Episode 796 | Marketing Isn’t Easy?, How to Grow Your Company, and Be Careful Who You Listen To (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling :
Welcome to another episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I fly solo to cover topics ranging from how outsiders don’t understand how complicated many topics are. It’s called the Dunning Kruger Effect. We’ll dive into that. Another one is answering the question of isn’t marketing just convincing someone to buy the stuff I’ve built? I’m going to talk a bit about how the idea that there’s no one right answer for how to grow your company is a flawed and potentially dangerous statement and might even get into another topic or two depending on time. Before we dive into the episode, MicroConf Europe has sold out. We have sold out all of our events for the past few years, and I’m looking forward to being in Istanbul in less than two weeks with everyone who decided to buy a ticket. 

If you want to get notified when tickets for our next event goes live, head to MicroConf dot com slash events and get on our mailing list. So you’re the first to know when tickets are available. I expect our events to continue selling out, so if you want to join me in a couple hundred of your favorite bootstrapped SaaS founder, friends, head to MicroConf dot com slash events. In addition, MicroConf mastermind matching applications are open. If you’re tired of tackling big challenges and making critical decisions alone, imagine having a hand-selected group of peers who really get it. These are people who understand the highs, the lows, and the late nights of being a founder because they’re living it too Together, you push each other forward, keep each other accountable, and you share honest feedback you won’t find anywhere else. That’s what you get with MicroConf Mastermind matching. Our team has successfully hand matched over 1000 founders into groups by looking at your revenue team size, strengths and goals to make sure your peer group is the right fit. In addition to matching. We provide an eight week curriculum to help you get started because those first few meetings can be awkward. If you’re ready to find your tribe, get unstuck and make real progress in your business, apply now at MicroConf from masterminds.com. Applications close September 24th. And with that, let’s dive into our first topic. 

My first topic for today is how from the outside before you understand most topics, you think they’re simpler than they really are. The biggest mistake I see a lot of developer founders make is they assume marketing is just something that you can learn in a weekend, or they assume it’s posting on Twitter or they assume it’s something I can read a book and suddenly I’m an expert in it. The thing I want you to think about is how long did it take for you to become a junior developer and a mid-level developer and a senior developer, and whatever level you’re at now, look back 2, 3, 5 years and think how much better you are today than you were a few years ago. Marketing is not the same as development, but the progression is similar. An entry level marketer with zero to, I dunno, six to 12 months of experience is comparable to an entry level software engineer with six to 12 months of experience. 

Now, think about that engineer even with AI and how dangerous they can be to your code base, how much they don’t yet understand because they don’t have the experience, they don’t know what they don’t know. That’s the same with marketing and sales, any type of motion that gets your product into the hands of your customers and gets them to buy. And this phenomenon of looking at a topic and assuming it’s simpler than it is just because you’ve never done it is called the Dunning Kruger effect. And it’s a cognitive bias where people with low knowledge or skill in a domain tend to overestimate their competence while those with higher competence are more likely to underestimate their relative ability because they know how complex it really is. I remember writing code when I was eight years old and I stopped around 13 probably when girls and sports caught my attention, but then when I took a coding class in college, I remember thinking, oh, I’m really good at this because I did it for all those years. 

I had no idea how complicated, not just writing code is, but software engineering and architecture and maintainability, scalability, security, all the things you don’t think about when you’re hacking away speaking basic to your apple. In a 700 line piece of spaghetti code, there’s a graph that’s often used to illustrate the Dunning Kruger effect. And there are a couple points on it that are named, it’s kind of funny. The first is the peak of mount stupid, and this is where early learners I was when I was 13 or maybe taking that first course in college. Early learners feel overconfident because they know a little and they feel like they know all of it. Early software engineers feel this way. Senior developers who look at marketing feel this way and maybe these days, senior marketers who look at software development feel that way because of ai, I’m not sure or know code or whatever, that they are overconfident that it’s just not that complicated. 

I mean, I do think a lot of people come into the SaaS world and they come in with this assumption of like, well, I’ve sold products before. I used to sell info products, therefore I can start a SaaS. And there’s a reason that I talk about how SaaS is one of the best business models, but it is one of the hardest company types to start because just building a SaaS and maintaining and hosting it, making it secure, making it performant, making it mostly bug free, building something that people want and are willing to pay for, all of that is five or 10 times harder than in any other sphere that I know of. And maybe that’s my own dunning Kruger effect because have I launched a consumer packaged good, a toothpaste that would go on the shelf at Target? No, I have not. But I do know that one of the mistakes I see of folks entering the SaaS space who have had success in other realms is they overestimate how easy it’s going to be. 

SaaS is just another product, right? If I used to sell eBooks and courses and I made a million dollars doing that, I mean it’s going to be easy. SaaS is subscription. Write some code, hire a developer to do some stuff and then sell that. That’s not how it works. You’re going to be at the peak of Mount stupid. And then the second step is the valley of despair where deeper learnings reveal the complexity leading to doubt. And finally, the slope of enlightenment slope that slowly goes up into the right, gradual increase in confidence as true competence builds. So the Dunning Kruger effect is fairly well known and it’s been studied and is well documented. And so marketing is complicated and it’s likely going to take you years to learn. You can’t just build something and then ask, how do I market this? Especially if you’ve never done it, it fucking drives me insane to be on X Twitter and Reddit and to see over and ing over. 

Are you kidding me? Developers posting, saying, I built this thing, now how do I market it? Or I built this thing and no one’s buying it. What do I do now? Or how do, I’m a developer, how do I learn to market? Can you just read any of the prior art on this? Read the SaaS playbook, listen to this podcast, follow arvid call, listen to things. Reuben Gomez says, follow Derek Reimer. Listen to Jason Cohen Heat and Shaw Dharmesh Shaw. There’s a lot of folks. Look at almost any Microcom speaker who’s been a founder, and they’re saying things like, yeah, this is hard. Learn how to do it or find a co-founder who knows how to do it. This is again, not something you can necessarily hire out very easily, if at all. Similar to how Derek Rimer and I talked just a few episodes ago about how hard it is to be a non-technical founder in SaaS. 

It’s also challenging to not have marketing background, but it is surmountable at TinySeed and across MicroComp and startups. For the Rest Of Us, we do see solo technical founders who can make it work, and usually they learn one marketing approach well enough to get themselves where they need to go. And that may not get them to millions in a RR, but if you’re a solo founder and you build something and maybe get a little lucky with marketing or maybe you know how to write articles and they catch in in chat GPT or in Google, then can you get to 10 k, 20 k 30 KA month? Yeah, you can, but that doesn’t necessarily mean marketing. It means that you have learned one tool on the tool belt. I have to describe my early days of learning how to market and sell software as being highly technical founder who had, what did I have? 

Seven years of professional development experience. So I was considered a senior engineer, and I didn’t know anything about marketing or sales. And slowly I learned it. I learned at one piece at a time. At first it was at content and SEO, and then it was pay-per-click ads. And then I did display ads and I learned, well, I learned copywriting in that certain point. I learned audience building. I slowly built out the tool belt, and each one of those took me at least a year to learn. And so as a developer or as someone maybe who, even if you’re not a developer or someone who was thinking about building, launching, growing a SaaS, you do need multiple skill sets. And I talked a while back about the hierarchy of skills in being successful in SaaS, and I actually don’t remember what my exact order, but coming up with it again, let’s see if I match. 

This is a test to see if I match. I think number one and two were like marketing and sales. Number three was product. Product might’ve been two actually. And then the bottom one was actually writing the code. And can be tough to hear when you’re a developer and you’re like, well, it’s SaaS. I know how to build a SaaS, but do you know what to build? Do you know what to build to get people to use it and to pay for it and to stick around that product is a skillset. Being a product manager, product owner is also skillset. Now that’s more adjacent to software development than marketing is, but each of these things are things that you will have to master. And that’s one of the reasons why launching a SaaS is hard. A lot of hard decisions with incomplete information, and you just should not assume that marketing or product are easy just because you don’t understand how complicated they are. 

And as a final note, marketing being difficult is really why I coined the stair step method, right? It’s why I came up with that whole framework also because SaaS is complicated. So it’s both of those things. SaaS being is technically complicated and the marketing is complicated. It’s the worst of both worlds. That’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s so valuable, because it’s hard to do. And if you stair step your way up by being in an app ecosystem and we list 70 something of those, just go to Google and type in MicroConf SaaS, app ecosystems, SaaS app marketplaces, it’ll get you there. It’s the first result and we have 70 something of them. And what that does for you is if you can get it to one marketing channel where you’re just in the app store and you’re getting your flow from there. So maybe it’s the iOS app store, maybe it’s Shopify, maybe it’s Heroku. 

You can for now just learn all the other stuff around SaaS and you don’t have to build a standalone SaaS app. You can write a much simpler add-on or extension of an ecosystem so you don’t have to start from scratch and do all the complicated scaly security. All the things of building an app from scratch, a standalone SaaS app and marketing it as standalone, you’re doing it on hard mode and I’ve done it. People do it. A lot of tiny companies do wind up doing it, but if you’ve never done it and you really don’t have much experience with it, it’s definitely an uphill battle. My second topic is a quote, and this is a bit of a, it’s a straw man. No one has actually said this quote, but I see this sentiment online. Maybe it’s indie hackers or developers who want to build stuff but don’t want to market it. 

And this quote is, even if marketing is hard, isn’t it just convincing someone to buy the stuff that I’ve built? I’m going to build a thing and then just convince people to buy it? No, no, it’s not. And you’re starting backwards if you’re going to do that, especially if you’re doing SaaS. Here’s the thing, if I was going to launch a toothpaste brand, well, right now it’s a commodity, and so I’m going to build a brand around toothpaste or if I’m going to start a gin brand or mezcal, I’m going to go to some famous person because that’s what seems to work these days. But you’re going to build a brand around that because with those products, these consumer packaged goods, it’s really about making people talk about it. It’s about pitching it to the bars and then it’s about getting on the shelves. And those things are hard, but we know that people are going to use toothpaste and consume gin and mezcal. 

If you go off and build a SaaS tool that is a new thing that you had an idea about that connects these two things into, you don’t know if anyone needs that. You don’t know if anyone wants it. And even if they do, you don’t know if anyone will pay for it. Good marketing will just make a bad product fail faster. And that’s a bastardization of a quote that I believe is either from Ogilvy or from Eugene Schwartz who are two advertising folks there, kind of the Mad men of 1950s and sixties. Good marketing will only make a bad product fail faster and bad product doesn’t necessarily mean the quality is bad. It might just mean it’s a product that no one cares about and no one wants. Especially with SaaS, you can have an audience and market really well and get a lot of people using your product, and if you haven’t solved a desperate pain point and you do not have product-market fit, they will bleed out and churn will kill your product and you will plateau very early. 

This is exactly what happened with Drip in the early days when all Drip was an email capture widget and a email sequence, and that’s all it did. And we were trying to charge $50 a month for it, and people were like, I can cobble this together with other tools, and we plateaued, and I put all my marketing energy behind it, hit the audience, hit the Facebook ads, hit all the places, and got it up to, it was about eight grand a month of MRR, which hey, that’s not bad. But then it plateaued and churn was very high. It was 12 to 15%, and we just sat there because we hadn’t built something people want, and my good marketing had just made a bad product fail faster, plateau faster. To me, that was a failure. I did not want to build another product to eight KA month. 

I wanted this to be a hundred K, 200 KA month at lease product. I still want it to be a lifestyle business. At that point, I was not even thinking about growing it and that it had the potential to do what it did, but realize that marketing a product no one wants isn’t helpful. And trying to add marketing as an afterthought is like trying to add virality as an afterthought. It doesn’t work. Now, the confusion comes about because with consumer packaged goods that can work with e-com stores that can work. You can be drop shipping, funky lamps, and you can run ads on Facebook or meta whatever, and you can make money that way. You can put ’em on Amazon. There’s the Amazon FBA fulfillment Amazon crowd where you can just figure that out. It’s just marketing a thing that already exists with info products. 

It is, right? As long as you pick a topic, maybe you have an audience, ideally you have an audience, but maybe you don’t and maybe you write a book about how to do X, how to become a dental technician or how to make money online, God forbid, please don’t do that. Well, then you can just sprinkle marketing on and be like, I’m going to try make people find this. So I’m going to go into Amazon, I’m going to set up a website, I’m going to put it on Gumroad. I’m going to do SEO, I’m going to try to get people to find this thing. And if they buy it, that’s all there is. But with SaaS, that’s not the way it is because people can churn, they can cancel, and people don’t stay with tools. They don’t keep paying for tools that they’re not using. 

And with info products, a huge percentage, let’s say 80 plus percent of folks who buy your info product, they never use it and it doesn’t matter and you never hear about it. Now that sucks, but it’s the reality. If someone’s not using your SaaS, they cancel. And that’s why so many people, these founders, these aspiring founders, the indie hackers, the folks who are trying to just build what they want, scratch their own itch, not do validation, not think at all about marketing until every line of code is written. That’s why they’re wasting their time and they’re not having success with SaaS. You have to build something people want and are willing to pay for. You can’t just promise a result. I’ve seen some info products courses that are 99% marketing and 1% product, and it just doesn’t work with SaaS. So in conclusion, marketing in SaaS is not just convincing someone to buy the stuff that you’ve built. 

You have to start with the marketing. You have to start and think about which channels might work. Have you heard of the 2 2200 idea validation framework, the 5:00 PM framework? There’s a reason I’ve developed those. It’s not to hear myself talk. It’s not so that I sound smart. It’s because those are the ways to maximize your chance of success. Now doesn’t mean that a hundred percent of the time you use them, you’ll be successful. No, absolutely not. Does it mean that there are no other ways to do it and be successful? No, it doesn’t. But I’ve baked into those two frameworks, the best practices and the most likely success scenarios for the vast majority of founders. And if instead of wanting to look at the SEO potential, the number of people who are searching for something, instead of trying to gauge some demand, instead of trying to see how you can enter an existing category and maybe tweak it and pick a position to where you are the leader or figuring out where the demand is, how many people want this actually doing some work that this sounds boring, doesn’t it? 

It sounds boring, it sounds grindy. And guess what? When you don’t do that, you just build a bunch of stuff and you build 10 tools and you launch ’em to crickets, and then you wonder why you don’t have success with it, and maybe you get lucky on one of them, and that can almost be worse for you because then you feel like you’re doing the right thing or then you feel like you’re good at this. But no, you’re not. You haven’t learned anything because you didn’t follow any of these things through to fruition. You just kind of threw a bunch of dice against a wall and one of them came up as a six. Let’s consider that success in this case. So we have six side to die, throw 10 of ’em against a wall. All of ’em are one through fives, one is a six, and now you’re like, oh, see how good I am? 

It’s like, are you good or are you lucky? And when you’re lucky, you just don’t learn very much. So the next time you throw those 10 dice against the wall, which let’s be honest, how many months or years of your time is it to get 10 more at bats? And if each time you’re not progressing from the time before, that’s a real travesty. And so I guess to state it even a different way, I know the validation is not foolproof, but validation. The validation is to do some research upfront and to think about marketing before you build that product rather than just cracking open an editor and starting to code and figuring, I’ll figure all this out later because then there you’re on Twitter saying, Hey, I’m not good at marketing. Can someone help me with that? And it’s like I couldn’t step in. I’m pretty good at marketing. I’m not the best, but I’m decent. I couldn’t step in and save a product that no one wants. It takes forethought to not waste your time. 

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And you know what? Inevitably do whatever fits your style because there are no right answers. There’s no one right answer that is a dangerous and catastrophic conclusion to draw. So again, that statement on its own, there’s no one right answer for how to grow your company. That’s true. But I tell you what, let’s say there are a thousand possible paths to grow your company. There’s probably five or 10 that are really, really good. Maybe even less than that. There’s probably three that are optimal, and there’s probably another five to seven that’ll do an okay job. And then there’s probably 990 that will get you nowhere. And you can see this pretty plainly by going on social media and seeing how many people are failing all the time and they’re failing in different ways. There’s a lot of ways to fail. There are only a few ways to succeed, and there are even fewer ways to say catch lightning in a bottle. 

So to have great success, to have that Cinderella story where things grow very quickly. And so why is it important to understand the subtlety of this? Because I don’t want you, dear listener of startups For the Rest Of Us to be under the illusion that A, since there’s no right answer, I can just do whatever I want and whatever fits my style. The whole thing about validation, yeah, talking to customers and thinking about demand and I dunno, seeing one idea through to fruition, even though Rob and Jason Cohen and Laura Rotor Heat and Shaw, Ruben Gomez, other successful founders, even though they say that’s pretty much the way to do it, there is probably 98% of the time that’s the right way to do it. And throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks is pretty catastrophic and you don’t learn from it and it’s just unlikely to actually bring success even though they say that that just doesn’t fit my style, that doesn’t fit my style of the way I want to work. 

I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you believe that and if you invest your time in that, because each of us not only has so many minutes on this earth, but we all have opportunity cost. It’s not just about the time. It’s about what else could you be doing with that time? Could you be spending it with your significant other, your good friends, your kids? Could you be walking the wall around Dubrovnik and gazing out at the Adriatic scene having an amazing time instead of hacking away on your ninth idea that you’re going to throw at the wall? Because you don’t want to shift your own mindset in how these companies can be successful. It’s interesting, I’m in a few private founder groups that go way back. I mean a handful of them. And I will sometimes see a founder struggling with a decision and they will ask for feedback about, Hey, should I do this or that, or is there another option? 

And oftentimes there is a general consensus. It’s not everyone saying the same thing, but I’ll see, frankly, the more successful founders generally agree on, you should probably go with A, and if you go with B, here’s the pers and cons, blah, blah, blah. It’s not that everyone thinks the same way. It’s not that all successful founders got there through the same path, but the more you do this and the more you pattern match it to success and failure, the more you do get a sense of things that generally work, it becomes that gut instinct. And there are outliers with this. I mean, I’ll be honest, Jason Cohen, for example, will come in, he’s not in these groups, but I’ll hear him weigh in on the topic and be like, oh, that was actually a pretty unique and insightful take. He has a very unique perspective having now grown. 

I think it’s three companies and sold two for cash. Two are unicorns, two are north of a billion. Yeah, he’s next level and he’s the one that’ll seek up with really unique insights and questions. But generally, a lot of us who have found success will kind of agree on this is the right direction for you to head. And then of course it’s up to that founder who asked it take that advice or not. But what you don’t see is someone ask for advice, and if there’s 10 successful people, there be 10 different completely different answers because there’s no one right way to grow your company. You won’t see that. You will see, again, a general consensus of a direction that’s usually like, yeah, if we have a hundred or a thousand ways to do it, there’s probably three that they generally agree on. Maybe two, and this is an added sentiment I think of be careful who you listen to online. 

There are some folks who have never had successes, but for some reason, some folks think that they have. There are some folks who’ve had one success, and if you look at ’em, they had 10 years of starting no success, starting failure, no success, no success, no success, and then eventually we’re successful. And oftentimes that is either because they got pretty damn lucky and they couldn’t do it again or because eventually they built up such a network and audience that it did kickstart those early days, and they finally still did get a little lucky and hit a gap of a thing that was growing at the right time. Now, I’m not taking luck away from anyone, and I think if you can manufacture luck, manufacture your own luck, but then be careful about listening to that person, unless you also are going to get lucky, then you’re not going to have the success that they do. 

I like to control the things I can, which are the hard work and the skill part of success. So I tend to follow people who have seen work hard and build up their skills and have generally good intuitions about how to do something, start a company for example, and how to do it successfully, and then how to do it again, and then maybe a third time as well. But you got to look at people’s track record when you’re listening to their advice. Just because they’ve been around a long time, or just because they have written a book or just because they put a lot of things out on the internet does not necessarily mean they know what they’re talking about. And I see this sad part is we didn’t used to have this a lot in SaaS. It was more in the info product affiliate space where there’s just a lot of sleazy stuff going on and people exaggerating making up numbers saying their net worth is more than it is saying they’ve sold more than they making a fake scarcity. 

There’s all kinds of stuff that used to happen that has crept into a lot into the indie hacker space, tiny bit into the SaaS space. But yes, there are a hundred percent people that are over, I would say, inflating their accomplishments or people who don’t even address it, they don’t overinflate, but for some reason, folks are listening to them. And that’s where I want to advise you once again, to be pretty careful. Be really careful who listen to it. Just because someone has 50,000 YouTube subscribers or a hundred thousand or 150,000 followers on X Twitter, it does not mean that they know what they’re talking about. Especially if you want to do something specific like, Hey, I want to build a SaaS company, bootstrap it, or mostly bootstrap it to one to 5 million, and I want to sell it for between 10 and $50 million. There are a lot of folks online who will say things that will not help you in that goal. 

It will seem like maybe they’re adjacent and they’re kind of a indie hacker founder person who, oh, I should, this kind of makes sense and that sounds easy. Problem is they’re feeding you ice cream. You probably need spinach, and I get that doing 2 2200 and doing validation and grinding away on SEO and marketing and learning to do that is spinach and lifting weights, right? That’s what it is. It’s the hard things. It’s not the ice cream. I would be so much more popular if I just told people, you should do B2C two-sided marketplaces. My following would be 10 times the amount, especially if I got outraged when people question that or if I just said, it’s just all luck. Just go and build and ship. Oh man, do you realize how many more followers I would have and how I could not live with myself? 

How I would not be able to sleep at night because of that? Because I would be doing, I think such a disservice to folks like yourself who are listening to this. Alright, that was a longer rate that I admitted to be. But the end cap of that is be mindful of who you are listening to and be aware that often when faced with a decision within your company, often within your personal life, within trying to grow and build an incredible business, oftentimes it’s the more difficult path. The path that has a bigger headwind and more resistance within yourself. That’s often the path that you should go rather than shy away from it. Thanks for joining me for this solo episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us. It’s been great having you here today. I love chatting with you each week. It’s been the highlight of my week since March of 2010. I laugh because that’s a long time. It’s always fun covering these topics and if you keep listening, I’ll keep recording. This is Rob Walling, signing off for episode 796.