Episode 800 | The 12 Commandments of Startups for the Rest of Us

Rob Walling:
Welcome to a very special episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. On this podcast, we believe that startups are not just about growth at all costs. They’re about building a business that creates and supports the life that you want to live, and that retaining control and independence, whether you raise money or not, is such a powerful way to stay in line with your values. You can build an incredible life-changing business, hopefully without burning out and without moving to a major startup hub or begging venture capitalists for money. Since this show started more than 15 years ago, it’s been about helping founders like you build sustainable, profitable, sane companies. And the mission of this show plus my books plus MicroConf TinySeed and everything else that I do is to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups. I mentioned at the top that this is a special episode and I’m going to keep that as a spoiler. 

If you stick around to the end, I’ll let you know why I feel that In this episode, I’m going to dive into the 12 Commandments of Startups For the Rest Of Us. Before I do that, I want to let you know that early bird tickets from MicroConf US 2026 are on sale. The event is in Portland, Oregon, April 12th through the 14th. Right now, ticket prices are as low as they ever will be, and we have sold out our last three or four events. Ticket prices will go up on October 22nd or when the first a hundred tickets have sold. If you’re planning to come, should get your ticket. MicroConf dot com slash us use promo code Rob 50 for $50 off. 

So let’s talk about the 12 commandments of startups For the Rest Of Us. I originally started thinking about is there a list of rules of thumb rules, ideas, thoughts that folks can take away as they bootstrap or mostly bootstrap their companies? I considered calling them the X Commandments of bootstrapping or the X Commandments of SaaS, but none of that really captured it because bootstrapping can be building a great little lifestyle business or it can mean being an ambitious founder trying to get to seven figures and to talk about SaaS is too broad because isn’t there venture-backed SaaS and there’s HubSpot and then there’s an Indie Hacker project doing five grand a month. So I noodled on this for a while and I realized, you know what, these X Commandments and I didn’t know how many there would be when I started, are really more of a distillation of things that I’ve said on this podcast, certainly over the past six or seven years since I’ve been solo on it. 

But even before then, you can hear the belief behind why we do the show. And so today I want to go through these 12 ideas, these thoughts, these rules of thumb, these commandments as I’m calling them. And I think over time I will wind up adding to this. This is not a complete list. Even as I created this list for this episode, I thought to myself, what am I leaving out? And I know there are a few things that are certainly being left out. Also, I don’t think anyone wants to listen to a 60 minute episode of me running through these. So without further ado, let’s dive in to my first of 12 commandments. Number one is nuance beats absolutes. And the idea behind each of these is it’s either a way to improve your thinking as a founder or to measure how you think or its advice to help you increase your chance of success as you build that bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped startup. 

So again, number one is nuance beats absolutes. There’s a temptation online, especially in founder circles, and frankly, there’s a temptation in politics, certainly in the US and I think in most of the world right now, to think in these extremes, to think in absolutes, to use words like always do this, never do that. Venture capital is always bad. Bootstrapping is always the best or the worst. Marketing doesn’t work. Marketing is tricking people. You should never do marketing, you should always do marketing. But in reality, the truth is more complicated. It’s much more helpful to think in nuance than in extremes. It is very, very rare that an answer is extremely black and white. And I say this as someone who is a left brain software engineer who got two engineering degrees, and when I came into the startup game, I wanted to really believe that there were absolute truths that I had to adhere to or if I adhered to these truths and if I followed these steps and these blueprints that people were trying to sell me, that I would have success with an online business. 

But in fact, the truth is more complicated and there are rules of thumb. You hear me say them on this podcast, you hear me jokingly say, don’t do B2C. Now, do I really mean that there are zero B2C companies that have ever survived or that you should never, ever, ever do them? No. What I mean is you are decreasing your chance of success by bootstrapping B2C, a two-sided marketplace, et cetera, et cetera. Well, we’re going to touch on some of my don’ts a little later. So on this podcast, I’m pretty careful not to say always and never, but to often say, eh, 95% of the time, 95 times out of 198 times out of a hundred, I think this is a good rule of thumb and look, this same goes for pricing strategies and feature decisions and hiring. Learning to think with nuance and seeing spectrums instead of binaries can make you a better founder and honestly, a better human. 

The real world is actually shades of gray and the startup space and bootstrapping is no different. So the next time you hear someone say, oh, you should never take funding because it’s just not true, and I’ve disproven that with TinySeed that the funding is actually founder friendly and every founder you hear talk about TinySeed says, wow, funding. It’s not evil. Who would’ve thought even though there has been a narrative with Bootstrappers that I mean really in 20, was it 17? I think it was 2017, maybe 2018 when I started talking about funding and how fund strapping at the time was becoming a thing. I got real pushback at MicroConf of people saying, oh, no funding, it’s bad, it’s bad, and I didn’t believe it then, right? My book Start small, stay small in 2010 has a paragraph that’s like I’m not anti venture capital. I think it’s a great tool. 

It’s like a shovel. You’ve heard me use this an analogy. If you needed dig a whole, then use it, and if you don’t, then don’t. But I’ve just always been against the narrative that funding of any kind is the only way to accomplish these things. Anytime you hear someone talk about product-market fit as I’ve hid it or I haven’t, or do you have it? It’s helpful to think of it with nuance to think of it as a spectrum instead of a binary commandment. Number two is learn how to make hard decisions with incomplete information. You’ve heard this one before. If you’re a long time listener, I couldn’t have a list of advice without touching on a few of the classics. I promise not all of them will be things you’ve heard me say over and over, but the idea behind this thought is that things will never be as clear as you want them to be. 

You’ll almost never have 100% of the data you wish you had. In fact, this is maybe what I’ll say, never. I don’t think I’ve ever had a hundred percent of the data I wish I had when I’m making a decision as a founder in an early stage startup, if you work for a Fortune 500 company and you have a million customers and you can survey them and get statistically significant opinions, maybe you’ll have a hundred percent that I don’t know. I’ve never been in that situation. And founders who wait for certainty wind up paralyzed while your competitors ship. The competitors who are making hard decisions within complete information and moving quickly will outpace you. So being able to make hard calls in the face of incomplete or messy information or mixed signals is a core founder skill that you need to embody for those nerds listening. 

You can think of it like bey and updates. You gather what you can, you make the best decision possible, then you course correct as you learn more because progress beats perfection every time. Learn how to make hard decisions with incomplete information. It is a skill that you will have to practice. You’ll have to hone your founder gut. I talk about how to do this in the mindset chapter at the end of the SaaS playbook, but the high level is be around founders who generally make good decisions, see how they think about them, get their advice. This can be in a mastermind or an advisor or an investor or a co-founder. I have run into people over the years that just made better decisions than I did, and I didn’t understand why founders specifically and I observed them. A lot of these folks I’ve had on this podcast, and when you hear their thought process, it’s enlightening and you can start to learn how they think, not just about the end result, not just the decisions they make, but what goes on in their head. 

And that’s part of why I interview founders, successful founders on this show is so you can hear that that’s partly why I come up with frameworks or I talk about my own internal thought processes so that you can potentially learn from someone who may be a bit ahead of you. The third commandment is to avoid the classic traps. These are the classic mistakes I’ve laid out on this podcast and I’ve put eight of them under this one bullet point. I cheated just a little bit, but if you recall, I had an episode that was seven things you should never Do. It was spurred on by a question from Dan Andrews of the tropical MBA podcast, and then a couple episodes later I added an eighth, and when I say never, you know what I mean? You can break the rules, but it’s learn the rules and get good enough at them that you learn when and how you should break them. 

So very quickly, what are my eight classic mistakes? I’ll probably add to these over time too, but the total number of these have stayed at eight since I recorded those episodes a year or two ago. Number one is don’t bootstrap a two-sided marketplace unless you already have one. Side number two is don’t start a B2C app when you are leaning towards bootstrapping or mostly bootstrapping SaaS. Number three is don’t build a second product just because the first one stopped growing and that one has a bit more nuance. Ruben and I recorded an entire episode about, well, there are exceptions, and there are some TinySeed companies that have convinced me that they should in fact build a second product. So is this correct? 95% of the time? Yeah, probably, but there are some exceptions as with all of these things. Number four is don’t try to define a new category of software from scratch. 

And you just heard an example of someone who did this, Colin from status skater was on just a few episodes ago and they have succeeded at it, but if you listen to him, he says, don’t do it. It was very, very hard and it took them like 11 years to get to the success that they potentially could have achieved much earlier on. The same thing holds with bootstrapping two set of marketplaces. Don’t start a B2C app. Every time I talk about these on X Twitter, on YouTube, on this podcast, a few people comment and say, well, that’s all I know. And then a bunch of people say, yeah, tried it. It was like eating glass. That was actually a quote from someone who’s like, I successfully did this, and I said, oh, was it easy? Would you do it again? And the response was, it was like eating glass. 

So what does that tell you about this list? Without knowing the rules and knowing when you should break them, probably a good idea to think about staying within the lines for now. Number five is don’t translate your app into multiple languages too early. Usually it’s, oh, I’ve stopped growing, so I’m going to translate to Spanish, German, and French, and that’s usually not the reason that you stop growing. Number six is don’t stop at surface level fixes. Dig deeper into root causes. Don’t just say, oh, my churn is high, therefore I’m going to use some churn reduction tactics. Usually the deeper root causes that you haven’t built something people want and churn reduction tactics are just going to mask that. And again, I spent a full episode talking about these in episode 6 85 came out Halloween of 2023 if you want to hear the full discussion. 

Number seven is don’t use a portfolio launch strategy, meaning spraying multiple products at once to see what sticks. Number eight is, don’t take outside funding and then start a bunch of side projects. So this was one commandment with eight traps and my hope is that you’re avoiding these and saving yourself months or years of wasted energy commandment Number four is don’t build without evidence. I phrased this very carefully. I could say never build without validating, but I find that this term validating, he puts in air quotes, makes people think that there is a way to get to 100% confidence that you’ve validated that this idea will be successful and that’s not the case. What validation is, or in this case evidence because I said don’t build without evidence. It’s evidence that says if you build this, it might be something people want and it points you in the direction of solving a problem that people slash businesses are willing to pay for. 

Evidence does not mean you have iron clad proof, but it’s better than nothing. So evidence includes things like customer conversations. It includes things like putting a landing page up and seeing how many emails you can acquire and then talking to those folks. It might include pre-selling, it might not. Folks who say validation don’t work and then spend two or three months nights and weekends or frankly full-time and then launch something to crickets and then post on Reddit, hacker News X Twitter and say, oh, I build something. How do I market it catastrophic and it pains me to see this over and over and over. There’s a reason that I came up with the 2 2200 framework you’ve heard me talk about. It’s exactly for this bullet. It’s two hours of research. Then if you make it past that point, you have some evidence that there’s some demand. 

Then you do 20 hours of a smoke test customer conversations and you let it, is there good evidence? Is there evidence for or against it? And then the 200 hours is building an MVP, whether that’s with no code with AI help or you’re just coding something. Or even with human automation, you have a VA on the backend who is doing the actual work instead of the code. That’s the point of that framework and whether you follow any framework I come up with or someone else’s framework, don’t build without evidence. The successful serial entrepreneurs that I see succeeding over and over, they usually start with a gut feel and then they gather evidence through conversations, landing pages, et cetera, et cetera. You saw Jason Cohen do this with WP Engine. You saw Ruben Gomez do this with Sewell. You saw Derek Reimer doing it with SAVI Cal, you saw me do it with Drip. 

You saw on and on and on probably every TinySeed or frankly every founder that I’ve interviewed on startups For the Rest Of Us, almost without exception either at a minimum had the themselves and I would say, if you have the problem yourself, your customer is zero. Now go out and find out, does anyone else have this problem and is anyone else willing to pay for it? Those are the questions you’re trying to answer, and most of the folks who come on the show did something upfront, not all, but most of them gathered some evidence instead of just purely going on a gut feel, spraying and praying Commandment number five is that marketing beats product. I know it’s a tough sell to talk to a bunch of builders and let them know that your skillset is actually less important in entrepreneurial success than learning how to market and sell. 

This was a very hard pill for me to swallow as a software developer, say 20 years ago, 22 years ago, trying to get out of my day job launching side projects because I’d spent so much time developing this skill writing code since I was eight years old. I thought that was the hard part, but it feels like no matter how many times I say this or any other successful founder says it about, Hey, distribution is more important than the code, right? Marketing and selling is more important than what you build. It seems like there’s always going to be developers posting on social media, okay, I built it now do I market it? Or worse yet, I’m a non-technical founder and I paid an agency $30,000 to build this. Now how do I market it? And that’s really tough. We’ve all seen really shitty products that are making millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. 

When people say, wow, man, have you seen Salesforce? It’s such a catastrophe, man. HubSpot is so tough to use. It’s so complicated. So you’re kind of saying it’s not a great product, right? Maybe it does a lot, but it’s not well architected or the UX or whatever it is that you’re saying in that sentence, and yet it’s a successful product. And why is that? They marketed really well. They sold really well. One could also say they were early. I mean depending on Salesforce or whatever, but even these days, new products that come out of the gate and succeed quickly usually have someone who really knows how to market and sell behind. It is extremely, extremely rare and extremely, extremely lucky for someone to build a legit like seven or eight figure business without marketing or sales acumen. Beyond that, there’s this old quote and I always misattribute it, but it’s from an advertising, one of the Mad Men advertising execs in the fifties and sixties. 

It might be Eugene Schwartz, it might be David Ogilvy, but the quote is, good marketing will make a bad product fail faster. And in terms of SaaS, obviously we see bad products that are actually poorly designed, but I mean more that a bad product is probably something that no one wants. You have a solution to a problem that no one really cares about, and even if you then have good marketing, it’s still not going to save that. I saw that in the early days of Drip. We actually did have a good product. It was very well constructed and a decent marketing acumen, but even those two things, if you don’t find product-market fit, that’s what those words mean, right? Is that you have built something that businesses want and are willing to pay for. If you don’t have it, then even being a good builder and a good marketer, you can then still fail. 

And so that’s why SaaS is so tough is that you need to learn to market and sell and you should know how to build or frankly be able to co-found or hire someone to do these things with. I won’t go into how hard it is to hire folks to write good code and market, but it is definitely a balance and a challenge. Bottom line is if you don’t know how to market beyond social media tweeting about your launch and putting it on product hunt, you’re damn near doomed. You’re going to wind up selling to people who want to follow your entrepreneurial journey. So it’s like other aspiring entrepreneurs who tend to be super price sensitive, high churn, just want to check out new tools, not an ideal customer base to build any type of sustainable business around. To summarize this one, there are just about 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. 

I’ve listed ’em in the SaaS playbook, understanding which ones fit, which business models, how to prioritize them, learning how to execute on one of them, two of them, three of them, and then building business that use those skills. It’s an incredible advantage that will pay dividends for years if not decades, on your founder journey. Marketing beats product, learn how to do it commandment number six is to have fewer customers, better customers. There is a myth with venture capital if you’re listening to venture capitalists who want to scale to hundreds of millions or billions in revenue, but there’s also a myth among, I don’t know, it’s the B2C founders who want to charge five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks a month. There’s a myth that you need massive scale to succeed, but the math on SaaS doesn’t really support that. You want to be thinking about building a product that is high priced enough, and this is if you’re doing a step three business, well, you know this third step approach, step one, businesses that only need to scale to two grand, five grand, 10 grand a month. 

Obviously you can be lower priced, but if you really want to build a seven or eight figure SaaS company with net negative churn, you want to think about having higher pricing and you want to think about having a few hundred high value happy customers that you can build into a multimillion dollar business. 10,000 customers sounds sexy, but it is a nightmare for support. It is a nightmare if you don’t have the process or the resources to be ready for it. More customers means more support, it means more churn, and it usually means more stress. I want to be careful here, and I’m not saying you can only build a successful business by charging a hundred, 200, $300 a month and up. That’s just not true even with SaaS, even with bootstrapping, but the idea here is try to think about how to solve a pain point that will keep people sticking around that can potentially lower your customer count rather than increase it and then focus on those customers, your ideal customer profile. 

These are the right customers, rather than just going for volume and getting caught up in that idea of how can I serve as many customers as possible? Of course you always want to do that, but also how can I choose customers who are going to really need and really love this product? And the problem it solves? Commandment number seven is to respect the platform, but fear the platform. Platform risk is tough and you shouldn’t necessarily avoid it. Whole hog, there are I think seven or eight levels of platform risk that I defined on this very show episode 735. So it’s not as if sending email through SendGrid or hosting on AWS is the same amount of platform risk as having a Shopify app where all of your new customers come from Shopify, all of your existing customers are on Shopify, and they can kick you out of the app store or just decide to charge you a 50% cut of your revenue off the top because they decide to. 

Those are different levels of platform risk. So respect the platform. Fear the platform involves educating yourself on which levels of platform risk you have. Do you have customer concentration risk? Do you have new incoming customer risks? Do you have the ability to be shut down? Is that your risk? What’s the switching cost? Is there kind of an equivalent that you could switch to? These are all things that you want to understand about platform risk, and again, I don’t say avoid platform risk. It’s very, very difficult if not almost impossible to totally avoid platform risk. And again, you’ll hear it in that episode 7 35 where I’m talking about hosting your own web server in your closet and your own email server and maintaining all that. That’s the way to avoid platform risk. And even then, aren’t you reliant on your home internet service? You kind of are. 

So the idea here is know what you’re getting into. Much like someone who says, I will never raise funding. Know what you’re getting into. Much like someone who says, I don’t want to work more than 20 hours a week. I never want to hire employees. I don’t want to do marketing or sales. Just know what you’re getting into by saying those things. Know that you are potentially and almost inevitably limiting growth or with platform risk that you are taking on some risk. That’s okay. We are nuanced thinkers on this podcast, so we can say, oh, it is okay to have some platform risk and to realize that if I have all my code on an EC2 instance with Amazon and I have written and maintained all that code, that there is of course some Amazon platform risk, but that risk is not equivalent to if I have built an app in no code on Bubble or Airtable, and this is where having a nuanced view can help you know what you’re getting into. 

When I talk about stair stepping, I don’t mind even heavy levels of platform risk with step one and step two businesses because I know that those are a little more squishy and maybe even a little more disposable because these are not designed to be seven or eight figure companies. They’re designed to be great little lifestyle businesses that can do two grand, five grand, 10, 20 grand a month, and so I’m willing to take a little more risk with them in order to get the upside because there are advantages to being on a platform, but whatever you do with the platform, learn the risks, respect the platform, fear the platform commandment number eight should sound familiar. Build your network, not your audience. An audience gives you reach, but a network gives you leverage so your audience might retweet you, whereas your network might introduce you to your first 10 customers or help you find your first hire, or if you decide to go down this route, you’re first investor, the relationships that you build in your network will outlast any audience, any social platform, your email list algorithm changes. 

There are folks out there who say, if you want to start a SaaS, just build an audience on social media, and that is some of the worst advice that I hear in our space. Don’t get me wrong, an audience is helpful. It really is, but it’s not worth the time that it takes to build it, not for SaaS. If you want to sell info products, if you want to sell courses, if you want to sell memberships, if you want to sell consulting, I do think an audience is extremely helpful, but with SaaS, folks want to use a tool and even with an audience, as Jason Cohen said of, I forget what he’s 20 or 30,000 email subscribers or our SaaS subscribers, he got two customers when he announced WP Engine to his audience, even with my audience of 20 or 30,000 at the time when we launched Drip, we got up to seven or 8,000 MRR and then plateaued hard with high churn and look, seven or 8,000 was good, but that’s as far as your audience takes. 

Nathan Barry saw this when he launched ConvertKit and he got ConvertKit up to about, I think it was like $1,500 of MRR and just couldn’t get past it with the audience. The way that all of us got past it was iterating, focusing, finding product-market fit, and then using our network of people that we have met at events online and that we have built relationships with two wave relationships, not an audience, not, Hey, here’s a tweet by this thing, but can I text you? Can I Slack you? Can I drop you an email and say, Hey, would you be willing to have me on your podcast? Would you be willing to promote me on your social account? Would you be willing to be a customer to switch away from your current provider to use my tool? Would you be willing to vouch for me and refer this tool to other people? 

I’ve done entire episodes on this show and on YouTube of how to build your network. Then that’s the next question. Well, how do I build a network? And I’ve gone through all that. I’m not going to go through it here. If you’re going to build SaaS, build your network, not your audience. Commandment number nine is that overnight success takes a decade. So back in episode 700 of this show talked about playing long ball and playing long ball can work. Most of the overnight successes you see in tech or in our communities, the founders who’ve been grinding and learning and focusing and failing for years and years, often a decade or more, the compounding effect of small wins, and whether that’s MRR growth over time, whether it’s skills that you learn marketing and selling or the credibility you earn, the network you build, these can help you eventually break through. 

They build momentum. If you’re looking for success in six months, you’re probably going to quit. If you give yourself a few years, maybe five, maybe 10, the odds are more in your favor. Folks have asked me how long from the day you launched Drip did it take until you sold it, and it’s two and a half years, so it’s very quick and people often say, wow, overnight success, right? Well, it was three and a half from the time we started building it, and it was six and a half from the time that we started this podcast and started building my network, building my audience. It was five and a half or six and a half since we started MicroConf that helped me build my network and audience. It was 11 years from the time that I made my first revenue online from products with Do net invoice, and it was 13, 14 years from the time that I launched my first websites and online product ideas where I was trying to make things work, and I guess technically I did make a few dollars here and there a hundred dollars a month or something back then, but the idea is that the story sounds like a Cinderella story, like two and a half years. 

That’s all you did. No, it was depending on how you count six and a half or 11 years or 13 or 14. If you give yourself a few months, you’re going to be disappointed. Don’t believe folks who are telling you that you can do this in months, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing Overnight. Success often takes a decade. Commandment number 10 of 12 is to stack small wins. If you try to launch a large complicated SaaS app into a competitive space on day one, when you are a new and aspiring founder, the odds are that you are going to fail. You don’t have the experience, you don’t have the skills, you don’t have the cash, you don’t have the confidence, you don’t have the credibility, you don’t have the network and you probably don’t have the support of, I dunno, if you have a significant other or a spouse launching something small and getting some kind of traction and some wins along the way. 

They build momentum, they build experience, they build confidence, they build some revenue, they build some credibility, a network, they build confidence from your spouse. All of that carries into your next effort and your next effort, and you might recognize this entire premise of small wins as being the basis of the stair step method of entrepreneurship. I’m not saying that the only way to become an entrepreneur is stair step, and I’m not saying the stair step is the only or the best way to stack small wins. Stack small wins to me is this umbrella concept of make a bet, follow it through, try to get some experience and some revenue under your belt. Take that as far as it can go, and then build on that, and maybe that means you acquire another small thing or maybe that means you then start a bigger effort. The idea that building momentum is so important as an entrepreneur, and it’s not just momentum in the early days. 

It’s all the things I’ve said. Experience, confidence, revenue, credibility, network, and it’s really hard to do that when you bite off something that takes you 12 months to build and launch and you just run out of motivation. I’ve often said that funded startups fail when they run out of money and bootstraps. Startups fail when the founder runs out of motivation, and motivation is so driven by momentum, and momentum is so driven by small wins along the way. And look, I can take this and apply it to building a step three business building a full blown SaaS application. Imagine you launch it and you get to V one, you get a small win, but then you need to learn, you need to iterate, you need to fight those headwinds, and you launch more and more and more features and then you get to V two. That’s a small win. 

You celebrate that you’ve gained some experience, some skills, some confidence, hopefully some revenue, and then you keep doing and you iterate and each step compounds into the next, whether you’re doing separate little apps like the stair step method, whether you’re doing a larger effort, like a full-blown SaaS app. Commandment number 11 is the one I’ve talked about on the show before. Be careful who you listen to. I went off on an entire episode rant here just two, three episodes ago, so I won’t belabor this one, but the idea is that there are so many folks online who are good at building audiences and good at selling courses and good at selling a dream to folks who follow them, but they are really vague about how to do it, and they frankly are pretty vague about what they’ve actually accomplished, and these folks have strong opinions about what it takes to be successful, but have often never had a real success themselves. 

Or maybe they had one that was a small success and hello, I’m an exited founder when they sold something for a few hundred thousand dollars and it’s just different or they’ve done it once and they got lucky and they really don’t know how to do it again. So now they’re selling courses because that’s easier. There are definitely knowledgeable founders out there, many of whom you’ll hear on this show or on the MicroConf stage because we carefully curate those voices. We want people with actual experience, a proven track record and the judgment that comes with it, the good solid founder gut that comes with that, so you’ll always hear me throw out names like Jason Cohen, Ruben Gomez, heat and Shah. I mean the list is pretty long in terms of founders that are knowledgeable and that have accomplished things. The challenge is a lot of those folks aren’t building audiences, and so you do have to find them on podcasts like this one or others. 

The danger is if someone is telling you that all you have to do is eat ice cream to lose weight, you should be skeptical. Be skeptical of that message. Be skeptical of the source and dig in a little further and ask, what has this person actually done? The people who tell you only what you want to hear are usually doing it because they want to sell you something, and that’s the easiest way to do it. It’s not because they want to help you succeed. The 12th and final commandment is the most difficult battles will be in your own head. The biggest threat to your company isn’t going to be competition. It’s going to be you. The potential for burnout, self-doubt, loss of motivation, destroying your relationships, mental health, these things kill more companies I think, than any external force. Again, this comes back to the bootstrapped companies go out of business when the founder runs out of motivation, and it’s easy to do that because it’s such a long journey. 

Protecting your headspace is as critical as any other element of your business. And look, my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling, and I wrote an entire book on this called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Together. We talk about it at MicroConf. I’ve had Dr. Sherry on this podcast. It’s things like sleep and mental health and boundaries. These are not luxuries. How often do we see a founder come on Twitter and just say, I’m completely burned out. How many tragic founder suicides have we seen in the venture capital community? It’s easy to go into this journey and think I’ll be able to figure it out, and you might, but don’t underestimate how hard the journey’s going to be. Not to mention if you ever go to sell your company. We wrote a whole book about the psychology of that as well called exit strategy, really learning how to manage your own psychology and not be completely decimated by people’s opinions of you, what they say about you online and to not link your mental health to your MRR growth. 

It’s a real skillset, and it’s one that I personally wished I had learned sooner. Almost every founder I’ve talked with in our spaces, every founder I’ve interviewed has talked about having some type of major challenge or obstacle over the years, and for some people it’s something like depression, and for some folks it’s maybe always being overly cautious and some folks it’s high anxiety and stress and that they’re naturally just in a stress day. Some folks, they work too hard and they burn out. They have self-doubt, they have imposter syndrome. There’s all this stuff that can hit you, and knowing as you’re going into this that one of the most difficult battles will be in your head I think can be really helpful. I said at the top of this episode that it’s a special one. If you hadn’t guessed by now, it’s episode 800 and throughout these 800 episodes of this show, no matter the format, the core message hasn’t changed. 

You don’t have to chase vanity metrics. You don’t have to build the next unicorn to win. You can build a company that gives you freedom, purpose, and healthy relationships and a life that you don’t want to escape from. These commandments I’ve given in this episode are not about rules being carved in stone. There are lessons forged from being in the trenches myself, as well as talking to thousands and thousands of founders around the world through this podcast, my books, my blog, MicroConf TinySeed, and on and on, and I think of these as reminders of what actually matters when the work gets hard. However you apply them, I hope they help you keep building on your own terms. Thanks for listening. Whether it’s been for eight or 800 episodes, I show up every week, 52 weeks a year because you listen and because you write ’em with questions and you tell me that the advice and the stories and the strategies and the inspiration that come out of this show matter to you, and that they help you build a better life. And if I can continue to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, one episode at a time, and one founder at a time, I’m living my best life. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 800.