Episode 805 | Gatekeeping vs. Paying Dues, Raw Material, and Surrounding Yourself with the Right People (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
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Before I dive into that, MicroConf remote is tomorrow November 5th. It’s a completely virtual event. Tickets are I think either 65 or $75, so we try to keep it really inexpensive and you get the recordings. Even if you can’t show up, you can use promo code Startups 15 for $15 off. We have amazing talks lined up. Sonny Hunt will be talking about a 15 minute intelligence framework so you can stop stocking your competitors. Victor Hot Faludi will talk about turning demos into your best discovery tool. Greg Hewitt will be focusing on AI tools and as I said, the recording from this event will be available for ticket holders microcomp.com/remote if you are interested and use code startups 15 for $15 off. 

My first topic of the day is around the difference between gatekeeping and paying your dues, specifically as a new startup founder. And I wish that when I emailed this to my Trello board that I had included a reference to what triggered this in me. It was probably something on social media I’m guessing, but someone was contrasting the difference between gatekeeping, meaning keeping folks out of an inside circle or of a circle where successful people mingle and kind of where it’s more about who rather than what you know, and they contrasted that with having to pay dues and not being able to just enter a community when you are a complete newbie and not do any research and not do any work and ask the same newbie questions that the other newbies last week asked. We were all new at one time, but what I didn’t do was come into a community and say, how do I find an idea here? 

I have an idea. Is this a good idea? I’ve built something. How do I market it? It’s these same questions that we see on the Reddit threads and on Hacker News and any other social media where folks want to be handed the answer, and that’s kind of why we can’t have nice things in these founder circles, right, is that if you are a new founder and you are coming in expecting other people to hand you the answer or to allow you into the inner circles with super experienced founders and to come in and ask very basic questions that you haven’t put any work into to answer for yourself by asking chatt, by googling it, by buying a book on the topic, by listening to any podcast from anyone reputable in your space who’s talking about this? If you haven’t listened to 50 episodes of Startups For the Rest Of Us or Lenny’s podcast or Jordan Gall’s offsite podcast or Omar Zen Holmes a hundred dollars MBA, there are a bunch of reputable startup podcasts, and if you haven’t done a bit of work to educate yourself on the fundamentals that are pretty, they’re out there either for free or for very low cost. 

There’s a reason that the SaaS playbook and start small state, small hall and exit strategy. All my books you can get for $10 on Kindle or you can buy them direct from me in DRM free PDFs. Links are available from Rob Walling dot com. But there’s a reason that I want those books to be in people’s hands for very little expense is I think that they are a part of a rising tide that raises all boats. So if you’re coming new into a space and claiming that folks are gatekeeping you, maybe that’s true. I think in the founder space, the odds are more likely that you have some dues to pay. You have some education, some upskilling. I talk about it being hard work luck and skill, put in some hard work and learn some skills, and sometimes learning those skills is just paying attention to what folks are doing around you and building and shipping something into the world, making a few mistakes and learning from that. 

When someone asks me a question, whether it’s on the show or in person or via email or via a contact form, if they haven’t put any effort into what they’re doing or any deep thought or any type of trial and error, I’m much less likely to give them a detailed answer, especially when the question is something like, how do I market this? I could write not just one book, but multiple books on how to market this. It doesn’t matter what this is. It is a huge topic. Narrow your questions and the best questions you hear on startups For the Rest Of Us are folks that have tried a bunch of things and are at a crossroads and say, this is what I’m thinking. What is your take on this? But there’s guardrails and there’s details. The worst questions you see are usually super, super general because the asker hasn’t put in the time or the effort either to craft the question or even to know what they really should be asking, and they want me as the person answering to do their work for them. 

And if you’re an experienced founder, I of course would encourage you not to gatekeep. I think that’s been my mission for 20 years, right? Since I started blogging in 2005 and writing my first book in oh nine, published it in 2010, and this podcast and the other books and MicroComp, I like to see that there are things available for free for $10 one time costs, and then going deeper for those who have more resources or who get further into their journey, things that can help folks at every stage. So if you were an experienced founder, I think I’ve already talked about, if you’re a new founder, as I said, build up your skills, educate yourself a bit more, put effort in, and if you’re a more experienced founder, certainly don’t gatekeep. I mean, I don’t think that’s a good approach at all, but if founders, I think there’s a two-sided balance to this of if a lot of new founders are asking basic questions, try to help educate them on, Hey, that question should be asked like this. 

You need to go put in some effort and come back with a better way to phrase that or a better way, bring something to the table. Don’t just expect us to give, give and at the same time realize that for your energy as an experience founder, you might be able to put a little bit of time and energy into new founders, and I think we kind of all should to raise up the next generation of folks, but also reserve good chunk of your time and energy for yourself, right? In your masterminds with your, whether it’s investors, advisors, co-founders, other mastermind folks, other experienced founders that you can find in a room at a MicroConf, right? Where almost 30% of the attendees are above a million in a RR, the SaaS Institute, our premium coaching program, everyone’s at seven or eight figures a RR, and if the majority of your time is spent with those folks, then it kind of builds you up and it allows you to continue growing and learning and always remembering to maybe give a little back to those folks that are coming up behind us, the new founders, I think of the, I don’t know, is it five generations of founders now? 

There was a really early generation. I mean there was Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, MailChimp, so Ben Chestnut, there was a couple others there pre oh five, pre 2005 and six, and then there was maybe a second wave. That was me, PEL d, Patrick McKenzie, Andy Bryce, it was the Joel and software, the business of software forums, and then I remember the Ruben Gomez’s and the Dave Augh round 2010 coming up, and then there was another wave in 2013 and 14, and so there’s been several waves of new founders coming on the scene, and that’s good. It keeps our ecosystem vibrant and it keeps it alive, and so there’s no reason to gatekeep, but I do think that there is a certain value to having standards of folks who are educating themselves and kind of paying their dues by actually launching stuff and doing things in public, getting things out there and not just post, I don’t mean posting on social media, I mean getting code into production and actually iterating and trying to get better and not launching 20 things in 25 days or whatever. 

I mean, my take on that, but in closing to realize that there is this balance between being someone new, coming on a scene and feeling like, oh, I’m getting talked down to, or people aren’t answering my questions. But if you’re not putting the effort in yourself to answer your own questions based on all the amazing information that’s out there, then you’re doing yourself and the community a disservice. My second topic of today is about the value of a raw material versus a refined version of that material. And I either got this from Facebook or Instagram. I have a screenshot of it on my phone if I’m honest. It looks like Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe posted this, and here’s the post. It’s got a picture of a 1000 gram iron bar. It says, this is a 1000 gram iron bar. Its raw value is about a hundred dollars. 

If you choose to make horseshoes, it’s value will rise to $250. If instead you make sewing needles, the value will rise to about $70,000. If you make watch springs in gears, the value will rise to about $6 million, but if you make precision laser parts from it like those used in lithography, it will be worth $15 million. Your value is not only in what you are made of, but most of all in how you make the best of who you are. And I love this analogy for founders and for founders and for startup ideas as well. We’ve been told that ideas are worthless and it’s all about execution, and we know that’s not true. We know there are some ideas that are just better than others. Derek Sives has a really good framework around ideas and how they’re a multiplier of execution. He says Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. 

They’re just a multiplier. And so you can imagine an awful idea is minus one and a weak idea is a one. Soso idea is a five. A good idea is a 10. A great idea is a 15. A brilliant idea is a 20, right? So from negative one to 20, and then he puts a dollar amount on no execution, up to brilliant execution, and no execution is a dollar, and brilliant execution is $10 million. And so if you multiply the two, you can imagine brilliant idea, brilliant execution is you don’t have the math in front of you, but it’s $200 million versus an awful idea with no execution is negative $1. I love that you lose a dollar, but a weak idea and no execution is a dollar, right? And the idea is he’s saying it is a multiplier. There’s a logarithmic or an algorithmic scale to it and that it’s not that ideas don’t have value, it’s that you also need execution. 

And the better your idea and the better, the more desiring the market is, and the more unfair advantages you have and the better execution, the better off you’re going to do. I mean, we see it over and over. I see this in companies that I invest in, companies that I don’t invest in. And so what I like about this post from Neil deGrasse Tyson is that it’s not just about where you start from, and it’s not just about having the raw material because you can waste it. I’ve talked to my kids about this. My kids are each gifted in different things, and I’ve told them both, just being gifted won’t get you anything. You also have to put in hard work. Think about my hard work, luck and skill framework in this context. When I have a 15 and a 19-year-old think about their giftedness of being an exceptional musician or exceptional athlete or exceptionally intelligent as being a skill for now, maybe we could say it’s a talent or a skill, but you get the idea. 

It’s that raw ability to do something and do it well. And of course, luck can’t control that, can we? So I talked to them, the way you are going to succeed is not just through raw talent or skills. It’s going to be by pairing hard work with that. And in fact, everything in my life that I’ve achieved, I had a bit of skill or raw talent that I then built upon, built upon, built upon, but I got better at that by applying hard work to it over not just months, but years. And this was some of my athletic success in high school and then college, my professional success as an entrepreneur, complete outsider, not knowing a single entrepreneur growing up, living in the Bay Area, but being in the construction industry essentially, like my dad was an electrician. My brother still runs an electrical contractor there. 

That was where I was brought up. And as you know, coming out of college, I’m working a job as an electrician, laying pipe and installing fixtures, and at a certain point, digging ditches. I think I’ve talked about the story here on the show before, but that was really transformative for me was that there was raw material there. But if I had not started going to the library nights and weekends, taught myself Pearl and PHP and a SP, was it 2.0, 3.0, I don’t even remember. It was 1.0, but taught me those raw skills. That was the value that I was adding to this raw material. Obviously, looking back, it’s like, oh, I have a knack for left brain thinking, and I have a knack for logic, and I have a knack apparently for programming computers and for thinking about frameworks. There’s a bunch of things. 

Maybe I’m not a bad writer. I’ve written five books. Good or bad is probably debatable, but at least I can get the books to print. But all that said, in retrospect, it feels obvious to me now, but it wasn’t. I was just an iron bar 25, 30 years ago like everyone else, and so that’s what I want to drive home. I was really struck by this because if you are a founder, an entrepreneur, an aspiring entrepreneur, realize that it takes both. And this is why I often talk about what’s your unfair advantage? What are you exceptionally good at? If you’re really good with people, well, maybe you want a co-founder who is a complete code junkie and you’re going to do the sales and they’re going to do the coding. And if you’re really a left brain marketer and you’re good writer and you can copyright, realize that you can capitalize and build on that, that there’s probably some raw material or some proclivity that you have. 

And don’t go with the proclivity of, oh, I just want to build a great product and have everybody use it. It’s just not going to work. Don’t convince yourself that eating ice cream is going to help you lose weight. You have to be within the realm of what works, but also look at the raw material that you have and think about how much time, effort, and energy you can put in into building up your skills, building up your experience over time, potentially by stair stepping your way up until you can potentially make precision laser parts from who you are and become worth $15 million. I don’t mean exactly that number, but you get the idea. I also, what I love about this is it really is a stair step, right? He says, if you’re just the kilogram iron bar, then you’re worth a hundred. If you make horseshoe, you’re worth two 50. 

If you make so many needles, you’re worth 70,000. Each of these is a stair step. So that is my second topic of the day. My third topic is a word of thanks from an anonymous listener, and he says, Hey, Rob, just wanted to drop you a message to thank you for your content in the podcast, which I’ve listened to for a long time. I started a bootstrap side project in 2018 that became my full-time focus in 2021. I’ve now exited this week for a life-changing amount of money, a slow burn, but a worthwhile one. Thank you. Keep up the good work as I believe the work you do is vitally important. Exit strategy has helped me during this process as well. I’ll be tuning in again next Tuesday. Kind regards, these are the types of emails and messages that I get that remind me of why it is that I do this. 

Why it is that my mission is to multiply the world’s population of independent self-sustaining startups, and it doesn’t get old. Hearing this and hearing the lives that are changed, not just by this podcast or this ecosystem or words that come out of my mouth, it’s by us. It’s the community. The multiplicative effect of the MicroConf and TinySeed and startups For the Rest Of Us community is 10 times, a hundred times a thousand times more than any one individual can do because on my own, I can only do so much. I can only say and write and think so many words and invent frameworks. It’s not that. It’s the folks out in the audience helping one another. It’s this community of bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders, whether you’ve attended a MicroConf, whether you’re in a Mastermind, whether you’re in MicroConf Connect, or whether you’re just doing your own thing and finding other founders and supporting one another, this is why we’re here. 

So thanks for that email anonymous. It means a lot every time I receive one of these. Thank you. My next topic is about how people who are winning don’t have a problem with other people winning. I also wish I had referenced a source. I think this was a tweet that I saw, and this sends me back to a blog post I wrote years ago, which is it’s easy to criticize from the stands, and usually, especially as I was coming up, and I think as anyone’s coming up, you’re going to get criticism on social media or even before social media. It was like you had a blog and people would comment on it. They’d send you direct emails. If you’re launching a product, people will message you, say how crappy it is, try to give you feedback that’s not super helpful, that they feel is constructive. 

Or maybe they’re just being jerks. And 99.5% of the time, the people who are giving you the harshest criticism and feedback and kind of trying to tear you down, not actually trying to help, let’s separate those. The people who are actually trying to help or at least think they are, okay, we’ll give ’em a pass. But the folks who dig in and are really trying to tear you down, usually to make themselves feel better, make themselves feel superior, those are usually the people who haven’t done anything. They haven’t shipped anything worthwhile. They have not had success. Every once in a while I’ll find that it’s someone who’s had success, and then I’m usually like, why are you punching down? It’s a bad look. This is not great. But so many of the people that you’ll hear from are folks who are not winning and who don’t know the difference between failure and success and who don’t know what it’s like to work hard nights and weekends while you have a day job, while you’re raising that family, while you’re trying to balance everything and make it all work, and you’re struggling and you’re putting in a ton of effort to change your life, and it’s the folks who are either half-assing it or just not having the success and not making the progress that want to tear other folks down. 

The idea that people who are winning don’t have a problem with other people. Winning holds true. In my experience. I love this summary of this, and this feeds into the idea of surrounding yourself with people, whether they’re winning or not, they’re at least optimistic. They’re at least positive. They’re saying, we can win. I can win. We can launch something and build a product against all odds, right? Make something that people want and are willing to pay for. And in all my years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve gotten so much more out of being around people who are positive and at least trying to win, rather than the ones who are tearing themselves or others around them down. And it’s interesting that in my early years of being an entrepreneur, since I didn’t really know anyone else who was doing it, I had to start distancing myself from some college friends and some just post-college friends who kind of wanted to, when I talked about entrepreneurship, or I had, what did I have? 

Ink Magazine or Business 2.0 or Entrepreneur Magazine, whatever it was. I mean, again, this is a while ago. It was a long time ago. So magazines were a bit more of a going concern at the point, but they would poke fun at it and say, oh, you think you’re going to be an entrepreneur? You think you can do this? Or just really, and I don’t know what the motivation was, tall poppy syndrome where they’re trying to tear other folks down, maybe because they can’t do it, or maybe they’re just looking at something to rag on someone for being different or having an aspiration. And the hard part is sometimes it’s is family. Oftentimes it’s probably family and sometimes it’s friends, and sometimes it’s acquaintances or whatever. But realizing that surrounding yourself with folks who either are winning, and what do I mean by winning? I mean, I’m not talking about hashtag winning Charlie Sheen, or I’m not talking about being some always be closing sales, bro. 

I’m just talking about folks who are trying to better their lives and change the lives of themselves and those around them through entrepreneurship. That’s what I mean is folks who are positive and trying to improve their little corner of the world. To me, someone who is doing that is optimistic about it and who’s driving it forward is someone who’s winning. So since you have a choice around this matter, try to surround yourself with people who were doing that because they won’t have a problem if you are winning. I remember in my early days of starting to share what I’ve learned, I was a few years in maybe four or five years, and I had successes under my belt, and I was doing well. Some of the folks that were learning from me that had read my first book, that had read my blog, started things and became more successful than me, they would tell me, oh, my MRR is 50 KA month or something. 

And I hadn’t gotten there yet. And I remember a twinge of jealousy at the start before I felt a tidal wave of happiness for them. I was winning enough. They were ahead of me, and they had learned from me, and they deserved it because they’d put in hard work and skill made a little bit of their own luck. Just because they had learned from me doesn’t mean that they didn’t deserve to be wildly more successful than I am. And there are TinySeed founders that have sold their companies for more money than I’ve ever sold a company for. There are TinySeed founders that have more money in the bank than I have in the bank. It is similar. I know what they’ve sold for and I am nothing but happy for them. Just because someone is winning a little more than you, if you have the right mentality and the right thought process around it, and don’t see this as a zero sum game, you see this as an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. 

You’re not going to mind if other people are winning. So the key takeaways here in summary are surround yourself with those folks who are winning, who genuinely want you to succeed, and figure out who those folks are that are thinking and doing the opposite, and realize that you want a lot more of the former in your life. Speaking of winning, you made it to the end of another episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, thanks so much for joining me today. It’s always an amazing experience to spend another half hour with you. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 805.