Episode 671 | Working on What Matters, Left-handed Threads, and Being Lucky (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
People ask me often, “What makes an entrepreneur successful across the …” I don’t know, I think the number’s got to be 300 now in terms of founders across the 151 companies I’m invested in. People say, “What’s the difference of those who succeed in those who don’t?” And one of the things I say is those who succeed generally work on things that move the needle. 

Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and this is the show where I talk about bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping tech companies, software companies, software as a service. It’s funny to think back 10, 11, 12 years where software as a service in SaaS was a term that was around, but it wasn’t obvious that it was going to take over the world. These days, and obviously for the past 5, 6, 7 years, we’ve really focused on that. It is the best business model in the world. I have half a chapter in my new book all about why SaaS is so amazing and really it starts with recurring revenue and that drives everything else. 

Today, we have a Rob Solo adventure. I’m going to start by looking at what it looks like to work on the right things versus the wrong things, and specifically what it looks like to work on something that moves the needle versus something that you’re comfortable with. I have a startup, SaaS specific example of this. Then, I’m going to talk a little bit about left-handed threads, and I’ll leave that as the teaser for that segment. Then, I’ll talk about how your choice of words matters and how using the word luck in a sentence can be an indicator of how you view the world and an indicator of why you’re not succeeding yet. Then, if we have more time, I’ll dive into more topics after that. 

The first topic for today is about working on what will actually move the needle rather than what you are comfortable with. I know a couple startup founders, and I wish I could call them Goofus and Gallant back from the old highlights for children days, but in this case, let’s just say it’s founder A and founder B, neither of whom are TinySeed founders, I should clarify. 

What I’ve had happen in the past is I’ll give examples of someone making a mistake and I’ll have someone reach out to me and be like, “Hey, were you talking about me in that episode?” No, usually in almost all cases I’m not. It’s probably someone that you don’t know. Founder A and founder B run similar SaaS companies in the same space and they are competing against one another. In this moderately contrived example, both founders are looking for ways to market their startup to a very specific niche. Let’s pick the niche of freelance designers, probably freelance web designers just to be specific. As they’re looking at the ways to market to this segment, to this customer type, one chooses to build a community for freelance web designers from scratch. Whether that’s a Facebook community or probably a Slack community if we’re thinking of web designers, maybe if they were CEOs of construction firms or folks in, I’ll say less tech-savvy areas, it might be a Facebook group or a proprietary forums or something. 

Founder A decides to build a community from scratch to bring these freelance web designers together and to provide them with a place where they can gather, ask questions, commiserate, you know what happens in online communities. If you’re part of MicroConf Connect, how amazing that can be. You also might know how much work that is, but that’s what founder A does. Founder B, instead of building a community decides to build a directory of freelance web designers. That directory has several benefits to it. One is obviously there might be some SEO play there where you build a lot of pages with names and keywords and you get inbound links if it’s a good directory. Then the benefit to those freelancers who are listed is that they could potentially get business from this, right? Because that’s essentially what they’re probably looking to do. They’re looking to up level their own skill, they’re looking to be able to charge more over time, and they’re looking to find more work. 

The more work they have, the more they’re able to charge over time. These are two perfectly viable options. On the surface, both of these seem reasonable. You want to gather your customers in a place, you want to have a relationship with your prospects such that they think of you when it comes time to buy your software. The problem is one of these is mostly a one-time investment of work, and it comes with a ton of potential benefits to the freelancers, and that is the directory of freelancers. As I already said, it can provide them with inbound interest, it can provide them with more business. Over time it can allow them to raise their rate and the amount of work for each individual who joins is negligible. 

Even getting it started, it’s setting up some pages, whether you’re doing this manually with no code, whether you have an actual SaaS that you’re paying for to have a directory, it’s not a ton of community management I’ll say. Right? It’s some nuts and bolts. Let’s optimize this. People can fill this in and then let’s approve or disapprove or whatever. And then let’s market this thing and let’s get the links and let’s get the SEO. That in my opinion, is a great approach, assuming that works in your space, it obviously depends on a lot of factors. 

First is founder A who has built a community which comes with a tremendous burden and a workload and an expertise … Hiring a community manager is nowhere near as easy as hiring someone who can, let’s say, manage a directory for what that even amounts to. In addition, a community is going to be private, so there’s really no SEO benefit. Maybe you have a landing page or something, but now you’re trying to get enough people in there that you need the community to work. It doesn’t work with 10 people. A directory does. In fact, a directory if you are marketing it well is actually better with only 10 people because then there aren’t that many choices and the freelancers that are on it are getting more benefit. 

I want to bring this up not specifically to say, “Oh, directories are better than communities.” For crying out loud, how many communities have I started and run in my career? How many directories have I done? I’ve done both these things and it’s about the time and the place and the value and how much effort you want to put in and whether that is core to your business. With MicroConf, community is the central focus of the entire effort. That’s what MicroConf is. When I draw everything that MicroConf offers, the center circle says community, the people, and then everything is off of that. 

Like, hey, there’s a circle out here that is the Slack group, and there’s a circle out here where if you are bootstrapping and you want funding, then TinySeed’s attached there. If you want to be in a mastermind, we have Matching. If you want education, you could probably buy one of my books or go to our YouTube channel for free or to this podcast. Each of these things is around the community. The community is the focus, and we spend a lot of time and money moderating that community. MicroConfconnect.com if you haven’t checked it out. If I were running a SaaS aimed at a niche community would be far down on the list of things that I wanted to start unless I felt like there was an extreme vacuum in the space and I already had an audience where I could kickstart that community. 

For me, if I was thinking about community, I’d be like, “Okay, but first I have to start a podcast or I have to start a blog. I have need enough of an audience or I need thousands of customers that the community builds itself.” It’s just a long road to go and it’s a ton of work. This kind of example is so apparent when you compare these two approaches because people ask me often, “What makes an entrepreneur successful across the …” I don’t know, I think the number’s got to be 300 now in terms of founders across the 151 companies I’m invested in. People say, “What’s the difference of those who succeed in those who don’t?” One of the things I say is, “Those who succeed generally work on things that move the needle, and they’re not afraid to fail, but in general, they don’t fail that much.” Whether it’s 70-30 or 80-20, whatever their ratio is, they analyze stuff well enough, they take the numbers into account, they think it through. 

They don’t just think, “What’s comfortable for me?” “Well, I’ve done podcasts my whole life, so everything is a podcast. When I see a nail, I’m going to try to hammer it in with a podcast because that’s what I do.” They don’t do that. The best founders put that aside and they say, “What is actually the best approach for building an audience or for reaching my prospects in this space?” Rather than going with what I know or what I’m comfortable with. Obviously, you want to blend that a little bit. If you’re really good at something and you’re exceptional, of course you can double down on it. But I see entrepreneurs who just can’t leave their own comfort zone and they won’t try cold outbound, they won’t try pay-per-click ads because in quotes, “They never work.” “They don’t work in my space.” It’s like, no, they [inaudible] work. Google is not a cajillion dollar company because ads don’t work. 

It is frustrating to me when I hear entrepreneurs who are getting in their own way and they have these limiting beliefs, this limited mindset of, well, this doesn’t work in my space, or this doesn’t work in general because I tried it once. What that leads to is you staying in your own comfort zone and doing the things that you’re comfortable with, and those are not always the things that are going to move your needle. Again, before I hear a comment on Twitter or on startupsfortherestofus.com, I’m not saying directories in every case are better than communities, is not the point of this. The point is to work on things that you think are going to move the needle and to get advice from experienced founders to get some data or to make a great gut feel, your best gut feel on what to work on next. Because working on the smart thing rather than what you want to do or what you see other people doing is the approach that’s going to get you to where you want to go. 

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Topic number two is about left-handed threads. If you’ve never seen a left-handed threaded bolt, it will blow your mind the first time you see it. Most of us know righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. If I’m going to screw a bolt in, I’m going to screw it to the right and that will make it go in and then to the left makes it come out. There’s certain applications where that doesn’t make sense. For example, when you’re putting a bicycle together, the left pedal can’t be a standard thread, a right-handed thread because it will unscrew and come off as you pedal it because you’re pedaling it to the left and you’re going to give it friction and unscrew it. The fact that threads are right-handed is completely arbitrary, but it is the way the world works these days. 

A couple months ago, I walked in on my teenager, my 16 year old, and he was trying to assemble something, and I don’t remember it was IKEA furniture, I think it was a standing desk. Sherry and I ordered a separate standing desk that is kind of our media center for recording YouTube videos and all that. There was one thread on it that needed to be left-handed for reasons that aren’t particularly relevant to this story. He sat there for 15 minutes, he couldn’t get it in because he had never heard of a left-handed thread. He is left-handed himself, but it had never occurred to him that you could screw something in by lefty-tighty, righty-loosey. It breaks your brain. What was funny is I came in and he said, “I just can’t get this screw in.” And I said, “I think it’s a left-handed thread.” And he said, “A what?” 

And I flashed back to when I was probably younger than him, I was probably about 10 years old, and I was putting together what was, I think it was a compass or protractor, one of these things for geometry, fifth or sixth grade. I remember it needed a left-handed thread because for the same reasons. Right? Because if you moved to the compass, it would unscrew it. I had never seen one, I didn’t even know it existed. My dad, who’s an electrician, construction worker his whole life obviously had experience with these. And he came in and said, I said, “I’ve been screwing this thing in for 15 minutes. It just won’t go.” He screwed it left-handed and I was like, “I can’t believe that. I didn’t even know this was an option.” Right? But once you see it’s like, well, of course it’s an option. It’s just the threads just go the other way. This is the kind of thing where being exposed to it once, you’ll never forget. I will never forget the moment when I first heard about left-handed threads, and I don’t think my 16-year-old will either. 

Just having that exposure and realizing that this can exist is an important developmental step in our journeys as human beings and learning how things work. Similarly, as I bring this back to startups and being a founder and a bootstrapper running SaaS companies, there are certain things you haven’t been exposed to. Just knowing that they exist and having a vague idea of how to handle them can be incredibly beneficial. That’s where while I’ve become a just-in-time learner, which is someone who when I need to learn something, I find a book or I talk to an expert and I try to learn it in a week and then go do it. But back 10, 15, 20 years ago, I needed exposure to a lot of things because I just didn’t know. I didn’t really know anything. You have this huge sea of blackness. 

These days when I look out over the huge sea, there’s like spots of knowledge that I don’t have, but I know enough to know what I don’t know. When you’re dealing with a left-handed thread, you don’t know enough to know what you don’t know because you’ve never been exposed to it. My point to this is early on in your entrepreneurial journey or your career, whatever you’re doing professionally, I think you need to be exposed to a lot of things. I think that’s why a college education, while I am really torn on our boys going to college because I just don’t think the value is there for the cost, I do think that getting exposure to a wide variety of topics and subjects expands your mind and it can help you figure out what you love doing and what clicks with you. 

In fact, if I hadn’t gone into electrical engineering, became a construction worker, I was going to eventually be an electrical engineer, I probably would’ve done computer vision because even as an undergrad, I took multiple graduate level computer vision courses and I loved them. It was so fascinating, and that was an experience that I never could have had without being exposed to a lot of things. I think that’s why listening to a lot of audiobooks, you’ve probably heard me talk about how I have now 865 audiobooks in my Audible account. I think that’s why founders who I see that are doing well are lifelong readers and learners. That’s why so many of the founders that we know and aspiring founders as well listen to podcasts is because the exposure to these different topics and to hearing what a left-handed thread is or to hearing that once you do something in public, you’re going to have criticism or you’re going to get flamed online for doing something at some point. 

Just realize that is a thing like a left-handed thread, it does exist. The first time you’re asked, “Hey, can we jump on a quick call? I just have some questions for you about your $30 one-time purchase product or $10 a month product.” You’re going to get these. How do you react to that just in advance knowing that that’s going to happen? So you’re not caught flatfooted and having to go to Reddit or somewhere else to ask a question? The first time someone asks you for a discount when you get an enterprise checklist sent for your $300 piece of software like I did back in 2008, and I said, “Yeah, this is hours of work and it’s $300 one time fee with a 20% annual maintenance thing, so $60 a year.” And I said, “Our sales model doesn’t work that way. Sorry.” And that dude got so mad, so mad, “I can’t believe you even run a business. You don’t deserve our money, blah, blah, blah.” 

Then, later I got an apology email from a colleague of his who said, “Yeah, he doesn’t really understand how things work.” And I said, “Look, if you want me to fill out this checklist, I need to charge you 10 times, 20 times what I’m charging. Frankly, I don’t think we are the software for you based on how you’re buying.” 

I had to go through these things and learn them myself, which is fine. It’s a weird thing to say, but I was like the pioneer taking the arrows in the back. The only person I knew who was blogging or talking about being a real software company that didn’t raise venture capital was Joel Spolski with Fog Creek Software. Started reading his blog in 2001. I started my blog in 2005. I didn’t know anyone else talking about it. Then there was Peldi and Patrick McKenzie over the next two or three years, Patio11 as most of you may know, and Peldi is the founder of Balsamiq. That was it. And I was learning from them as much as I, they’ve told me they were learning from me. This was from 2005 to say 2007-2008. 

Then Jason Cohen, I think, started his blog in 2008 or 2009, but this was it. We were learning stuff on our own. We had to figure out, “Oh, there are left-handed threads.” And, “Oh, B2C is actually really crappy and B2B is going to be superior in almost every way.” And, “Oh, we really should charge more. All of us are undercharging.” On and on and on. The best practices that you hear in our spheres today were discovered in those years. Then as MicroConf started, and as we got Jason Cohen, and Heaton Shaw, and Patio11, and Stelli Efty, and myself and other people in a room to do these talks that you now see on YouTube, we were learning those things as we went. They weren’t just in the gestalt. 

To wrap up this topic, what I’m saying is I do think that exposure when you’re first getting started to a broad variety of aspects of startup topics, whether it’s through a podcast like this or through books or through online communities like MicroConf or Twitter. Right? There’s a great ecosystem there with MicroConf founders and beyond. There’s a real advantage to kind of having almost a liberal arts approach. You know what a liberal arts degree is. Right? It’s where you go and you just learn about a bunch of different things. Now, I think there should be some science mixed in there and some engineering, or not just philosophy and psychology and all the other things, but taking that approach that you would take in your first two years of college where you’re just getting a bunch of general education, I think that is pretty important for a lot of us so that we know what exists out there. We may not know how to deal with every solution, but at least then we’ll know who to ask. We’ll know where to go, and we will understand that indeed left-handed threads do exist in this world. 

My last topic for today on this Rob solo adventure comes from a comment made on the MicroConf YouTube channel, and I wish I remembered which video it was, but it was a video where I was talking about how to come up with startup ideas. I think that was it. It was kind of a framework, seven approaches for coming up with SaaS ideas. The first of those seven reasons included asking yourself, what are your unfair advantages? Do you have an audience? Do you have a network? Are you early to a space? 

And then on and on and on, and it’s a 12 to 15 minute video. It’s actually quite dense. I pulled it from a chapter of my next book, oh my gosh, am I really saying this? While I was writing the SaaS playbook, I realized there was a whole chunk of more early stage stuff that was really idea phase and idea validation and all that, that it just didn’t belong in the SASS playbook. I think there’s like 30,000 words, so it’s kind of 100 … What is that 140, 150 page book? I have that in a Google Doc and I need to figure out what I’m going to do with it. But the bottom line is these seven things for this YouTube video came out of that. I talked through a lot of different ways to come up with ideas and frameworks and patterns, and we’ll link that up in the show notes if you want to see it. 

One of the comments was so striking to me because the commenter said, “I’ve heard that YouTube best practices are to give something that excites people in the first two minutes. I’m four minutes in, and all I’m hearing about is what I can do if I’m lucky enough to have an audience or a network.” Lucky enough, think of what that word means. No one lucks into an audience or a network. I don’t know of anyone that has, I talk about hard work, luck, and skill. Of those three, I think an audience and a network both take hell of a lot of hard work. Eventually, I would say I was not skilled at building an audience, nor at building a network and eventually you figure it out with enough hard work. But I was struck by that word lucky, because what does it imply? 

It implies that if you don’t have it’s not your fault. That somehow you didn’t buy the winning lottery ticket to suddenly have a podcast with 35,000 listeners, or you didn’t luck into a YouTube channel with 62,000 subscribers. I don’t tend to be pedantic about people’s sentences or phrasing, but to use the word lucky in that context, it shows a certain mindset, a belief that you have to be lucky to have these things. If you’ve listened to me long enough, I hope you know that’s not true. You don’t have to be lucky to get rich. You don’t have to be lucky to build an audience. You don’t have to be lucky to build a SaaS company to 10K a month that can change your life. You don’t have to be lucky to build an incredible network. You don’t have to be lucky to be a successful entrepreneur. 

Now, hard work, luck, and skill are all always three factors, and the more luck you have, great, but don’t count on it. Put in the hard work and learn the skill and do the work. That’s what I would tell this commenter is it sounds like you are making an excuse that you don’t have something because you don’t want to record 671 podcast episodes over the next 13 years. And once you’ve done that, if you’re not lucky enough to have the audience of your dreams, then you can totally come and talk to me at that point. And I will say, you know what? I was wrong. But what happens in these conversations is folks who think that way, who think that this is all luck, mostly luck. Those are the folks that don’t ship. They don’t put in the time because they think that luck has so much to do with it and that they’re not “a lucky person”. 

And if you’ve learned anything over the past 671 episodes of this podcast, I hope that sharing my journey and the journey of so many of the founders who I’ve spoken with on this show has shown you that while luck can be a factor, it’s not a requirement. Also, that commenter was right. I was four, four and a half minutes into a 13-minute video, and I should have gotten to the point faster. I appreciated the sentiment he was trying to communicate. I just don’t necessarily want others to believe that you need to be lucky to have an audience or a network or a successful company. Speaking of luck, I’m lucky enough to be wrapping up episode 671 of this podcast, and I have a call with the podcast production team here in one minute. This is Rob Walling signing off. I’ll see you next week.