Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 816 | Developing an Editorial Eye, The Right Kind of Stubborn, and The Power of Focus (A Rob Solo Adventure)
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: How can you develop an editorial eye as a founder?
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Chapter 2: When should you let experts lead in your business?
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Chapter 3: What problem should your product aim to solve?
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between persistence and obstinacy?
Welcome back to another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this solo adventure, I'm gonna talk about developing an editorial eye, a realization a founder had about solving problems and being the right kind of stubborn. Before we dive in to today's topics,
Chapter 5: How do great founders adapt to new information?
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Chapter 6: Why is focus the hardest skill for entrepreneurs?
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Chapter 7: What does 'Triple, Triple, Double, Double' mean for startups?
First topic I want to touch on today is about developing an editorial eye, or as I've sometimes called it on this podcast, developing taste.
And I think in most of the instances I'm thinking about it, editorial eye might be better. But I think about this applying to all creative or intellectual domains like movies, books, visual design, software, code. And when you're first exposed to any of these things, you don't yet know what's good or bad because you lack taste. You lack that editorial eye.
And the reason I like the term editorial eye is it implies a level of discernment.
Chapter 8: Why should you be cautious of clickbait startup advice?
And it applies the ability to not just have taste and be snooty, this is good or bad, but to potentially editorialize it. And that's what I want to talk about today. I was thinking about the three stages of developing an editorial eye in any medium. Again, whether that's movies, books, design, code. The first is exposure, to just figure out what's good and what's bad. Right.
It's exposure to many films or to many books or to writing and reading a lot of code, not just writing code, by the way. I find that the people who have only written code have never worked on a team, have never had to get into a code base that they've never seen before. It's like they're code blind and they've only experienced the way they do it.
And they have these really strong opinions about how it should be done. And this code base is a piece of shit. Because the whole thing needs to be rewritten. It's like the famous, you know, the famous agency or new dev that comes in. It's often folks who have not had to adopt code bases that they themselves didn't write.
But the idea here with knowing what's good and bad is that you get enough exposure to enough variations of this thing that you've seen enough work to develop a sense of quality. You can't form an editorial eye by watching one movie, right? Or reading one book. It might take hundreds.
And this again is why seeing a lot of code bases and seeing code written by different people and having to take over a code base you didn't write, I think is actually a really helpful skill. Or with visual design, you know, seeing hundreds of websites and logos and layouts, you start to understand the continuum between good and bad, especially if you learn some fundamentals along the way, right?
This is either self-study or school or perhaps mentorship. So that's the first stage, exposure, figuring out what's good and bad. Stage two is analysis. It's understanding why it's good or bad. It's understanding the reasons behind your instincts. Because as a developer, you might know bad code when you see it, but the why involves understanding specifics, right?
Broken logic, poor structure, lack of clarity, lack of maintainability. As a non-designer, you might recognize a design feels off. but struggle to articulate why. And this is the bane of designers, of freelance designers, where it's like, someone says, I need it to pop more. You know, can you make it, can you make it? Pizads and pizads to it, right? It's awful.
This is where there's a lot of folks stuck at stage one. And there are even a lot of folks who maybe even don't have the taste and think that they do. But it is a common frustration, right? If you're hired by someone is a client who can judge taste or thinks they can, but they can't explain the why. And it's because they haven't gotten to stage two.
this ability to explain why something works or doesn't. It's a refined skill. It's a key marker of deeper expertise and it takes a lot of time and exposure and I think some self-learning as well to learn the vague rules. And maybe there are rules of thumb and maybe there are hard and fast rules or maybe there are rules in your own head, but it's your pattern matching that gets you here.
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