125: Rob Walling - Choosing the Right Product Idea
In this episode, Adam talks to Rob Walling about choosing, validating, and marketing a viable software product.
Topics include:
- Brainstorming ideas vs. paying attention to your own problems
- Why it's smart to start with a product that might never make a million dollars a year
- Should you avoid markets with competition?
- Why it's a good idea to build something for fewer people
- Strategies for figuring out how many people have the problem you're trying to solve
- Why you should start marketing before you start building
- When should you start charging money for your product?
- Why getting 1,000 customers is extremely hard and how that affects your pricing
- Why you don't need an audience to build a software product
- Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
- DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack
- Rob's website
- Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob's podcast
- Drip, the last software business Rob built
- TinySeed, Rob's startup accelerator for bootstrappers
- MicroConf, the conference Rob organizes
- "The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping"
- "Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding"
- "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg
- "SaaS Marketing Essentials" by Ryan Battles
- "Start Small, Stay Small", Rob's book