Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 736 | Founder Regrets, DIY vs. Hiring, Defining your ICP, and More Later Stage Listener Questions
Tue, 22 Oct 2024
In episode 736, join Rob Walling as he answers some later-stage listener questions in another solo adventure. He discusses common pitfalls in delegation, transitioning from one-time transactions to SaaS models, and when it makes sense to target multiple ICPs. Rob also warns about the limited impact that social media marketing can have on growing your SaaS tool. Episode Sponsor: Are you drowning in challenging tech decisions? You should check out today’s sponsor, Techstack. Unlike typical staffing agencies, these folks are startup specialists with over a decade of experience in startup software development. Techstack can help your startup build an MVP that's designed for explosive growth, rapidly expand your team for new features, or optimize your existing codebase for peak performance. Whether you're launching, scaling up, or fine-tuning, they've got the expertise to supercharge your tech. One of Techstack’s clients was recently featured on Inc. Magazine's Fast Growth Companies list, and they attributed part of their 375% growth to their partnership. Here's an exclusive offer for "Startups For the Rest of Us" listeners: Get a 10% discount on your first month of development with Techstack. And if you're one of the first 10 listeners to get in touch, you'll also receive a free, in-depth tech assessment and expert consultation – a $3,000 value – in your choice of critical areas like architecture, infrastructure, development process or project management. This could be the game-changer your startup needs. Don't let tech challenges slow you down. Check out https://www.tech-stack.com/startups to discover how Techstack can turbocharge your growth. Topics we cover: 2:17 – What to delegate on the path to $10k MRR 6:43 – Be wary of social media marketing masquerading as productivity 10:31 – DIY vs. hiring a growth agency for B2B SaaS marketing 15:22 – Not every business should be a subscription business 22:00 – Defining, targeting, and selling to different ICPs Links from the Show: Get Tickets for MicroConf US 2025, New Orleans The SaaS Launchpad TinySeed The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy Rob Walling (@robwalling) | X If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review:
Full Episode
Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. As always, I'm your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I'm going to be answering later stage questions. I received a ton of good questions on ex-Twitter a month or so ago when I did a call for them. And I had gotten a little weary of answering the same questions about idea validation and early stage stuff.
So these are all folks doing six or seven figures in ARR that have questions ranging from regrets for things you didn't delegate, how to decide to DIY versus hiring a growth agency, deciding whether a customer type is worth selling to or targeting, and more. Before we dive into the episode... My new course, the SaaS Launchpad, has been live for a few weeks. It has been receiving rave reviews.
SaaSLaunchpad.co if you want to check it out. It's for the earliest stage SaaS founders. So if you're looking for an idea, if you want to vet an idea to validate it, if you want to build a launch list, if you want to build an MVP, launch your product. This is the course for you. It is the best course I've ever put together. And it's really the first course I've built in about 14 years.
So you can head to saslaunchpad.co for full details and to check out the course. And one more thing, MicroConf US 2025 tickets have just gone on sale. Every event we've run for the past 18 months, I believe, maybe more, has sold out. And I expect MicroConf US 2025 to be no different. It's going to take place in New Orleans, March 16th through the 18th of 2025.
And right now, our lowest priced tickets are available on sale. They will never be lower priced than they are now. We've just wrapped up our Dubrovnik event. That one sold out. And again, I expect this New Orleans event to sell out. All the details are at microconf.com slash US. Be sure to check it out soon if you're interested in joining me.
and to 250 of your best founder friends that you've known on Twitter, that you've met in person, that you've aspired to meet in New Orleans next March. My first question for today comes from Tobey. He is TobeyBuilds on ex-Twitter. His question is, is there anything you regret doing yourself instead of delegating while trying to grow to 10K MRR? And I'll do you one better.
I won't just talk about things I regret, but the most common mistakes I see early stage founders making. And these are founders who listen to startups for the rest of us. These are tiny seed founders. These are microcomp founders. And there are some pretty common anti-patterns in this early stage of learning how and when to delegate.
Now, delegating is a balance, especially in this early stage, if you're bootstrapping, because oftentimes you should delegate or outsource a bunch of things, but you don't have the money, right? You don't have the luxury of a funded competitor who can hire a chief of staff on day one or who can hire a staff to do things that you don't want to do.
So there is this balance between your willingness to delegate and the budget you have to do so. But with that said, I think a couple things that I commonly see founders keep doing that they shouldn't be doing in these early stages are things like bookkeeping or doing your own books in general, doing your own accounting, not hiring a CPA, DIYing your own legal.
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