Episode 706 | 2/20/200 Validation, Prior Art, and Designing by Committee (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
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I’m Rob Walling, and in this week’s episode, I do a Rob solo adventure, where I’m going to talk through a few topics, always bringing it back to being a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped startup founder. Before we dive into that, I want to let you know it’s your last chance to get tickets to MicroConf Atlanta. The event is April 21st through the 23rd. Speakers include Rand Fishkin from SparkToro, Asia Orangio from DemandMaven, Stephen Steers, myself, and Dr. Sherry Walling. It’s going to be hosted and emceed by me and Lianna Patch of Punchline Copy. 

I’m also going to be doing a fireside chat with Ben Chestnut, the co-founder of Mailchimp. He does not do very many public appearances, and so I’m very excited to host him at MicroConf this year. MicroConf.com/us, if you’re interested in grabbing tickets. Again, tickets are going to sell out soon, so if you’re thinking about joining me and about 225 of your closest bootstrap founder friends, head to MicroConf.com/us. My first topic of today is how the startup world and the bootstrapper, MicroConf community, and I’m kind of breaking those. 

Those are overlapping Venn diagrams, but they really are two different things. I think of the startup world as probably being more of the Silicon Valley high growth stuff, and then bootstrapping, and MicroConf being maybe a subset of that with some overlap. But the idea is that the startup world struggles to not only learn from prior art, but to credit prior art. It’s two related things, but they really are different. So if you’re an academic and you go, let’s say get your PhD in psychology, or in computer science, and you’re writing papers or writing a dissertation or a thesis, it is 100% plagiarism if you claim someone else’s idea as your own, without giving credit. 

It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about ideas that you’ve heard elsewhere, but you give them credit. So if you go on Twitter and you say, “I had this great idea, it’s to do things that don’t scale,” or even if you don’t say, “I had this great idea,” but you go on and say, “Here’s a secret to success, little known, do things that don’t scale in the early days so that those will eventually lead you to be able to scale up,” but you never mention that Paul Graham wrote an essay called Do Things that Don’t Scale, and he wrote it back in, I don’t know, 2006 or 2007. And it is a very commonly known idea and thought that he came up with, and you don’t credit that, you are plagiarizing someone else’s idea, because the people reading that think you came up with it by default. If you say something and don’t credit, they believe you came up with it. Not a week goes by … 

Literally, not a week. Sometimes it’s more than that, that I don’t see someone on Twitter, or YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, claiming a concept, or even not claiming it, but not crediting a concept that’s pretty well-defined, that either I invented or Paul Graham came up with, or Jason Cohen, or Hiten Shah, that has pretty obvious and clear prior art, and it’s not like someone saying, “Oh, work hard for success.” Right? That’s a pretty generic way of talking about it, but if someone says, “You have to work hard, and you need skills,” and then there’s a little bit of luck involved. Well, obviously, that is exactly the framework that I talk about for achieving success, is hard work, luck, and skill, and so you can rephrase those two things or whatever, but if you pick those exact three things, the odds of that being a coincidence that we both came up with it, that you came up with it on your own without the influence is pretty unlikely. 

And this is really common, like in the creator maker influencer space, the info product, info marketing space. People are just kind of plagiarizing, and I find it frustrating, I think, as someone who does a lot of deep thinking about this stuff and comes up with a lot of frameworks, and seeing things, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, it just never feels right that folks on the internet, in the startup space, I don’t know why they feel like they need to do that. I don’t believe that it’s an accident. I think it’s pretty intentional, but the thing is, is it’s not just crediting prior art and just saying, “Oh, yeah, that person came up with this idea, but here, I’m going to build on top of it,” or, “Here is how I implemented it,” or, “Here is how it impacted me.” It’s not negative to you to just say that, to just give the credit, but the other thing is not just crediting prior art, it’s learning from prior art, and I see so many folks trying to reinvent the wheel and justify it by saying, “Well, I’m going back to first principles,” or, “That’s rule of thumb, common wisdom, therefore, I’m going to go against that.” 

Like the teenager in the family, every what, generation rebels against the prior generation, right? There’s an example of Ryan Breslow, Breslow. I don’t know how you pronounce his name, but he was the founder and CEO of Bolt, and he was the guy … I don’t know, he’s a 20-something who just thought he knew everything, basically, and he went on Twitter, and what, flame Stripe and Y Combinator as being some type of mafia, or a cabal or whatever. Anytime I hear this type of phrasing, I’m like, “Oh, boy, someone really wants some clicks rather than fighting the good fight.” 

But anyways, Bolt was giving loans to their employees so that employees could buy stock options, and then Bolt lost 97% of its value, and so anyone who took out loans to buy their stock options now owes the company money, sometimes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, this founder, Ryan Breslow, sold millions of dollars of his shares in secondary, so he seems to walk away okay, but it’s kind of a disaster for employees who are now on the hook for these funds. The thing is, this was already attempted. If you listen to the All-In Podcast, you’ll hear David Sacks talk about this, where this had already been attempted in the ’90s, and it was proven to be a disaster, but he was touting it as this great new invention, this employee-friendly thing. A, did no one tell him this is a catastrophic idea, they tried this 30 years ago, and this same thing happened, or B, did people tell him, and he waved that off, right? 

He said, “Well, no, I’m going back to first principles. They did it differently. They did it wrong in the past.” I’m not saying we should be tied to every mistake that everyone makes in the past and never try things that didn’t work, but you have to learn from that art and do it differently. You have to learn from the failures and not just try the same thing again and expect a different outcome. 

If we are not as a community learning from prior art and reading books like Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters, or the old blog post from Joel Spolsky, old posts from Peldi Guilizzoni, Patrick McKenzie, my books, my old blog posts and podcast episodes, if you just come on the scene and you don’t read any of that, then you can’t stand on the shoulders of giants. There’s a reason that in academics, you study and you go to school to learn what people before you have learned, so that you don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch every two weeks. If you come on the scene and you don’t read any of that, then prior to yesterday’s Twitter feed or Hacker News, do we just start over from zero every week or two, and we don’t drag anything along with us? Now, you could say, “Well, dragging things along is baggage,” and I want to, once again, go back to first principles, but at least know, “What’s been tried?” At least know, “What’s been talked about?” 

And you can make a case to disagree with it, but even that, just knowing what the common wisdom is, and then zigging when everyone else is zagging, at least make that a deliberate decision, not just a decision of, “I’m going to do this because I didn’t educate myself that I need to actually market and sell this,” even though, every week on this podcast I’m saying that. You go and start a B2C business, it has high churn, and you’re surprised everyone is price sensitive, even though every other week, I talk about that. You go and start a B2C two-sided marketplace, try to bootstrap it with no audience, even though I’ve said it so much, it’s become part of the Startups For the Rest of Us drinking game. And look, I’m not saying just me. I’m not saying, “Oh, I should say things, and everyone on the internet should hear it.” 

It’s not the case. There are so many smart people with experience that are talking about these things, and yet, there are so many people who are making the same mistakes over and over because they’re not doing any of the learning or the research on their own in order to stand on the shoulders of giants. As you start your journey, it’s hard enough already. Learn from the mistakes of others. You do not have to make every mistake yourself, and hopefully, if you’re a creator, if you’re recording videos, if you’re putting out podcasts, if you’re tweeting, that next time you mention someone else’s idea or framework, that you give them credit. 

My next topic is a concept I mentioned on a podcast four or five years ago, and then poof, it just disappeared. I had forgotten it. I think it was during an interview, and the idea of it … I want to bring it back up today because I’ve realized that there’s a lot of value in this framework. It’s about early stage product validation, okay? 

So if you’re a later stage founder, you may want to skip this section, but the framework I’m calling the 2-20-200 validation framework. So you know how I have the 1-9-90 rule, right? That’s where I think about 1% of tech companies should consider raising venture, about 9% should consider raising some type of funding, whether it’s angel, TinySeed, indie funding, whatever, and then about 90% should just bootstrap. It’s directionally correct. It’s directionally accurate. 

As Braden Dennis said on the show a couple of weeks ago, “This 2-20-200 validation framework is similar, directionally accurate.” The idea here is that there are three steps, three stages that can happen in order as you try to validate or invalidate a startup idea, and the numbers stand for the approximate number of hours that I think you’re going to spend doing them. So two hours, 20 hours, 200 hours. And the idea here is the first stage of two hours is something you can do relatively quickly. So if you have five different ideas that you’re thinking about evaluating, well then, you spend two hours each to do this very first step. 

And that first step really involves just implementing the 5 P.M. Idea Validation Framework that I’ve talked about on this podcast. You can Google that if you aren’t aware of it. I’ve recorded a YouTube video about it, and I am including it in my next book, which is about the earliest stages of building and launching a SaaS, and that book is already written, actually. I’m just going back and revising a few elements of it, but 5 P.M. Idea Validation Framework is something that, where you go through several steps and you can do it in literally a couple of hours. So if you have five ideas and you want to spend 10 hours over the course of a weekend, or a week, to just get a little better picture of which of these ideas might be the winner … 

And when I say winner, I mean better than the others. You go through the two-hour stage of the 2-20-200 framework. 20 hours is where you take it to the next step, and this is where you either do landing page validation, or you speak one-on-one with potential customers, or you do both. I tend to do both when I’m thinking about building a product. The idea, of course, is that if you’re going to have a marketing funnel and a low-touch product, then you put up that landing page and you try to drive traffic, and the way that you’re going to ultimately market the product, and you see what kind of opt-in you get, and you see what kind of traffic you get, and you see how many emails you collect, versus if you’re going to do high-touch sales, and obviously you want to have more conversations, I think doing both is always better. 

The idea behind 20 hours is, “How long does it take you to put up a landing page and/or reach out to your warm network for these conversations or reach out to your cold network for these conversations?” Set up ads. SEO takes a while, but cold outreach, whatever you’re going to do to start gathering qualitative and quantitative data around this. You’re not just sitting in a research modem like you are with a SEO keyword tool maybe within the two-hour section of this, but you’re getting out and spending more time. This is where, if you have five ideas, you probably don’t want to do all five ideas at the 20-hour mark. 

It’s just a lot of time to invest, and that’s where the first stage, where it’s only two hours into each idea, is helpful to maybe narrow you down to one or two, and then you move on to this second stage, where you spend 20-ish hours. And then the third stage is the 200-hour stage, and that’s where you think about building an MVP. And, of course, an MVP can be a no-code MVP. It can be a human automation MVP, like I talk about in Start Small, Stay Small, or it can be a full-blown coded MVP, and whether we call it an MVP or a V1 or something to get into the hands of people to see if they like it, what parts of it resonate and what don’t? And honestly, I’m putting together a video course right now for MicroConf that’s going to be out in several months, and I dive more deeply into this because there’s a lot to say about it. 

But the idea behind the 2-20-200 framework is to level-set in your mind that it’s not just this big amorphous cloud of “Validate.” It is there are specific stages that you can go through. I’m not saying this is the only way to do it. You can validate any way you want, but this is just a repeatable way to think about, “How am I going to go about being a little more confident?” This is the thing, right now, you’re probably 0% confident that this is a great idea. 

After two hours, are you 10 or 20%? After 20 hours, are you 30, 40%? After 200 hours, do you get to 50, 60, 70%? If it works, maybe. That’s kind of the goal, is to get a little more confidence before you invest a ton of time, tens of hours, if not, hundreds. 

You get a little more confidence, that the thing might work and that you might actually be building something people want, because that really is the hard part, right, building something people want and are willing to pay for. Credit to Paul Graham for saying, “Building something people want.” I added the and are willing to pay for, but doing that is really hard. I’m not saying everything else is simple, but there certainly is more of a playbook once you’ve done that, and my hope is that the 2-20-200 validation framework can be a sort of … It’s not a playbook per se, but sort of a compass or a guiding light as you think about validating your ideas. 

All right, my next topic of today is about design by committee and why I have always believed that it is by far the least efficient way to do things and that you just get bland, crappy output. Your art or your product or whatever it is usually sucks if a bunch of people have input into it. One example I can think of is every school project I ever did, where it was a group project, the more people involved, just the worse the quality was, right? Unless it was like a hand-picked group of people who are all on the same page and had the same vision, it was like the vision just tore everybody in different directions. And even at larger companies that I’ve worked at, after Drip was acquired, or with TinySeed, which isn’t a huge company, I tend to keep input to a minimum of, that everybody around here is really smart and competent because that’s what we like to hire, that’s who I want to work with, but I bring in one, maybe two people even to make really big decisions because the moment that I have six, seven, eight, nine people weighing in on a decision, A, it grinds it to a halt, and B, I find the output is subpar. 

And that two exceptional people who are on the same page with a similar shared vision can build incredible things, but the moment you get to three, four, five, it can often derail that vision. One example of this is a Metallica album called St. Anger. And if you’ve ever watched Some Kind of Monster … That is a documentary. It’s like two and a half hours. It’s actually pretty long, but it’s of Metallica almost breaking up. 

Is it 20 years ago now? Yeah, it’s probably about 20 years ago, and they bring in basically a therapist, like a … It’s like a marriage counselor. No, he’s actually a sports counselor, but if I recall, they’re paying him at 40 grand a month to be on call, and he’s trying to keep the band together. One of the things that a couple of the bandmates had an issue with was that two of the members of Metallica, Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, had pretty much written all the songs up until then, and the band’s been together since what, the ’80s, since the early ’80s? 

So I mean, you’re talking 20 plus years, and these two guys had written almost all the songs and almost all the lyrics. Other people would come in with a riff or whatever, but then they would take it and they’d run with it, and there were some complaints, I think it was mostly from Kirk Hammett who’s one of the guitarists, that they wanted input. And so in this documentary, Some Kind of Monster, it’s pretty fascinating documentary, actually. If you’re at all into their music, it’s cool, but even if not, just seeing the dynamics and the craziness of trying to keep a band together, it’s a fun watch. I’ve seen it a few times, but one thing they do is they are writing the songs together as a group, and you can … 

It’s just painful. It is just painful to watch them come up with a riff and to hear the song be like, “This is actually a cool song,” and then they’re like, “Cool, so throw out lyrics,” and people are just throwing out random sentences that have nothing to do with each other, and they string them together as the lyrics to these songs. And so if you listen to the lyrics of that album, they’re terrible. They’re terrible, compared to the cohesive … Look, I’m not saying Metallica are the best lyricists at all before that, but at least there’s a story there. 

At least there’s poetry. At least there’s a cohesiveness to each song prior to that, but on this album, in particular, which … Look, a lot of people hate on this album, especially folks who really are into Metallica. I actually really enjoy the snare sound. It sounds like he’s banging on a beer keg, but kind of has this weird … 

It’s a different sound, and it has kind of almost a punk-ish vibe, even though they’re playing metal, but I don’t dislike the album specifically about two or three songs that are good, and the rest I would pass on, but even then, the lyrics are awful, and I don’t typically pay attention to lyrics that much in Metallica songs, but it is noticeably cringe. And I think 99, if not 100% of the reason, that is the case, is because they designed this by committee. They didn’t collaborate. They didn’t get two people or three people together and all with the same vision. It was, “You said you wanted to write, and the therapist said that we have to let you write, so let’s sit here and just write stuff out on a sheet of paper. Just call things out.” 

It almost feels half-hearted, and it certainly feels like they did not put out the best end product they could have because of this one or two people doing it could have done a much better job than the group doing it together. And so why do I bring this up, and why does it relate to startups? Well, back to my point earlier of, whether you’re on a big team or a small team, I feel like some folks are uncertain around what they’re doing and they feel like getting more opinions will add more certainty to that. And what I’ve found in rare exceptions is that the more people get involved, the more noise there is, and more chaos is created. Now, I will say that I’ve found it helpful to kind of semi-crowdsource some naming stuff recently, where I am trying to … 

I mean, I’ve had to name three books in the past. I guess it’s like maybe year, is that right? Yeah, probably last year, I’ve had to name three books and I’ll have to name a course, and I always want those names to be really good and catchy. And so I do brainstorming and I talk to some people and I go to ChatGPT, and I come up with a list, and then I narrow it down, or I come back three days later when it’s cold, and I start narrowing and narrowing, and then I start asking opinions, but I don’t go and ask 20 people’s opinion. I go to like … 

I’ll say my inner circle, and it’s like three or four people that I trust, that I know have taste and I know have an understanding of the space, and I say, “Hey, I have this handful of titles.” I don’t give them 50 titles to choose from, but maybe I’ll give them three or four, what I call short titles, which is like The SaaS Playbook, right? That’s the short title, and then I give them three or four subtitles. And with The SaaS Playbook, it’s build a multi-million dollar startup without venture capital. And so I have three or four of my tops that came out of like 50 plus, but it’s usually pretty obvious which of these I think are going to be great, and I get feedback there, and then I iterate, and I might even brainstorm again, then I go a little broader. 

I might go into the TinySeed Slack, or I might go to a MicroConf Slack, and get some input, and it’s always noisy, right? It’s always fuzzy. You’re guessing like, “Oh, all right, more people like this.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best one, I’m going to use it, but there’s a signal there, right? And then maybe after that, I might wind up on Twitter, and at that point, I’m probably trying to more confirm my own favorite pick or have two that are so similar that it maybe doesn’t matter, but I certainly don’t want to go to Twitter with 10 different options because you’re going to get 10% of the people liking each of the 10 options, and then how much good does that actually do you? 

So I do think that getting a lot of voices and input at a certain point can help, especially the further along it is, right? Let’s say you’re building a feature, you’re trying to figure out how it is complicated, how to build it, you get one or two people together, and you crank on this thing, and you put it out, and it’s art and it’s science, and you’ve got this amazing screenshot or this design that you’re using, then you bring it to some people who maybe kind of know how your product works, so they’re kind of in the space, right? And then you bring it to a few inner circle customers, and then you get broader and broader and broader, but you refine it as you go. So I’m not saying you can’t get other voices involved, but if you start with 10 people trying to design that same screen or that same idea, it is so difficult, so time-consuming to get everyone on the same page in a way that you can then be productive and actually move forward in a way that’s not just compromise. “Well, we all disagree, so let’s just do the thing in the middle,” and the mushy middle is like eating a mayonnaise sandwich. 

It’s very bland. A note to the listeners, I put mayonnaise on my turkey sandwiches. I also put mustard, and cheese, and often lettuce, and guacamole. I don’t dislike mayonnaise. Last time I said a mayonnaise sandwich, several people thought that I was ragging on mayonnaise, when in fact, what I’m ragging on is a sandwich that is made up of two pieces of white bread and mayonnaise in it. 

That is the analogy I’m going for when I say a mayonnaise sandwich. If it had turkey in it, I’d call it a turkey sandwich, but in this case, I’m saying, yeah, two pieces of bread with mayonnaise is just very bland. That’s the analogy. That’s all we have time for today. Hope you enjoyed this episode. 

Thank you for coming back this and every week, listening to Startups For the Rest of Us. If you haven’t given a five-star rating in iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, wherever your greater podcasts are served, really appreciate it. If you have, could you please go to Amazon or Audible and rate The SaaS Playbook as a five-star? You don’t even have to leave a review, I believe, and it helps me continue to progress on my mission to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups. I’ve been doing that since I’ve started blogging in 2005, so almost 20 years. 

Yeah, next year it’ll be 20 years, and each year, as I’ve pushed that boulder up the hill, I’ve been able to increase momentum and grow the audience and grow the number of people that are impacted by this message. At this point, I do it because it changes people’s lives. I want everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur to have the same freedom, purpose, and healthy relationships that you and I do, so I always appreciate any effort you can put forth to help me continue on that mission. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 706.