Episode 804 | Positioning, Inventing a Category, Marketing Globally, and More Listener Questions (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
Some folks I know never want to be in their comfort zone and they’re always out doing new things and they bounce from one thing to the next to the next, and that’s not good. And some folks always want to be in their comfort zone and they stay within it even if the business needs other things like sales and marketing and that’s not good either. And some people stick with things for way too long and they’ll ride a losing business for years and years and years and just stick with it because they don’t know what else to do and that’s not good either. So the idea is to figure out which of these are you. 

This is startups For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. In this episode I answer listener questions ranging from how to position a product, whether to focus on horizontal, vertical, orthogonal as a bootstrapper, whether you should invent a category when there maybe are exceptions to the rule to not do so whether to market locally or globally. And I’ll answer another listener question or two depending on the time we have. Before I dive into questions. MicroConf remote is happening on November 5th, 2025. So far we have talks from Sunny Hunt about stop stalking your competitors, your 15 minute intelligence framework, a talk from Victor Hot Faludi, who is a B2B sales consultant and trainer on turning your demos into your best discovery tool to get your deals unstuck. The theme of this MicroConf remote that is a totally virtual event is ship it. It’s about getting launched. 

The recordings from this event of course will be available to all ticket holders, but if you show up live, you can ask questions of the speakers. And after the talks, we’re going to have our patented founder by founder session. It’s not actually patented, it’s just an expression, which is like a digital version of our hallway track where you can meet other bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap founders. We keep the ticket prices extremely reasonable to make it a no-brainer for you, and the event is completely online. And if you buy your ticket, we’re going to throw in a bunch of extra talk videos from MicroConf Remote Spring 2025 and our talk videos from MicroConf us the live version we had just a few months back in New Orleans tickets are $65, but if you use the promo code startups 15, you can get $15 off. And with that, let’s dive into our first question about positioning.  

Speaker 2:
Hi Rob, thanks so much for all the content that you provide. I have been listening for the last four years and it helped tremendously. You talk a lot about niching down and not chasing other markets too early, but for the last months, me and my co-founders have been discussing if we should niche and position ourselves in a more horizontal or orthogonal way. The context is this. We are scraping thousands of publicly available regional data sources and combining the structured and enriched data into a single dashboard, all with notifications about new data filters and collaborative features for our users. We have deep expertise in renewable energy, so that was the first market segment we targeted before we came along. They were spending hundreds of hours searching through these sources manually. We got great feedback and already closed a good chunk of the biggest players, but now there are three ways forward. 

We could double down on renewables, adding more features for their specific needs, but also dealing with the volatility of the market and new legislation changing customer needs. Or since we already have all this data, we could go more orthogonal and also target other markets with similar needs to renewables. Here we would have a first mover advantage since nobody is providing this much needed data outside the renewable sector, but we would lack the industry knowledge or we could go more horizontal and become what’s stripes for payments providing access to a unified data API for everyone that needs it. What do you think about this? What are the conditions for considering vertical orthogonal and horizontal positioning? I would love to hear thoughts and again, thanks for all that you do.  

Rob Walling:
I like this question and this really is a one with a big, it depends, but of course, as you know, I like to say it depends and then go through different scenarios instead of just punting on it and using that as a cop out to not actually answer the question. I don’t think there’s a single unifying theory that I’ve heard or that I have around when to go orthogonal vertical or horizontal. It’s kind of a case by case basis, but there’s certainly more guardrails than that, right? There are times when it’s kind of obvious that you should be in one versus the other. Choose that vertical, horizontal or orthogonal. I think the two things that I think about are, number one, how much does the product have to change to go with one of those three options? Is it kind of broadly the same across all three and two is do I have any reach? 

Do I know how to market and sell to any of these versus one of the others? So that was kind of a weird convoluted way to say it, but obviously in the vertical that you’ve chosen the renewable energy, you had some type of advantage. So is there a way to then add other verticals that are adjacent to renewable energy? And when I say adjacent, lemme give you an example. I have this exact conversation once a quarter at least, maybe more often with either TinySeed companies or companies that apply to be in TinySeed where we’re talking about the idea that you can start with a vertical and add more later. You can start with multiple verticals and narrow down. You can start horizontal and narrow down to a few verticals that become the most profitable or easiest to serve or sell to. There’s all zoom in and zoom out pivots. 

That’s the phrase for these. None of these is right or wrong, and I don’t think there is a one size fits all. You’ll often hear me say, oh, my default if I’m launching a new B2B SaaS is to have a credit card. But there are times when you don’t have to. There are exceptions to that kind of rule of thumb. I don’t have a rule of thumb on this yet and maybe I will develop it over time if I think more about it and see more examples. Usually I develop these rules of thumb based on seeing dozens if not hundreds of examples of something and seeing the patterns and then coming up with a theory and the framework around it, and I don’t have a strong one on this particular conversation yet, but I was talking about if you’re going to move into another vertical, try to make it adjacent to the vertical you’re in. 

And the examples of that are like if you are serving realtors, real estate agents who sell homes, then adjacent to that is mortgage brokers who might underwrite loans or at least broker loans in the real estate sector. And then are there title companies, are there real estate attorneys or just in general attorneys? Are there accountants? It’s these professional services folks that are similar enough in need and may even talk to each other, like realtors talk to mortgage brokers that it kind of translates. There’s an adjacency between those two spaces versus saying something like, I am currently catering to realtors and we’re going to switch to catering to folks who do lawn maintenance. It’s not a similar market. They might not even have similar needs in the product. They’re not going to talk to one another. There’s very little overlap or adjacency, and that’s what I mean by that. 

So the question is, in your shoes, would I stick with and double down on renewables? Would I go orthogonal or more orthogonal and add more verticals or would I go horizontal And I come back to how I started this, which is how much does the product have to change to serve these three? And I would probably just wing it and take a guess. Is there zero hours? Is there a hundred hours? Is there a thousand hours for each of these three paths? And my guess is the product, well, my guess is the product doesn’t have to change that much, but I include in that the need to write crawlers and scrapers and pull in that data. That’s a product task. And so if going horizontal is a ton more work, then there’s more opportunity there. But then I ask myself, okay, so is horizontal for anyone, and I’m this, as you said, unified data, API for everyone. 

How as a bootstrapper am I going to find everyone? How do I market that? Is there a search for a unified data api? Is there a search for the terms that I would become? Because right now if I’m a renewable data source and folks are seeking that, then you have that advantage. You have customers that are relatively aware of their need versus going horizontal. If it removes that and it makes it really hard to sell broadly, then I would shy away from that. The idea of adding more verticals, I’m never opposed to that. It’s always an experiment. It’s always a question and a hypothesis of can I either target some keywords, create some content, do cold outreach, go to in-person events in order to find folks in these adjacent verticals, or if it’s just a single adjacent vertical, you get the idea. I think there’s a lot less risk in adding another vertical or two. 

Now that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice, just because less risky doesn’t mean it’s the way you should go, but with no other information beyond what you’ve presented, I’m not sure I see the path to going horizontal unless you see a compelling case to go there. But I do see adding more verticals as potentially a stepping stone that you start where you are, you add verticals, you eventually get to horizontal. To wrap this up, I would ask myself, is what we’re doing now working by just being in this one vertical or is it broken, right? Do I need to fix it? Or if I keep doubling down, will I get to a million a RR? I mean it depends on what your goals are, right? But it’s like if I were you, I’d be trying to get to 1,000,002 million and 3 million a RR and can I get there with it as it’s been going or is it too slow? 

And you said there’s volatility in the market, and the question then is, okay, so if I add another vertical, then do I even out my volatility and am I adding a lot of work to do that? Is it the two-sided marketplace problem, not literally two-sided marketplace, but the idea that now I’m marketing to two audiences and so it doubles the amount of work that I have to do to bring folks in or is there overlap because they’re adjacent? Lastly, you made the comment, we have first mover advantage if we add new verticals and why that is not a silver bullet by any means. I’m intrigued by that. I like first mover advantages. I would just make sure that the marketing and sales plan, the strategy, the tactics, that there’s some type of validation there. This is where folks will come and say, well, I don’t like the term validation and I want to validate and then just build in launch. 

And it’s like you’re validating until you sell that company, you’re still validating do people need this feature? You’re validating that every expansion, every strategic decision, every move you make, every marketing approach you add kind of doing some validation in advance, right? I never just launched a new marketing effort without having some idea of whether it was going to work or what it would look like if it was going to work or not. And so that’d be the thing I’d be thinking about and looking at is like, how can I get just a little more data on each of these? Or if I have a gut feel that I want to add more verticals, how can I have some conversations, build some landing pages, start some SEO and outreach before I go full bore into trying to actually build the product out and ramping everything up? So thanks for that question. Hope it was helpful. My next question about starting a new product category.  

Speaker 3:
Hey Rob, Andrew ASINs here from Meta Monster. First off, thank you so much for everything that you do. I have devoured startups For the Rest Of Us over the last few years. Somehow I came to the podcast late and as someone who’s been working on building bootstrapped startups and tried a bunch of times and failed miserably for years, I so wish I had found your content sooner. It has been tremendously helpful to me. And so just thank you for everything that you do. Really appreciate it. So the tool that I’m working on building, I think I want to describe as an SEO automation tool. It’s an AI native SEO tool and we’ve been struggling to figure out how to position it. We started off calling it a site audit tool or AI powered Screaming Frog or an SEO crawler that fixes issues for you and we’re really leaning more thinking. 

The thing is more in this automation piece, but the problem with that is that doesn’t seem to be a super well-defined category, and I know your advice and advice that I have seen firsthand play out is that bootstrappers should never ever start a new product category, but that feels like the direction we’re being pulled in. And so I’m basically trying to figure out how big of a mistake is this? Is AI changing things? Is there something natural happening here that we can tap into and grow with? Is AI making it easier for bootstrappers to create product categories? Would love to hear your thoughts on some of this and happy to give you more details if you need them. Thanks again for everything you do. Look forward to hearing from you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks for the kind words at the top of that voicemail. I hear that a lot. I’ll be honest of I wish I’d found your show earlier. So I really do. It means a lot coming from you and I really do appreciate that. My thoughts here, there’s a couple things, right? On the one hand, if your H one says what your product does, we audit and fix the SEO issues on your website, then I’m more lenient with the need to even have your product category defined on your website. Do you need to be in a category? I mean, I guess if you’re on Capterra and you need a category there, right? So you’d be an SEO tool of some kind or maybe you’d be the SEO audit if there’s an SEO auditing or site audit or whatever to get more granular. But the thing I think defining categories is tough when it’s far afield from the existing stuff and where it takes you an entire sentence or two to describe what your tool does, that’s when it gets difficult. 

And when you’re trying to cram that into an H one where it’s like we are email automation that also does this other thing and talks to all your customers at the right time and this and that, and you go into this long explanation, it’s like, gosh, that’s your H one. That’s brutal. Rather than saying, we are the best email service provider for accountants, that makes sense. Email service provider is a category and your vertical is accountants. In your case, if you’re getting customer poll to fix the issues and not just audit and unearth the issues, I’m not sure I would resist that. And what your product does can be, I won’t say different than your category, but it can be more than just your category. Again, let’s say your product category is an SEO tool or an SEO site audit tool. I don’t dunno if that’s a full-blown, it depends on how we define product categories, but let’s say that it is, it’s a site audit tool is the category, and then you also using AI fix the issues. 

I mean, that’s kind of a neat bonus and I don’t know that you’re saying it’s SEO automation. I don’t think I would use that term on my homepage. The danger is that you say a phrase that means something to you, that doesn’t mean anything to anyone else. That’s the real danger. And I guess what I’m saying as I’m talking this through is I would piggyback off of an existing category. As you said, you kind of started as a site audit tool and it’s like you’re trying to pivot away from that. But if you still do site auditing and then just fix people’s issues, I don’t know that I would define that as a new category. If you say SEO automation, I’m not sure what that means. Does that mean you write articles, post them on external websites and build back links to me, plus you do onsite auditing and this and that, it’s just not specific enough. 

The reason when I say email service provider to you, if that wasn’t a category, you’d be like, wait, ESP, is Gmail an ESP is a OL an ESP hotmail or is it a MailChimp? Is it thing that sends emails for you? Email service, you provide email. The reason that these categories work, CRM is another one. Customer relationship management. So that helps me communicate with my customers. It helps me manage my relationship with my customers. It doesn’t. It’s a sales tool. It’s for salespeople because the description of a category or the title of a category, the name of it, it really is kind of inside baseball, right? It is jargon or words that have come to have meaning in our minds. And so if you say SEO automation and no one’s heard that before, most people haven’t, it’s not helpful. It’s not a shortcut. It’s confusing. 

And that is of course why we say most people who talk about who have tried to create categories and who’ve seen people try to create categories as bootstrappers. My thing is if you don’t have millions of dollars and three to five years to build a category to start one, don’t do it. And that’s why most of us say it because we have seen a lot more folks fail at it than not. So to wrap up my thoughts here, is AI making it easier for bootstrappers to create categories? No, because if you think about it, creating a category is kind of like building a brand on hard mode. So building a brand is where you build hopefully a great product and you get a bunch of people using it and then they start talking about it and then that name, your name has meaning, right? So MailChimp evokes a certain emotion in us, right? 

Startups For the Rest Of Us, MicroConf, TinySeed, each of these has a brand with people who have heard the name and who associate it with something. If you are trying to build a category, you are trying to build a brand for an entire grouping of software and everyone else who’s in that grouping is going to resist being under that brand, especially if you coined it. So I don’t think AI makes any of that any easier. AI makes building products easier and it means the type of products we can build are more varied and we can build maybe some new new product types or categories, but building a product category and fleshing that out I think is as difficult as ever. So thanks to that question, Andrew. Hope it was helpful. 

If you know me, you know that I started TinySeed, which is the SaaS accelerator for ambitious B2B founders. To date, we’ve invested in more than 200 companies and we’ve raised $60 million across all of our funds. We’re about to close fund three, and if you want to hear from TinySeed founders, you can go back to episode 783 of this podcast where Pierre de Wolff talked about having an eight figure all cash exit with Scraping Bee and episode 728 with Gym Desk where the top line number, the headline number was 32.5 million, but that was for a partial acquisition of Iran galperin share of Gym Desk. The vast majority of our investors are B2B SaaS founders themselves, either current founders who have companies that are throwing off enough money that they can be accredited or folks who have exited, check out the full thesis@tinyc.com slash invest. And if you want to take some money out of the public markets and get them into ambitious, highly vetted and so far, highly successful B2B SaaS founders, you should head to tiny c.com/invest. If you fill out that form, it goes directly to a R’S inbox. My next question is about getting through mental blocks of launching.  

Speaker 4:
Hey, Rob and the team, it’s Farish from London again, and had a question on focusing one thing at a time when you guys started working on Drip, how did you discipline yourself to focus on the product? What signals did you have on a daily or weekly basis that kept you motivated to work on shipping it fast and out the door? I’m getting stuck shipping and mostly procrastinating when I’m nearly at the point of launching just a landing page. I get excited for weeks working on it, but I feel drained out just thinking about publishing and I get to the point of just changing the idea just before launching. Do you have any tips on trying to get out of this mental  

Rob Walling:
Block? I think the majority of entrepreneurial success is managing your own psychology. Just like so much of your job as a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information. Both of those apply here. The biggest thing is to know yourself. It’s to learn about yourself and when you have resistance, because we all resist different stages and different activities, a lot of developers resist anything but coding because it’s their comfort zone. Some folks I know never want to be in their comfort zone and they’re always out doing new things and they bounce from one thing to the next to the next, and that’s not good. And some folks always want to be in their comfort zone and they stay within it even if the business needs other things like sales and marketing, and that’s not good either. And some people stick with things for way too long and they’ll ride a losing business for years and years and years and just stick with it. 

They don’t know what else to do and that’s not good either. And then the folks who spray and pray 20 things at once or who just are serial launchers looking for that dopamine hit, that’s not good either. So the idea is to figure out which of these are you, and it sounds like something you struggle with is really getting through that resistance of actually shipping it that you build and work and it’s fun and ooh, this is great, and I’m getting the dopamine hit because I’m imagining what it’s going to be like and it’s so fun to build and building is fun, and I get it. I get it. I’m a maker too. I’ve been writing music and writing code and I used to write fiction. This is something I’ve done for decades and decades, but the trap is that the and the making, unless you’re doing it purely as a hobby or just as art, you’re sitting down just to make a thing that no one else will ever consume unless that’s your goal, then it has to get in people’s hands. 

And so the way that I got over this was to realize very actively and very left brain that rationally I have a resistance around this time, and so I am going to counter that resistance and I’m going to brute force it. You’ll hear me say that expression on the show. I was just going to brute force it. What does that mean? It means to fight my own instincts to fight not only the voice in my head, but when it’s not even a voice in your head and it’s just this internal lizard brain resistance that is kind of guiding me. The folks I see, some of the folks I see making the same mistakes over and over and always getting in their own way. They don’t have the self-awareness and the self-knowledge to see that they’re sabotaging themselves. I talk about having weaknesses and all of us have weaknesses, but a weakness that you are not aware of is a blind spot, and blind spots are catastrophic for entrepreneurial success, frankly, success in a lot of realms. 

So the idea is to learn what your blind spots are, and it sounds like you kind of already know what yours is. You called it out of I build and build and then I just don’t launch and I change it last minute because I’m uncertain. And so you can do it on your own, you can. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten over a lot of my blind spots and turned them into weaknesses. So it’s a blind spot I’m aware of and fought through them. You can do it with the help of other people. This is where a mastermind comes in, mastermind for accountability. Potentially it’s your spouse or significant other. It is unlikely to be unless you have a very special relationship with that person. Sherry, my wife of 25 years is not that for me, and that’s fine. It’s just not the role that we play for each other. 

You can get this from an investor, an advisor, a co-founder, a friend. You see what I’m getting at? There’s someone external here that you might need to find who can bust your chops. An accountability buddy. A coach might be someone you pay, might be someone that you return the favor for that if you can’t do it on your own, much like going to the gym. Some people just don’t do it unless they’re going to let their friend down by not meeting them. That might be the case in this case is that you have to figure out a way to fight your programming. And each of us has these things that will trip us up over and over if we don’t A, recognize them and B, put systems in place to figure out how to get through them. I happen to not have the best memory for, I don’t even know what it is, but it’s like items in the future, like Sherry will tell me, oh, we’re going to do this on this day, or we have this appointment on and it doesn’t sink in for me. 

So my system is everything that I’m going to do goes on a calendar and anything I need to remember is always in writing somewhere and it will pop up. It’s an email that is snoozed until that day or it is, like I said, a calendar item. This is very simple, but you get the idea is that I know what I’m strong at and I in general know what my weaknesses are. And you can build systems around your weaknesses if you know what they are. And so to answer your original question, which was as we were building Drip, how did you focus? Well, number one, we kept getting feedback, right? Because we weren’t just building in a basement for six months. It took six months. No, it took at least five or six months from the first line of code until it was in Patient Zero’s hands, customer zero’s, hands. 

And along the way though, I was out there marketing and building a list and getting interest in having conversations and emailing folks and sending out surveys or episodes of this podcast where I talk about the surveys I was sending to the mailing list. So I was getting that the dopamine hit and a little bit of motivation from that as Derek was coding. He was coding halftime for me as a contractor at the time, but we had that feedback loop of, oh, at least people are interested. So that was one. The other thing is Derek and I were working together on it, and so there was some little bit of accountability there and some motivation. I was also in maybe two masterminds at that time and I was telling people about it and I was committing that we were going to try to get it out and this is the progress and this is how we’re thinking about it. So you can see the scaffolding that I put in place to keep us moving forward. So thanks for that question. Hope it was helpful. My next question is about marketing locally versus globally.  

Speaker 5:
Hey Rob, how can I market to my local group of people without hurting my reach for a wider audience? Or should I just ignore the wider audience until later? I’m working on a SaaS app with Target customers that can be in any country, but I can sell it better in my own country. New Zealand, is it better to make landing pages on a New Zealand domain that will have a higher chance of showing locally but less internationally? Or is it better to keep marketing as wide as possible with the downside of being somewhat less effective and reaching people locally? Thanks, Rob. Love the podcast.  

Rob Walling:
Similar to the earlier question about positioning. I mean, this reminds me of does the product have to change and does the marketing slash sales have to change, and how much does it have to do local versus global? The way I would think about it is the odds are probably good. I don’t know the space, so I’m making assumptions. The odds are probably good. You’re eventually going to want to make it into other countries, Australia, the uk, Canada, the us. So I would plan longer term for that to be the plan. And therefore I would not personally, this is not advice, this is what I would do. I would not do a.co nz domain because it will be detrimental, especially if you try to market into the us. I can’t speak for all the other countries, but in general, I think folks who live in a particular country or area are biased towards that area. 

And.com is just the most kind generic or whatever ly, whatever you wind up landing on. The idea is I would allow that flexibility. I wouldn’t want to change domains later. Now, could I see having a.com and having language on the site that says, Hey, we are this for New Zealand. I could, I dunno if you need that, if you think it’ll help do it and change it later, it’s an H one on a homepage, you can change that later. If you don’t think it’ll help that much, then just don’t add the restriction to it. And I think marketing and selling into your home country to start with and to prove it out and to get a feel for it is really quite a good idea. Again, assuming you think it will be some type of advantage, like certain tools, I just don’t think it matters. We were just talking about Drip because the prior question asker asked about it, I just don’t think it would’ve made any difference if Drip was, let’s say Drip was built in Canada or Drip was built in New Zealand, and it’s like we are email marketing automation for New Zealander. 

It just doesn’t matter. And so it does depend on whether or not your product becomes more attractive or easier to market or easier to sell or easier to build because it focuses on your own country. That would be a big part of the decision for me. And then as I said, I would try to keep that flexibility longer term and not make big decisions like it wouldn’t include NZ or New Zealand in the name of it or in the domain. If I thought, eh, that’s probably a pretty good chance I’m going to add other countries or just go globally later without additional information. I’m not sure I have a more concrete answer, but those are my thoughts thanks to the question. Then my final voicemail of the day is not a question. It is more of a thought around validating ideas. And Sean who sent this in is hearkening back to my prediction that I made about self-driving cars in 2025, really accelerating, so to speak, forgive the pun, but their growth and adoption really accelerating and he had some thoughts on why they may or may not do that.  

Speaker 6:
Hey, Rob, Sean Murphy here, a fellow co-founder based in the Twin Cities like you. In your recent podcast where you made predictions about 2025, you predicted about the rise of self-driving cars or self-driving taxis. And as part of that, you used a data point. And I thought it was really interesting to think about how entrepreneurs like all of us can use data to make business decisions or identify business opportunities. And in this case, the example you used was that there are 50,000 traffic desks per year, and it’s estimated self-driving cars could save or reduce 90% of those deaths every year. And so that would take it from 50,000 deaths per year to 5,000 deaths per year. And that made a really compelling case for why these self-driving cars should take off. But I also think that this is a great example that all entrepreneurs should be fluent at doing, which is to reverse a statistic and see are there business opportunities or reasons why something won’t work In this case, you can imagine that that still leaves 5,000 deaths per year, in which if there’s only a handful of companies that provide these platforms, let’s say five of ’em, that’d be a thousand deaths per year that each company was responsible for or three people per day. 

And so it’s pretty hard to imagine a company that could handle, that could survive where their users of their products are dying three per day. And so that could be a strong counter argument against that business idea, or it could be thought provoking idea for entrepreneurs to say, well, what must be true to enable this? And so are there business opportunities there in saving lives or in handling the grief or issues that come out of this other thing? So I was super thought provoking. I love the idea that you had there and I thought the technique was something to share with the audience. Love what you’re doing with the show. Thanks.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks for writing in Sean. I appreciated your insights and I think you make a valid point and I guess we’ll get to see how it plays out in the coming years. Thanks so much for joining me. For listener questions today, if you have a question for the show, you should head to startups For the Rest Of Us dot com. Click ask a question in the top NAB and right from your phone, you can record an audio question, a video question or just type a text question, audio and video. Of course, go to the top of the stack as do any questions that are intermediate to advanced. I did ask one beginner mindset question today. I like to trickle ’em in because there’s a tremendous backlog of them, but realistically, the beginner questions have, we’ve covered so many of them so many times on the show that I’m kind of trying to optimize more for intermediate and advanced questions. Thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 804.