Episode 824 | Crowded Markets, Problem Aware, A Stolen Idea, and More Listener Questions (with Jordan Gal)

Rob Walling:
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Visit mercury.com to apply online in minutes. Mercury is a FinTech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA Members FDIC. Welcome back to another episode of Startups of the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I welcome Jordan Gall back to the show. Jordan is a longtime fan favorite. And in today’s episode, we answer listener questions ranging from how to compete in a crowded market to what to do when your customers are only problem aware but not solution aware. Someone stealing someone else’s startup idea and more. Before we dive into the episode, do you know that I’ve written five books? You can get one of them for free by heading to robwalling.com and look for start marketing the day you start coding. But the other four books are really good and I think well worth the money. 

You can head to SaaSplaybook.com to order PDF or audio copies of the SaaS playbook and exit strategy as well as start small, stay small. These books cover different topics for SaaS founders and entrepreneurs. The SaaS playbook is my bestselling book of all time. It has crossed 50,000 copies sold. So if you’re looking to start somewhere, head to SaaSplaybook.com, grab the PDF or the PDF plus the audio. You can hear my Dulcet tones reading the book. And of course I like to do a little improv as I’m reading. It’s interesting when you sit and write a book for a couple years and then when you actually go to read it out loud, I’m like, “Oh, I have more to add to that. ” So I would riff a little bit on certain aspects of it. So that’s SaaSplaybook.com to learn about my three most popular books, which are exit strategy, SaaS playbook, and start small, stay small. 

Hope you pick one or all of them up if you haven’t read them. And with that, let’s dive into listener questions with Jordan Gall. Jordan Gall, thanks for coming back on the show.  

Jordan Gal:
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.  

Rob Walling:
It’s always good to have you here, man. With all your experiences, well, I mean, you’re kind of on your third SaaS startup if we think about it. And I like to have folks with your distinguished experience come and weigh in on some of these listener questions.  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah, I’m happy to do it. I’m living it every day. I read some of those questions and I’m like, “Ah, that’s happened to me.  

Rob Walling:
Yes,  

Jordan Gal:
I’ve made that mistake.”  

Rob Walling:
This  

Jordan Gal:
Exactly.  

Rob Walling:
No, totally. And this is why it’s great. I mean, you hear the episodes with Ruben Anum and Derek Reimer and Craig Hewitt and everything and Laura Roeder has answered questions. And it’s cool to hear everybody’s perspectives because we all have different experiences. But in general, the answers are relatively the same if you’ve been through this over and over. Don’t do this. Generally directionally, do that other thing. It’s fun to see the patterns.  

Speaker 3:
Right.  

Rob Walling:
So catch us up on what you’ve been doing with Rosie. For folks who maybe haven’t heard of you, which is probably a small subset of the audience, tell us what Rosie does. You’ve raised a series A. So you’re a bootstrapper at heart. I like to think of you as a … Like Jason Cohen was a bootstrapper and raised a bunch of money, Heat and Shaws like that. There’s a bunch of us that raise funding and you’re one of them. So talk it through.  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah. I think of myself and others like me as non-ideological. Whatever approach makes the most sense. Sometimes it’s bootstrapping. Sometimes it’s raising money. Sometimes it’s something in between, like a tinySeat or fun strapping or something. You just have to finance the business. One way or another, you put your own money in, customer revenue, debt, or equity. Those are your options. You can’t make money come out of thin air. So the options are relatively limited and depending on the situation, you take whichever one makes the most sense.  

Rob Walling:
And Rosie, what does it do?  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah. So Rosie is an AI answering service for small businesses. What that means is a lot of small businesses, think about your local service businesses like landscapers, pest control, small law firms, dog groomer, like the Fortune five million. They still do a lot of business on the phone. They advertise on Google, people see their phone number, maybe they do a bunch of research online, but then when it’s time to call the house painter, people pick up the phone and call. And so the phone is still this very challenging channel for small businesses. And a lot of times people miss phone calls. And when you miss a phone call, you’re either making a customer unhappy or you’re losing a revenue opportunity. So Rosie was built with this new AI tech that works over the phone on voice to answer the call when the small business owner or their team can’t answer the phone. 

That’s where it started. And over the last month, today actually is our launch day of our second communications channel. And so in 2025, Rosie was an AI voice product. And in 2026, Rosie’s going from a uni channel voice product to a multi-channel customer communications platform. So it’s the same rosy brain as we like to think about it that gets to know your business. And then there are just different channels. Someone calls over the phone, that’s a voice channel. Someone goes to your website, it’s chat or text. Someone sends you an email. So that’s our challenge in 2026 is to go from this very, very specific, very easily described solution to a very specific pain point to a bigger opportunity, but also slightly more difficult on the messaging and positioning.  

Rob Walling:
Well, thanks for catching us up, man. I know folks who are paying attention and followed your journey have known for the last few years, you pivoted your prior effort, rally into this. And then launching multichannel has got to be a big day. Not stressed at all, huh? Just hanging out? Everything’s good.  

Jordan Gal:
Sure. I found myself almost out of breath today. I would just catch myself like, “Whoa, relax. Take a breath here.” It’s just exciting. So far it’s going well, but we’re switching billing. It’s complicated and it’s scary. And like others, the big challenge right now is that roadmaps are like folding in on themselves because what we thought would take us a year to build out all these channels with this new tooling, we’re understanding, okay, we can probably build all these out in like three months. And if that’s the case, what should we do first? What does the roadmap look like? What does the difference between a front and a backend engineer look like? What does the product person do anymore? Why am I here as the CEO? What am I doing? So it is a confusing and exciting time.  

Rob Walling:
Confusing and exciting time I think should be stitched on a pillow and handed to every SaaS founder on earth.  

Jordan Gal:
Yes.  

Rob Walling:
All right. Are you interested in answering some listener questions today? Should we dive in?  

Jordan Gal:
Absolutely. All  

Rob Walling:
Right. Let’s dive in to our first question from Misha.  

Speaker 4:
Hi, Rob. Misha Manolas here. Got two questions for you. So we’re bootstrapped building distal EMR. It’s an AI powered medical chart review platform for outpatient clinics. Our ICP is CMO’s chief medical officers at organizations with 50 plus clinicians. My co-founder is an MD with the primary care relationships and we’ve closed several deals with regional and national organizations in our first eight months, which is incredible. But healthcare moves at the speed of trust, even with warm intros and name recognition deals takes six plus months to close and onboarding requires customization per client. So the first question I have is for bootstrapped companies in regulated industries with long sales cycles, how do you decide where to invest limited cash and engineering time when customer feedback is still sparse? And my second question, what are your thoughts on using bank loans or lines of credit against signed contracts where cash won’t arrive for 60 plus days, but we need capital now, for example, to fund SaaS two compliance. 

Any gotchas to be aware of for something like that. Thanks and appreciate everything you do.  

Rob Walling:
All right, Jordan. So Misha has two questions for us. The first one is how do you decide where to invest limited cash and engineering time when customer feedback is sparse, the classic SaaS conundrum, how do you think of it? You’ve never been in this situation, so you’re just going to have to pontificate off the top of your head.  

Jordan Gal:
Well, this situation scares me. This is scary. And I think the whole thing with Misha is that the market is a relatively slow moving market. It’s healthcare. And what he mentioned in his question was that they’ve closed some deals. So they’re not just building and guessing, right? They are building and people are paying. And so my immediate instinctual response to his question was, “Well, don’t build anything unless you’re getting paid for it. ” Because there’s an enormous amount of risk in bootstrapping into a market with long sales cycles. So unless you really know the space and you want to take that risk of, I’m going to build ahead of the market, the fact that they already have customers and each customer requires a certain level of customization, I would really wait for the market to push me toward the right feature set and get paid for it. 

I think it’s connected to a second question that we haven’t gotten to yet.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Well, let’s roll right into that. I mean, that was really around what are your thoughts on using bank loans or lines of credit against signed contracts where the cash won’t arrive for 60 plus days. You’re someone good to talk to about this because I don’t know that you’ve ever pulled debt or revenue-based financing, but you have certainly evaluated it because I remember having conversations about it.  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah. I’m evaluating it now also. And I have not pulled the trigger on it. I haven’t needed to, but I’ve put it in place and it’s kind of amazing what Stripe Capital does in the SaaS toolkit. The fact that you have access to debt at any time with the click of a button really changes that calculation because normally with debt, you have to go get approved. You got to go through underwriting, you got to do a song and dance for the bank. And oftentimes the bank, it almost doesn’t make sense for them to give loans to this type of a company. So I always encourage people, check out Stripe Capital to at least understand what that option looks like. So I have that in mind. Have you done any debt?  

Rob Walling:
No. And I mean, it didn’t exist when I was renting … I sold Drip in 2016. It was just coming up and frankly, it always scared me a little bit. And I think if I was going to try to raise money, I would have probably gone with an equity round at the time because we hadn’t raised any funding and so we could have. The debt was always like, then it becomes … Again, for me, the calculus was like, “Well, now it’s a drag on my growth because I have this money coming out every month.” And it just scared me a little bit because it’s like, how good am I actually at cashflow management? This is not my expertise. I’m like good at marketing and like recording podcasts and thinking about product and making those decisions. And everything else I did, I was winging it as we all are. 

And so when I thought debt-  

Jordan Gal:
Can’t wing it with debt.  

Rob Walling:
No, I know. That’s the one thing. I was like, “Dude, my finances, that’s like the worst thing.” So plus the amount I think at the time that you could raise just wasn’t enough to move the needle for us. And so it was always like, “Eh, maybe we’ll do it next month and maybe we’ll raise funding next month.” And then we had acquisition offers and I was like, “Why don’t we just do that? That sounds easier.”  

Jordan Gal:
The calculation that always stopped me from moving forward is that the payback is pretty short. And so it’s like, I’m going to take on $300,000 and then immediately have to start paying like 25 grand a month, which doesn’t feel right. It is really tailored for being put alongside an equity raise. That’s where it really makes a lot of sense. If you’re at three million in ARR and you want to get to five before you fundraise, you can pull a million bucks and you’re kind of going for broke anyway. And then you use the money and you push and you try to raise the next round. And if it doesn’t work out, like the whole thing’s coming crashing down anyway. So it doesn’t really matter as much. So it does feel like it works really well alongside the VC path equity raise to extend your runway to give you yourself a little more time so that you’re not staring down the barrel of a gun with three months of runway when you’re talking to investors, that’s a bad spot to be in.  

Rob Walling:
What do you think about Fermisha where he’s saying, “I have these contracts and it’s net 60 terms or whatever it is and I’m thinking of doing debt for that.  

Jordan Gal:
” So the first thing is I would only draw the debt under the assumption that contract is not coming through. And looking through that prism, if the contract does not come through, am I okay? I would not put myself in a situation where I am not okay if that contract doesn’t come through because then you’re piling risk on top of debt and that feels wrong. Now, at the same time, we started this conversation, we mentioned debt and equity and customer revenue. Those are the three sources of funding. And if you want to stay bootstrapped and you don’t want to sell equity, then you should at least be open-minded on debt. But with that said, you have to kind of go into it with clear eyes on what the payback schedule looks like. Usually the payback schedule is pretty tight on a bank loan.  

Rob Walling:
Or these Stripe capital stuff, it’s a good chunk. The interest rates on these are high because they know the numbers and they know how many will default. And there are obviously some predatory lenders out there, but I don’t believe most of them are. Ainar and I, at one point, this is six, seven years ago, talked about should we raise a debt fund and have tinySeed capital, I don’t know what we’d call it, but whatever, you get the idea, TinySeed RBF. And when we looked at the amount that we would have to charge the interest rate just to make any money and make it worthwhile with the defaults, it was like, “Gosh, that sucks.” I don’t want to do that. I know.  

Jordan Gal:
I like Stripe Capital because it is very, very transparent. You want to take 250K, you’re going to pay 24,000 bucks in interest, period. It’s a fixed amount of interest. So you borrow 250, you pay back 274. I like that clarity and not this two year period of what happens and then you have to send financials and if you get into a little bit of cash trouble, then you’re getting into a different category. Yes. So Misha, just be clear eyed about it and do not count on the contract revenue coming through in order to get you out of the gym.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I like that perspective. Now you’re saying even with a signed contract, until the money’s in the bank, don’t count on it, right? That’s essentially what you’re  

Jordan Gal:
Saying. Yes, because a sign-  

Rob Walling:
They could default. And what do  

Jordan Gal:
You can do? Sue them.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. A signed contract is a  

Jordan Gal:
Piece of paper, right? Yes, that’s right. That’s right. A signed contract is very different from an enforced contract. And if you’re not willing to go out and spend the money to enforce the contract, then you don’t have the money yet.  

Rob Walling:
Well, thanks for that question, Misha. I hope our thoughts were helpful. My next question, I’m going to keep anonymous. It was someone who responded to my recent email newsletter. So Jordan, did you know? I have not published original content aside from books. I’ve not published original kind of blog/email newsletter content since it’s got to be like 2012. And I just decided I’m doing it, man. I’ve pushed three or four live, robwalling.com, if folks want to enter their email and hear from me once a week with a very thoughtful original essay. Some of the concepts are things that I’m thinking about. Some of them are from this podcast. Some of them are from five years ago that I never published, but so far I’m getting really good responses, positive responses to people like, “Hey, it’s good to hear from you in writing again,” because I publish a bunch of audio and I publish a bunch of video, but aside from books, I don’t publish written content. 

And so I sent emails to however many tens of thousands of people are on that list and I say, respond with your number one problem that you’re facing because it can help me answer it on the show or potentially answer it in the newsletter. And this person responded and said, “This is a rant, but my number one problem is that any idea I come up with is washed away with a sea of vibe coded apps promising to do the same thing, but probably not as well.” Customers are now reluctant to try any new SaaS app because everyone and their dog is making them now, so us experience builders get buried. The other issue is that any app idea now is labeled as a wrapper for GPT and therefore it doesn’t have any perceived value even if it does, which makes finding product market fit tough. 

I’m tired of hearing every 20 year old now shout on X that they have just created their own ZaaS in two weeks and they have already scaled to 10K of MRR. So while I don’t necessarily agree with this person’s takes of customers are now reluctant to trust any new SaaS app because everyone is making them-  

Jordan Gal:
Who are these customers?  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And therefore there’s no perceived value, blah, blah, blah. I don’t necessarily wholeheartedly endorse that, but I understand that this person’s feeling that way, right? So have you thought about this in your space or how do you think about this more generally?  

Jordan Gal:
First, I too am tired of hearing of all the 20 year olds who gets a 10K number the first month. Sure. I think you have to build up some antibodies to the noise. Now, my very short answer is no, you’re letting the timeline get to you and you have to ignore it. You have to build what you think is valuable for people who need it. Okay. However, there’s a big difference in who the audience is, who the customer base is. If you’re building for the most hyper aware, basically if you’re building for the timeline for everyone who’s staring at the timeline and talking about it, then you do have an issue around, well, everyone’s there is just aware of everything happening and that does seem a bit high risk or low probability of success to just throw another thing in the mix. But for the most part, most markets are not just staring at the timeline like you and I are. 

We’re in like the top 2% of awareness.  

Rob Walling:
When you say timeline, you mean the X or the Meta, the Facebook, the whatever, any social media.  

Jordan Gal:
Yes. The noise, the 20 year olds claiming to get to 10K MRR in three days type of thing. So your customers, if they’re not staring at the timeline, that means they live in other environments. Maybe they’re even doing work, crazy idea. And in that case, they’re not aware of everything and you need to go into those environments to show them what you have. I mean, if we look at today, I mean, the number of competitors for Rosie is not good. If you were to look at that market today in voice AI, you would be convinced like this person is, that there’s no point at all because it’s taken and everyone’s got a million things and everyone’s vibe coding and nobody values it. I still think it would be wrong. If I were to try to give a little bit more valuable advice than that, I would say to look out into the future a little bit instead of what everyone’s building right now, I would try to be thoughtful about, well, okay, if everyone’s building this right now, what’s coming next? 

What has a logical progression from where we are today? An example would be like, okay, open claw, whatever the lobster thing comes out, and then you can kind of just squint out into the future and say, “Oh, people are going to need help.” Okay, so that’s what’s going to come next. So if you try to squint out into the future more, where is it going? And then yes, I would try to build out into the future a bit more instead of just what’s happening right now. And even then, you should expect it’s going to be an ocean of competitors. I think that it has been a relatively norm for a while in terms of a lot of competition with whatever you build that is on hyperdrive. Every market will have a lot of competition. It just is what it is. I don’t know if you need to care. 

You do need to care if you’re trying to build a billion dollar company because you kind of have to win the market. But if you aren’t and you’re trying to do a million ARR and get there as soon as possible, you have to be really good and you have to be good at finding your market and explaining to them why they should use your product. I think it’s okay to have a lot of competition everywhere’s going to have a lot of competition.  

Rob Walling:
I agree. And I think the thing that I tend to drive home a lot is like, he’s basically talking about building an audience or social media marketing. It’s like, I’m going to sell everything by posting on X. And it’s just like, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Most of your customers, no, none of your customers are there unless you’re selling to the same insular indie hacker crowd and you want Indie Hackers to be your customer and you want to be in the Indy Hackers and have them buy from each other. It’s like, stop. Yeah. No, of the 210 companies that a TinySeed has invested in, I think it’s just over 4% have any type of social media marketing or any type of audience. The other 96%, they just market. They do SEO, they do cold outbound, they do advertise, pay-per-click, they do in- person events, they do affiliate marketing, they go on podcast tours, they go on YouTube tours. 

There’s 19 other B2B SaaS marketing approaches and they’re listed in the SaaS playbook. And so you’re in a bubble. That’s how I feel, this anonymous person. You’re in a bubble and you think this is how you make it. And guess what? Almost no one makes it. How many hundreds of thousands of people follow Peter Levels? 450,000, maybe it’s a half million now. All of them probably want to be Peter levels. How many levels are there? There’s one. You know what I mean? It’s like trying to be, I follow what’s a big band today. All right, so someone who’s really popular today like Blink 182, I’m not dating myself at all. You know I’m kidding. But like any big band, it’s like you follow them and you’re like, dude, everybody wants to be like that. And there’s like one of them. It’s a different, it’s a hit based business. 

It’s a lot more of a luck. There’s some talent, there’s some skill, but it’s a lot of luck versus actually building a B2B SaaS that solves a problem for a real customer and a real market that is where money’s already going to, right? Where there’s budget line item for this is hard. I don’t know anything about those markets. It’s like, well, you partner up with someone who does or you work in a business that teaches you, oh, this is the problems that are being solved there. This is the money we’re spending and you work for other companies. There’s tons of ways to do this. Acting like posting on X Twitter is marketing or is going to build you some company is … No, that’s ridiculous.  

Jordan Gal:
The way I solved for this was selling to people who don’t care about the tech at all. So he wrote here, the other issue is any app ideas labeled as a wrapper and therefore doesn’t have any perceived value. That part is like very, very in the bubble because ideally your customer does not care at all about what you wrapped around. The only thing they care about is the problem. The way I solve for that is to sell to non-technical people. I want to take the magic that’s happening on the timeline and put it through this filter of, here’s your problem, here’s a solution. In our product, the concept of an LLM or a model or a prompt does not exist. There is no choose your model like absolutely not. It’s just the problem and here’s the solution for it. And at least that has worked to give me relief around having to be on the bleeding edge. 

I mean, I don’t really talk about Rosie on the timeline because our customers aren’t there. Anytime I post, it’s for peers and the general market and investors. It has nothing to do with marketing, not really.  

Rob Walling:
So thanks for that question, Ainan. I hope our thoughts were helpful. Next question comes to us from Bailey about whether to offer design partners advisory shares.  

Speaker 5:
Hey, Rob. My name’s Bailey and I’m a huge fan of the show and the SaaS playbook. Before I get into the message, I just want to say thank you. You’re in my ear week and week out and it’s been helpful whilst navigating this challenging solo founder journey. I’m the founder of UserSound, which is an AI voice survey platform for product managers at high volume product companies. So it helps teams capture qualitative customer insights at scale. I used to be a product manager myself running quantitative surveys. I felt that they lacked depth and customer interviews were really great, but didn’t scale. And so User Sound is designed to sit right in the middle of that spectrum as another tool for product managers to use. The product is live, but it still has some teething issues. I have one paid design partner client and two free design partner clients at large SME and enterprise companies. 

My target customers are scale ups and enterprise businesses with tens or hundreds of thousands, if even millions of customers. A big challenge I have right now is procurement. I have a strong UK network of product managers who want to use the product, but getting internal sign off and budget approval is slow and often is stalling my momentum. At the same time, I still need to be very hands-on with customers, so deeply understanding how they use the product and where it’s falling short. So my question’s about incentives. How do you feel about offering advisory shares to people in my network at these organizations that I’m very close with who actively use the tool and help push it internally? And I think my thought process is that the equity would be conditional on landing a revenue generating contract with their company or someone that they know in the network. 

Is this something you’ve seen work before or is this a naive attempt to shortcut proper customer discovery and long sales cycles? Thanks, and I’d love to hear your take.  

Rob Walling:
So Jordan, what was interesting is when I saw the subject line of this, I thought, oh, he means offering a freelancer who’s like doing design work or a dev shop. I was thinking, offering advisory shares in exchange for that. It’s not what it is at all. It’s like offering advisory shares for people to bring in customers or to at their own company become customers, which I’ve never heard of. So what do you think? Yeah, this is very interesting. What do you think about this?  

Jordan Gal:
Yes. Same as you as when I read the headline, I thought about my experience with a design team that I worked with that I did give equity and they stuck with us for years and they were amazing and we treated them like employees and yes, but then as soon as I started to read, I was confused and it all made sense as soon as I read the word UK. The buying process in the UK is not like in the US. That is an understatement. You basically need an in, a personal in that like requires a Guinness at a pub. And that’s how everything is bought there. And I personally was allergic to it and I have a lot of sympathy for Bailey that he has to kind of navigate this. So I’ve never seen equity be offered. I’ve seen basically bribes like, yes, if you help us get into your company, I will give you $5,000 or 5,000 Euro. 

I’ve seen that and I’ve done that on the rally front when we were selling into the UK. But I don’t think this is the right incentive mechanism for someone working at a company. I don’t think they generally think that way. And I don’t think there’s enough energy behind that incentive to push through a buying process that leads to like a closed deal. It’s like too distant.  

Rob Walling:
Because it’s shares that might be worth something in five years or 10 years.  

Jordan Gal:
Yes. Yes. It’s too far apart.  

Rob Walling:
So cash continues to be king and queen is what it sounds like. So I haven’t heard that. I totally believe you that like that’s the buying process there. I haven’t heard that firsthand, but now it makes me want to go talk to a few more of my tinySeed UK companies.  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah. And convince them to stop selling into the UK. That would be my advice, which is really tough.  

Speaker 3:
Yeah.  

Jordan Gal:
Okay. So cash seems like the obvious answer, but it’s not necessarily the answer. There are other incentive mechanisms. We found that status in the UK is very important. So letting the person be important in the process, take credit was just as important. And most people, they weren’t nearly as transactional as we expected them to be. We’re Americans. We’re like, “All right, how much can we pay you? ” And they were like, “No, that’s not what I’m looking for. ” So I think you have to find better incentive mechanisms and really the right incentive mechanism is that the solution is so good and important to them that that’s the actual thing, that they’re going to be the ones that bring it into the company and take credit for it. So that’s a bad answer to this question, but I don’t know what else.  

Rob Walling:
But it’s honest. Yeah, I appreciate that. So yeah, thanks for the question, Bailey. I mean, I guess I haven’t really weighed in, but my answer is I’ve never heard anyone do that and I personally wouldn’t. That’s really the end of the story. I think it’s not going to be super effective. And I also struggle to compensate with equity. I mean, I guess if there was someone in your network, it’s kind of almost like an affiliate deal at this point where it’s like, they’re not going to become the customer, but they know some people that they will refer to become customers and you’re going to pay them in shares, in advisory shares in a startup that may or may not work. And I think Jordan’s point is, I don’t know that anyone cares about Yeah. So I kind of am on board with his answer.  

Jordan Gal:
We had one person on the ground. We were selling into the UK and knew that because we weren’t going to the pubs in the events, it was never going to work for us. We paid a consultant on the ground in the UK who knew everyone in the industry and had kind of jumped out on her own to create this consulting company. And we paid her as a consultant and she basically evangelized our product at the events and the pubs. That was as far as we got into making it successful.  

Rob Walling:
Great advice. So thanks for that question, Bailey. I hope our advice was helpful. Next question is, it’s another anonymous one also from my email list and the person said, I’m bringing this one up because I just think a lot of people don’t think about this or they’re running into it as well and they don’t really know how to describe it. So this person says, “My number one problem is that my product is a solution that people are not yet looking for. They might be aware of the problem, but not of my solution.” And I would say, jumping in, they’re not even aware that there is a solution. And so if we look at the five stages of awareness from, isn’t it Eugene Schwartz? You can Google this. There is a problem aware audience who is not yet solution aware, who then are not going to be product aware. 

And then there’s unaware above that and most aware on the bottom. So I laid out a couple things in an email response to them that I can talk about. This is a hard way to go as a bootstrapper. It’s really hard. And it effectively means it’s mostly outbound. And usually you’re either good at that and that’s what you want to do and you want to do outbound and you want to do sales or you raise money to do this and you really kind of build it up. Start small, stay small. I know it’s 16 years old now. It talks a lot about building things for existing demand. And it says if people aren’t searching for this, don’t try to nights and weekends be a solopreneur and go after a space like this. Now, that was 16 years ago. Things are more competitive. There were more spaces back then that were not as crowded. 

So I don’t want to act like, oh, everyone should go for these greenfield markets. But I do still think that there are small little niches, 1000 to 5K MRR, 10K MRR, depends on how big you want to get, where people are searching for things. And if you learn a skillset like SEO or content marketing or whatever that you can get in front of them. So with that said, Jordan, what are your thoughts on this question?  

Jordan Gal:
So I have been in this situation with Rally. Outside of the Shopify ecosystem, people knew that their checkout was bad. They did not yet know that they could just replace the entire checkout from their platform for a different one. It was a really tough problem to crack. This person sounds like they need to team up with the person that’s in the bubble to throw products in that people are already clamoring for. Now with that said, if you have an existing product like this, it makes me think of a book I was given by our lead VC called Play Bigger, and it is about category creation. There’s some things in there that are related to this. Now, the only thing I’ve seen work is becoming the person known for the problem. So to articulate the problem well enough, you can buy yourself the attention to introduce a solution. 

So it’s like you need to become the company or the product that is most known for not the solution that you’re offering, but for articulating the problem most clearly so that when people hear your articulation of their problem and it’s so spot on, then they believe you’re going to be the one that has the solution. The challenge of that is you need attention. Attention’s expensive. It’s some way or another, you need to get them paying attention to you and that’s the hard part. And I guess that’s the part that the SEO and content and blog posts and videos and the media in general that you use to articulate the problem, that’s where the play bigger book comes in and it kind of assumes you have budget to go out and yell about the problem. So that’s a difficulty for a bootstrapper. You can articulate the problem really well, but if you can’t amplify it out there, then it’s tough to get attention. 

But if you shrink it down to a day-to-day bootstrapper problem, in the messaging, marketing, outbound emails, my YouTube videos, all that, I would be describing the problem really, really well and focusing on that 80% of the time and putting my solution at the 20%. That’s as good as I can do in this very difficult problem that I personally failed at.  

Rob Walling:
If they don’t know there is a solution that exists, a lot of it has, as you said, it has to be this outbound motion and that can be creating content and building an audience if that’s in your wheelhouse. Folks can go back and listen to my interview with Jay Klaus that went live in the last week or two where we talk about founder-led marketing and I say, B2B SaaS founders, maybe 10, 20% should consider it. I do not think it’s the majority. And he agreed and he said, “Yeah, if you don’t really want to do that to create content, to create YouTube videos, create podcasts, if it doesn’t fire you up, you’re not going to be good at it and you’re not going to enjoy it. ” And you can get good at something you don’t enjoy, but that’s also a recipe for burnout. But that is one way, right, is to build the audience. 

Another way is just with direct warm and cold outreach. I also, when I was emailing this person back, said, “You can show up where they hang out. ” So you do like Kevin Wagstaff did. He’s a co-founder of Spectora and he and his brother bootstrapped Spectora to multiple exits, but the first one was a majority buyout at $90 million. Just the two of them were the only equity holders. Yeah. He was on, I don’t know, six or eight months ago. They spent a tremendous amount of time, like an inordinate amount of time in Facebook groups because that’s where the home inspectors, where their customers lived. Today it’s what is it? Subreddits, Facebook groups, private Slacks, forums. It’s wherever your customers are. You can also do in- person stuff. You can go to trade shows, you go to industry events, and you can go on podcast and YouTube tours, right? 

And I’d recommend doing, if you can do those as a guest, pitch an interesting story and do … There’s five YouTube channels that are really big in this space. You can start building your own if you want, but learning how to guest will get you that reach without having to go through the pain of building an audience because take it for me, building an audience is a ton, ton of work. And so that’s it. If you’re in a problem aware space where people aren’t aware of a solution and you want to build a little Indie Hacker 10K a month business, I don’t know how you do that. It’s too much work. You don’t do it. It would be my advice. Go after something where that you can possibly get in front of some type of demand on an ongoing basis. But we talk a lot about, you and I about ambitious bootstrappers. 

It’s like, no, I want to be a seven figure or an eight figure ARR company. If I was in this space and we have back some, there are some TinySeq companies that are just like this where they are, they have problem aware audiences who don’t know there’s a solution and that’s approximately the playbook that they run and that we recommend.  

Jordan Gal:
Yep. Hammer on the pain.  

Rob Walling:
Got to do it. So thanks for that question. Ainan. Hope it was helpful. Last question of the day comes to us from Jason and it’s kind of a story. It’s about a collaborator using their idea to develop a competing … Well, it’s a kind of a competing or overlapping product.  

Speaker 3:
Hey, Rob. Jason here. I’m a full stack developer, dad, musician, and a huge Beatles fan. I like your hat. I’m building an EdTech product that fills a gap in a niche market. It’s customer validated, user informed, and will launch as a closed beta in the next couple months. Early on, I was introduced to a key player in the industry, a successful, respected specialist. He was interested in the product, so I had him sign an NDA and I gave him a tour, but the NDA did not have an explicit non-compete clause, just to foreshadow the future here. We’ve been in a shared telegram chat. I’ve shared updates, screenshots, product info. I’ve had conversations with other key players and potential clients, kind of developing somewhat in the open, using their feedback to make my product stronger. Twice last year, I asked him to get involved. I offered equity at one point. 

He declined. Earlier this week, he showed me something that he’s working on, some software and many of the features are comparable or exactly the same as an earlier prototype of mine. There’s some analytics that are also very similar to recent screenshots I shared in the chat. And he acknowledged that there’s some overlap and I suspect he was showing me this in fairness so that I knew that he was doing it, but despite whatever intentions he had, I feel crushed. I feel like my openness has been taken advantage of and my good ideas are being stolen. When he showed this to me, I said, “Hey, I prefer Confluence to competition.” And again, I brought up partnership. He said he’d think about it, but he’s a bit of a lone wolf. I feel stung. I’ve now deleted proprietary info from the chat. I’m keeping my head down and focusing on what I can control. 

And overall, my product remains largely distinct and I’m certainly much farther along in my development, but I’m wondering if I misplayed my hand somewhere here. So what do you think about this situation? Is his behavior as wrong as it seems? Should founders make their NDAs more ironClad in general? I try to be a trustful and collaborative person and I take that as a strength, but what lessons can I extrapolate beyond the obvious ones about him? What would you do? Thanks.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, Jordan. So he had the guy sign an NDA, but it didn’t have a non-compete or something in it, which I think is probably the first thing we would say is obviously you need that, but even then, then you have to enforce it. You need a lawyer. It’s like, this is a heartbreaking story. And the weird part for me, I had to wrap my head around why he was giving this other person all of this information ongoing in a telegram chat. And I think it’s because he thought he might become a customer. I think that’s what was happening here, but what’s your take on this?  

Jordan Gal:
Or an influencer, right? Someone respected in the field that then talks about your product and you borrow that credibility is a great way to enter a market. Absolutely.  

Rob Walling:
Got it.  

Jordan Gal:
Unfortunately, this person seems to have seen the opportunity and decided to run with it on their own.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. And look, this is the biggest fear, and of course, biggest fear of every entrepreneur out there, especially early stage. It’s like, well, I can’t talk about my idea. I need to be in stealth mode so that no one steals it. And the advice is usually like, look, almost nobody’s going to steal it. And if they try, they’re going to do a poor job. You need to out execute about market them anyways because once you launch, and you have any success, people are going to copy you. What are you going to do at that point? That is the advice. Every once in a while, something like this happens that is gnarly. Like this person has unfortunately shared a lot. Before launching Drip, I had this email list and I was sending screenshots and kind of what we were building and what we’re up to. And someone could have taken that and built something, but they didn’t really know what we were building because it wasn’t like I was feeding them all this information. 

And in this case, it sounds like the person has a lot of it. So how would you think about this? I guess there’s kind of two questions here. How to avoid falling into this trap, even though you should probably be sharing stuff with people and then what you do now that he’s in this situation.  

Jordan Gal:
I don’t know if there’s much avoiding it other than using your radar. If things don’t feel quite right, then you should pay attention to that radar as early as possible. And other times there’s just nothing to do. This is just the big ocean full of sharks. This is just hardball and how it unfolds sometimes. I had this happen to me at CardHook with a marketing partner who just ripped everything off, just pixel for pixel. One of those jobs where you then look at the source code and it still has your copyright and your code in it 

Because they really just ripped it off and it’s emotional problem first to address because it is dispiriting. It is depressing and that is the enemy of running a startup. The confidence and the optimism is necessary. And to have something like this happen very early on is like dangerous because they can break you before you have a sense of confidence. At CardHook, we were up and running. We were probably somewhere in the area of like 100K a month at that point, but it still felt like this betrayal. Now, I do want to just inject into this that a very strongly worded letter from a lawyer can be very effective. It depends on the person, it depends on the situation and what the resources are of the other company, that sort of thing, but a very scary letter from a lawyer can be worth your time and the money that it takes. 

So I would incorporate that into my general response. Probably though, it’s not going to do anything. It might. So for the risk reward for spending 500 or thousand bucks with a lawyer and putting that out there, the on paper, on the record threat can be very effective. So don’t discount that. At the same time, if this had happened on the other side of launch, then it would be effectively the exact same thing, like another competitor in the market, but it wouldn’t have the same emotional issue or response. And so I would just think about it that way. Once you get through this, you’re going to launch and then people are going to copy the hell out of your product anyway. The market as it is right now, anyone can kind of build any product they want pretty quickly. If you get any traction whatsoever, you’re going to have competition. 

And so just pretend like this is after launch and a new competitor comes in and yeah, it sucks, but that’s just the reality of being in the market. So it’s a bit of a test on, do you really like this category? Do you really like the solution and product? If you do, then you have to ignore it and there’s room for everybody. And yes, it will absolutely annoy the hell out of you to watch this person succeed in the market alongside you, maybe even eclipse what you’re doing and that’s just part of the game. Sucks. And I’m sorry this happened to this person and I feel for them, but it’s a bit of a test.  

Rob Walling:
I really like that mindset, thinking about it of like, “Hey, it does suck and I feel the same way. I feel really bad for this guy.” I think the thought that this is like the one in a thousand that this happens. And so it doesn’t mean that everyone should take this as the one example. I see this on X Twitter where the bootstrappers pull out the article of like the VC founder who got who like raised money and then the VCs kicked him out or he left and then like five years later it sold for 300 million and the person got nothing because they were so diluted or whatever it is. Usually A, there’s more to this story. Usually that founder pulled out a bunch of secondary when they sold in their series B, C, and D, and they have 10, 20 million in the bank and usually they screwed themselves. 

But let’s just say, no, venture capitalist screwed the guy on this one. And then people are like, “See, you should never raise venture funding.” And it’s like, “Dude, your story is not my data. It’s not it. ” And so a single anecdote, but it does suck when it happens, right? In this case, especially, I feel bad for him, but I like your thought about the mindset of, “Hey, if it was post-launch, it’s going to happen  

Jordan Gal:
Too.” In business, there is injustice everywhere. Things that should have happened, the reward that should have been had, this thing should never have happened, Apple screwed you. It’s like it is a normal part and this does suck. Hopefully they can use it as fuel. The amount of joy I had watching Fast and Bollt implode after watching them dog smack for like two years, a little payback.  

Speaker 3:
Yep.  

Jordan Gal:
Look, if the person loves the solution and the space, then just keep going. Keep going.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Of all the people, all the founders I know though, you are exceptionally good at saying, what is it? Nobody cares work harder or something like that. I think that’s one of your things, but you mean it and I get you that you really feel that. I can say that. I still get super pissed when people copy me. Really mad. People copied MicroConf and our community in the early days. They copied HitTail, Pixel for Pixel. Definitely saw a few copies of drip, some which worked and some which didn’t. Copies of TinySeed, yes. I mean, it’s like everything I’ve ever done that’s had any meaning has been copied and every time it makes me mad and it hasn’t even been to this degree where it’s like I’m sharing something out of trying to give somebody a benefit of the doubt.  

Jordan Gal:
Yeah. It still bothers us. I mean, Rosie has been cloned- Oh,  

Rob Walling:
I bet.  

Jordan Gal:
So much. There’s like, “Hey Bobby, hey Josie, hey Julie.” There’s everything and we don’t like it. We don’t let it get to us too much, but Rock, my co-founder, CTO, he does get an enormous amount of joy at blocking people because we have a self-serve free trial. So we have one to five cloning competitor types signing up every single day and Rock gets a little hit of dopamine and blocked. No, I see the same IP address, different email, different … So he’s like, “He’s Gandolph. You shall not pass at Rosie.” It’s awesome.  

Rob Walling:
Oh, that’s good. That’s funny. It’s the game, unfortunately. So yeah, I don’t want there to be injustice in business and in the startup space. And it is a painful truth. So I appreciate you bringing that up. And obviously our feelings go out to the question asker here because it sucks and it would bother me too, but I think you’ve offered some pretty significant advice for him. So sir, thanks so much for joining me once again on the show.  

Jordan Gal:
Thanks for having me. Thanks for everyone that wrote in with the questions and got us going on these topics and hopefully it’s helpful.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And if folks want to keep up with you on X, you are at Jordangal, G-A-L. And if they want to see one of the best answers … I always say with Ruben, I always say one of the best electronic signature. But I’m trying to think of what is your … I need to go to your H1 and do this. All right.  

Jordan Gal:
Well, if you have advice for me, please give me because we’re about to change over from the best. The easiest is actually our positioning, the easiest AI answering service for small businesses, and now we have to talk about multiple channels. So that’s our challenge. And I’ll be on Brian and Justin’s panel podcast in the next week or so talking about all the development changes and challenges. It’s a wild ride right now in software. It is a trip and it does feel like an amazing opportunity. I think everyone’s kind of exhausted by the opportunity and not sleeping enough, but it’s so cool. It’s so amazing all these things happening. It’s great.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s heyrosie.com for the AI answering service for your business calls, the easiest AI answering service for your business calls. Thanks again, man.  

Speaker 3:
Thank you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Jordan for joining me on the show. In addition to co-founding Rosie, Jordan is also a coach with our TinySeed SaaS Institute. That’s our premium coaching program for founders doing seven and eight figures of ARR. If you’re looking for a highly curated community of SaaS founders, seasoned mentors, and top tier dedicated coaches, you should head to SaaSInstitute.com to get the systems and the support you need to scale from a million dollars to 10 million and beyond. Jordan is one of our coaches, as well as Taylor Hendrickson, Mark Thomas, and several other highly competent folks who know SaaS inside and out. So if you’re interested in that one-on-one coaching, direct access to subject matter mentors, a curated circle of ambitious founders and a private members only community, SaaSinstitute.com. Thanks for listening this week and every week. If you keep listening, I’ll keep recording. This is Rob Walling stunning off from episode 824. 

Listener, if you’ve made it this far, you know the drill here. Jordan’s my long-term friend, and when I bring long-term friends, people I’ve known for 10, 15 years on the show, I ambush them with ridiculous trivia questions. I  

Jordan Gal:
Was going to say, maybe they know the drill. I did not know the drill. You don’t listen  

Rob Walling:
To my podcast anymore. I think I  

Jordan Gal:
Turn it off after this.  

Rob Walling:
I do this to Derek Reimer all the time, dude. And I just pick a topic that sometimes hopefully they know something about and sometimes they don’t. So the topic that I picked is the B movie.  

Jordan Gal:
Oh, okay. Have I seen it? If I went downstairs and brought my wife up into this room and I’d say, “What’s the funny joke that the whole family knows when it comes time to choosing a movie, what’s dad going to say 100% of the time?” And she would say, “Be movie.”  

Rob Walling:
Be movie. B  

Jordan Gal:
Movie. Perfect. Jerry Steinfeld, perfect movie.  

Rob Walling:
ChatGPT steered me right. It pulled a quote from you from an interview on a podcast because I said, “What are Jordan Gall’s? Hobbies.” And I was like skiing, family, driving to random places in Illinois. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I mean, I could ask you questions about Portland, Oregon. There’s a bunch of other stuff, but I ask ChatGPT for B-Movie trivia questions. We’re going to start easy. We’re going to go hard. We got five of them.  

Jordan Gal:
Oh,  

Rob Walling:
Geez. We’re going five for five today. I want you five for five. All right.  

Jordan Gal:
Wish me luck. Wish me luck because I love the movie. I don’t know about the details, but we’ll see.  

Rob Walling:
Totally. So difficulty two out of 10. What is Barry’s job immediately after graduating from college?  

Jordan Gal:
I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. Hold on. Let me pull up the browser.  

Rob Walling:
I love every minute of this.  

Jordan Gal:
His job right when he graduates is he doesn’t like the job. He wants to be a fighter pile. His job is like, I don’t know, like clearing out old wax or something. I don’t remember what it is.  

Rob Walling:
Is he a worker at Honex Industries specifically assigned to Stir Honey? Does that sound familiar? That’s your job to be detailed. Yes. I’m going to take that as- Seriously,  

Jordan Gal:
A Honeystir. Honey skirt.  

Rob Walling:
That’s what it is. All right. Here’s a difficulty one. Who voices Barry B. Benson?  

Jordan Gal:
Seinfeld? Yeah. Seinfeld.  

Rob Walling:
The main  

Jordan Gal:
Character. The main character.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. All right. So you got one out of two. What is the name of the human woman, Barry Befriends?  

Jordan Gal:
Oh my God, his girlfriend. The  

Rob Walling:
Greenhouse.  

Jordan Gal:
He’s never coming  

Rob Walling:
Back on  

Jordan Gal:
This. I mean, this is crazy. This  

Rob Walling:
New low.  

Jordan Gal:
I’m thinking in Jerry Seinfeld’s voice right now is what I’m doing.  

Rob Walling:
Starts with a V. Hint starts with a V.  

Jordan Gal:
Vera? Vanessa.  

Rob Walling:
There it is.  

Jordan Gal:
Vanessa. Vanessa. Yeah. Yes. All  

Rob Walling:
Right. I’m going to give you that. So two out of three. What is Vanessa’s profession?  

Jordan Gal:
Sweating.  

Rob Walling:
Sweating is not  

Jordan Gal:
A profession. Well, that’s what I’m currently … That’s my current profession.  

Rob Walling:
I love that you could run a startup and do all the crazy ups and downs and I asked you questions about a movie you’ve seen 58 times.  

Jordan Gal:
So many times. Love that movie. Okay. She goes on her laptop. Her husband … Okay. Is she a lawyer?  

Rob Walling:
She’s a florist. Oh,  

Jordan Gal:
Hence the B attraction. Okay.  

Rob Walling:
Hence the B  

Jordan Gal:
Attractive. Totally off zero out of … You’re  

Rob Walling:
At two out of four. Two out of four. 50%.  

Jordan Gal:
Generous scoring system.  

Rob Walling:
All right. Last one. I was going to go up to difficulty 10. I think you might implode. Yes. I’m going to do a difficulty five as your artist. What product does Barry see in a grocery store that shocks him and sets off the main conflict?  

Jordan Gal:
I mean, he sees the bear, the little bear honey. And he’s like, oh my God.  

Rob Walling:
Jar slash bottles of honey  

Jordan Gal:
Being  

Rob Walling:
Sold  

Jordan Gal:
By humans.  

Rob Walling:
Yes. And  

Jordan Gal:
Then he realized it’s big honey. It’s not what he thought it was.  

Rob Walling:
Three of five, sir. 60%, D minus. You just passed. I appreciate that. Crutch. One pointless independent half. Thanks for coming on. I hope that this doesn’t dissuade you from coming onto a future episode.  

Jordan Gal:
Oh, absolutely not. I’m looking forward to it. It’s good to get the juices going. And I’m still not relenting. I will still suggest B movie every time my family wants.  

Rob Walling:
You’re like me with The Thing, 1982 and Blade Runner. Those are my two movies every time. I’m just like, “Oh yeah, I watched that yesterday and I could watch it again today.” See, my kids are older, so we can watch horror movies.  

Jordan Gal:
Oh, good for you. Yeah, I have a house full of girls, so three girls. So it’s a challenge for me to get a movie in. So B movie’s kind of pitch perfect.