Episode 745 | Reflecting on 2024: Revisiting My Predictions, The Best Episodes, My Favorite Frameworks, and More (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to another episode of Startups. For the Rest Of Us, I am Rob Walling, and in this solo adventure, I’m going to look back at 2024. I’m going to reflect on some key concepts that I discovered slash introduced on this podcast in the last 12 months. I’m going to reflect on accomplishments, things I was able to ship this year, as well as look back at my top four favorite episodes from the year. And then I’m going to revisit the predictions that I made for 2024 because with only, I’m recording this a few weeks in advance of it going live, but there’s only a couple of weeks left in 2024, and some of these have come to pass and some have not. Before I dive into the episode, I want to let you know about my course that’s SaaS Launchpad, but not just the course because I’ve talked about it on this show before, but the fact that we have added a free sample, a free trial of the course, it’s one of the 27 26 videos that are included in this course. 

Total course is about nine and a half hours of content, and this is 28 minutes long. It’s called the DNA of a great SaaS idea. It’s kind of my response to the question, if you could design the ideal SaaS product for a bootstrapper, what would be all the aspects that you would want from it? What elements would it have? And I think I came up with 17 or 18 different factors, and realistically, I don’t know that if there’s a single idea that has all 18, but it’s things to think about as you are evaluating your SaaS ideas. So SaaS launchpad.co, if you click the start free button, you will be able to download that video and check out what the course is all about, SaaS launchpad.co. 

As I’ve recorded this podcast over the years up to almost episode 750 in the course of almost 15 years, I like to reflect every so often, and sometimes it’s in episodes where the episode number ends in two zeros or maybe ends in 50, and other times it’s at the start or the end of a year. So in this episode, I did a quick, it was frankly a cursory look back through the past 12 months, so almost 52 episodes as well as I skimmed through the YouTube channel, although that was even more cursory. And I came up with four concepts that I introduced in 2024 frameworks or concepts. Now, obviously there’s a lot more in the solo episodes where I talk about a herd of bison walking into a storm or normalizing doing hard things. I don’t consider those concepts. Those are just maybe motivational things that come along now and again to give you some inspiration. 

But when I talk about frameworks or concepts, I mean things like in episode 706 where I introduced the 2 2200 validation framework, and that’s a novel approach to thinking about ways to validate an idea where the two is two hours, that’s where you do some keyword research and go online and look at forums, do whatever else you can do online. The 20 is 20 hours, that’s when you start talking to customers or building a landing page and sending traffic. And the 200 is usually where you get in and build some type of MVP. So the 2 2200 validation framework was introduced just 39 short episodes ago in episode 7 0 6. Another concept that I stumbled upon. And usually what happens is I’m observing all these companies that I’m either advising or invested in or just in the broader MicroConf startup For the Rest Of Us TinySeed community. And I start to see patterns and I’m trying to figure out a way to describe those. 

And oftentimes it comes when I’m coming to a conclusion and I realize there’s an edge case that isn’t defined. So the second concept of the four that I’ll mention today was when I was looking at horizontal and vertical SaaS, I was trying to evaluate the growth and the difference in growth between the two categories across the tiny C portfolio of now I believe it’s 192 companies. And I realized there was a third type that kind of didn’t fit into either or. It kind of fits into both. And I was trying to think of a good name for it. And I came up with orthogonal SaaS. And so this is where you have a horizontal product, meaning it can be used across any type of business. So it’s not vertical, right? It’s not in a specific niche, but it is aimed at a single job title or a single role at a company. 

And so I went with all the clunky things like role-based SaaS and title Focus, all these dumb names, and talked about the chat GPT for way too long. And eventually I liked horizontal, vertical and orthogonal. It matches up. And actually, if I drew a diagram, we’re at a whiteboard right now. I could point out to you why it makes sense that it’s orthogonal, but realistically trying to do that a podcast would be terrible radio. So Orthogonal SaaS was the second concept I introduced in 2024. The third one was in episode 735 where I got really fired up about this eight levels of platform risk. And this is absolutely one of my favorite episodes of this year. I was reading X Twitter and I was listening to a podcast, and I get so fucking tired of people saying, well, every business has platform risk because that acts like platform Risk exists or it doesn’t, that it’s a one or a zero that much people think product-market fit is a one or a zero, that it’s on or off. 

People think platform risk is on or off. And usually this is from someone who’s, it’s often like a no-code proponent, and I’m totally cool with no-code, but realize the pros and cons of no-code. And one of the big cons is platform risk. So when people point that out, the no-code folks bristle and say, well, everything has platform risk because built on AWS, and that’s platform too. But no, no, no, it’s definitely a gradient. It is a spectrum. It is a continuum. And so I sat down and came up with a whole framework around this, and I got seven levels of platform risk. And then WordPress and Matt Mullenweg started to implode and I realized, aha, I think there’s an eighth level of platform risk. So it was a last minute I called an audible and for those familiar with American football terms, and I added an eighth level right before recording it. 

So I really enjoyed this episode because it was something that seemed to really resonate with people. And I’ve already used it in a few conversations, especially on X Twitter, letting people know that, hey, it’s not binary and trying to put some shape to this because if we don’t talk about it in these detailed terms and isn’t platform risk just this amorphous kind of cloud that you can float through and it’s like, ah, maybe I platform is maybe an owner. Everyone does. So why even think about it? And it’s like because it can kill your business. And I think thinking about it at a deeper level than just saying, oh, it exists or it doesn’t. Really, really helpful for all entrepreneurs and frankly, especially for SaaS founders, as you’ve probably heard me say, my mission in life, the legacy that I will leave behind when I’m no longer here is to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups and things like the eight levels of platform risk and the three factors, I think I had three axes that I use to kind of frame that conversation and framework. 

This is one of those that I think will stick around for years to come because guaranteed to put it into a future book. And then the fourth concept that I introduced in 2024, this one has a question mark. I may have introduced it. 2023 is the 1 9 90 rule. And this is the idea that not everyone should raise venture. Not only should not everyone raise it, but I only think about 1% of venture eligible tech startups should raise venture. I think 1% approximately should consider raising venture. I think 9% should consider raising some type of funding, whether that’s angel investment, something independent funding like TinySeed or Indie vc. And then I think about 90% of those companies should bootstrap. So the 1 9 90 rule is something, again, I may have coined it in 2023, but I know I presented on the podcast in 2024, and it’s something that I similarly think will stick around for years to come. 

I have a feeling there are a few more concepts I did after I wrote the SaaS playbook, a lot of kind of got my juices flown, and I started discovering slash noticing more frameworks and concepts in late 2023. And then throughout this year, I can almost guarantee you there are more that I have missed. If you think of one, email me questions at startup For the Rest Of Us dot com, I’d love to include it in a future episode. Next, I want to talk about my four favorite episodes, actually five favorite because one of them already mentioned, which was the eight levels of platform risk. That was episode 7 35. Another one of my favorites was 7 28, which is where I talked to Iran Galper and the founder of Gym Desk about his exit. He exited, bootstrapped, took very small amount of money from TinySeed and then exited for more than $32.5 million. 

An incredible, incredible success story for both Iran and frankly for TinySeed. Next episode is 7 0 6 0.5, where I rethought my most common startup advice. So that was the April Fool’s episode. And decide from you grumpy curmudgeons out there who hate fun and don’t like April Fools. Actually don’t like April Fools either. So I’m trolling you. That episode received the most feedback. I believe of any episode ever in the history of this podcast. Absolutely received the most feedback of any episode last year, but I’m pretty sure of all times. So let’s just plan on doing an April Fool’s episode every year, shall I don’t think I’m going to do that, but I’ll keep you guessing. Next episode, one of my favorites of the year, 729, 9 things I learned investing in more than 190 SaaS companies. I just episodes like this that can present findings or thoughts or patterns that are based on, I guess a unique viewpoint, right? 

It’s like how many people, I’m actually up to 212 SaaS companies bootstrap, mostly bootstrap SaaS companies that I’m invested in, and there just aren’t that many folks thinking about it like that. And certainly not folks thinking about it in terms of being capital efficient and independent SaaS or being mostly bootstrapped. And so I have more than nine patterns, actually. Yeah, nine things I learned. I think I had another six or seven over on the YouTube channel, so there were probably 15 or 16 that I presented, and of course the list goes on, but I enjoyed that episode. It gave me a chance to sit and reflect on those findings and to try to pull things out that you can’t get out of chat GPT, you can’t get off the internet, you can’t Google this to learn it, right? It’s like things that I’m learning, being in the trenches, doing something that’s a relatively unique experience and a unique viewpoint. 

And I think that episode turned out great. I actually got a lot of positive feedback about that. And then the fifth and final episode of my favorites of the year is 7 0 9, the seven greatest investments of my life where I talked about from top to bottom, top being the most money I’ve made from any investment, which is selling startups all the way down the list, including crypto, investing in startups, et cetera, et cetera. And kind of took some lessons away from that, but it was something that people said resonated with them so they could hear and get a sanity check because salaried employment was number, I don’t even remember, number six maybe, and running and operating profitable companies was in there, number five, maybe it was a fun episode for me to walk down memory lane, but also something that I think could potentially be helpful to people. 

So it was one of my top fives of the year. So now I want to reflect a bit on 2024, and then I’m going to look at those predictions that I made. I don’t think I did very well with these predictions. I’m going to look at ’em on the spot. I have not prepared, not prepared. So I better be prepared to probably get two out of seven or something. I dunno how many I made in total, but I want to look back in 2024. And the first thing I want to talk about is how entering 2024, I recorded an episode about how I was basically experiencing burnout, and I took three weeks off at the start of the year, something like that. It was like two to four weeks off to get around the burnout. And also we decided not to do any MicroConf locals. 

So my travel schedule was cut in half, and I was basically kind of at the edge of I don’t know that I can keep doing any of this. At the end of 2024, it was really fall through, it was through December, and you’re burning out when you start questioning everything you’re doing, and do I even want to be a startup founder anymore? Do I even want to do any of this entrepreneur stuff anymore? And that’s when I know I need to take a step back and recharge and take some time off and kind of clear the head. So that’s where I found myself. I adjusted my travel schedule and the amount of travel reduced it dramatically, probably cut out 75% of my travel. And then I asked myself, what are the things that give me life during the year? And all of this worked. I got through burnout when I came back in January from that four weeks off, two to three weeks, I actually don’t remember how long it was, but I did feel recharged and then I didn’t go back to the grind. 

I think within a few months of that actually, we went down from one YouTube video per week to one every other week, so it cut that delivery in half, and that was also more of the grindy part of my job. So releasing this podcast, it rarely, rarely feels like work. It’s something I thoroughly enjoy. It’s a creative outlet for me, and I’ve been doing it for almost 15 years now. YouTube is a little bit different. It’s more of a grind, not all the time, but it’s definitely, it feels like work a lot of the time. And so a video every week was taxing. In addition, the channel, the growth really slowed down. We kind of tapped out most of the market, not all of it. We’re at about 91,000 subscribers now, but we plateaued around 80,000, I think it was within a month or two of that January sabbatical, in essence, sabbatical, two to three weeks, no sabbatical, but two to three weeks off that we did decide, Hey, shipping one a week, just it isn’t worth the effort, the time and the money. 

And so we backed off on that and I think that also thoroughly contributed to helping me get through burnout in 2024. A couple things we shipped from MicroConf this year were MicroConf US in Atlanta. We had Ben Chestnut and Rand Fishkin were there. It was a great, great event. We did MicroConf Europe and Dubrovnik. Both of those events sold out. Europe sold out relatively quickly and was, I believe it was either the best or definitely top two or three best MicroConf Europes that we’ve produced for a number of reasons. The attendees were amazing. The talks just everything came together. The execution was outstanding. So I’m thoroughly looking forward to those two events this year. Well, I guess in 2025, we have New Orleans happening in March. You want to get tickets that it’s approaching sellout at this point, and that is microcomp.com/us and then Europe is yet to be announced also with MicroConf, we launched the State of Independence SaaS report in, I believe it was May or June, and we launched my course, the SaaS Launchpad. 

I talked about it in episode 730, but I just talked about it at the top of the episode as well. But what an effort. You figure you can record a course in a couple months and get it out, and it was like nine months of a lot of work, and as a result, the quality of that product is outstanding. So it is by far the best course I have ever produced. I’m super proud of it and I’m glad we were able to get it out. A couple more things, the SaaS Playbook, which I did a Kickstarter for, and then shipped the book and started selling it widely in, what was that, June or July of 2023. It has continued to sell very briskly and it caught in past to start small, stay small within a year, something like that. Start small, stay small, has been around for 14 years and sold about. 

My best approximation is 30,000 copies and the SaaS Playbook hit 30,000 copies in about a year, and it still continues to sell. I haven’t run the numbers in a few months, but it’s got to be at 32,000, 33,000 copies for a self-published book. That’s not bad, given that I keep so much of the revenue. If you buy directly, I keep 97% because Stripe takes some. Amazon is, I think a 70 30 split. Is that right? And then Audible takes 75%. Don’t get me started on Audible, but all that said, yeah, if you’re going to buy the audit book, buy from me directly and get the DRM free MP threes. But anyway, the SaaS playbook has continued to sell well and was a highlight of my 2024 to hit those milestones. And again, to see it hit the hands of so many people. The podcast on YouTube are free. 

Things that I’m able to put in the world, obviously funded by all the other stuff I’m doing. The Things we sell at MicroConf, the book is very close to free like Kindle or PDF. Go to SaaS playbook.com. You get a DM free pdf. It is 10 bucks and the paperback copy, I think it’s 25 or 30 on Amazon, the audio book is 12 or $13 on Audible, so it is not totally free, but it is approximately free. And given my mission to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, it feels to me and kind of always has felt this way to me, that writing books is one of the best ways to do that. And that getting a book in someone’s hand, even if it contains some information I’ve already talked about, even if people don’t read the entire book, it just codifies things in a different way than a podcast or a YouTube channel can or pontificating things on social media. 

I really do see and think books Move the Needle. I know that books have moved the needle for me in my entrepreneurial journey, and I hope that they do for you as well. If you did buy SaaS Playbook or Start Small, stay Small. Speaking of books, my Kickstarter for Exit Strategy, the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Selling Your Business Without Regret ended just a couple weeks ago. As of this episode going live, it successfully funded. I’m recording it before the end of the Kickstarter, but I do know that we have hit the goal. My best estimate, you can go check this because you’re living in the future. My best estimate is it did in maybe to 30,000, 35,000 in that range, which is a third, about a third of what the SaaS Playbook did, which I think I’m both surprised by and not surprised by it. I thought it would do a bit more, but I knew it wouldn’t do as much as the SaaS Playbook. 

SaaS Playbook is obviously just so much more broadly applicable. SaaS playbook’s also the first book that I have written and released in more than a decade with exit strategy coming basically 18 months later, I figure people are like, Ooh, man, can I really do I really want to read another book by Rob Walling? But anyways, exit Strategy Kickstarter, I am very excited about that book. We’re doing a hardcover print run that’ll be out launching to the broader world here in February, I think, or maybe March at the latest of 2025. And I am excited to see what that book does in the long run. It is an evergreen book, the Can Sell for years and years and years, and I do think it’s going to be one of those like start small, stay small and SaaS playbook that has staying power. As I already said, in 2024, I invested in my 212th SaaS company and looking ahead to 2025 TinySeed tails. 

People have been asking me, is Tiny Sea Tales coming back? Season five and six are both being recorded, five is almost done. There was a reset. Someone had to start over completely. They lost a co-founder. They had to start over with a brand new idea, and so it just reset the clock. So there was no story arc and I didn’t want to end it with a question mark. And so we’ve just kind of waited and waited and recorded less frequently in order to make, I believe we’ll have nine episodes in Tiny Sea Tale Season five, but we are recording episode nine. Well, it may already be recorded by the time you hear this, and I think we will be pushing that out weekly on this podcast feed as we typically do on Thursday. So you get a bonus episode each week. And it’s cool because it’s heavily edited. 

It’s got voiceovers for me and it has the music telling the story, and it’s, I think in this case it might be an 18 month journey told over the course of 9 25 minute episodes. It’s a neat kind of NPR Gimlet media type production. At least that’s what we aspire to within time constraints and budget constraints. And that will be coming out here in probably January or February of 2025. And then season six is in the works. And so who knows? I don’t like to promise that, but maybe the fall of 25 if we get it done. Alright, so last thing for this episode, and I’m going to say stick around till next week because I’m going to talk about my predictions for 2025, but as we wrap this episode, I want to revisit the predictions I made for 2024. The first is I commented that there would be opportunity in vertical SaaS and I would say, ding, ding, ding. 

Heck yes. I’m still seeing that the companies were funding with TinySeed, the folks I’m seeing in Microcom succeeding. Obviously you can still succeed with horizontal and orthogonal SaaS. Vertical SaaS is a great place to be if you are a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrap founder. The second prediction was that SaaS will continue to grow in emerging markets. I’m going to give myself a win on that. Similar, the application volume at TinySeed of emerging Markets SaaS and seeing the ones that we have funded in Latin America that are focused on the Latin American market or other emerging markets like India, et cetera. They have some unique headwinds in terms of pricing. They have unique advantages in terms of how cheap it is to market in those spaces. So giving myself a win here, SaaS will continue to grow in emerging markets, and I’m seeing it this year and probably just predict it for 2025. 

It doesn’t count. I can’t keep predicting it if it already happened. My third prediction was that Twitter would change hands in 2024. Obviously not. That’s a fail unless it happens in the next two weeks before this episode goes live. My prediction is a big fat zero goose egg. I’m going to roll this one forward. Usually I predict things about two, three or four years before they actually happened. When I ran back through all the predictions since we started, which I think was 2012 or 13, which was the first year we did them, a lot of times the prediction that I made would come true two or three years later. So it was early, and I think that’s the case here. Twitter changes hands in 2024. No, it did not. That is a fail, but I think it will be true here coming up. My fourth prediction was that subscription fatigue will have little impact on the adoption of B2B SaaS. 

I’m going to give myself a half point on this one. B2B SaaS is starting to see headwinds. I think it’s because of the economy, the uncertainty of the recent election of the fears of a recession. I think subscription fatigue maybe. So that’s why I’m giving myself a half. I guess I am kind of inconclusive on this one. So half point, my fifth prediction was that no code and low code will undergo professionalization, meaning things like source control, version control. We could roll things back and forward better debugging unit tests, and that is a fail. This is something that I do think is going to happen eventually. I just think I’m early. I want this to happen. I want no-code and low-code to be more manageable. And back in the day, 20 years ago when we were writing code code and we didn’t, a lot of us didn’t use version control and we didn’t write unit tests. 

It’s just we still got it done, but it makes it brittle. It makes it harder to maintain. That’s where I think no code and low code are heading. And I think there are some very interesting opportunities in the professionalization of no-code and low-code. My fifth prediction was about AI and about whether it was just hype or not, because people were saying, do you even still use chat GPT anymore? AI is going to take all the developer jobs and folks even saying it was kind of a fad. So I said, no, it’s going to stick around. It is going to become ubiquitous. It’s going to continue to improve productivity. I said, AI is not going to take a bunch of developer jobs, and I don’t think that it has. I said, AI is going to continue to help devs build faster. And this was before Cursor came out, ding ding, like yes, yes, I talked about there would be real productivity gains from ai, not just for devs. 

I think that’s certainly been true on my team and word on the street is other folks are experiencing that. So I would say it was right on this one, although I kind of baked a bunch of predictions into this one just about AI in general. I just gave my thoughts of where it was headed. And so there wasn’t a concrete thing aside from things I’ve just read off to you. One of the things I said is that non-obvious AI apps will start to come out. The obvious AI things are, hey, describe something in habit, create an image or a video. And I was figuring that more non-obvious, less obvious AI apps would start to get built as the obvious ones all kind of got scooped up. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think that that happened. So this is where I kind of like, I don’t know. 

Do I get three quarters of a point? I think I was mostly right on this prediction that I am bullish on AI on the fact that it’s going to help us all be more productive, that I think it’s going to stick around and is not a fad, and that I think it will help devs build faster, which won’t necessarily remove dev jobs. It’ll just help us build more software because man, we have a need to build software faster. Or what my last prediction was, I think Stripe will go public in 2024, and that did not happen. That is a goose egg. This is one of those I’m going to roll in 2025. It’s inevitable. And eventually, you know what a stopped clock is, right? Twice a day, and I think stripe’s going to go public soon. And so I will take a goose egg for 2024, and likely you’ll hear this again In next week’s episode. I want to give you my predictions, my bootstrapper slash related predictions for 2025. So thanks for joining me again this week for a look back at 2024, revisiting some key concepts, my favorite episodes, some other happenings, and revisiting those predictions. It’s great to have you here this week, every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 745.