March 16, 2022 • 30 mins
‘’The biggest risk is not can you build this? The biggest risk is that no one cares. So how do you validate that someone will care? And how do you validate that someone will be willing to pay for what you are selling?’’ – Rob Walling.
Calling all bootstrap founders! Joining us on today’s masterclass on launching and growing a business is special guest Rob Walling. Rob is an admired serial entrepreneur, investor, author, and host of the popular podcast ‘Startups for the Rest of Us’. Since 2005, Rob has guided thousands of startup founders through his widespread books, recordings, articles, and MicroConf discussions.
In this episode, Rob kindly lends us his time to openly share his experience of finding people who care when starting and growing a business. Rob also reveals how to communicate with your customers and unpacks the magic within collecting customer feedback. This episode may seem short and sweet but trust us when we say it is stuffed with brilliant insights and actionable nuggets of advice for you to take away straight from the master of startups. Key points throughout the discussion include:
- An introduction to Rob Walling.
- When is the right time for building an audience?
- The art of selling: warm VS cold leads.
- Business development and the magic of customer feedback.
- The early day selection process: unlocking product-market fit.
- Smashing sales as an introvert.
- The key to capturing clients and communicating effectively.
- Sustainable marketing in a tech-savvy world.
- How to avoid an unprofitable business.
- Book recommendations for business builders.
- Rob’s top two sales techniques for obtaining your first 10 customers.
- Why a landing page is a must!
- The rhythm of business growth from beginning to take-off.
Connect with Rob Walling:
https://twitter.com/robwalling
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robwalling/
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/about
Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy:
https://www.first10podcast.com
https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/
Resources:
Book: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
http://momtestbook.com/
Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/Traction
Book: How the World Sees You by Sally Hogshead.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/how-the-world-sees-you
Book: Fascinate by Sally Hogshead.
https://www.howtofascinate.com/store/books
Check out my podcast partners!
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Robert Walling (00:01):
The biggest risk is not can you build this? The
biggest risk is that no onecares. So how do you validate
that someone will care? And howdo you validate that someone
will be willing to pay for whatyou are selling? And how do you
validate that you can reach themin a sustainable fashion?
Conor McCarthy (00:21):
Hello, and welcome to season four of the
First 10 podcast. I'm your host,Conor McCarthy, and I help
people start and grow theirbusinesses. I do that through
joint ventures, collaborations,coaching and online workshops.
In each episode of this podcast,I interview business builders
about the early days of startinga business, about how they found
their first 10 customers and gotoff the ground so that you could
(00:43):
learn what works and whatdoesn't. Check out my website
Conormccarthy.me for moredetails. My guest today is Rob
Walling. Many of you mayrecognize Rob's name as he has
created some really wellregarded businesses and projects
over the last few years. Hestarted and sold Drip, an email
marketing software platform. Hethen went on to create
(01:03):
Microconf, which is a conferencefocused on SaaS
entrepreneurship, and also TinySeed, the first startup
accelerator designed forbootstrappers. Rob also hosts
one of the most popular and longrunning podcasts for non venture
startups, called Startups forthe rest of us. And somehow in
there, Rob has found the time toalso write three books,
(01:24):
including one of the cornerstoneworks on bootstrapping startups,
called Start small, stay small.
This episode is short and sweet.
And Rob really has a ton toshare from his extensive
experience starting and growingbusinesses. We cover how a
simple landing page might be allyou need to get started on your
next big idea, how to talk tocustomers before building
(01:45):
anything, the power of warmemails and the importance of
distribution. Lastly, Rob hassome really great advice on the
thing you may not want to do onyour next sales call, as well as
two key things you need to findyour first customers. Please do
enjoy this episode with RobWalling and thanks for
listening.
(02:07):
First of all, Rob, thank youvery, very much for taking the
time to be with us here today.
Robert Walling (02:11):
It is my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me
on.
Conor McCarthy (02:13):
Do you want to just tell the listeners what
exactly it is that you do at themoment?
Robert Walling (02:19):
I do three things. I whisper that because
it's it's a lot and I tellfounders, you should really
focus but you'll once I describethese three things you'll see
they are actually focused on thesame thing. So the first is I've
I've had a podcast aboutbootstrapping startups for 11
years now no 12 years, it'scalled Startup for the rest of
us, about to hit the 600thepisode and that is to help
(02:41):
entrepreneurs and founders. Thesecond thing is Microconf, which
is an online and in personcommunity for bootstrapped
startup founders, as well asTiny Seed, which is the first
startup accelerator aimed atbootstrap startup founders. So
you'll see that the mission ofall those three is aligned. And
I of course, have great, youknow, great teams that we've
(03:03):
hired to help us run that.
Conor McCarthy (03:06):
It's yeah, you you, you spread yourself across
a lot of different domains. Butbootstrappers and the kind of I
suppose the non VC people areyour they're close to your
heart.
Robert Walling (03:17):
It's my jam, bootstrapped and mostly
bootstrap founders is how Iphrase it.
Conor McCarthy (03:21):
Okay, nice.
Nice. So yeah, so this, thispodcast is all about starting
off, it's the first 10customers. So I mean, you can
jump into any one of what youjust mentioned, like in jump
into the conference, or yourseed fund. Or you can go even
further back. Do you wanna tellus about a time that you started
something off, the the earlydays of a project?
Robert Walling (03:41):
Yeah. So that the interesting thing is a lot
of what I've done, has beenbased on building an audience.
And that's, that's good andthat's also not good in the
sense of, I don't want to tell Inever want to come on a show and
tell people you should build anaudience first before you do it.
Because I for info products andcourses, hey, build an audience,
(04:04):
you should, if you're going togo and build a software company,
SaaS company, and you don'talready have an audience, I
don't think it's worth the timefor you to go out and do that.
So. But if you have one, which Idid from blogging, and then
podcasting, you shouldabsolutely use that as an unfair
advantage. And so the first 10customers about last SAS app I
built was called drip, and it isstill around, I sold it in 2016.
(04:27):
It's an email service provider.
And it can be with MailChimp.
And you know, Infusionsoft andsuch, the first 10 customers for
that were me basically warmemailing is what I call it. It's
it's emailing people that I knewwho I thought could use drip.
And before we wrote a line ofcode, I sent out these emails
(04:48):
saying I'm thinking aboutbuilding this thing. It's like
MailChimp, but it's different.
If we built it, would you thinkthat'd be well, you know, would
you be willing to pay $100 amonth for that? And I emailed
actually 17, it was likefounders that I knew. It was a
couple kind of course creators.
It was a blogger. And I got 11yeses on that. 11 yeses. And
(05:08):
then I said, Let's do it, that'svalidation enough for me to
start, you know, basicallyhaving a developer write code.
Conor McCarthy (05:14):
That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, the,
at the time, what was the marketfor, like email service
providers, like emailnewsletters, what is that like?
Robert Walling (05:25):
It was 2012 when we were doing this, is that
right? Yeah, it was, we brokeground on code in December 2012.
So it would have been the fallof 2012 that I was doing it. So
it was basically MailChimp isthe 900 pound gorilla and Aweber
was the info product. So likestartups use MailChimp. And
there were still I mean, therewere 100 200 DSPs already. But
(05:47):
there was no automation, youknow, now everything has like
this marketing automation. Theonly tools that did that were
these expensive tools likeInfusionsoft Pardot Marketo
silverpop, I think HubSpotdidn't have automation in their
email yet, either. So that wasit. There was no ConvertKit
there was no drip, obviously,because we were about to build
(06:07):
it. And it was, I was kind ofcrazy to go into the space. It
was it was a bit of an accident.
I mean, basically, I had anotherSaaS app that was a longtail
keyword tool SS subscriptionservice. And, there was no
OptinMonster there was no sumoas well, because that was the
thing that we really wanted wasan email capture widget that
(06:28):
could appear I wanted to dropJavaScript into a footer and
have a widget appear on everypage of the website, there was
nothing that did that. Like ifthat's how crazy is 10 years
ago. So I had my developer buildthat for hittail. And we had a
couple 100 pages. And suddenly,you know, you have this pop, it
was a little toaster pop upwidget. And it worked great. It
really, really increased thenumber of emails that we got, we
(06:49):
wrote a little mini course. Andso then I said, Why don't we
productize this because no oneelse is doing it. And so we
forked out, that's all it was,was just email capture and a
like a secret email sequence,then, like a campaign tied to
it. You couldn't even send likeone time broadcast to this list.
It was purely the whole tool wascapture, send a sequence? And at
the time, it was it was a verysimple tool.
Conor McCarthy (07:13):
Mmhmm. And do you remember beyond those, those
warm leads, do you remembergetting the first cold leads, I
suppose. What was that processlike?
Robert Walling (07:22):
Yeah, I do.
Basically what I did, because weit took us about took my dev
about six months to build thatproduct. And so I had six months
where I was still working on theold product, you know, because
that was throwing given thecash, giving us the cash to
basically build this one. And Iwas doing my typical podcast
interviews, where I go on showsI was, you know, I don't know
doing written interviews, Iactually ran some Facebook ads
(07:45):
just for fun. So I set up alanding page. And originally it
was it get drip.com and I wasbasically just every podcast
interview I got on, I wouldmention Drip, oh, yeah, so
what's what's your new project,I'm working on this thing. It's
called Drip. It's I'm kind oftrying to, you know, they have a
real unique take on emailcapture, and blah, blah, blah.
And then yeah, there'd be 10, 2030, people show up on that email
list. And then I was bored. Andso I ran Facebook ads for the
(08:09):
same thing, I had had a bunch ofsuccess with Facebook ads with
the prior SaaS app. And so I didthat and got that list, that
email list, kind of a launchlist up to about 3400 3400
people 3400. And that was a nicelittle asset to have, not only
for the launch itself, but alongthe way, I started emailing
screenshots of that, hey, thisis what's gonna do. And people
(08:31):
started giving feedback of like,this is great, or I don't
understand what this does, or isit going to have? And then I
started doing questions, is thisgonna have automations in it?
And at the time, I was like,what are those? I didn't know
what I know, all I ever used wasMailChimp and Aweber. They
didn't have automations builtin. So then people start
explaining to me, oh, there'sthis really expensive tool,
there are these really expensivetools. Infusionsoft, Marketo,
(08:54):
Pardot, you know, that do allthis Ontraport was another one
that do this complicated stuff.
But they're like, 400 500 amonth and up. So if you add it
just yet, it became reallyinteresting, where the feedback
loop so that launch list wasn'tjust, oh, I can sell to them. It
was actually cut. It was acustomer development. It was
(09:15):
really powerful.
Conor McCarthy (09:17):
That is, what an amazing I was gonna say, an
amazing resource. I mean, theywere customers, but the feedback
is, I mean, that's that probablyguided every decision from then
on.
Robert Walling (09:28):
Kind of Yeah.
And I eventually sent, I startedgetting some individual feedback
like that. And then I sent thewhole list again, 3400 people, a
survey that I later dissected onmy podcast, I went through every
question and talked about whatpeople answered, but I kind of
asked like, what's your role ata company? You know, are you
like a solo founder, asolopreneur, info product, SaaS
founder, you know, I just kindof wanted to know and that's
like, what do you currently usefor email marketing? What do you
(09:50):
hope Drip will do and I had someaw esome choices and with an
other and like it gave me a goodlens on A - which market should
we focus on first becauseeventually we want to get
everybody but you can't youcan't do that from the start.
And also, then what should webuild first? Because it's so so
hard to decide what features tobuild in the early days.
Conor McCarthy (10:09):
Yeah and that I mean, two things you said there,
yeah, deciding what features tobuild? And also, you can't and
shouldn't try to sell toeverybody. Yeah. How do you I
mean, you interact with so manybootstrappers and entrepreneurs
and founders, etc? How, how doesthat conversation go down? When
someone comes to you and goes,this idea? It's gonna be big,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna geteverybody on board. What's the
(10:30):
conversation like?
Robert Walling (10:31):
Well, usually I say, Oh, how do you know that?
how do you know that? Right?
Who? And then it whatever theanswer. It's like, well, who
have you talked to? Like, do youalready have an audience in that
space? And if it's yes, thenlike, okay, cool. Yeah. How big
is it? And how have youcommunicated that? What's been
the feedback? Or if you don'thave an audience in that space?
Who have you talked to in thatspace? Have you tried running
ads to a cold landing page, someproducts, you know, that smoke
test is still a thing. Otherfolks, it's just a lot of, I
(10:54):
encourage them, I think youshould have a lot of
conversations with potentialcustomers and see what they say.
And these can be face to faceconversations, they can be zoom,
they can be email, I pre soldthose 11 you know, drip
customers via email never did acall with any of them. And in
the end, the question I oftenget is how many of those 11
converted to paying customersand it was less than half? If it
(11:16):
was like five? Everybody triedit out the way they said they
would? And then it just didn'tdo? You know, a lot of times
people would say, Well, I cankind of cobble this together
with MailChimp, plus this J Sform thing. I don't know what I
want to, you know, pay for thison a monthly basis. And so that
was great feedback for me oflike, okay, we haven't built
something valuable enough yet.
(11:36):
And that's where we kept adding,you know, more features and
automation. And that'seventually when we hit product
market fit.
Conor McCarthy (11:41):
Do you find there's a kind of a reticence?
Or what's the word? You know, ifyou were to say to someone who's
about to launch a business, orhas an idea, and they come to
you that they need to go out andtalk, talk to people just and
have conversations withpotential customers or with
anybody? You find people arealways up for that? Are they a
bit like, I don't know, thatfeels weird.
Robert Walling (12:01):
Yeah, some people say it feels weird,
especially like softwaredevelopers, you know, and more
introverts. I'm an introvert,I'm not a salesperson at all. So
me, that's why my conversationswere via email, because I prefer
for them not to be in person. Idon't like rejection. And so
yeah, people do have resistanceto it. And then that part of
that conversation is, well,here's how to do it without
(12:22):
feeling like, you know, like,feeling like you're putting
pressure on someone or feelingawkward is you just say, look,
I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, orI am a founder, I'm a developer,
or I'm a whatever, I do my dayjob, but I'm also trying to
launch this thing on the side tohelp insert their role here, you
know, it's to help HR execs,it's to help hair salons, it's
(12:44):
to help, whatever, I havenothing to sell you. I've not
built anything. I just wonder ifyou know, I could have 15
minutes of your time. I wonderif you could answer a couple
questions. That it's that kindof thing, right? I've heard that
people ranging from offering,you know, $50, amazon giftcard,
or a Starbucks card for eachconversation, I heard that when
Jason Cohen did this for WPEngine, his now literally
(13:07):
billion dollar web hostingplatform. He wanted to talk to a
bunch of agencies andconsultants. And so he basically
said, I'll pay your hourly ratefor an hour. Right? So if they
want to charge him 150 - 200 anhour, he just said, I'll pay
that I don't I'm not gonna wasteyour time. I genuinely want it,
you know? Yeah, so it depends onthe resources you have, of
course.
Conor McCarthy (13:28):
I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that
there's some actionable andinsightful advice that you can
take out to your business,helping you identify and create
those first 10 customers is whatI do. So if you like what you
hear on this podcast and wantmore information, including a
bunch of free resources on howto find your first 10 customers
and grow your business, checkout first10podcast.com That's 10
(13:50):
one, zero, or find me on Twitter@thefirst10pod. Now, you
probably hear what I'm about tosay on every podcast you listen
to and it makes a really bigdifference to the show. If you
find this podcast in any wayuseful or enjoyable, I'd be so
grateful if you left me a reviewon iTunes, it really does make a
big difference in terms of otherpeople discovering the podcast.
(14:12):
Also, if you leave a review, youwill get to see your name and
the review in lights. What I'lldo is I'll design your words and
post them online, tagging youand your project along with it.
I know it's a pretty sweet deal!Okay, let's get on with the
show. If there were cardinalsins or warning signs for when
people you know, tried to launcha SaaS just for, for example,
(14:35):
like you know, having domainknowledge really, really key
talking to customers is super,super important. Are there any
of the things that you wouldlook out for or would advise for
or against?
Robert Walling (14:46):
Yeah, domain knowledge is really nice to
have, but it's not required. Ihave seen we have several
successful companies that wehave funded, where the founder
was purely a software developerand stumbled into an idea in a
space, they had no relation towhatsoever, one founder made 70
cold calls before he figured outthat there was a need for
(15:07):
software in the senior placementspace where it's just where, you
know, if my mom's getting older,I'm going to place her in a
senior assisted living facility,there are senior placement
agents who I can call andthey're like a broker, and they
know all the local things, andthey know all the local, you
know, local businesses, orwhatever they do the placement,
(15:27):
the actual living facilities.
And so there was like, no goodsoftware for them. And so the
software developer built that,right. So domain knowledge isn't
required, and he's havingsuccess. There's a handful of
others. But it is, to me, it's aleg up, if you haven't right,
it's a perfect thing, I thinkthat the talking to customers
thing is something that so fewpeople do. And in addition, even
when they do it, they often doit wrong, where people will kind
(15:49):
of try to be nice or tell youwhat you want to hear, which you
should ask are3 the questionsthat are in this book, the Mom
Test, where they're not leadingquestions like so here's some
mock ups, what do you think?
Because no one wants to be ajerk, right? But what you do is
you say, this idea I have doesthis, it solves this problem? Do
you have that problem? or whathave you done to solve this
(16:12):
problem in the past? You know,and you start to get a feeling
of not only do they need it, buthow badly do they need it? So I
think those are, those are somebig ones. The other one, I mean,
I used to launch all my, Ilaunched a book, conference,
several apps, with just alanding page where I didn't want
(16:34):
to write the book, I didn't wantto book a conference venue. I
didn't want to build an app, youknow, but I can build a landing
page and the accelerator tinyseed was a landing page when we
launched it. And all it saidwas, you know, it's the first
startup accelerator designed forbootstrappers. And here's our
plan. And if you're interested,this is me, you know, we really
want to rock the world orwhatever, and and then it had an
(16:58):
email capture, and it doesn'twork for everything. And email
capture doesn't, it's like, oh,I got 500 emails, it's a
successful idea. That's nottrue, either. What we then do
is, you know, you then gothrough and you have
conversations and figure thatout. But before I wrote a word
of my book, I put up a landingpage and I blogged about it,
tweeted about it, you know, gotit on Hacker News, and wanted to
(17:18):
gauge was their interest? CouldI sell at least a few 100 copies
of this book to make itworthwhile?
Conor McCarthy (17:23):
Yeah, I think that's a smart thing to do.
Because again, there's, there'sa, probably a fallacy of build
something. And spend money andtime creating the thing. Without
actually just asking people it'sit's interesting, you know,
asking your audience, yourpeople, your friends, your
relations, your customers like,right? Is this something you
want to see in the world
Robert Walling (17:41):
The biggest risk is not, can you build this?
Conor McCarthy (17:42):
So that's, that's a really interesting
That's a yes, you can you canbuild this, that's not the hard
part, the biggest risk is thatno one cares. So how do you
validate that someone will care?
And how do you validate thatsomeone will be willing to pay
for what you are selling? Andhow do you validate that you can
reach them in a sustainablefashion? Those are really the
(18:04):
three things that are difficultabout starting.
point. They're like reachingpeople in a sustainable fashion.
Could you just double click onthat? And just describe what
that looks like? In the world?
Robert Walling (18:19):
Yeah. So imagine you built an amazing piece of
software for, you know, forsenior placement firms, for
example. And it solves aproblem. Absolutely I product
market fit, because it doesexactly what they need, and
they're willing to pay the pricethat I want. But imagine that
they're not online. None of themare online. And, you know,
(18:40):
imagine none of them haveemails, and none of them have
phones. That's bizarre, butlike, so I can't reach any of
these customers. This businessdoesn't work, you know, but I
know they have phones. So maybeI'm cold calling. And I do know,
they have email, so maybe I'mcold emailing or cold outreach,
or do they attend events. Somaybe I'm going to those events,
maybe I'm sponsoring thoseevents, maybe I'm trying to
speak those events, it's thatpeople don't think through these
(19:01):
distribution channels inadvance. They think I can build
it. And maybe I, maybe Ivalidated that these people need
it. But if they're really hardand really expensive to find and
to close, you can build abusiness that is unprofitable.
Be even with a good product, ifpeople are really hard to reach
(19:22):
and, you know, close sales, inessence, and that's why a lot of
their early, you know, I comefrom the tech world SaaS world,
not the venture funded space,but a lot of bootstrapping. And
a lot of the early SaaS that wascoming out of bootstrappers was
stuff that we knew about becausewe were online. It was for
designers, it was fordevelopers, it was for founders,
(19:43):
because all of them were onlinein the mid 2000s. It isn't until
now that a lot of this otherstuff like for construction, you
know that there's a CRM for homeimprovement contractors that we
funded and it's like, I don'tthink that would have worked 10
years ago, I just don't thinkenough of them were on line, you
know? But it's 2022 now andthere's a bit more, there's a
bit more, I guess, techsavviness, you know, bit more
(20:07):
people looking for that lookingfor these solutions similar to
that senior placement?
Conor McCarthy (20:13):
Like that. Yeah, there's just to switch gears
slightly when with the first 10customers, or the first 100, or
whatever, there's, there's aheavy sales element, let's say.
Do you have any sales techniquesas to stronger sales tips that
you give out to founders, orjust ways to go about the the
art of selling?
Robert Walling (20:35):
I do and I actually steal these from Einar
Vollset, he's my co founder atTiny Seed because he's a good
sales guy and he's done a lot ofsales. And he says think about
sales, like you are a, anexpensive, high paid consultant,
except you're not getting paid,you're getting paid in the sale,
but not, you know, actual hourlyrate. Think of yourself as that,
(20:57):
that you're basically trulytrying to understand what does
this customer need? And what isthe best solution for them. And
to that end, when I used to sellDrip, which is email service
provider, I used to get on somecalls. And I would say, You know
what, MailChimp is actually abetter fit for you. I don't you
don't need Drip, you know, and Iwould just send them off to a
competitor. So I think that's agood one. I think the other one
is that a sales call is not ademo of your software, they
(21:21):
don't want to see the settings,they don't want to see the
checkboxes, what they want tosee is how does this solve my
problem? So the first severalminutes should just be what,
what problem do you hope thissolves? What problem do you have
today? You know, what do youknow about the software? What do
you think it does? How do youthink it will help you? And then
you kind of go from there to belike, cool. So instead of
running through the whole app,I'm just going to show you these
(21:41):
three screens that are going tosolve exactly the problems that
you said.
Conor McCarthy (21:45):
That's genius, because I have been demoed, I
have been demo'd alot, whereit's like, yeah, hey, sign up
for demo and you just get a verystandard issue.
Robert Walling (21:54):
It's lazy. It's lazy and it's easy. And you can
just get a call you can paysomeone minimum wage to demo
through your software. Butthat's that's not how that's not
the how to best do it. You know,if you get if you get really
well trained salespeople, they,they go after it, they
personalize it and try tounderstand the customer's needs.
Conor McCarthy (22:11):
Apart from the Mom Test, are there any books
that you recommend to earlystage business builders?
Robert Walling (22:18):
I like the book traction by Gabriel Weinberg,
which is a it's not the one byGino Wickman. Net, that's about
Entrepreneurial OperatingSystem. It's same title, but it
is about marketing approaches.
And it has like 21 chapters. Andeach chapter is a marketing
approach that you can considerfor your business. And it gives
you some they interviewedsomeone for each chapter, and it
gives you some criteria of whento use each one or when to
(22:41):
consider using each one.
Conor McCarthy (22:45):
And inside of, inside of a business context, I
suppose. Are there any books orresources that have helped you
understand people more?
Robert Walling (22:53):
There's two books. Well, this is even still
it one's called fascinate. Andthe other is called how the
world sees you that same author,it's Sally Hogshead. And they're
both about it's a lot in thecontext of business but it's
about, fascinate is the sevendifferent elements that a brand
(23:18):
or a person can have and leaninginto one or more of these makes
you unique and intriguing. Andthen how the world sees you is
you read it then you take apersonality test and it tells
you which of the seven you haveyou know or which of the seven
you should lean into or arenaturally yours. And so it's in
both a personal and a businesscontext, right of like, they
talk about how Jägermeister hasyou know that awful tasting, you
(23:40):
know, alcohol, but there butshe's like, but that's that's
why everyone talks about itbecause it's awful tasting. And
that's the there's like anintrigue of like if you're told
it tastes awful, you want totaste it. So intrigue is like
one of the seven. And then shewas talking about how I don't
know if you know there's liketrust right of like the the
stalwart right of like, I don'tknow, GM, maybe a, you know,
(24:01):
automaker, maybe they havetrust. I don't know, but it's
that kind of stuff. Is that whatyou meant about? Are you meaning
more like psychology of people?
Conor McCarthy (24:09):
Oh, like anything that isn't, you know?
Yeah, just a straight upbusiness book. But they're two
really good examples. That's agreat title how the world sees
you. That's an, yeah I betterpick up a copy of that. As a
last question, I always ask myguests, what would you say to
someone who's going out to findtheir first 10 customers today?
(24:30):
What would you say to that?
Robert Walling (24:32):
I would do two things. I've done these two
things over and over and over.
And they've worked for me. So Iwould absolutely 100% have some
type of landing page with sometype of email capture on it. And
as you go through anythingyou're doing online, if you have
a chance to do it in a nonsalesy way, the non crappy way.
You mentioned it, you know,you're in you're answering a
(24:55):
question on Quora, and it'slike, oh, this happens to be
real full disclosure. I'm goingon this project, so I have kind
of an inside, look at this rightbing! drop your link, if you're
on Twitter, do a little bit ofbuilding in public, hey, I'm
working on this project, it'spretty cool. But if you're
interested to keeping up withit, head over here. If you're on
a podcast, if you just whereveryou are, you're kind of you
either casually mention it, oryou intentionally, you mention
(25:17):
it. And then the other thingthat I would be doing is, I want
to figure out where my customershang out. Sometimes, I'll give
you an example. I am not only inthe business world, but I
collect signatures, autographs,and I collect from like, you
know, I've an AlexanderHamilton, for example, like old,
you know, it's not modernpeople. It's like, oh, and I
(25:37):
collect expensive comic books,right? So I'm in these groups of
people talking about comicbooks. And so if you would 10
comic book collectors, you wouldwant to be in these groups, they
are on Facebook, almost all ofthem. And then there's one forum
on this grading website calledCGC. So I literally know all of
them. There's only like, youknow, 10 of them. So if you
(26:00):
wanted to do that you would goand participate. But if I was
going to go sell b2b, if Iwanted to sell email marketing,
you know, ESPs, probably notmany Facebook groups. They're
probably hanging out in privateslack groups, or in communities
like Microconf has almost 3000founders in our online
community. It's called MicroconfConnect happens to be a Slack
(26:20):
channel, but it could just be aforum, right? The software
itself doesn't matter. But if Iwanted to talk to aerialists, my
wife does aerial circus stuffwith slings and hammocks, and
she does trapeze. They're all onInstagram. So I would if I
wanted to sell them, I would geton Instagram, I would start
following them, I would startinteracting, you know what I
(26:41):
mean? So if you're gonna findyour first 10 customers, where
are they now? Where are theyalready? Or maybe a lot of them
probably listen to podcast, orwhat blogs do they read? Are
they on Hacker News? Or are theyon, you know, growthhackers.com
or are they on Pinterest? That'swhat I would be thinking through
as they're already gatheredsomewhere. Everyone gathers
right even my brother runs aconstruction firm, and says
(27:01):
construction is so old school,you know, so slow to adopt. And
there are places where they hangout. I guarantee you there's
some online and then there's alot offline. There's in person
events, they have trade pubs,they have trade magazines, and
that kind of stuff. So that'swhat I would say is I would have
a landing page and then I wouldfigure out where they hang out
and then I would go be among thepeople in a non douchey, non
(27:22):
salesy way.
Conor McCarthy (27:28):
That is a great answer. Sorry, I realized there
was one question I forgot to askyou earlier, if you don't mind
me popping it in now. It's aboutso the first 10 customers is one
stage of the journey. And Ithink you meet a lot of
bootstrappers, who go beyondthat early kind of struggling to
get the first customers and theyreach a place of Oh, actually,
this isn't working. What is themain difference after that
(27:51):
inflection point of okay, we'redoing okay, we're confident we
can bring in some more sales,what changes? What's the main
thing that changes do you find?
Robert Walling (28:00):
Usually, it goes from spearfishing, which is one
at a time just dragging a mandown in this really laborious
process, to oh, oh, we kind ofnow start having a brand and a
little bit of recognition. Andoh, wow, our brand is getting
(28:20):
mentioned in the Facebook groupswithout me being in there.
There's a little bit of word ofmouth from existing customers.
And we've, the product is betternow. And even our marketing copy
is better, you know, just yourwhole process there gets better.
And oftentimes you find asustainable, sustainable channel
where it's no longer I'm lookingin the groups, it's, oh, we
(28:40):
figured that we found out thatwe can run ads on Instagram,
Facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords, andone of these gets us, you know,
10 leads a week at a cost thatwe can afford. Or we've started
writing content, it's gettingpicked up and now we get 100
uniques you know, from Googleand that's turning into five
leads a day or whatever. Sosomething clicks with that where
(29:04):
there's it goes fromspearfishing to, I think it's
what they call it net fishingwith a net in essence, right
where you're doing a whole groupat once because they're they're
coming at you faster.
Conor McCarthy (29:13):
Hmm. Okay. I love that. Rob, thank you so
much. You've got so much deepexperience with so many people
and through your own personalexperience. Thank you for
sharing all that. All thatwisdom today with us. I will of
course include links tomicroconf and all your projects
in the in the shownotes forpeople to check out. And yeah,
(29:33):
thank you very much for forsharing your time today.
Robert Walling (29:36):
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on.
The biggest risk is not can you build this? The
biggest risk is that no onecares. So how do you validate
that someone will care? And howdo you validate that someone
will be willing to pay for whatyou are selling? And how do you
validate that you can reach themin a sustainable fashion?
Conor McCarthy (00:21):
Hello, and welcome to season four of the
First 10 podcast. I'm your host,Conor McCarthy, and I help
people start and grow theirbusinesses. I do that through
joint ventures, collaborations,coaching and online workshops.
In each episode of this podcast,I interview business builders
about the early days of startinga business, about how they found
their first 10 customers and gotoff the ground so that you could
(00:43):
learn what works and whatdoesn't. Check out my website
Conormccarthy.me for moredetails. My guest today is Rob
Walling. Many of you mayrecognize Rob's name as he has
created some really wellregarded businesses and projects
over the last few years. Hestarted and sold Drip, an email
marketing software platform. Hethen went on to create
(01:03):
Microconf, which is a conferencefocused on SaaS
entrepreneurship, and also TinySeed, the first startup
accelerator designed forbootstrappers. Rob also hosts
one of the most popular and longrunning podcasts for non venture
startups, called Startups forthe rest of us. And somehow in
there, Rob has found the time toalso write three books,
(01:24):
including one of the cornerstoneworks on bootstrapping startups,
called Start small, stay small.
This episode is short and sweet.
And Rob really has a ton toshare from his extensive
experience starting and growingbusinesses. We cover how a
simple landing page might be allyou need to get started on your
next big idea, how to talk tocustomers before building
(01:45):
anything, the power of warmemails and the importance of
distribution. Lastly, Rob hassome really great advice on the
thing you may not want to do onyour next sales call, as well as
two key things you need to findyour first customers. Please do
enjoy this episode with RobWalling and thanks for
listening.
(02:07):
First of all, Rob, thank youvery, very much for taking the
time to be with us here today.
Robert Walling (02:11):
It is my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me
on.
Conor McCarthy (02:13):
Do you want to just tell the listeners what
exactly it is that you do at themoment?
Robert Walling (02:19):
I do three things. I whisper that because
it's it's a lot and I tellfounders, you should really
focus but you'll once I describethese three things you'll see
they are actually focused on thesame thing. So the first is I've
I've had a podcast aboutbootstrapping startups for 11
years now no 12 years, it'scalled Startup for the rest of
us, about to hit the 600thepisode and that is to help
(02:41):
entrepreneurs and founders. Thesecond thing is Microconf, which
is an online and in personcommunity for bootstrapped
startup founders, as well asTiny Seed, which is the first
startup accelerator aimed atbootstrap startup founders. So
you'll see that the mission ofall those three is aligned. And
I of course, have great, youknow, great teams that we've
(03:03):
hired to help us run that.
Conor McCarthy (03:06):
It's yeah, you you, you spread yourself across
a lot of different domains. Butbootstrappers and the kind of I
suppose the non VC people areyour they're close to your
heart.
Robert Walling (03:17):
It's my jam, bootstrapped and mostly
bootstrap founders is how Iphrase it.
Conor McCarthy (03:21):
Okay, nice.
Nice. So yeah, so this, thispodcast is all about starting
off, it's the first 10customers. So I mean, you can
jump into any one of what youjust mentioned, like in jump
into the conference, or yourseed fund. Or you can go even
further back. Do you wanna tellus about a time that you started
something off, the the earlydays of a project?
Robert Walling (03:41):
Yeah. So that the interesting thing is a lot
of what I've done, has beenbased on building an audience.
And that's, that's good andthat's also not good in the
sense of, I don't want to tell Inever want to come on a show and
tell people you should build anaudience first before you do it.
Because I for info products andcourses, hey, build an audience,
(04:04):
you should, if you're going togo and build a software company,
SaaS company, and you don'talready have an audience, I
don't think it's worth the timefor you to go out and do that.
So. But if you have one, which Idid from blogging, and then
podcasting, you shouldabsolutely use that as an unfair
advantage. And so the first 10customers about last SAS app I
built was called drip, and it isstill around, I sold it in 2016.
(04:27):
It's an email service provider.
And it can be with MailChimp.
And you know, Infusionsoft andsuch, the first 10 customers for
that were me basically warmemailing is what I call it. It's
it's emailing people that I knewwho I thought could use drip.
And before we wrote a line ofcode, I sent out these emails
(04:48):
saying I'm thinking aboutbuilding this thing. It's like
MailChimp, but it's different.
If we built it, would you thinkthat'd be well, you know, would
you be willing to pay $100 amonth for that? And I emailed
actually 17, it was likefounders that I knew. It was a
couple kind of course creators.
It was a blogger. And I got 11yeses on that. 11 yeses. And
(05:08):
then I said, Let's do it, that'svalidation enough for me to
start, you know, basicallyhaving a developer write code.
Conor McCarthy (05:14):
That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, the,
at the time, what was the marketfor, like email service
providers, like emailnewsletters, what is that like?
Robert Walling (05:25):
It was 2012 when we were doing this, is that
right? Yeah, it was, we brokeground on code in December 2012.
So it would have been the fallof 2012 that I was doing it. So
it was basically MailChimp isthe 900 pound gorilla and Aweber
was the info product. So likestartups use MailChimp. And
there were still I mean, therewere 100 200 DSPs already. But
(05:47):
there was no automation, youknow, now everything has like
this marketing automation. Theonly tools that did that were
these expensive tools likeInfusionsoft Pardot Marketo
silverpop, I think HubSpotdidn't have automation in their
email yet, either. So that wasit. There was no ConvertKit
there was no drip, obviously,because we were about to build
(06:07):
it. And it was, I was kind ofcrazy to go into the space. It
was it was a bit of an accident.
I mean, basically, I had anotherSaaS app that was a longtail
keyword tool SS subscriptionservice. And, there was no
OptinMonster there was no sumoas well, because that was the
thing that we really wanted wasan email capture widget that
(06:28):
could appear I wanted to dropJavaScript into a footer and
have a widget appear on everypage of the website, there was
nothing that did that. Like ifthat's how crazy is 10 years
ago. So I had my developer buildthat for hittail. And we had a
couple 100 pages. And suddenly,you know, you have this pop, it
was a little toaster pop upwidget. And it worked great. It
really, really increased thenumber of emails that we got, we
(06:49):
wrote a little mini course. Andso then I said, Why don't we
productize this because no oneelse is doing it. And so we
forked out, that's all it was,was just email capture and a
like a secret email sequence,then, like a campaign tied to
it. You couldn't even send likeone time broadcast to this list.
It was purely the whole tool wascapture, send a sequence? And at
the time, it was it was a verysimple tool.
Conor McCarthy (07:13):
Mmhmm. And do you remember beyond those, those
warm leads, do you remembergetting the first cold leads, I
suppose. What was that processlike?
Robert Walling (07:22):
Yeah, I do.
Basically what I did, because weit took us about took my dev
about six months to build thatproduct. And so I had six months
where I was still working on theold product, you know, because
that was throwing given thecash, giving us the cash to
basically build this one. And Iwas doing my typical podcast
interviews, where I go on showsI was, you know, I don't know
doing written interviews, Iactually ran some Facebook ads
(07:45):
just for fun. So I set up alanding page. And originally it
was it get drip.com and I wasbasically just every podcast
interview I got on, I wouldmention Drip, oh, yeah, so
what's what's your new project,I'm working on this thing. It's
called Drip. It's I'm kind oftrying to, you know, they have a
real unique take on emailcapture, and blah, blah, blah.
And then yeah, there'd be 10, 2030, people show up on that email
list. And then I was bored. Andso I ran Facebook ads for the
(08:09):
same thing, I had had a bunch ofsuccess with Facebook ads with
the prior SaaS app. And so I didthat and got that list, that
email list, kind of a launchlist up to about 3400 3400
people 3400. And that was a nicelittle asset to have, not only
for the launch itself, but alongthe way, I started emailing
screenshots of that, hey, thisis what's gonna do. And people
(08:31):
started giving feedback of like,this is great, or I don't
understand what this does, or isit going to have? And then I
started doing questions, is thisgonna have automations in it?
And at the time, I was like,what are those? I didn't know
what I know, all I ever used wasMailChimp and Aweber. They
didn't have automations builtin. So then people start
explaining to me, oh, there'sthis really expensive tool,
there are these really expensivetools. Infusionsoft, Marketo,
(08:54):
Pardot, you know, that do allthis Ontraport was another one
that do this complicated stuff.
But they're like, 400 500 amonth and up. So if you add it
just yet, it became reallyinteresting, where the feedback
loop so that launch list wasn'tjust, oh, I can sell to them. It
was actually cut. It was acustomer development. It was
(09:15):
really powerful.
Conor McCarthy (09:17):
That is, what an amazing I was gonna say, an
amazing resource. I mean, theywere customers, but the feedback
is, I mean, that's that probablyguided every decision from then
on.
Robert Walling (09:28):
Kind of Yeah.
And I eventually sent, I startedgetting some individual feedback
like that. And then I sent thewhole list again, 3400 people, a
survey that I later dissected onmy podcast, I went through every
question and talked about whatpeople answered, but I kind of
asked like, what's your role ata company? You know, are you
like a solo founder, asolopreneur, info product, SaaS
founder, you know, I just kindof wanted to know and that's
like, what do you currently usefor email marketing? What do you
(09:50):
hope Drip will do and I had someaw esome choices and with an
other and like it gave me a goodlens on A - which market should
we focus on first becauseeventually we want to get
everybody but you can't youcan't do that from the start.
And also, then what should webuild first? Because it's so so
hard to decide what features tobuild in the early days.
Conor McCarthy (10:09):
Yeah and that I mean, two things you said there,
yeah, deciding what features tobuild? And also, you can't and
shouldn't try to sell toeverybody. Yeah. How do you I
mean, you interact with so manybootstrappers and entrepreneurs
and founders, etc? How, how doesthat conversation go down? When
someone comes to you and goes,this idea? It's gonna be big,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna geteverybody on board. What's the
(10:30):
conversation like?
Robert Walling (10:31):
Well, usually I say, Oh, how do you know that?
how do you know that? Right?
Who? And then it whatever theanswer. It's like, well, who
have you talked to? Like, do youalready have an audience in that
space? And if it's yes, thenlike, okay, cool. Yeah. How big
is it? And how have youcommunicated that? What's been
the feedback? Or if you don'thave an audience in that space?
Who have you talked to in thatspace? Have you tried running
ads to a cold landing page, someproducts, you know, that smoke
test is still a thing. Otherfolks, it's just a lot of, I
(10:54):
encourage them, I think youshould have a lot of
conversations with potentialcustomers and see what they say.
And these can be face to faceconversations, they can be zoom,
they can be email, I pre soldthose 11 you know, drip
customers via email never did acall with any of them. And in
the end, the question I oftenget is how many of those 11
converted to paying customersand it was less than half? If it
(11:16):
was like five? Everybody triedit out the way they said they
would? And then it just didn'tdo? You know, a lot of times
people would say, Well, I cankind of cobble this together
with MailChimp, plus this J Sform thing. I don't know what I
want to, you know, pay for thison a monthly basis. And so that
was great feedback for me oflike, okay, we haven't built
something valuable enough yet.
(11:36):
And that's where we kept adding,you know, more features and
automation. And that'seventually when we hit product
market fit.
Conor McCarthy (11:41):
Do you find there's a kind of a reticence?
Or what's the word? You know, ifyou were to say to someone who's
about to launch a business, orhas an idea, and they come to
you that they need to go out andtalk, talk to people just and
have conversations withpotential customers or with
anybody? You find people arealways up for that? Are they a
bit like, I don't know, thatfeels weird.
Robert Walling (12:01):
Yeah, some people say it feels weird,
especially like softwaredevelopers, you know, and more
introverts. I'm an introvert,I'm not a salesperson at all. So
me, that's why my conversationswere via email, because I prefer
for them not to be in person. Idon't like rejection. And so
yeah, people do have resistanceto it. And then that part of
that conversation is, well,here's how to do it without
(12:22):
feeling like, you know, like,feeling like you're putting
pressure on someone or feelingawkward is you just say, look,
I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, orI am a founder, I'm a developer,
or I'm a whatever, I do my dayjob, but I'm also trying to
launch this thing on the side tohelp insert their role here, you
know, it's to help HR execs,it's to help hair salons, it's
(12:44):
to help, whatever, I havenothing to sell you. I've not
built anything. I just wonder ifyou know, I could have 15
minutes of your time. I wonderif you could answer a couple
questions. That it's that kindof thing, right? I've heard that
people ranging from offering,you know, $50, amazon giftcard,
or a Starbucks card for eachconversation, I heard that when
Jason Cohen did this for WPEngine, his now literally
(13:07):
billion dollar web hostingplatform. He wanted to talk to a
bunch of agencies andconsultants. And so he basically
said, I'll pay your hourly ratefor an hour. Right? So if they
want to charge him 150 - 200 anhour, he just said, I'll pay
that I don't I'm not gonna wasteyour time. I genuinely want it,
you know? Yeah, so it depends onthe resources you have, of
course.
Conor McCarthy (13:28):
I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that
there's some actionable andinsightful advice that you can
take out to your business,helping you identify and create
those first 10 customers is whatI do. So if you like what you
hear on this podcast and wantmore information, including a
bunch of free resources on howto find your first 10 customers
and grow your business, checkout first10podcast.com That's 10
(13:50):
one, zero, or find me on Twitter@thefirst10pod. Now, you
probably hear what I'm about tosay on every podcast you listen
to and it makes a really bigdifference to the show. If you
find this podcast in any wayuseful or enjoyable, I'd be so
grateful if you left me a reviewon iTunes, it really does make a
big difference in terms of otherpeople discovering the podcast.
(14:12):
Also, if you leave a review, youwill get to see your name and
the review in lights. What I'lldo is I'll design your words and
post them online, tagging youand your project along with it.
I know it's a pretty sweet deal!Okay, let's get on with the
show. If there were cardinalsins or warning signs for when
people you know, tried to launcha SaaS just for, for example,
(14:35):
like you know, having domainknowledge really, really key
talking to customers is super,super important. Are there any
of the things that you wouldlook out for or would advise for
or against?
Robert Walling (14:46):
Yeah, domain knowledge is really nice to
have, but it's not required. Ihave seen we have several
successful companies that wehave funded, where the founder
was purely a software developerand stumbled into an idea in a
space, they had no relation towhatsoever, one founder made 70
cold calls before he figured outthat there was a need for
(15:07):
software in the senior placementspace where it's just where, you
know, if my mom's getting older,I'm going to place her in a
senior assisted living facility,there are senior placement
agents who I can call andthey're like a broker, and they
know all the local things, andthey know all the local, you
know, local businesses, orwhatever they do the placement,
(15:27):
the actual living facilities.
And so there was like, no goodsoftware for them. And so the
software developer built that,right. So domain knowledge isn't
required, and he's havingsuccess. There's a handful of
others. But it is, to me, it's aleg up, if you haven't right,
it's a perfect thing, I thinkthat the talking to customers
thing is something that so fewpeople do. And in addition, even
when they do it, they often doit wrong, where people will kind
(15:49):
of try to be nice or tell youwhat you want to hear, which you
should ask are3 the questionsthat are in this book, the Mom
Test, where they're not leadingquestions like so here's some
mock ups, what do you think?
Because no one wants to be ajerk, right? But what you do is
you say, this idea I have doesthis, it solves this problem? Do
you have that problem? or whathave you done to solve this
(16:12):
problem in the past? You know,and you start to get a feeling
of not only do they need it, buthow badly do they need it? So I
think those are, those are somebig ones. The other one, I mean,
I used to launch all my, Ilaunched a book, conference,
several apps, with just alanding page where I didn't want
(16:34):
to write the book, I didn't wantto book a conference venue. I
didn't want to build an app, youknow, but I can build a landing
page and the accelerator tinyseed was a landing page when we
launched it. And all it saidwas, you know, it's the first
startup accelerator designed forbootstrappers. And here's our
plan. And if you're interested,this is me, you know, we really
want to rock the world orwhatever, and and then it had an
(16:58):
email capture, and it doesn'twork for everything. And email
capture doesn't, it's like, oh,I got 500 emails, it's a
successful idea. That's nottrue, either. What we then do
is, you know, you then gothrough and you have
conversations and figure thatout. But before I wrote a word
of my book, I put up a landingpage and I blogged about it,
tweeted about it, you know, gotit on Hacker News, and wanted to
(17:18):
gauge was their interest? CouldI sell at least a few 100 copies
of this book to make itworthwhile?
Conor McCarthy (17:23):
Yeah, I think that's a smart thing to do.
Because again, there's, there'sa, probably a fallacy of build
something. And spend money andtime creating the thing. Without
actually just asking people it'sit's interesting, you know,
asking your audience, yourpeople, your friends, your
relations, your customers like,right? Is this something you
want to see in the world
Robert Walling (17:41):
The biggest risk is not, can you build this?
Conor McCarthy (17:42):
So that's, that's a really interesting
That's a yes, you can you canbuild this, that's not the hard
part, the biggest risk is thatno one cares. So how do you
validate that someone will care?
And how do you validate thatsomeone will be willing to pay
for what you are selling? Andhow do you validate that you can
reach them in a sustainablefashion? Those are really the
(18:04):
three things that are difficultabout starting.
point. They're like reachingpeople in a sustainable fashion.
Could you just double click onthat? And just describe what
that looks like? In the world?
Robert Walling (18:19):
Yeah. So imagine you built an amazing piece of
software for, you know, forsenior placement firms, for
example. And it solves aproblem. Absolutely I product
market fit, because it doesexactly what they need, and
they're willing to pay the pricethat I want. But imagine that
they're not online. None of themare online. And, you know,
(18:40):
imagine none of them haveemails, and none of them have
phones. That's bizarre, butlike, so I can't reach any of
these customers. This businessdoesn't work, you know, but I
know they have phones. So maybeI'm cold calling. And I do know,
they have email, so maybe I'mcold emailing or cold outreach,
or do they attend events. Somaybe I'm going to those events,
maybe I'm sponsoring thoseevents, maybe I'm trying to
speak those events, it's thatpeople don't think through these
(19:01):
distribution channels inadvance. They think I can build
it. And maybe I, maybe Ivalidated that these people need
it. But if they're really hardand really expensive to find and
to close, you can build abusiness that is unprofitable.
Be even with a good product, ifpeople are really hard to reach
(19:22):
and, you know, close sales, inessence, and that's why a lot of
their early, you know, I comefrom the tech world SaaS world,
not the venture funded space,but a lot of bootstrapping. And
a lot of the early SaaS that wascoming out of bootstrappers was
stuff that we knew about becausewe were online. It was for
designers, it was fordevelopers, it was for founders,
(19:43):
because all of them were onlinein the mid 2000s. It isn't until
now that a lot of this otherstuff like for construction, you
know that there's a CRM for homeimprovement contractors that we
funded and it's like, I don'tthink that would have worked 10
years ago, I just don't thinkenough of them were on line, you
know? But it's 2022 now andthere's a bit more, there's a
bit more, I guess, techsavviness, you know, bit more
(20:07):
people looking for that lookingfor these solutions similar to
that senior placement?
Conor McCarthy (20:13):
Like that. Yeah, there's just to switch gears
slightly when with the first 10customers, or the first 100, or
whatever, there's, there's aheavy sales element, let's say.
Do you have any sales techniquesas to stronger sales tips that
you give out to founders, orjust ways to go about the the
art of selling?
Robert Walling (20:35):
I do and I actually steal these from Einar
Vollset, he's my co founder atTiny Seed because he's a good
sales guy and he's done a lot ofsales. And he says think about
sales, like you are a, anexpensive, high paid consultant,
except you're not getting paid,you're getting paid in the sale,
but not, you know, actual hourlyrate. Think of yourself as that,
(20:57):
that you're basically trulytrying to understand what does
this customer need? And what isthe best solution for them. And
to that end, when I used to sellDrip, which is email service
provider, I used to get on somecalls. And I would say, You know
what, MailChimp is actually abetter fit for you. I don't you
don't need Drip, you know, and Iwould just send them off to a
competitor. So I think that's agood one. I think the other one
is that a sales call is not ademo of your software, they
(21:21):
don't want to see the settings,they don't want to see the
checkboxes, what they want tosee is how does this solve my
problem? So the first severalminutes should just be what,
what problem do you hope thissolves? What problem do you have
today? You know, what do youknow about the software? What do
you think it does? How do youthink it will help you? And then
you kind of go from there to belike, cool. So instead of
running through the whole app,I'm just going to show you these
(21:41):
three screens that are going tosolve exactly the problems that
you said.
Conor McCarthy (21:45):
That's genius, because I have been demoed, I
have been demo'd alot, whereit's like, yeah, hey, sign up
for demo and you just get a verystandard issue.
Robert Walling (21:54):
It's lazy. It's lazy and it's easy. And you can
just get a call you can paysomeone minimum wage to demo
through your software. Butthat's that's not how that's not
the how to best do it. You know,if you get if you get really
well trained salespeople, they,they go after it, they
personalize it and try tounderstand the customer's needs.
Conor McCarthy (22:11):
Apart from the Mom Test, are there any books
that you recommend to earlystage business builders?
Robert Walling (22:18):
I like the book traction by Gabriel Weinberg,
which is a it's not the one byGino Wickman. Net, that's about
Entrepreneurial OperatingSystem. It's same title, but it
is about marketing approaches.
And it has like 21 chapters. Andeach chapter is a marketing
approach that you can considerfor your business. And it gives
you some they interviewedsomeone for each chapter, and it
gives you some criteria of whento use each one or when to
(22:41):
consider using each one.
Conor McCarthy (22:45):
And inside of, inside of a business context, I
suppose. Are there any books orresources that have helped you
understand people more?
Robert Walling (22:53):
There's two books. Well, this is even still
it one's called fascinate. Andthe other is called how the
world sees you that same author,it's Sally Hogshead. And they're
both about it's a lot in thecontext of business but it's
about, fascinate is the sevendifferent elements that a brand
(23:18):
or a person can have and leaninginto one or more of these makes
you unique and intriguing. Andthen how the world sees you is
you read it then you take apersonality test and it tells
you which of the seven you haveyou know or which of the seven
you should lean into or arenaturally yours. And so it's in
both a personal and a businesscontext, right of like, they
talk about how Jägermeister hasyou know that awful tasting, you
(23:40):
know, alcohol, but there butshe's like, but that's that's
why everyone talks about itbecause it's awful tasting. And
that's the there's like anintrigue of like if you're told
it tastes awful, you want totaste it. So intrigue is like
one of the seven. And then shewas talking about how I don't
know if you know there's liketrust right of like the the
stalwart right of like, I don'tknow, GM, maybe a, you know,
(24:01):
automaker, maybe they havetrust. I don't know, but it's
that kind of stuff. Is that whatyou meant about? Are you meaning
more like psychology of people?
Conor McCarthy (24:09):
Oh, like anything that isn't, you know?
Yeah, just a straight upbusiness book. But they're two
really good examples. That's agreat title how the world sees
you. That's an, yeah I betterpick up a copy of that. As a
last question, I always ask myguests, what would you say to
someone who's going out to findtheir first 10 customers today?
(24:30):
What would you say to that?
Robert Walling (24:32):
I would do two things. I've done these two
things over and over and over.
And they've worked for me. So Iwould absolutely 100% have some
type of landing page with sometype of email capture on it. And
as you go through anythingyou're doing online, if you have
a chance to do it in a nonsalesy way, the non crappy way.
You mentioned it, you know,you're in you're answering a
(24:55):
question on Quora, and it'slike, oh, this happens to be
real full disclosure. I'm goingon this project, so I have kind
of an inside, look at this rightbing! drop your link, if you're
on Twitter, do a little bit ofbuilding in public, hey, I'm
working on this project, it'spretty cool. But if you're
interested to keeping up withit, head over here. If you're on
a podcast, if you just whereveryou are, you're kind of you
either casually mention it, oryou intentionally, you mention
(25:17):
it. And then the other thingthat I would be doing is, I want
to figure out where my customershang out. Sometimes, I'll give
you an example. I am not only inthe business world, but I
collect signatures, autographs,and I collect from like, you
know, I've an AlexanderHamilton, for example, like old,
you know, it's not modernpeople. It's like, oh, and I
(25:37):
collect expensive comic books,right? So I'm in these groups of
people talking about comicbooks. And so if you would 10
comic book collectors, you wouldwant to be in these groups, they
are on Facebook, almost all ofthem. And then there's one forum
on this grading website calledCGC. So I literally know all of
them. There's only like, youknow, 10 of them. So if you
(26:00):
wanted to do that you would goand participate. But if I was
going to go sell b2b, if Iwanted to sell email marketing,
you know, ESPs, probably notmany Facebook groups. They're
probably hanging out in privateslack groups, or in communities
like Microconf has almost 3000founders in our online
community. It's called MicroconfConnect happens to be a Slack
(26:20):
channel, but it could just be aforum, right? The software
itself doesn't matter. But if Iwanted to talk to aerialists, my
wife does aerial circus stuffwith slings and hammocks, and
she does trapeze. They're all onInstagram. So I would if I
wanted to sell them, I would geton Instagram, I would start
following them, I would startinteracting, you know what I
(26:41):
mean? So if you're gonna findyour first 10 customers, where
are they now? Where are theyalready? Or maybe a lot of them
probably listen to podcast, orwhat blogs do they read? Are
they on Hacker News? Or are theyon, you know, growthhackers.com
or are they on Pinterest? That'swhat I would be thinking through
as they're already gatheredsomewhere. Everyone gathers
right even my brother runs aconstruction firm, and says
(27:01):
construction is so old school,you know, so slow to adopt. And
there are places where they hangout. I guarantee you there's
some online and then there's alot offline. There's in person
events, they have trade pubs,they have trade magazines, and
that kind of stuff. So that'swhat I would say is I would have
a landing page and then I wouldfigure out where they hang out
and then I would go be among thepeople in a non douchey, non
(27:22):
salesy way.
Conor McCarthy (27:28):
That is a great answer. Sorry, I realized there
was one question I forgot to askyou earlier, if you don't mind
me popping it in now. It's aboutso the first 10 customers is one
stage of the journey. And Ithink you meet a lot of
bootstrappers, who go beyondthat early kind of struggling to
get the first customers and theyreach a place of Oh, actually,
this isn't working. What is themain difference after that
(27:51):
inflection point of okay, we'redoing okay, we're confident we
can bring in some more sales,what changes? What's the main
thing that changes do you find?
Robert Walling (28:00):
Usually, it goes from spearfishing, which is one
at a time just dragging a mandown in this really laborious
process, to oh, oh, we kind ofnow start having a brand and a
little bit of recognition. Andoh, wow, our brand is getting
(28:20):
mentioned in the Facebook groupswithout me being in there.
There's a little bit of word ofmouth from existing customers.
And we've, the product is betternow. And even our marketing copy
is better, you know, just yourwhole process there gets better.
And oftentimes you find asustainable, sustainable channel
where it's no longer I'm lookingin the groups, it's, oh, we
(28:40):
figured that we found out thatwe can run ads on Instagram,
Facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords, andone of these gets us, you know,
10 leads a week at a cost thatwe can afford. Or we've started
writing content, it's gettingpicked up and now we get 100
uniques you know, from Googleand that's turning into five
leads a day or whatever. Sosomething clicks with that where
(29:04):
there's it goes fromspearfishing to, I think it's
what they call it net fishingwith a net in essence, right
where you're doing a whole groupat once because they're they're
coming at you faster.
Conor McCarthy (29:13):
Hmm. Okay. I love that. Rob, thank you so
much. You've got so much deepexperience with so many people
and through your own personalexperience. Thank you for
sharing all that. All thatwisdom today with us. I will of
course include links tomicroconf and all your projects
in the in the shownotes forpeople to check out. And yeah,
(29:33):
thank you very much for forsharing your time today.
Robert Walling (29:36):
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on.
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