EP10: Rob Walling – outsource on oDesk, find your idea, market your product (part 2)

If you're here for part two of our interview with Rob Walling, you're in the right place. Rob's the man behind hittail.com and the Micropreneur Academy. In part two, we talk about how to outsource on oDesk, what makes a good product idea, and how to market your product once it's launched. It's a full show, let's get it going! For the next thirty minutes, let's let's dig into some tactics here.

And let's start with because you've mentioned a couple of times you have virtual assistants and consultants and this group of people that you can call on to help you. How did you build those relationships? How did you connect with those people originally?

I went through many different avenues originally and I gotta be honest, the only one I go to now is Odesk. Okay. Yeah. And it has served me very well over the past two and a half years. Before that, I I did hire folks through like Manila Craigslist.

Manila is in in The Philippines. Bestjobs.ph. Gosh, there were a couple others. I used Elance for a while, but for one reason or another, they all eventually failed. You know, they they just would turn out people who didn't do the work and who would bill me for it and just different things.

And it wasn't there was always a hurdle, and oDesk has solved that because they have that nice project management app where it basically records someone's takes a screen snap every five to seven minutes, and that allows you to observe what someone's doing.

Oh, interesting.

Yep. So it's a project management tool, kinda like rescue time or whatever, but it it allows you to to keep an eye on folks. Now I don't do I haven't looked at most people's screens. I look for a month, you know, just to make sure they're doing what they're saying. And then after that, I don't have time.

I don't wanna I'm not a book keeper. I don't want to be and count on people. And once I trust someone and we have a relationship, they can kind of do their own thing. What are some help early on.

What are some good tactics for someone who's getting started on oDesk? What are what are a few things they should be doing?

Yeah. So I'll you I've thought a lot about this. I actually am launching a a video training course on this Oh, wonderful. On this topic. Yeah.

It'll go out in February. So if and I'm gonna I'm gonna have to charge for it because I hired a professional videographer and he came to my house and someone interviewed me. So it's like a full on knowledge product. But Oh, great. If folks are interested in hearing about that, yeah, if you go to softwarebyrob.com, in the upper right, there's a little email newsletter that you can sign up for, and that's probably where I'll just promote it through that.

Perfect. And I'll I'll link to that on the website, productpeople.tv as well. Awesome. So

but I can give out some tips for sure. Sure. Yeah. So, in terms of Odesk, it's basically the it's a great collection of people around the world who are gifted in, you know, any different discipline, and they're available hourly. And that's the beauty of it is that you don't have to hire someone full time.

You don't have to have a a $100 a month contract. You can literally find someone, and if they're good and and you enjoy working with them and they enjoy working with you, you could that you kinda have them on call. And that's really the secret, is that it scales with your business. And so when you first get on oDesk, you're, you know, gonna wanna poke around. And if you're looking for a virtual assistant, it has one of the the largest groups of virtual assistants of any site, which is really nice.

And I would post a job right away and post a job. It has to be something interesting, I guess, is what I'll say. The more you can stand out and and make it sound like you're not just another because, boy, if if you look through the jobs there look through the job postings maybe my first advice because you'll start seeing that a lot of them are just crappy jobs. And so the advantage that I found is to actually have something even if the work isn't that interesting. If you're working on a cool product or you happen to be a uniquely interesting person to work with, there's some type of advantage that you should have that you can put in that job description that, hey, you're working on a public facing startup that's growing and it's profitable and, you know, whatever.

I mean, there there's something. It's like to to get someone invested because that will bring you the best people and to put a little bit of personality in your job posting as well. Because these are these are people. Like, I I've sent wedding gifts to my VAs. I give them, you know, bonuses at certain times of the year depending on, you know, how how things go.

I mean, it just it's not like it's a transactional thing. You're actually trying to find people and build relationships. And so the more you can keep that in mind as you go through the hiring process, the better.

So it sounds like three things. So start by looking through job postings, then post something interesting, and then finally treat them well, build the relationship.

Yep, that's right. That's right. Great.

So Rob, I imagine that there are quite a few people listening to this that are kind of sitting at home and they have a burning desire to build something. What is your advice in terms of finding product ideas? How do you find it and what makes a good idea?

So I'll answer the second part first. What makes a good idea in terms of building a business is the caveat, I'll say, is that you're building something that people want, solves the problem, and that you can find that market fairly easily. So you can solve the problem of building the best invoicing software for loggers, people who, you know, cut down trees and sell them to lumber yards. You could build the best software for that or people who clean chimneys, and you could actually solve their problem. But if you can't get to them, if you can't communicate with them and market to them and sell the product for more than it costs you in time or money to get to them, you're bit you don't have a business.

And likewise, if you're a great marketer and you have SEO traffic of people coming to, you know, for whatever niche, but you build a product that doesn't solve their problem, then you you you also will fail. So you have to hit those two things on the head. And to solve the first part, which is commonly referred to in startup vernacular, it's problem solution fit. It means you've solved someone's problem. That I mean, I I don't think anyone's covered it better than Steve Blank, which is cutting the whole customer development movement.

And that it can be done through a number of ways. It can be done through phone interviews. It can be done through email interactions, which is how my latest idea is called drip, you mentioned earlier. I emailed 17 of the SaaS owners and software company owners that I know. And I said, look, I'm thinking about building this product.

It's aimed at your market. Here's what it does. Here's how much I'm gonna charge. Would you would you use this? And I told them specifically, I don't wanna hear what you think about the market or if you think other people use it.

Would you pay me for this? And out of those 17, I got 11 yes responses. So to me, that was my go ahead point that I made the choice I would do it at ten. So you can do it via email, some people do it via telephone depending on your market. You can also put up a landing page and and drive people there and then interact via email, which I'm also doing via, with drip.

It's at getdrip.com, as you mentioned earlier. So that's the prop part about figuring out, you know, are you gonna solve their problem? And then being able to market it, yeah, that's probably may maybe I'll stop there. That's a that's a pretty large, endeavor of figuring out if you're gonna be able to to find the people, but I think a lot of common sense comes into play there as well as, looking at what others have done in the past. Like, you go to, softwarebyrob.com, if you go there right now, there's a blog post and it's called 13 prelaunch traffic strategies.

It's very good post written by Dan Norris. Look at all the strategies he used and figure out, can I do those too? How much time, money will it take to do those? Test them out. He did them before he launched.

You can do, and that will help you. You can actually do a lot of that before you've written a line of code, before you've designed a single line of your product. You can do more than you think before you get to the building. I know building is the fun part, but I really encourage people to put that off, as long as possible until they've really validated, they think they've solved the problem and that they can actually reach the market.

Mhmm. And so let's talk let's use GetDrip as an example, and maybe you can think of others as well. Sure. What is the actual genesis of an idea? Do you start with, know, realtors seems like an interesting market.

Or do you start with, Oh, I'm having this problem myself. I wonder if someone else is having this problem. What's a good genesis for the initial thing that sets you off on that path to do some customer development and ask people if they would pay for a solution.

Both of those examples you gave are excellent ways to do it. There's no one way to do it, and I do think that thinking of problems you have is fantastic, but people typically stop there and they assume, oh, I have problem solution fit with myself. And they don't go and validate that with nine or 10 other people. And then they don't take the next step and look at how am I gonna market to people like myself. Because you gotta think of yourself in terms of of which demographic you are, which part of yourself needs that problem solved.

Because if I do some design work and I solve a problem for that design part of me, then I I I know where to find designers. We know designers read these blogs, they go to these websites, etcetera. But if I solve the problem for the let's say I'm really into dog I have a kennel and I show dogs, which my parents did when I was a kid. So Mhmm. And I'm solving it for that part, That's a whole different market.

Right? Just because it's me the same person, but I do design and I have a dog kennel. If I'm solving it for the dog kennel part, it's an entirely different marketing approach. It's gonna be more outbound. They don't hang out on a lot of websites.

There are some, but it's not nearly as viral or as interactive as the designer segment. So that's the the first thing I'd say is if you're thinking of scratching your own itch, scratching your own itch isn't enough, to be honest. You have to also have these this solving a problem and and having a market. In terms of the second part where you said, you know, starting with realtors. Right?

Choosing a niche and then figuring out if you wanna solve their problems. I think that's a great way to go as well. And the reason is is because if you can pick a niche that you're already interested in, that you already have some kind of traction in, even if you just have a tiny little blog or maybe you have a a warm lead in terms of, you know, your wife is a psychologist or a realtor or a designer. Mhmm. That helps because then you have inside knowledge of that.

And if you're in that market, obviously, that's helpful as well. But any you know, if if you're interested in solving problems for realtors, then it does make it that much better to start with that niche. That's what I did with Drip is I said, I really like talking to and working with entrepreneurs and startups and founders. What problems do we have? So I had the advantage of, I'm probably gonna solve my own problem and hopefully, I know the market well enough because I talked to so many founders that I'm gonna be able to guess what their problems are.

And I sat with a notebook and I didn't write down product ideas. I wrote down what problems we have. And there was a list of nine or 10, and it was problems like we, you know, try to do tier one email support, try to do too much stuff ourself, we need to drive more traffic to our website, we need to convert more website visitors to trials. We I mean, it was things like that. Like, these are all the problems.

And then I slowly went down and said, how could I solve them better than they're being solved today? And from there, I came up with this whole slew of basically loose product ideas that were really kinda wonky, and I was just trying to flush them out. And I eventually arrived at what is now DRIP.

Interesting. Now what are some characteristics of a good market and what are some characteristics of a bad market?

I don't think there are good or bad markets, to be honest. I think that there are markets that are easier to market to. I think there are markets that are less expensive to market to. And so most people listening to this will probably not want to do cold calling outbound email and in person enterprise sales. That's my guess.

And so if you define that as a bad market, which I do, but I that's not necessarily a universal definition. Right? That's actually a very very it can be a very lucrative market Mhmm. As you see by the fact that Oracle and PeopleSoft have massive buildings and headquarters and stuff. They're in that market, but it's not a bad market.

It's just maybe not where I wanna go with it and probably not where your listeners wanna go. So I would say, in terms of my definitions of of fun markets to to market to, there are markets that are online. There are markets that talk to each other a lot because that allows something cool that you build to have virality and for them to spread the word. And there are markets that are open to trying new things. Specifically, I'll name a market that isn't open and realtors tend to be a little resistant towards trying new things.

You really have to get a lot of folks using it before the laggards will come along and there are more laggards than early adopters in realty. The legal market is the same with lawyers. I've seen people try to enter that market. It's not impossible to do, but it is a challenge. They're suspicious of newer technologies.

So a lot of great markets are things, you know, having some relation to the tech industry, things like designers, whether it's web design, graphic design, logo design, obviously, developers are decent. Some people say developers don't pay money for things. I disagree. But that's those are those are you know, fit the criteria I said earlier, right? They're online, they talk to each other and they're relatively open to trying new things.

And I also certainly think that startup founders and, business people, marketers, any of those guys are those are examples of good markets. There are a lot of them. Those are a few off the top of my head. Mhmm.

And and as a part of that, you would also be thinking about their ability or willingness to pay. Is that something that you kind of look into?

For sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I left that part out. I was someone asked me to give them feedback on their idea, and it was for, you know, an an app for college students, like a SaaS app.

And that's they're willing to try new things. They do talk a lot. They are online, but there's a real lack. I mean, students in general as a rule are not gonna pay even a few dollars a month for something that is just not critical critical to them. You're gonna need to be more ad supported.

Same thing with, you know, unfortunately, like, the school teacher market is tough tough to enter because they just school teachers in The States don't make as much as they should, as much money as they should. So that's also a challenge. Getting into bands and music, you can find a good niche there, but it's the same thing. It's kind of tough to get them to pay money for a lot of things because they aren't making a lot of money.

And what's your take on business to business versus business to consumer? You've done both with beach towels. What is there is there one that's better in your opinion?

I prefer business to business because businesses buy based on value, whereas consumers buy based on price. And so value means if you can save the money or make the money, you can justify, you know, a a good price, whereas consumers will look at some and say, $30? That's way too expensive. Even if you're saving them fifty hours of time, people will just go off and do that. You know, they they don't value their time nearly as much.

Hobby niches are decent. I've seen people make money in them, but mostly with info products, it's harder to do it with info products and mobile apps. It's a lot harder to do it with, things like a software as a service app where there's any type of subscription billing. And frankly, consumers are harder to deal with in terms of support. They just tend not to really understand how companies work.

Whereas if you're going b to b, there's a lot more of an understanding that you may have to wait a few hours for an email response and that you shouldn't, you know, expect every company to have a a phone number, you know, and be able to give phone support even if you're paying, you know, $1 a month for a little little tiny subscription.

That's right. That's really great advice. I think maybe what we'll do we've got about ten, fifteen minutes left. Let's get into talking more about marketing. And I kind of identified three things that I think you've done well.

One is personal brand type marketing. That would be Software by Rob, your podcast, etc. Then there was content marketing for your actual products. So on HitTail, you have a series of blog posts. You just released infographic that I think I saw on Hacker News.

And then there's the traditional AdWords advertising, etcetera. So maybe just to start, you could say, you know, how important are each of these channels? And then we can kind of do a deeper dive into each of them in terms of helping our listeners do them well.

Sure. I have a question for you. Where would you put SEO in those three?

I think under content marketing, but maybe if if you think it's a separate, category, let's we can separate it out too.

Okay. And then I think viral marketing could be a separate category as well, like Dropbox and and those guys where they don't really do a lot of paid acquisition.

Oh, That's a that's a good point. Yeah.

Yep. So I'll just throw that out.

Yeah. So as an overview, what in terms of what each of these might contribute to, you know, some sort of like sign ups or some sort of bottom line, how important are each of them? And yeah, let's just start with that actually.

Sure. I'll say upfront, personal brand has very little to do with b to b sales. In terms of HitTail, I've definitely signed up some people who follow me through the blog and the podcast and my book, but the vast, vast majority of Hittail's growth has been from people who have never heard of me and have no idea who I am. So if you build a personal brand, the the things that I'm able to to market to a personal brand and provide value I'm sorry, to people who follow me through the personal brand and provide value to them are things like my book and the conference and the the video training course that I'm selling next month, about, you know, hiring a VA. Those things tend to do better in my experience.

But if you're gonna go b to b, I you know, Jason Cohen said the same thing when he started WordPress Engine, which is WordPress hosting. He has a blog with more subscribers than I do. I think he has 30,000 30 something thousand. And he said he got a handful of sign ups from that. And that's it's just how it goes.

Now over time over time, you will get a trickle of sign ups from people reading your your stuff. But if you think that you're gonna build a business and really grow it based on that, it's it's not gonna happen. But there are as I said, there are things you can market and or sell to a personal brand audience. It's just not you're not gonna get them to sign up for a SaaS app in general.

That's really helpful, actually.

Yeah. No. And I've noticed that with all my products. People will come and take a look at it, and it's and that's great, you know. And and I'm here to teach, so it's not like I need them to do that.

I mean, if it's not like I need them to sign up for my SaaS apps in order for it to succeed. Right? I'm using other means. Mhmm. In terms of content marketing and, you know, I see content marketing is different than SEO, and here's why.

Content marketing, I see as as building infographics, writing viral blog posts like Kissmetrics does and like Buffer does, bufferapp.com. Really like driving traffic from Twitter and and getting people engaged and getting comments. And that to me is different than SEO. Although it they they tie into each other, I know people who do SEO and never do that that public, you know, kind of dialogue about it. It's more of an engineering discipline.

Right? It's more about finding keywords and and writing content around it and writing good content, but driving traffic where it's not really going through all the social channels. So I'll say I consider content marketing more of a social a little more of a social thing. Content marketing is an absolutely fantastic channel as you've seen by the growth of Buffer and Kissmetrics and as we've seen, you know, with with Hittail as well. I think you could build I think it could be maybe not your only source, but it certainly can drive a lot of traffic.

It can be kinda one of your pillar sources of traffic if you get it right. Problem with content marketing is it's super time intensive or it's super expensive. If you don't have the time to do it and are paying someone, you can't just hire any writer off of oDesk or Elance. They need to be very knowledgeable. They need to be basically a professional writer with experience in your in your venue or in your industry Mhmm.

In order to build an infographic or or write articles that are truly viral. So that's kind of the pros and cons of it. SEO, I mean, it's always a great source. I you know, I'll add that I don't I don't see SEO as just ranking in Google. I see that as getting into any channel that is sending you traffic.

That includes ranking high in Amazon, ranking high in YouTube, high in Bing, ranking high in the iPhone app store, ranking high in the wordpress.org plugin and theme store or the you know, it's not a store. It's just a directory or search engine. Any of those things to me, if you rank high in there and you can stick around, you get this constant incoming stream of traffic and that is valuable. And you can build smaller businesses on it, you know, from 1 to maybe 5 or $10,000 a month just with those streams. If you wanna grow bigger, I think you need to diversify and have that plus something else.

But what the great thing about that does is it's this recurring revenue that you can then use to parlay into other things. So you can take several thousand of that and pay someone to do content marketing for you. You just you have the budget from there, you know? Mhmm.

What about advertising?

Yes. So advertising is a tricky one. It's hard to get right, but if you get it right and you find a channel that works and converts and gives you positive ROI, it's it's a big channel. It's like there's SEO, there's content marketing, there's paid acquisition. Those really are the three biggest channels that I know of, I guess, from viral.

But paid acquisition has grown many, many businesses. And it typically takes several thousand dollars just to figure out what you're doing, and then it's not cheap. You can't you can't just bootstrap and start doing paid acquisition. Because even if you figure out positive ROI, you're gonna need to drop several grand a month just to get new customers in, and you're gonna make that money back over time if you're a subscription service, which I'm assuming a lot of people are these days. Mhmm.

In addition, paid acquisition never works for things like iPhone apps because they're only 99¢ or $4.99. There's not enough of a lifetime value to do paid acquisition. So you really do need something with a, I don't know, rule of thumb maybe at 75 or a $100 lifetime in order to even consider. That's doing like cheapy, cheapy advertising. You really want to be over 150 I think.

Yeah. Okay, well let's dig deeper into that right now. It seems like advertising, paid acquisition, become more and more expensive. Is there is it still worth doing? Are there still some deals?

Yeah. I think it will always get more expensive, especially with, you know, any type of AdWords or, you know, the Bing Ad Center, Yahoo, that kind of stuff. Google's algorithm, they're just so smart. And the way they make more money is by having those numbers go up. Right?

And so they're always gonna be smarter than we are. So over time, you know, clicks were 5¢ five years ago and clicks for dot net invoices, an example, are like 4 and $5 now. So pretty much went up a 100 times over several years. I do still think there are deals out there to be had, but it changes. It's not a static thing that you can just say, I'm gonna build my business on AdWords.

There are people who build awesome businesses on AdWords. Jason Cohen built his first business a lot using AdWords and you hear it over and over. The new opportunities that I see right now are in the Facebook with Facebook ads. I see where are the others? You know, there's depending on your market, you can look at buysellads.com has some decent stuff.

Reddit ads, if if, you know, if you can find a niche there. And there was one other. You know, LinkedIn is not bad. You need a higher lifetime value for that because they have a $2 minimum click. Mhmm.

But if you can get two clicks for $2 versus from four or five, you know, from AdWords, I definitely think that, you know, the social social stuff is is doing better these days than in terms of price than than AdWords.

And and I'm assuming you're man you're managing all of your advertising campaigns in Google Analytics? Yes. So that's how you decide whether, you know, if I decide to do some advertising on Reddit, I need a way of say of seeing whether there's actually any money there.

That's right. And so you go you can just go to Google URL builder, and they have a thing where you type in some parameters and it creates this URL for you. And so then when someone clicks on that, it collects it in your campaign section of Google Analytics, and you can identify not just I mean, if you're running multiple ads, you can't do that on Reddit. But if you advertise somewhere else, StumbleUpon's another one. If you're running multiple ads, you can put a different URL for each individual banner ad, and so you have an idea of which of those, you know, convert for you.

Mhmm. So what about SEO? What's a good way to to get into SEO? I've heard that it you know, it's a very specific skill set and it's actually very difficult to outsource. Yes.

It was easier to outsource and easier to do a year ago, and then Google really clamped down with their updates recently, Panda and Penguin. And then they did an exact match domain update where they just threw a lot of the previous knowledge out the window. Or a lot of the I should say it's people who were gaming it well aren't able to do that as easily anymore. The workarounds that that people are finding are they're just more time consuming and more expensive to do. And so what has always worked with SEO is writing good content and, you know, getting people to to link to it.

And that's why content marketing is a good good way to do that, is to get SEO traffic. Mhmm. Bottom line these days when people ask, I say if you're gonna if you're gonna go after SEO, you need to know you start with keywords that you think people are gonna be searching for, and you need to write you need to blog about it, write articles, and then you need to figure out a way to get links to those. And, if you're in niches where there is virality and where people are chatting about it on Twitter and Facebook and that kind of stuff, you need to you need to go after that and get people to talk about it. It is a lot of work.

Bottom line, SEO two years ago was something you could yeah. You could do you could kinda do it behind the scenes and there was a lot of opportunity to game Google, and I just don't really believe that that's that's around in any sustainable fashion these days. There are still tricks. I just think Google's gonna shut them down in the next, you know, or in the coming months.

Interesting. So now more than ever, content is going to be important. And so let's talk about content. What what's what are some good approaches to doing content marketing?

I tell you that the success that I've had using longer tail, like, long tail content marketing has been good. And it that's what HitTail does. Right? This is not a plug for HitTail, but it's one of the reasons I bought it is because HitTail looks through your keywords and says, oh, here's a bunch of longer tail keywords, meaning there may be two, three, four, five words in the phrase. Not a ton of of of competition for these terms.

But as a result, if you write a blog post with that phrase in the title, you're gonna rank really high for it. And you're just gonna generate over time, you're gonna generate this snowball of traffic. And each article may only bring in forty, fifty, 70 uniques a month, but, you know, you write enough of those, and it it builds up for you over time. So that's been a pretty good way of kind of crossing that boundary between SEO and content marketing.

Yeah. As an aside, I I just signed up for a a Hittel trial for my blog, justinjackson.ca. And I think if anyone's out there looking for they're trying to figure out what would be a good product idea, the results I'm getting out of HitTail are interesting because it looks through everything I've ever posted, and then it's pulling out these kind of interesting searches that obviously there's some demand for.

Got it, yeah.

And that's been pretty neat. Think just to see here's some things I've already been passionate about personally, and now, Hittel's starting to show me, that there's some at least some search demand behind some of those things.

Right. There's at least one person, one customer of Hittel, longtime customer, who has built several products. I think they were info products based on the suggestions he's gotten in Hittel, they've been they've been successful for him.

Yeah. Anything else in content marketing that you think people should be aware of?

I think I think that content marketing is is absolutely viable, especially if if you're a good writer or a good, you know, podcaster, good interviewer. Any of these things can be turned into content, you know, doing a video interview and posting it on your website. If it hits your niche and people are talking about it, all of that drives traffic to your site.

And do you do how much of your content marketing do you outsource?

I let's see. With HitTail, product specific, my product manager, his name is Derek, he does that for me. So I wouldn't I mean, I kind of outsourced it, but he really is. I mean, he works for me forty hours a week, and he's a contractor. So we he's kind of part of the team.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

He's like, in sourced, I guess. In terms of did an infographic this week that we had outsourced the design. I don't have certainly don't have an infographic designer on staff or anything. Yeah. But coming up with the ideas and batting them around, we definitely do that together.

You know, my product manager and I and the email we have an email seven day email course about long tail SEO. We he did a lot of the work, but we brainstormed that. So it's always it's typically a little bit of a collaborative, but I I outsource as much as possible. How about that? If I have someone who's good enough, why not do that?

Because it is very, very time consuming. Yeah. I think the last thing I'll say about content marketing is be sure to measure. You have to measure your content marketing efforts. Some of our content marketing efforts have had ridiculously bad ROIs that we'll never do them again.

But other ones have worked quite well. Yeah. So, you know

I think that's actually that's great to to to bring that up because if anyone has been blogging or putting up content, you know that what distinguishes a hit and a miss, it's very hard to tell sometimes beforehand and you shouldn't necessarily get discouraged just because you put some effort into a blog post and it didn't go anywhere. In my personal experience, it's been hard to say, What's going to be the next hit? I have no idea.

Yep. And in my experience, I don't know either. And it's always it's that harder you work, luckier you get. You need to put out a lot of this stuff and some of it will catch. You try five or 10 marketing approaches.

If one or two of them hits well, you're you're doing pretty good.

That's great. And I I think we're gonna we're gonna close off with just talking about personal brand again. And it sounds like one of the things you've said is you have to be doing something interesting. You have to have built something interesting or at least have an interesting perspective. What are some other things that people should have in mind as they're trying to do some personal branding, personal marketing?

I think that keep keeping in mind that the more laser focused you are, especially to start with, the faster you're going to attract those early followers, people who are interested in your message. Now you may may limit the size of your market by doing that, but you can always expand that later. So as an example, I started off focusing solely on single founder software companies like micro ISVs, and I use the term micropreneur to describe that. And I just said, this is the way to go. It's self funded.

It's single. And, you know, you can collect multiple products and have them all be small, thousand bucks a month, few thousand bucks a month and grow that. And I I got people rallying around that. Now, over time, I have grown as a person. I've grown in my kinda desires to be challenged.

And so I'm now moving beyond that where I'm actually as I've talked about, I have a product manager. I mean, I kinda have a team I've put together. So although I truly am a single founder, I maybe, you know, letter of the law I am. It's it's kind of not that way anymore. And I'm actually looking at larger and larger ideas, like Hittail and Drip that have big markets.

And so but I've taken that original audience with me, and I've now grown it to be more of the just in general, anyone who's bootstrapping or self funding, yeah, is the market I'm going after now. And that's a much larger market. And so you can kinda start laser focused and build build that that tribe and that community. It's much easier to do it and then expand beyond that.

Yeah. Rob, this has been really, really good advice. I'm so thankful you could come on the show today and talk. Just as we've gone through this, I've been taking notes and there's so much of this stuff that I want to start applying myself. So thanks so much for taking the time to be on the show.

Is there some links you want to to send people to?

I think if people wanna wanna, you know, keep up, softwarebyrob.com is a good place. I have, like I said, a kind of a tips for startup founders and stuff. It's an email newsletter in the upper right, and that comes out every two or three weeks. And then my podcast, that's where I'm on. I'm on there every week without fail, startupsfortherestofus.com.

And Justin, again, really appreciate you having me on. I had an awesome time and I hope you know the stuff I mentioned is valuable to your audience.

Yeah, this has been really great. We're going to have to have you come back on the show another time and follow-up with some of the other things we couldn't cover today. So thanks again, Rob, and you have a great day. You too. A big thanks to Rob Walling for being on the show.

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