Episode 816 | Developing an Editorial Eye, The Right Kind of Stubborn, and The Power of Focus (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling:
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Before we dive into today’s topics, MicroConf Europe this year is heading to Iceland. The dates are September 21st through the 23rd of 2026. Tickets have just gone on sale. And if you want to buy a ticket and you should, you should use promo code Rob50@microConfEurope.com. We are selling all of our MicroConf in- person events out and have for several years. So if you want a ticket and you want it at the cheapest price, it will ever be head to microConfEurope.com and enter code ROB50. 

First topic I want to touch on today is about developing an editorial eye, or as I’ve sometimes called it on this podcast, developing taste. And I think in most of the instances I’m thinking about it, editorial eye might be better, but I think about this applying to all creative or intellectual domains like movies, books, visual design, software, code. And when you’re first exposed to any of these things, you don’t yet know what’s good or bad because you lack taste, you lack that editorial eye. And the reason I like the term editorial eye is it implies a level of discernment and it applies the ability to not just have taste and be snooty, oh, this is good or bad, but to potentially editorialize it. And that’s what I want to talk about today. I was thinking about the three stages of developing an editorial eye in any medium. 

Again, whether that’s movies, books, design, code, the first is exposure to just figure out what’s good and what’s bad. It’s exposure to many films or to many books or to writing and reading a lot of code. Not just writing code, by the way. I find that the people who have only written code, have never worked on a team, have never had to get into a code base that they’ve never seen before. It’s like they’re code blind and they’ve only experienced the way they do it and they have these really strong opinions about how it should be done. And this code base is a piece of … Because the whole thing needs to be rewritten. It’s like the famous agency or new dev that comes in. It’s often folks who have not had to adopt code bases that they themselves didn’t write. But the idea here with knowing what’s good and bad is that you get enough exposure to enough variations of this thing that you’ve seen enough work to develop a sense of quality. 

You can’t form an editorial eye by watching one movie or reading one book. It might take hundreds. And this again is why seeing a lot of code bases and seeing code written by different people and having to take over a code base you didn’t write, I think is actually a really helpful skill. Or with visual design, seeing hundreds of websites and logos and layouts, you start to understand the continuum between good and bad, especially if you learn some fundamentals along the way. This is either self-study or school or perhaps mentorship. So that’s the first stage, exposure, figuring out what’s good and bad. Stage two is analysis. It’s understanding why it’s good or bad. It’s understanding the reasons behind your instincts, because as a developer, you might know bad code when you see it, but the why involves understanding specifics, right? Broken logic, poor structure, lack of clarity, lack of maintainability. 

As a non-designer, you might recognize a design feels off, but struggle to articulate why. And this is the bane of designers or freelance designers where it’s like someone says, “I need it to pop more. Can you make it? Can you make it? ” Bizzad some pizazz to it, right? It’s awful. This is where there’s a lot of folks stuck at stage one and there are even a lot of folks who maybe even don’t have the taste and think that they do, but it is a common frustration. If you’re hired by someone is a client who can judge taste or thinks they can, but they can’t explain the why and it’s because they haven’t gotten to stage two. This ability to explain why something works or doesn’t, it’s a refined skill. It’s a key marker of deeper expertise and it takes a lot of time and exposure and I think some self-learning as well to learn the vague rules. 

And maybe there are rules of thumb and maybe there are hard and fast rules or maybe there are rules in your own head, but it’s your pattern matching that gets you here. And then stage three is mastery. It’s knowing how to fix it. This is not just diagnosing a problem, seeing there’s a problem, understanding why. It’s being able to say, “This is how to make it better.” So as a developer, you move from saying this code is bad to refactor this class or extract this into a parameter. In films, it might mean that you know pacing really well. You can say, “Oh, the pacing was off and here’s what I would’ve done.” Structural changes, right? That character didn’t need to be there at all. Story arc improvements, writing improvements. And being able to prescribe how to improve moves you from being a critic to creation and mastery, right? 

Being able to actually improve a work of art, or in this case, a piece of software or a website. And this is kind of like ninja level expertise, right? It’s editorial vision. It combines a lot of experience, judgment, reasoning, and creative problem solving, and probably quite a bit of education that you’ve given yourself. And so there are a lot of things, there’s some things that I consider myself stage three at. Back in the day when I was still writing code full time, I was definitely this in software. I was never this in design. I was often stage one and I dabble in stage two now and again. So why am I telling you this? Well, I’m telling you for a couple of reasons. Number one, so that as you interact with people at your day job, or if you have clients, let’s say you’re a developer, designer, and you’re freelance, that you can start identifying this in yourself and in the people you work with. 

I think it will be helpful. Second thing is if you’re a founder or you’re hiring freelancers or contractors or full-time employees, that you can accurately grade yourself and get the hell out of the way and let an expert maybe do it a little better if they can. So if you’re a stage one in design and you hire a really good designer, you might need to get out of their way and put your opinion aside. Likewise, if you hire a designer and you feel like they’re not even at a stage three, well, that may be a problem for you. I think having some type of framework for thinking about editorial eye and this trichotomy of knowing what’s good and bad at stage one, understanding why, and then knowing how to fix it. I really do think that being competent at these levels is something you should strive for in the areas of your expertise. 

You’re not going to be this in everything. You are not going to be a stage three in movies, books, design, code, and all these things, right? It’s very unlikely because it takes a lot of exposure and it takes a lot of work to get there. My second topic is a realization that a listener had. They emailed a question into me and I just answered it via email and I told them to read the mom test because they had a solution in search of a problem. They had an idea for a product because it was an idea for a product. And I said, “What problem does this solve?” And they were like, “I don’t understand what you mean.” I said, “Go read the mom test.” And they emailed me. I just wanted to thank you for your suggestion. I listen to the mom test and I get what you mean. 

It makes more sense for a solution to a problem to become a product than forcing a product to become a solution. I thought that was a very succinct and insightful statement of a real key to making successful B2B SaaS companies is starting with the problem. What problem do you solve and for whom? That’s the most common question I ask. When starter founders come to tell me their idea, I say, “Don’t tell me your idea. Tell me what problem it solves and for whom.” And if you haven’t read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, you’re missing out. It’s a great book. My third topic is based on a Paul Graham essay that I was reading while I was on vacation with my family in Mexico just a few weeks ago. The essay is called The Right Kind of Stubborn, and I want to read you an excerpt from that essay. 

Of course, you can Google it or go to Paulgram.com if you want to read the whole thing. “The reason the persistent and the obstinate seems similar is that they’re both hard to stop and I want to break in right here. He’s using the word persistent to describe successful founders. These are founders that get it done, they have a vision and they keep going after it. They’re persistent. He’s using obstinate to define founders who are stuck in a certain direction. They seem persistent, but they’re actually stubborn and they don’t change their minds when they should. So resuming this piece. They’re both hard to stop in different senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can’t be throttled back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can’t be turned. It’s a great analogy. In the degenerate case, they’re indistinguishable. When there’s only one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up or not, and persistence and obstinacy both say no. 

This is presumably why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. It assumes simple problems, but as problems get more complicated, we can see the difference between them. The persistent are much more attached to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lowered down while the obstinate spray don’t give up indiscriminately over the whole tree. The persistent, and this is the key right here. “The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. ” I love, love those two sentences. Those two sentences alone described so many founders that I have seen or tried to give advice to or interacted with on the internet. And I tell you, the persistent are the ones that they just can figure it out and the obstinate are the ones that get in their own way over and over and over. 

And the only way they’re successful is if they happen to luck upon the right answer from the start because they’re so attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Continuing on with the essay. Yeah, he says it right here. “We’re still, that means they’ll tend to be attached to their first ideas about how to solve a problem. “I wasn’t trying to quote him, it came to me, even though these are the least informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren’t merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be attached to the wrong ones. Paul Graham drops knowledge. I mean, if you haven’t read Mongram’s essays, they’re very well thought out. But I love it when he has this take because I see these patterns playing out over and over in founders over and over. I see it on social media and you see the same people tripping over themselves and getting in their own way over and over and it’s because they’re being obstinate. 

So there’s a wrong kind of stubborn and a right kind of stubborn. The right kind of stubborn is like, ” I’m going to figure this out and I’m going to be persistent with it. “So the idea is to find out which kind of founder are you? Where’s your blind spot? What’s your weakness? Is your weakness that you give up and you’re just not persistent at all? Well, that’s a problem. Is your weakness that you are obstinate and that your rudder can’t be turned, that the initial idea of how you want to do something doesn’t change with new information, with new data, or with conversations with experienced and knowledgeable founders. I have worked with or seen founders in a group of very knowledgeable and successful entrepreneurs and I’ve seen some founders ask for advice and then ignore all the advice from all the other founders and they act like they want advice and they really don’t. 

And it’s a problem. It’s a problem. And it’s not just a problem because it pisses everybody off. These founders almost never succeed. Or if they do, it’s because they got lucky and stumbled upon that very first idea that happened to be right, and that’s just unlikely to happen. So the reason I’m bringing this up is look at yourself, like give yourself a good look in the mirror. Take a personality test or two. Ask some folks around you, a co-founder, a mastermind, a spouse, a significant other. Think about how you go about solving problems. And when things get hard, do you take in new data and do different things? Do you mix it up or do you make excuses and continue doing the same thing over and over thinking that this should work? This really should work. Should isn’t going to get you there. I like the way that Ruben Gomez, founder of Sinwell, weighs in when I was saying the successful founders I see, they do a lot of things and they’re right most of the time. 

They’re right enough of the time that they make forward progress. And Ruben said,” You should point out that they’re usually not right the first time. They usually have a hypothesis that they try and then they get new data and then they realize, Oh, that wasn’t quite right, pivot a little bit to the right. “And they tried that, make a little bit of progress. “Eh, it wasn’t quite right either. Pivot back to the left.” And they move and their rudder can be changed, but you can’t throttle them back. They keep moving forward, taking in new data and being creative about the next step that they need to solve this problem or to overcome this mountain or to get to a million or two million ARR when things aren’t working. I think it’s a really insightful comment both from Reuben and Paul Graham about the idea that the odds of you coming up with the right solution from the start are really, really low and that the best founders I see are not only the persistent ones, but they are the ones that take in new information and adjust their course as they move forward. 

My fourth topic of today is from X Twitter and it’s a tweet from Sam Parr, co-host of My First Million. He says, “One reason why entrepreneurship is hard is because you fear that what you’re working on today won’t pay dividends in five years and that it’ll be a waste of time.” And so you switch from thing to thing to make yourself feel that you’re addressing that fear, not true. He says in all caps, “Constant switching will kill you. The focus is the hard part and will increase the likelihood of the desirable outcome.” The price of the payout future profit selling company is the focus. If you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know that this is something I harp on a lot because there are a lot of people making excuses for being distracted and for engaging and feeding their entrepreneurial ADHD or their shiny object syndrome or their, “I need to be diversified or it’s all a matter of luck, so I need to make a hundred bets because won my payoff, et cetera, et cetera.” I don’t believe that. 

I think it’s terrible advice. Sam Parr doesn’t believe that. Jason Cohen has come out, doesn’t believe it. He’s come out in favor of focus. And I love it when someone like Sam, who by all means has been very successful and is now in his second successful effort. He sold his first startup, I believe he’s been public about it, that it was an eight figure exit and now he started Hampton and here he is talking about the power of focus. And someone chimed in that they think this is survivorship bias. And Sam says, “If your goal is to have an outsized success and be above average, that doesn’t come from diversification.” Diversification is what you do to preserve wealth. Focus people, don’t believe those who tell you that you can lose weight by not exercising and eating more ice cream. It sounds good. It feeds your instinct. 

I want to start 20 things. I don’t want to focus on anything. Focusing is hard. Bouncing from one thing to the next is easy and it’s fun. Usually in life, I’ve found that the things that are most worthwhile and that are going to bring me the success that I want or the results that I want are the hard things. When in doubt, I lean in to the hard things. My last topic of the day is an original tweet from Harry Stebbings who hosts the 20 minute VC podcast and he’s a venture capitalist himself. And then Adam Fox, who’s at last name Fox on X Twitter said, “Rob Walling for your next episode.” So Harry Stebbings original tweet says, “Triple, triple, double, double is dead. Going from one million to three million to nine million is not interesting. You have to go from one million to 15 million to a hundred million.” Adam Fox has the melt emoji because he’s kind of like, “Are you kidding me guys? 

Are you kidding me with this? ” And yeah, it’s interesting. So if you haven’t heard of triple, triple, double, double, it’s a big thing in the venture capital world where it’s like, all right, once you get to a million, then to have a good growth trajectory or like a fundable or a unicorn growth trajectory, like a really solid one, you get to a million and then you triple once to three, you triple again to nine, and then you double to 18, you double to 36 in that once a year. So that’s over the course of, you get to a million and that’s four years from there, you’re at 36 million ARR. And I mean, even that is pretty impressive growth. I get it that venture capitalists only want to fund deco corns now, but yeah, the idea that anything is dead, triple, triple, double, double is dead and you have to go from, you have to 15X and then six and a half X. 

I mean, that’s essentially what this is, right? One million to 15 million in a year and 15 to 100. Do you have to be venture fundable? I don’t think so. If you triple, triple, double double, I still think, yeah, you’ll be overshadowed by those that are doing the lovable and the Nin growth curves, right? The one to 15 to 100, but can you still raise rounds? I do believe you can. I don’t think it’s dead. This is where you have to consider your source, right? You’ll see certain folks on the internet, especially big influencers who are trying to get the eyeballs and they say stuff like this, that really like you have to do this. Have our growth expectations changed forever is what he tweets. And look, I get it. You’re listening to this podcast. You don’t really care about venture capital. You’re not going to raise venture capital, so why does this impact you? 

The point is, be really aware of who you’re listening to. There is probably half the tweets that I see in any given day. I think to myself, “That’s not true.” Like you’re either lying to yourself or you’re lying to me by posting this. And you’re going to be rewarded for it, of course, because it’s an outlandish take. And this is one of the most frustrating parts for social media that I’ve experienced is that the folks who do the click baity bullshit to either get people mad or to say outlandish things to get attention are the ones who get rewarded with these audiences on social media. Back in the day, a little bit about blogging was to have a crazy headline writer to get some attention, but really earning that audience by writing a meaty piece that you’ve thought through, it was so much harder to be lazy, right? 

Because you had to put in work to write a thousand, 2,000, 3,000 word blog posts. You look at Jason Cohen back in the day, myself, Patrick McKenzie, Pell Eagles only. There’s a bunch of folks who were bloggers back in the day in the entrepreneur space, even like Paul Graham and Joel Sporsky. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t get some eyeballs by being clickbaity, but you had to put in that work and have some meat to your statements. Now with social media, you can make a two sentence thing about how this is all dead and everything’s changed forever. Don’t believe everything you read, please. I know that I keep saying this. This is something I avoid so hard on social media and maybe it’s to my detriment. Shouldn’t I have 10 times the following that I do? Probably if I said statements like this, would I? 

In fact, if I told you you should do a two-sided marketplace and that B2C is where it’s at, do I think I’d have a lot more followers than I do? Probably, but I couldn’t sleep at night. I just couldn’t live with myself saying these things that I feel are disingenuous and are done for no other purpose than to engagement bait and to grow my audience. As you know, the mission of this podcast and really my mission for the past 20 years has been to help startup founders like yourself. Folks, maybe you’re bootstrapping, maybe you raised a small amount of money, maybe you’re raising series A’s and you’re raising a huge amount of money. If you’re starting a SaaS company, I think you can gain from the information in this podcast and on my YouTube channel and in my books. And that is really what excites me these days is being able to see across the wide swath of startups and SaaS companies that are being built today. 

I’m certainly indexed more on Bootstrap than mostly Bootstrap, but I do get exposure to venture funded because I’m invested in 234 companies and I don’t know, a dozen or two dozen. No, it’s got to be close to two dozen have raised venture rounds. And so I’ve been exposed to that as well. And I like to be able to take that knowledge and experience and that filter and that lens and the viewpoint that I have and try to distill it down into helpful frameworks and insights for you every week on this show, every other week on my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/robwalllling. And of course in the books I put out every couple years and maybe on social media too, you can follow me on X Twitter @RobWalllling. I don’t tweet as much as I used to, partially because I got fed up with having to read tweets like this. 

But all that said, it’s enough smack talking for me today. I hope that today you are building an incredible business for yourself that may not change the world, but hopefully changes your little corner of it. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 816.