbers just aren’t good. And so I, personally, would give some thought to how to make this better.
In addition, you asked about going upmarket. Honestly, it’s a huge topic and it just depends on who’s upmarket, do you already have competitors upmarket, or are you going above upmarket past them? Whether you have to add new features … Obviously, changing your pricing going upmarket means charging more. So are you going to be charging so much more that you’re going to be going from, say, teams of one or two up to teams of 10 or 20, and you’re going to go from low-touch sales where people self-onboard, to high-touch sales where you need to have a customer success person and a one-call or a three-call close? Are you going to have to go through procurement? There’s all these questions that without having those specifics, it’s just too much to cover.
So honestly, Alex, if you want to write back in or send another video question … The reason Alex’s question is getting a answered today, even though I have 30-something questions in the queue, is that he sent an audio question in. Audio and video always go to the top of the stack. And so Alex, if you want to head back to startupsfortherestofus.com, hit that ask a question link at the top of the page. I’d be happy to dig into that in a future episode. So thanks for the question, Alex. I hope that was helpful. My next question is a video question from Matt Lasker.
Matt:
Hey, Rob. Matt Lasker back again from PlayerBook. Quick reminder, we are gameifying the sports playbook. This is my third video call, so I appreciate all the feedback. You always have such great insight for me. You might just have to admit me to TinySeed with all the help you’re giving me, so I do appreciate it. This question is about the feedback loop. The prototype’s almost done, and I just want to really ask you a direct question about who I should be gaining my initial feedback from. I have built a community of about 1,500 to 2,000 through YouTube, and a website that I built off that YouTube channel. I built an audience of individual coaches that I would love to have demo it, work with their players on it, and get feedback from them directly. I think that’s a great place to start.
But there’s also this second grouping that I want to target with this initial MVP. Let’s just call them weekend camps, where 50 to 100 kids all kind of go to one place. It’s a kind of a quarterback training camp, and I want them to be a target as well. But I’m not sure whether I should let them see this very first version one and just stick with the feedback loop from my initial community members, where there will be a little bit less visibility … Or if I should just say, “Let’s just go for it,” get it to as many eyeballs as possible, get as much feedback as possible. It doesn’t matter if they’re maybe a higher level target down the line or not. Just get it out to as many people as possible. So I just really want to know if I should stick with less visibility initially to get the feedback started, or go bigger. Thanks!
Rob Walling:
Thanks for writing in again, Matt. I always appreciate your questions and the context as well. I definitely remember answering your past couple questions. So my thoughts on this are that in the early days, you don’t want as much feedback as you can get. Now, people often struggle to get feedback. I don’t think that’s going to be the case with your product. I think you’re going about it pretty deliberately. You have this audience built up. I think people are going to give you feedback. When I see some bootstrappers launch and no one is signing up … they don’t have product market fit and they’re churn as high … they often struggle to get to the bottom of why that is because no one will give them feedback. And in that case, yes you do want more feedback. You want more conversations. In your case, I would be really concerned about showing this.
What you’re calling an MVP … and I should take just a little side jag here … I want to make sure you’re not calling it a beta product. If it’s buggy, you can call it beta. If it’s not buggy, even if it’s just small, if it’s minimally viable, I would call it early access, right? This is early access. I believe Peldi from Balsamiq calls it that, and I loved that idea. We did early access with Drip and people paid for early access. They weren’t given lifetime, free use of the product. They weren’t even given a discount. They weren’t given a year free. We didn’t offer any of that. We wanted to build something that was so valuable to them that they were willing to try it out. And that that pain point, the need to solve that problem was such that they were willing to try it out.
Am I saying you should never give discounts? No. I’d be fine giving 20%, 50%, some number off the first year. It’s a nice courtesy. It’s the least you can do for people. You’re also going to probably be listening to them and building features they specifically asked for, so that’s also kind of a cool courtesy. And it’s a neat advantage they have as early access participants. All that said, one of the hardest things to do in the early days is if you get too much feedback and it’s from too many different groups. So I remember back in the early days of Drip, I was getting feedback from bloggers, from SaaS founders, from downloadable software people like the WordPress plugin folks, there were photographers that were using Drip, and some others. And the feedback across those four or five verticals was very different and that made it very hard for me.
And my big concern is if you have an audience of individual coaches who have these ongoing needs, where they have a team for an entire season, or an entire year or multiple years … I’m concerned that they are going to have different needs than someone who is a coach at a weekend quarterback camp. I played football. I was a wide receiver, and so I went to these week-long camps, actually, in the Bay Area. So I have context for this. And my relationship with my high school coach and my college track coach was very different than the coaches that were at my week-long or weekend camps, so I’m making an assumption here that their use cases are going to be different. I don’t know much about your product so I don’t know if that’s correct. But if you do think the use case is going to be different and the needs are going to be different, you probably don’t want all that feedback all at once.
I would personally think about, “I have this owned audience.” You have permission to contact the 1,500-2,000 folks that you have through YouTube and the community that you’ve built. I would most likely start with them and not go big yet and kind of iterate with that audience, and see how things go from there before I branched out into another audience. ]I don’t think you have full-time developers. If I recall, you’re working with an agency or freelancers. If you don’t have high feature velocity and you’re getting a lot of feedback, it can be overwhelming. I mean, you can get so much feedback that you have six months of building to do and you kind of can’t do much during that time because you’re like, “Wow, this MVP. It was not minimally viable. It was completely unusable.”
So then, you get to sit on your hands for months and months. And if you’ve gone out to this other audience that doesn’t know and trust you like your own audience does, it can be challenging. That’s my gut feel based on, I’ll say, the limited information I have so far. That’s how I would proceed. So thanks for that question, Matt. I hope it was helpful. Our next question is another video, and this is from Jonathan.
Jonathan:
Hey, Rob. What’s up? My name is Jonathan. Doing the fourth take already in a video question. Talking to you all the way from Israel. I am an aspiring bootstrapper. I was wondering … They say and you say, also, before you write a single line of code, you need to validate the target audience, the target market, to see that they need your solution and that they have the problem you are trying to solve. And only then, when you see that there are enough of those and validate your business plan, only then you should start writing code and promote your business. So I’m wondering when you do that process of sending out those copies and your idea to other people and asking people around, how do you manage the risk of being exposed, of your business idea being exposed?
Especially when you have nothing yet built, so you are taking a big risk because you don’t have something already that is enough progress to protect against certain competition. So I’m asking this: How do you deal with this risk? And I’m specifically trying to reach out to markets outside my country, so I’m doing paid ads in Facebook. I’m wondering whether I should avoid certain countries. Should I just not do that and go word-to-mouth?
Rob Walling:
Thanks for that question, Jonathan. I know that speaking into video can be difficult, so I appreciate you taking a couple cracks at it. This is a sentiment that I definitely hear among developers. I hear it less among non-developers because I think they aren’t folks who would go out and build something really easily, right? But as developers, we think everyone is able to do it. The interesting part is the actual subject line of Jonathan’s question. “Should I worry about people copying my business idea?” And if you look really close at that language, it’s, “Should I worry about it?” And I want to change that and say, “Is it possible that someone will copy your business idea?” Absolutely. Is it probable that they will copy your business idea? It depends. Some business ideas are really, really good. And once you hear them you’re like, “That’s amazing.” And if you have one of those? Yeah, someone’s probably going to copy it. If you don’t have one of those and you build it up to $40-$50K a month, odds are pretty good someone’s going to copy it. It’s inevitable. This happens, right?
So then the first part of your question was, “Should I worry about people copying my business idea?” And I know I’m taking it a bit literally here, but I want to think about this. Because I, personally, have naturally high anxiety and I worry about way too much in my life. I have worried about way too much throughout my life. And 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?
And I don’t think that as a person trying to execute in a high-pressure environment, whether you’re running a startup, running an accelerator, doing whatever it is that I do day-to-day … I don’t think worry is all that helpful. So perseverating or worrying about something happening, I have come to realize … Who said this? Someone else said this and I thought that was great. It was, “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe, but with your emotions.” It’s really interesting, right? It’s the “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” or what could possibly happen. And if you let your life get tied up and hung up on worry … Again, I did that for the first 30-something years of my life and I regret it. It made my life less enjoyable. And if you are tied up in those kind of cycles of everything is fear-based, it’s not super helpful and it can make you more risk-averse than perhaps you should be. It’s like asking, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and really answering that.
If you’re a developer working on something on the side, what’s the worst that can happen? Usually, it’s that you’d spend a bunch of time on a side project that doesn’t pan out. Okay, are you willing to risk that in order to potentially have a SaaS app that’s doing $10-$20K a month? That has to be up to you, or you’re going to leave your day job because you do have something making five or 10 grand a month? What’s the worst that could happen? Well, you could get put out of business and you then need to go back and get a day job, which is what you had last week. And even in this economy, if you’re a good developer, I think you’re going to work. These are each decisions you have to make for yourself. Now, that really wasn’t your question. Your question wasn’t, “Should I worry Existential Rob?” Hey, Philosopher Rob! Why don’t you weigh in on whether I should worry about things?” I know that’s not what you’re asking.
Your real question is are people going to steal your stuff? Are they going to steal your idea? And the answer is I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s unusual for an idea to get stolen in the idea phase. Usually, it’s you launch something, it gets some traction, and then some people on Hacker News or Indie Hackers or Quora or whatever, Stack Overflow, wherever you’re talking about it … or even going on podcasts and talking a lot about your business. Especially if you say, “I had quick success and I built this in a week! And now, it’s doing $10K a month,” or whatever. That type of stuff attracts competition. It attracts copycats, right? It attracts people who want an easy win. So I would say that’s more often … It’s that phase. Or it is when you get to that half million, million-dollar point and you are a mini brand and you have traction, and people see it and hear about it and they want to copy it.
I have heard a lot less about someone who has an idea and they floated out there, and someone steals it and builds it and somehow, maybe, gets to market before them. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve heard of a single example of that. Not to say it never happens. I don’t know of every idea that’s ever launched, obviously. But kind of in the past 15, 17 years since I’ve been doing this … It’s not that ideas are worthless. Some ideas are better than others. But it’s usually that our ideas are so not fully-formed in these early days that they’re just not worth taking. If I think about the idea of Drip, it was not what Drip ultimately became. And in fact, the idea of Drip was not that great. It was just an email capture widget and an autoresponder. That’s it. It just wasn’t that great of a product idea, in terms of not being that novel.
It’s all the learning and the conversations that came from that, and then the product decisions that I made in the early days, that led us to building something amazing. But that wasn’t the idea from the start, and that’s often what happens. I’ll be honest. Most people have an idea, and by the time they get to product market fit and get to the point where they hit escape velocity and they’re growing, the idea has actually adapted and morphed quite a bit from that initial incarnation. And realistically, if someone can copy your idea, it depends. If they can get to market first, sometimes being first to market is an advantage, and other times it’s not. So that would be a bummer if someone got to market first. There’s already a bunch of competitors out there and you’re just another one. I just don’t know how much it matters.
And there are ways to even think about mitigating this, which is, as you said, to kind of go word-of-mouth only, right? One-on-one conversations, whether you’re doing cold email and having conversations. You’re not doing anything in public. You’re not running ads. You’re not doing the big landing page thing. That’s one approach to take. I’ve never done it that way. If you look back at my relaunching HitTail after I acquired it, at launching my first book, at launching MicroConf, at launching my first online membership community for bootstrapped founders, at launching Drip, launching TinySeed, all of those … There were a couple one-on-one conversations, but then it was a landing page that said pretty much what it was going to do. The book and the conference and the apps, the SaaS apps, and TinySeed … They said what they were going to be, and someone could have come out and copied me. And in fact, every one of those things has actually been copied.
Every one of the things I just mentioned was copied at different phases. Sometimes, it was just a competitor that copied features and copied some verbiage. And other times, it was almost a pixel-by-pixel recreation of what I had, which was a little annoying. And it’s super annoying when it happens, but that does happen eventually. And so I think, is it worth the risk? That’s a question you have to ask. It’s just a matter of risk tolerance and thinking, “What are the odds this is going to happen? And is my idea so incredible that everyone else is going to want to steal it? For me, the answer’s always been no. And I think for most founders, with most ideas, that’s also probably the right answer. So thanks for that question, Jonathan. I hope it was helpful.
My next question comes from Craig. He says, “Hey, Rob, I’m thinking about signing up for MicroConf Connect. I’m early in my startup and still working a day job. I’d like to sign up, but I’m unsure if I’m too early. I’m still validating the idea and getting a landing page in place. I am pre-step one of the stair step method. Are there any qualifications for joining Connect, and is there a cost to join .big fan of the pod and the content you provide.” Thanks for the email, Craig! I wanted to answer it on air. I actually replied directly to him. But just in case I haven’t been clear, MicroConf Connect is our community. It’s a Slack workspace where we have … I think it’s over 4,000 bootstrapped and mostly-bootstrapped founders now. It’s a pretty incredible place. Very positive, good amount of volume without being overwhelming. We moderate it heavily.
And so the answer to your question, Craig, is the only qualifications are that you are a founder and that you’re not a service provider. We don’t want a bunch of lawyers, investors, CPAs, anybody who’s trying to sell services to founders. We want it to be a community of founders, much like MicroConf has been from the start. And that’s just to keep the quality up, right? That’s to keep someone from pitching their stuff. And we obviously have some trouble, as any growing and vibrant community does, with people getting a little over-pitchy and having to moderate a bit. But it’s really, pretty minimal based on the size of the community, to be honest. The second part of your question is, “Is there a cost to join?” The answer is no there is not, nor are there any ongoing fees to be part of Connect. So we’d love to have you join. You can head to microconfconnect.com if you want to check it out.
My next question was from Twitter. I tweeted back in August. I said, “In your personal life, money can save you hours. In your startup, money can save you years,” and I got this great reply from Arvin Peter. He’s @RvnP on Twitter. He said, “Hiring project level thinkers versus task level workers! How do you go about identifying when you need that, and how do you go about finding such a person?” I liked this question! We can talk about these frameworks or theories of task level versus project level versus owner level as someone being maybe more able to manage more and more complex things. But to actually identify, “What person do I need in this role, and then how do I find that person? How do I interview for it? How do I craft a job description to do it?” I think is a really good thing to look at.
So first, let me talk about, “How do you identify which you need?” Obviously, it depends on the role. If you’re hiring a director of X, Y, Z, they at least need to be a project-level thinker. If you’re hiring a manager of engineering, a manager of blah, they have to be able to do something aside from being an individual contributor. Basically, individual contributors often are task level thinkers. Not always. You can get some ICs that are project-level thinkers, that are higher level thinkers. But if someone’s managing a group of people, or managers who manage groups of people, you have to be able to manage multiple projects. And so therefore, by definition, you have to be a project-level thinker or starting to edge.
Once you become a C-level, or even VPs, you’re kind of an owner-level thinker at that point, if you’re good. Because you have to be not just thinking about, “Oh, here’s these projects,” but thinking out a year. “Where is this headed? What happens when these plateau?” Consuming new information, reading books, going to events, listening to podcasts, and taking all of that and using it to make your role or your department better. That’s more owner-level thinking. It’s when you own a business and you’re constantly thinking about how to improve it, and not just how to drive projects forward. That’s a big piece of that owner-level thinker. And so identifying when you need what often, usually … especially with bootstrappers … it comes down to money. Usually, you just can’t afford owner-level thinkers. They’re just very expensive. They often become co-founders because you need to pay them an equity. And if someone’s that good and you don’t really have the tremendous budget to pay them, that’s often what happens.
If you have an individual contributor role where you just need an assistant, an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, you need someone to write blog articles, you need someone to run a pay-per-click ad campaign … Really, they can be task-level thinker, right? But the moment that they have to do, let’s say, marketing strategy, or they have to start deciding what features are built in your product … Usually, founders do that. But let’s just say it’s this one level up from doing the work and not just thinking, “I’m doing a task now, but what am I going to do next week and next month?” That’s when you start to need those project-level thinkers.
In a perfect world, you would hire a ton of project-level thinkers. Even individual developers … I’ve known several who are also project-level thinkers, even though they were coding. And it makes them really good because they’re thinking ahead. They’re super-senior. It’s that emotional intelligence that goes beyond just being a good coder, being a good developer. But actually, thinking ahead to what’s best for this product, what’s best for the team, what’s best for the company. Those are the folks that are amazing to find. They’re usually just very expensive. And as I said earlier, if you’re hiring someone, let’s say, to run marketing for you as a manager of marketing, a director of marketing, they have to be a project-level thinker. If they’re going to be managing several people who are working on projects, by definition, they have to be involved in those projects and have to be able to manage them.
And then the second part of Arvin’s question was, “How do you go about finding such a person?” I mean, really, it comes down to the title. And this is where job titles are actually important. I used to think they were (beep). After I left these big corporate jobs, where there was all this hierarchy, I started making up job titles. It turns out that’s not the best way to go, as I actually talked about that a bit in my MicroConf Europe talk just a couple months ago. But in essence, when you have a title like a director, a VP, a C-level, even a “manager of,” that’s going to imply a project-level thinker, and the bullets in that job description should reflect that, right? You don’t have a Director of Development where there’s no bullets in there about managing a lot of projects or about managing a bunch of developers, or about driving the whole team forward. That has to be part of it.
And if you’re looking for, let’s say, a mid-level or a senior software developer, probably won’t have those kind of bullets. I mean, you want them to be part of the team, but do they have to drive projects? Do they have to be a project-level thinker to be a mid-level software developer? I don’t think so. They can crank on their code and they can get the next task done, and they can do the next task until the end of the sprint and then go. If there’s someone above them in the hierarchy who is doing that project level thinking, then that all works.
So I hope that was helpful, Arvin, if you’re listening. Or if you’re not, to any of the other listeners out there. That’s the last question for the day. If you have a question, you can email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or just head straight to the website, click the “Ask a Question” button at the top. As a reminder, saasplaybook.com is now live and you can learn more about my new book that’ll be kick-starting here in a couple months. Thank you so much for joining me this week and every week on Startups for the Rest of Us. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 641.