Episode 710 | Is Coding Dead?, The “Right” Tech Stack, Funded Competition, and More Listener Questions

Rob Walling:
Is your outsourced development team dropping the ball? Maybe you’ve worked with a team that just couldn’t grasp your vision and needed constant oversight because they weren’t thinking strategically. Or maybe you ended up wasting hours micromanaging, often needing to jump on late-night calls across massive time-zone differences to get alignment. And in the end, they delivered a sluggish app with a frustrating UI that didn’t come close to the solution you had envisioned. 

If any of that sounds familiar, you need to reach out to our sponsor. DevSquad. DevSquad provides an entire development team packed with top talent from Latin America. Your elite squad will include between two to six full-stack developers, a technical product manager, plus specialists in product strategy, UI/UX design, DevOps, and QA, all working together to make your SaaS product a success. 

You can ramp up an entire product team fast in your time zone, and it rates 75% cheaper than a comparable US-based team. And with DevSquad, you pay month-to-month with no long-term contracts. Get the committed, responsive development team that your business deserves. Visit devsquad.com/startups and get 10% off for the first three months of your engagement. That’s devsquad.com/startups. 

Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling, and today I go through listener questions and listener comments. I received several comments regarding episode 704 where someone had written in with the question, “I really like my day job. I don’t have a burning desire to be an entrepreneur, but I would like to be one. Do you have advice for me?” 

And I gave advice like, well, I had a burning desire and most of the entrepreneurs, actually all the entrepreneurs I know who’ve had success, had that burning need to do it. So if there’s a listener out there who is struggling with that motivation or who didn’t have a bunch of motivation and found success, please write in. I also said maybe just try some things and if you get lucky, great, and if not, it’s a win-win because you can keep the day job. So I have responses to that as well as a couple comments about the now infamous April Fools episode. And of course I’m going to answer listener questions. Stay tuned. 

Before we dive into that, you should check out MicroConf Connect at microconfconnect.com. This is our online community and forum. We host it in Slack and we’re approaching 7,000 members. They’re bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders. Recent conversations in Connect including a debate about magic sign-in links, how long you should spend diving into a niche before deciding on the product offer, how to safeguard your product from misuse during free trials, at what point in your journey should you invest in a conference booth and more. It’s a vibrant and highly moderated community, very high signal to noise. If you’re looking to find and hang out with other misfits like you and I, head to microconfconnect.com. 

So to kick us off, I received a response to that episode, 704, around do you need a burning desire in order to be successful? And this first one, I’m going to keep anonymous. He wrote a really well-written and well-thought-out lengthy email, so I’m going to summarize it. 

He says, “That caller’s question really resonated with me, and I kept pushing the rewind button on my walk and listening to that snippet over and over. It’s just one data point, but I believe I support your general experience with startup founders. I’m a previously bootstrapped founder with a successful exit through a strategic acquisition.” 

And in summary, he and a co-founder built an app that they sold for 10 times ARR. And it’s a life-changing amount of money, but it’s not enough money that he never has to work again. And so he said, “It’s been hard for me personally post exit, trying to find my place again. I’m consulting 20 hours a week making great money, so I’m fortunate, but I’m also kind of miserable because,” and I like this quote, in quotes, “my volume is turned down to a two like you mentioned.” 

So I must have … maybe I said that in the episode. I know that as an entrepreneur, the volume’s always at, what, 11? And then you go get a day job. I remember 15 years ago or whatever, I would be consulting or I’d be launching products and it was super exciting, but it was super frustrating and scary and uncertain. And then I would say, “I want to go back and get a day job.” And I would get a day job and I would be so bored and so frustrated. And so I think that perfectly encapsulates that my volume was turned down to a two. 

And so back to the email, “I have another bootstrapped product that I’m spinning up and I have multiple other opportunities, but I haven’t committed to any of them. I desperately miss shipping valuable products to users, that dopamine hit. I want to fly again and have that feeling of same day turnaround fixes for users, new features to solve real problems, et cetera. I’ve considered going back to a day job, but instead I think I’m going to use this time to hit it harder on my startup projects while I’m consulting part-time.” 

And then he wraps up with very kind sentiment, “I hope you get some level of satisfaction from how life-changing your podcast is on so many levels. For every person who writes you, there’s probably 20 others you don’t even know about.” That is actually very meaningful to me. So thanks, Anonymous, I really appreciate the insight. 

And he’s basically talking about without the motivation, it’s been really hard to get back in the game. And I think that can be a second-time entrepreneur, or if you have a great day job that you love, it can be hard to find the motivation to do the grind. So thanks so much for writing in. 

The next email is on the same topic and it’s from Paul. 

Paul: 
Hey Rob,  I’m a co-founder at WonderProxy, and a scatter-shot listener to Startups For the Rest of Us. WonderProxy has been around for over a decade now, we do over a million dollars a year in sales, full time staff beyond the founders. We’re doing okay. Back in episode 704 you had a question from someone with a comfortable job who wasn’t sure about making the leap. You talked a bunch about the burning desire or need, and wondered if it was a requisite for starting this sort of thing. I don’t think my co-founder or I ever really had a “burning desire”, neither of us is particularly passionate about the space. We help people test their website from around the world, we’re not curing cancer. I think we had two things going for us that let this work for us. First, we both loved building things: I’ve loved programming since childhood, my co-founder has loved working on servers since college. Working on the company was something we liked doing in our spare time. I was excited to come home from work and keep programming. Second, 0ur day jobs could give us the space to let the company grow at its own pace. We didn’t have a full time employee for the first five years. New customers let us expand the service, or pay ourselves some amount of money. So there wasn’t any passion or burning desire, but there also wasn’t any pressure. Our day jobs paid us well. The company grew slowly over a period of years until we made our first hires. Then, things accelerated and I eventually went full time, but was able to do so without risking my salary (which was handy, by that point I had a kid and a mortgage). My suggestion for your listener would be to find a problem out there they think they can solve by doing something they enjoy. Stick that solution out there, and invest just bits of money and time into it. In my view the super power that comes with this approach is that giving some change (like a new landing page, or ad copy, or whatever) a month or two to work is easy (You’re busy at work!). Where fully invested founders act like hampsters on speed, changing things daily, never giving their product enough time to actually see results. Hope this helps them, thanks, can’t wait for the next episode.

Rob Walling:
Ooh, see? I actually want to dive in here. I didn’t say a burning desire about the space, I said a burning desire for freedom, or a burning desire to be an entrepreneur or to start your own company or to own your own thing. That’s the burning desire I had. Many of the early products that I owned, I didn’t necessarily care about the space, but there were opportunities for me to make enough money to quit the day job. And I felt as long as I did that ethically in a way that provided value for what people were paying for that that was fine.  

So thanks for writing in. I think it’s an interesting take and I do think that it’s an example of folks who put it on autopilot. Now do I think you’re less likely to find success that way? I do. I think that if you’re driving day-to-day and you have this burning desire to get to some end result, he’s right, you are a hamster on speed, but that can be beneficial when you’re an entrepreneur and when you’re trying to get to an end goal. 

And do I think you flail a bit and you probably waste some cycles? Probably. But do I think that focusing on a product and … I did at nights and weekends. So I worked a 40 hour a week day job and then depending on the week, and it was before we had a kid. And then after we had a kid, it might be between eight and 20 hours of nights and weekends that I could put in. 

And of course that was not getting enough sleep and it was not working out. It was doing all the things that you don’t want to do. But that allowed me to start building up side-income to the point where I actually did back off to four days a week at my day job. And I think in the end I was working three days a week, so like 24 hours a week and building products on the side. And so I love the fact that folks wrote in with their experience and I really appreciate their thoughts. 

My next email is on the same episode, but it’s on the ideal or the right trademark tech stack. And Daniel writes in, “When I started working on Codelantis, which is a code review app, I chose a tech stack that I knew and that is reasonably scalable, front and back end in different languages. Only later I realized this wasn’t an ideal choice.” 

“The best choice for an early stage product like mine is one that lets you iterate quickly and easily. I’ve switched to a single language repository,” so for him it’s TypeScript and Node.js, “a couple months back and the difference in development pace is like night and day, which also means that I’m not only shipping faster, but that my motivation stays up too. And this is arguably even more important for a nights and weekends project.” 

“So my TL;DR is don’t worry about scalability, worry that you can’t iterate fast enough, lose motivation, and no one will be using your product.” So thanks for writing in with that, Daniel. I think you need to worry about both. I don’t think I agree you don’t have to worry about scalability. 

There’s this weird balance of back in the day when I was a contractor writing code for third parties, some of our developers on my team would, we call it gold plating, and it’s over-engineering everything. And they would say, “Well, it’s for this big bank and maybe they’ve got a kajillion users.” And we had to have a balance. We couldn’t fall over when there were five users, but we couldn’t plan for five million, and we had to have a reasonable, pragmatic approach to making these things work. 

And I think picking your tech stack is similar, have a reasonable pragmatic approach. Will it scale well enough and will you be able to iterate quickly? I know that there are tech stacks that can do both, and I already weighed in on this whole topic. I appreciate Daniel’s insights on choosing the right tech stack. 

All right, so the April Fool’s episode, I have received more tweets, DMs, and emails about that episode than perhaps any other episode in the history of the podcast, so I really appreciated it. I did not think it would get that kind of response. 

I will give you some inside baseball that I had a real difficult time recording that episode because if you know me, I tend to be what? Pragmatic, logical, I tend to tell the truth. I try to tell you how I actually feel about things. If I don’t know the answer, I try to say, “I don’t know.” If I’m pretty certain about something, I try to say, “90, 95% certain.” And to say something that is just not what I believe and to actually steel man the arguments was challenging for me. 

I don’t think I’ve ever done this before, but I came into my office, I didn’t hit record, and I just recorded the whole episode without recording it. I just did a monologue in my office to figure out am I capable of doing this episode with a straight face? I did the whole thing and I thought, “You know what? That wasn’t that bad.” So then I hit record and recorded it. I still struggled when I listened back. I can hear myself acting a little bit, but it’s so cool that it didn’t come across like that for most people. So people were shocked. 

What I really appreciated were folks who wrote in and said, “You had me until you said this.” And for some people I think like Derrick Reimer said, “The moment you said that, I’ve rethought my stances based on thoughtful conversations on Twitter and Hacker News, I knew this was bull (beep). And Ruben Gamez, who has been a many-time guest on the show said, “The moment you talked about lowering prices, I was like, ‘Ah, he’s making it up. And this is a special episode, it’s got to be April Fool’s.'” He knew it right away. 

Most people, it seemed to take five to seven minutes. I think the entire diatribe was about 11 minutes before I gave it away. So a lot of people made it halfway through. And one such listener, Jakob Ericsson wrote in and said, “At first I was all for it, ‘Hell yeah, finally Rob is seeing it my way with consumers being great evangelists for products, B2C is fun.’ Then I started thinking, ‘Hey, he’s really having second thoughts on a lot of things. I wonder what people will think about being told things in such a convinced tone when it’s really the opposite of previous talking points. Churn is a good thing now?’ That broke the illusion for me.” 

Yeah, it was either churn or two-sided marketplaces. There were certain points that just became kind of ridiculous. So I appreciate you being a good sport if you listened to the episode and liked it and reached out. I haven’t done an April Fool’s episode in I believe six or seven years, so I felt like it was time to do it. 

All right, now let’s dive into a listener question from Mike. Mike says, “I started a company last year to address a sell shovels dev tools problem for this AI wave. I’m getting a consistent message about the features users need for me to be a viable option. My only pre-existing competitor has begun building for this use case and a new VC-funded competitor has entered the race. Realistically, there will be more coming.” 

“I take the competition as a sign I identified a real need, but I have strong doubts I’m going to be able to compete given how the ecosystem is shaping up. It’s a challenging problem in a complex and ever-evolving space. Lacking funding, revenue, and co-founders, my options seem limited. How should I handle this situation?” 

Yeah, so this is the double-edged sword of entering a, quote, unquote, “hot” space is, it’s inevitable if you’re in a space with a lot of opportunities growing quickly that a bunch of venture dollars are going to get poured into it. That doesn’t mean you’re going to lose, it’s just going to make it harder. I talk a lot about this in Start Small, Stay Small and probably should have talked a little more about it in The SaaS Playbook to be honest. 

But in The SaaS Playbook, I talk about why niches and verticals are usually so much better for solopreneurs who want to lifestyle it. A big mistake I see folks making is thinking I can build a venture-scale business or I can build a business that will probably need a lot of funding, but I can just bootstrap it. Or I can build in a market where there’s going to be a ton of funding and probably just bootstrap it. And while it’s possible, the odds are stacked against you. 

And so if it’s your first time, you can either do the step one business or you can restart small, stay small and look for out-of-the-way niches where no venture money is going to enter it. And am I saying go somewhere where there’s no competition? Of course not because there probably doesn’t exist a market of any size at this point that you can launch a software product into. But this is the double-edged sword of oh, there’s opportunity and there’s a bunch of people talking about it, therefore there’s going to be a kajillion dollars brought into it. 

Now can you still win? Can you still beat venture-funded competitors? Of course. If you know what you’re doing and you’re experienced, I would compete against venture-funded competitors. In fact, I did. Drip was, what, the 300th email marketing application? 

And our competitors who, I think VentureBeat did a top 10 marketing automation providers, maybe it was top 15, and we were number, I honestly forget the number, 10 or 11, and everyone ahead of us had raised a minimum of $20 million. Some had raised hundreds of millions and yet there we were in a little closet in Fresno, California at the time with five employees just scrapping. 

So yes you can, but I was an experienced entrepreneur. I had put 150 to $200,000 of my own money from my other projects into building it. I knew what I was doing, I had a network, I had an audience, I had blah, blah, blah. I had all these unfair advantages and if you don’t have that, it really becomes an uphill battle. 

So back to Mike’s question, how should I handle this situation? There’s a bunch of things you could do. You could look to get acquired. You could throw your flag out. Now here’s the thing, you’re going to get acquihired. They’re going to want to hire you as an engineer, probably pay you a bunch in stock, but if you can get … 

I saw someone who had 70K ARR, maybe it was 75, and they got acquired for 10X ARR. So they got three quarters of a million dollars for a fairly early stage product. If you don’t have that kind of money in the bank and that is life-changing for you and you have to work for a year or two in order to get it, I don’t know, that’s something I would have done in my younger years. So in thinking about acquihire, often that can cut both ways. It can be a good deal or it can be a crappy deal. 

You mentioned you have no revenue, which I think that’s probably the biggest problem here, is if you’re going to build, if you’re going to bootstrap, please go towards revenue. Don’t do the free plan. And if you’re entering a space where everyone has a free plan and therefore you need it to compete, think twice about whether or not you want to bootstrap in that space. I feel like a lot of folks, I’m not saying Mike’s doing this, but I do see folks entering these hot spaces and not realizing that the competition is stacked against them if they don’t have revenue co-founders and funding. 

So anyways, back to my answer. You could look to get acquired, which is harder than it sounds because if you go out looking to get acquired, then you look desperate and people are going to want to not pay you very much. But build and get on the radars, and if they approach you, you say, “I’m not really looking to get acquired really early, but sure I’m open to talking about it.” You play coy and then you go along with it as it evolves. 

Another thing you could do is just walk away, do something else. You could take what you have and focus on a vertical where there isn’t necessarily VC dollars. I don’t know. Without knowing a bit more about your space, I don’t know if there’s a vertical or a way that you can position down and take a corner of the market that they are not going to go after, but that your tech can translate to really easily. So to make up an example, instead of building the AI CRM for everyone, you build the AI CRM for realtors or for freelancers or for salespeople at SaaS companies. You get the idea. 

Another option is to go raise funding, fight fire with fire. And either go to something like a TinySeed, go out and try to raise angel money, go try to raise venture. If venture’s going into the space, it’s not as hard as you think to be able to raise funding. And yes, gasp, Startups For the Rest of Us, Rob the bootstrapping podcaster talking about raising venture funding. Well, I’ve been saying that for 15 years. It’s just a tool and if you need that tool to succeed in your space, then of course I would consider raising it. 

You have a big decision to make, Mike. Obviously this is a tough choice with a lot of things at play, and of course it depends on the specifics. I can’t even say, usually I say in your shoes, here is what I’d do. And really without knowing all the details and just sitting down and talking about the ins and outs for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, I don’t know that I could even weigh in on what I would do in your situation. But I hope all the options I’ve laid out for you are helpful. Thanks for writing in. 

Our next question is from Reid Alexander, subject line is, “Is Learning to Code Dead?” Reid writes, “Hey, Rob. Thanks for putting in all the work making Startups For the Rest of Us a great show. My favorites are the listener question episodes, which is why I’m writing. I’m currently in the process of selling my small online business with the hopes of further exploring the ins and outs of software development after its sells. I’m extremely novice when it comes to programming, so I’ve been looking for the best ways to quickly learn what I need to know to develop software myself thinking of becoming a full stack developer.” 

“So I guess my question is in three parts. Number one, is learning to code still relevant?” Yes, it is still relevant. I view AI as augmentation, like a little bit of a co-pilot is a great example. Having a co-pilot, having something that does autopilot, you still need humans involved to fly an airplane. So is it still relevant? Yes. Do I believe it will still be relevant in 5, 10, 15 years? Yes, people will still be making software. 

Now we may not be making software in the way that we do today, much like if we flash back to the ’50s. Now, I think in the ’40s, you would program a computer by moving vacuum tubes. And then eventually we got the integrated circuit, which was what, the ’50s or the ’60s. You’ll have to forgive even though I have a degree in computer engineering, I do not remember my history of how computers evolved. But I think it was in the ’60s we had the integrated circuit and therefore programming became typing ones and zeros, literally binary. 

Then there was assembly language, which were these short, usually three letter instructions that would generate the binary. And at that time people said, “Well, it’s going to be slow. Well, you’re not going to need programmers anymore because everyone’s going to be able to do assembly language.” And if you’ve ever seen assembler, it is an absolute nightmare to work with. 

And then it goes on and it’s like, well, C is a higher level language. Well, now everybody’s going to be able to program. And then they build C++ and then they build Ruby on top of that, and then they build whatever else. They build no-code on top of that. It’s all code. And at every movement, at every big shift, when those new languages came out, people would say, “Well, now you can just type human English instructions into a computer and it’ll just do the thing, and so we’re not going to need developers.” 

I see AI as the same thing. It’s another abstraction layer, it’s another augmentation layer, but there are still going to be brilliant developers, brilliant makers, brilliant product people who are better than others at it. Do I think it makes it easier to get on board and easier to learn? Probably. Do I think it makes it easier to be a crappy developer and build things that are not going to scale and that are going to break and that are going to have bugs? Yeah, probably. So is learning to code still relevant? In my opinion, 100%, yes. It’s going to change, but it’s still relevant. 

“Number two, if it is still relevant, which I believe to be the case,” the OP is saying, “what’s the best way to go about learning to code in a shorter period of time? With all the new tools, like ChatGPT, Replit,” which I haven’t heard of, “et cetera, is learning the traditional way, a waste of time?” 

I don’t know what the traditional way is because coming up, I read books. I was eight years old, there was a book called How to Speak BASIC to My Apple. I read that, I learned how to speak BASIC to my Apple. So is that traditional? Is going to four years of university traditional? I certainly don’t think that’s the way to code by the way, much cheaper, much faster ways. Is going to an online coding boot camp traditional? Is going to an in-person coding school traditional? Probably not, those things are newer. And then there’s also sites like Boot.dev and Frontend Mentor, which is, Frontend Mentor’s a TinySeed company, Boot.dev, Lane, the founder, was on this podcast just, I don’t know, in the last six months. 

I would say, which way do you learn the best? Any of those ways can work. If you learn from books, which most people don’t. For some reason I did, and I don’t know why, but I guess it was because it was the only way I had. Imagine me, eight years old in the 1980s trying to learn to code. It’s like, what were my options? There was no internet, there were no online coding schools. And it was intriguing to me that you could type something and a computer would do it. And I was like, “Well, I’m the youngest of four kids and everyone orders me around. I want to order something around.” So I learned how to speak BASIC to my Apple to do it. 

And then as time went on, there were in-person schools, in essence there were trade schools. But then there were even just these in-person boot camps where you can go for six weeks or six months and learn the basics. Figure out what modality works for you. If you’re the person who needs to go somewhere and be sitting there to not be distracted, then look locally. 

If you can do it online, that’s probably cheaper and you can probably find a better school because you have the whole world now as your option. Or again, Boot.dev, Frontend Mentor, there are a kajillion of those online. I think those are two good ones that I know about, but there are probably at least 50 more sites that can help gamify it and help you learn how to do it. That’s how I would think about it. 

Tools like ChatGPT are just augmentation. ChatGPT in my opinion, is not going to teach me how to code. It’s not designed to do that. But can it help me as I go along? It’s like I remember at a certain point in either high school or college, they allowed us to start using calculators. And they just said, “Look, doing basic math isn’t the thing anymore.” 

But when you’re in fourth grade through eighth grade, it’s like, “Well, you have to learn to do the math so that you know it.” At a certain point, they were just like, “Take the calculator and use it to do the basic math because the hard part is figuring out the geometry or the equations or which equation to use or how to do something that’s a higher level function.” 

And that’s how I see ChatGPT, it’s like the calculator. It’s just a little assistant that can help you if you get stuck. It can write a bit of code for you and it may or may not work, and you need to know how to debug that and integrate it into a core application that’s actually going to make sense. 

“And the third part of the question is are there certain languages or specifics I should focus on learning to become a full-stack developer who can create my own software and web applications, hopefully utilizing LLM within my projects? Thanks for all the advice you give and have a great week, Reid.” 

So are there certain languages? I mean, we talked a little bit about this, right? A lot of people use Node. We just heard someone write in and say, “I want it to be all JavaScript, therefore I only have to learn one language and I use some type of JavaScript framework on the front with Node on the back.” People build startups out of that. 

If I were to start today, I would probably go with Ruby on Rails or Python Django. I know another really popular one is PHP Laravel and there are these amazing SaaS starter kits that, again, I talked about these a couple episodes ago. I don’t want to rehash all that, but that’s what I would do. And maybe go to Stack Overflow or to Reddit or Quora and just Google this exact question and look to see what people are saying and just make a call. 

The thing is learning one language allows you to then learn other languages a lot easier. And I know switching ecosystems, it can be a pain. But I was teaching myself Python three or four years ago just for fun on weekends because I had never coded in it. And I knew PHP and I had seen Ruby on Rails because it was what drove Drip, but I was never able to code in it. But I was like, “Python seems pretty elegant and I really liked the ideas behind Django and it seems like you could get something going pretty quick.” 

And I was going to start building just some basic web apps to do whatever crazy things and I wanted to get into a little bit … This is before the LLMs come around. But I liked the idea of semantic analysis and such, and I was like, “Who has the best libraries for semantic analysis?” It was Python. 

And so, literally in a weekend, now I have an advantage of course, because I used to be a developer so I could translate the paradigms. But that’s what I’m saying here is if you pick one that’s generally accepted and a bunch of web apps are built in and then later you realize, you know what? I really should have picked this other one, it’s like making that transition is a transition, but it’s not as painful as just getting started. So thanks so much for those questions, Reid. I hope that was helpful. 

I do not believe learning to code is dead. Let me just underline that. People say this for the sensational headline of it to get clicks and stuff. Will it change? Yes. Will driving change as self-driving cars come around? Yes. Did making garments change when the automated loom was invented? Yes. Did transportation change when cars were invented? Yes, but it’s like these are all advancements in technology that we can work with that make our lives better, make us more productive. 

And as long as we aren’t acting like an ostrich with our head in the sand imagining, “Oh, it isn’t coming, I’m not going to update my skills. No, I’m just going to be the same old developer I always have been.” Well, then I think you probably have a problem because there is a paradigm shift occurring right now. 

It’s like some of the developers in the early 2000s who I knew who were either desktop developers or they were still developing in COBOL and just older systems and didn’t want to learn even Perl or ASP or PHP stuff that was really evolving in the early 2000s. And I was like, “Look, that’s your choice, but realize there will be fewer and fewer jobs for you in the coming decades if you don’t update your skills.” 

My last question for today is from Patrick Bowman. Patrick asked about product protection, “When developing and researching a SaaS product, what is the risk of potential IP theft?” So the idea of someone stealing your intellectual property. “On a scale from 1 to 100, where would you rate this as a concern? Would you recommend an NDA or similar for the early adopters or testers who are testing a SaaS product? How would you recommend founders and developers protect their product if it is a substantial concern?” 

So here’s the thing, an idea for a product is not IP or it’s not something that you can protect against. Copyright protects the actual code. Trademark protects your mark that you’re using in trade, so your logo and the name. And patents can protect the specific way that you’re doing something. I’m looking at a patent law here. 

But realistically, if I come up with an idea for an app that does exactly some very specific AI thing for realtors and someone comes along and mostly replicates the exact same interface and tries to compete with me, unless I have deep pockets, you send them a cease and desist and they can ignore you. And what are you going to do, sue them? Again, unless you have deep pockets, IP protection is actually very, very hard. It’s a lot more complicated than people think. 

There’s difference between law and justice and when people have copied me, I’m always like, “(beep) this sucks.” It’s not just. But can I go after someone who recorded a YouTube video and basically used the same outline I did? Probably not. I mean, I could try, but is there any … Do I want to go to court and spend years and tens of thousands of dollars to try to get someone’s YouTube video taken down?” It’s just not worth it. 

And so what I thought this question was going to be about is people you hire to actually write the code for you, and of course you should have them sign an IP agreement they’re not going to steal your stuff. That’s just law. If they’re overseas, so you have a developer in the Philippines and they decide to steal it and try to compete with you, well, that sucks. Are you going to sue him in a Filipino court? It’s like there are risks you have to take I think with this kind of stuff. 

On a scale from 1 to 100, where would I rate this as a concern, especially with early adopters or testers who are testing a SaaS product? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it. So it’s like if I say it’s a one, does that mean it never happens? Certainly it’s happened. It has to have happened, I just don’t hear about it. 

I talk to TinySeed companies, I talk to MicroConf companies, I talk to listeners of this podcast, see people at events. Every once in a while I’ll hear, “Oh, an employee took a piece of our code and went and did X, Y, Z and tried to compete with us.” It does happen now and again, but for me personally, it’s just not something I have ever been concerned about. 

I feel like if my customers are a bunch of indie makers or indie hackers who are really scraping looking for an idea, then yeah, maybe I’d have them sign an NDA. I am not sure how I would enforce that. But if my customers or early adopters or testers are realtors or lawyers, do I think that they’re going to go try to build a software product to compete with me? No. Could it happen? Yes. Is it likely to? I don’t think so. 

It’s just one of these things. It’s, as you’re saying, I like that you said 1 to 100 because it really is risk tolerance. It’s like at this point you have testers and early adopters. Do you also have general liability insurance or errors and omissions insurance at this point? Well, why not? Because isn’t there a risk that your software could do something, someone could sue you around the software? Of course, but the risk right now is astronomically low. So you’re not going to spend the time or the money worrying about it. 

I think similarly, do you have an LLC or a C corp set up so that you are not personally liable if anything happens to the software? You might, but a lot of people don’t. I didn’t have an LLC for the first five years of … I had all these products. This was from ’02 to ’07, 2007. I was a freelancer, I was a contractor and I was making money from software products, six figures from all this stuff. 

And I was still a sole proprietorship, meaning someone totally could have sued me personally for any of this. And for me it was just not worth the headache to get that corporate entity set up and to get all the stuff set up. And so am I saying everyone should follow my path? Well, of course not. But on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, I guess as you said, it’s very low. It’s very low on my list to be honest. 

And the third part was how would you recommend founders and developers protect their product if it is a substantial concern? I guess not showing it to people that I was concerned about. I guess having them sign an NDA. That’s it. I mean, that’s what an NDA is for. You can’t take this and do anything with it. You can’t even tell people about it. That’s it. 

Yeah, I don’t know where else to go with it other than that’s what NDAs are designed for. And if people don’t sign NDAs, you’re going to let them check out your product? I guess that’ll be your choice if you think it’s a substantial concern. Typically, this is more of a concern that’s in people’s head than it is in reality. So thanks for that question, Patrick. I hope it was helpful. 

Thank you for joining me today. If you have a question for the show, you want to hear me or me and a guest answer it in a future episode, you can email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and you can send a Dropbox link to an MP3 file or a video file, you can attach an audio file. Or you can go to startupsfortherestofus.com, click Ask a Question in the top nav, and then you can record right there on your phone or on your computer, send in video, audio. 

They always go to the top of the stack, except for … I say always. Most of the time they go to the top of the stack. Every once in a while I dig through the text questions because I still have a question from June of last year. So we are, what is that? 10 months. I’m starting to feel guilty a little bit, and I did go through several text questions today. But as a rule, the video and the audio are the ones that go to the top of the stack. 

One of the reasons for that, it’s just really cool to hear from people in the community and to know that there are other humans listening to this podcast. Because if you’re listening to it solo, do you know how many listeners there are? Are there five listeners? Are there 50,000 listeners? When you start hearing people writing in with their own concerns and you hear their voice and you hear the intonation of the question, there’s just so much more fidelity to that experience than it is sending a text question in and me reading it. 

Of course, still send text questions in if you want to. They still work out really well, as I think today’s show was hopefully helpful for you and certainly fun for me to record. And with that, I wish you an amazing week of productivity and progress on your entrepreneurial journey. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 710.