Episode 833 | Success Patterns of Nobel Laureates, Developing Expertise, and From Zero to $10k (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Rob Walling (00:00): Imagine this: you’re about to close a massive deal. You’ve been grinding for it, you’re pumped. And then your customer’s legal team decides to make things interesting. What happens if you get hacked? How do you protect our data? And your brain just goes blank. That’s the nightmare founders deal with all the time. That’s exactly what Ysecurity solves. They are 40 security engineers who’ve actually done security at Apple, Uber, Microsoft, Robinhood, Brex, and more. And get this: you don’t hire them, you rent them by the hour. No massive salary, no expensive consultants, just real experts embedded in your company helping you get SOC 2, ISO, whatever you need. Set a monthly cap, know exactly what you’re spending, and close the deal. Head to ysecurity.io/startups and book your free strategy call. Your first eight hours are free. 40 engineers, one full working day, totally free. Go take it. 

(00:57): ysecurity.io/startups. That’s the letter Y: ysecurity.io/startups. Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I’m going to talk through some solo topics. The first one is about how a TinySeed founder who found they didn’t have product-market fit just started generating $10,000-$15,000 a month in quasi-consulting revenue. It’s really customer development mixed with project-based work, and I was impressed with how quickly they pulled this off. I’m going to talk about what separates Nobel Prize winners from forgotten researchers, and one or two other topics as time allows. Before I dive into those topics, tickets for MicroConf Europe are going fast. We will sell this event out. We’ve sold out all our events for the past several years. MicroConf Europe is in Reykjavik, Iceland from September 21st through the 23rd of this year. We have incredible speakers coming to this event, our world-class hallway track. 

(02:05): And of course, producer Sonya is lining up some amazing excursions to hot springs, thermal spas, and a distillery. microconf.com/europe if you want to check that out and grab your ticket. Tickets will never be cheaper than they are today. And if you or your company are interested in supporting the event and getting in front of a couple hundred founders, mostly focused on B2B SaaS, you should consider sponsoring. Shoot us a note at sponsors@microconf.com and my trusty team will get back to you ASAP. 

(02:46): My first topic of the day is about a TinySeed company called BlinkMetrics at blinkmetrics.com. I did get permission from the founders to tell this story. I was going to anonymize it and then I was talking to Nathan Tyler, one of the co-founders, and mentioned I was going to talk about this on the podcast and he said, “Oh, just use the name. Tell them what we’re up to.” And I really appreciated that because the story is an interesting one. So we accepted BlinkMetrics into TinySeed earlier than a lot of other TinySeed companies. Nathan has had a nice exit under his belt, so he’s a serial entrepreneur and someone we put faith in to execute alongside his co-founder. And so they were building BlinkMetrics, purely as a B2B SaaS, and had some early traction. They came into a batch, I don’t even know if it’s 18 months ago. 

(03:41): I lose track of it these days. And what they found is that what they were selling wasn’t resonating. Their product-market fit was very weak or non-existent, and they were struggling to make sales and struggling to retain people, tweaking with the pricing. But in true entrepreneur startup founder form, they have iterated so quickly, tried a lot of things, and been right on enough of them that they’re starting to see some traction. So Nathan in particular and I have gone back and forth with Loom videos and Slack voice messages, having these async conversations about approaches that he and his co-founder are trying. And one of the things he eventually decided to try, he was asking me what I thought about it, was the approach of: look, I want to do some consulting and project-based work to serve both as revenue for the company, because the company wasn’t really making any money, but also as customer development to find out what people really need. 

(04:42): And before I continue, BlinkMetrics, the H1 today is “Take your business reporting out of spreadsheets for good.” You know the data is somewhere in your CRM, finance, and operations tools. BlinkMetrics pulls it all together into live dashboards that finally answer the questions your individual tools can’t. And as I’ve talked about on this show, building analytics dashboards is a tough space because they’re often vitamins, not aspirins. And that’s what BlinkMetrics was running into. And so they decided to take a pretty bold move. If you go to their custom dashboards page today, you can see they have just three pricing plans and they are effectively one-time. They have a $5,000 custom reporting dashboard done in 30 days, done for you, with a lot of custom code and custom integrations with apps. There’s a $10,000 one if you need a few more things, and then there’s a custom one starting at $25,000 and going up from there. 

(05:39): And I’ve seen founders both inside TinySeed and out try to do the consulting-to-product path, and it is challenging. There are a lot of challenges that go along with it. If you can’t see commonalities between all of the projects, then you’re basically just a dev shop. And if you can’t charge enough to make really strong margins, you find yourself on a hamster wheel of never-ending code writing and you can’t productize it. It’s a trap that a lot of consulting firms and agencies fall into and they’re never able to get away from that instant infusion of cash when you can charge $5,000, $10,000, or $25,000 for a few weeks of work. It makes it hard to then go try to build a business on $50 a month. 

(06:24): And so Nathan and I had a lot of conversations about this. The interesting thing is he came back, a month or two after one of our conversations, and said, “Well, I’ve been generating between $10,000 and $20,000 a month in this project work and we are learning a ton.” And I thought to myself, and I realized both he and I had been talking down about it, being like, “Yeah, it’s kind of not working and you have this consulting stuff you’re doing.” But then he said, “Well, some of it is turning into recurring revenue.” So some folks are paying $500 or $1,000 a month. It’s a pretty substantial amount of MRR with most projects. So the MRR is actually starting to build. Talk about customer development. Most people don’t do customer development to this level, where you are truly building mostly custom software and then able to find the commonalities. 

(07:23): But the really interesting thing was just how I was like, “Yeah, it’s not SaaS, so the revenue isn’t worth much.” That was kind of the way I was talking about it. And then I realized it’s pretty incredible. Think about what they’ve done: within a month or two of deciding to do this, they’re bringing in between $10,000 and $20,000 a month in project revenue. But it’s cash. It’s cash that allows them to pay the bills and to keep the company going. And I just had the realization at a certain point that as entrepreneurs, we often just make things out of nothing. From nowhere, suddenly this business is a six-figure ARR company that will support both founders until they can figure out how to turn this into recurring revenue. And it’s such an incredible luxury that we are able to do that. I asked Nathan, “Ten years ago when you were working a day job, did you ever think you could just spin up a business doing $10,000-$20,000 a month effectively overnight?” I mean, they had a website, that was it. 

(08:31): They didn’t have a bunch of incoming leads or anything, and all of a sudden this business is doing this. And he said, “No, I kind of take it for granted these days.” And that’s the thing when you talk about entrepreneurs who execute and just get it done: they kind of take it for granted. And I was doing that in our conversations as well. I actually asked him, “I don’t think you have a ton of traffic, but how are you finding these new clients?” And he said in a Slack message, “Nothing secret. LinkedIn, networking groups, coffee chats. I did 104 coffee chat type calls in Q1, which yielded 24 sales calls, which landed enough deals.” So it’s just putting in the work that has led to this. And I’ll say it’s not about never giving up. I don’t mean you should never pivot. This is in fact a pivot. But the fact that they’re keeping this business alive, learning things, and seeing commonalities between these dashboards, they discovered a whole new customer type. 

(09:20): There are partners, agencies, and fractional CFOs, EOS integrators who want this type of thing, and they don’t just want a $100 or $200 a month dashboard. They want something that’s pretty complicated to set up. But Nathan is technical, he’s a developer, and so he’s able to get this going. The other thing he pointed out to me is that back in the day this would be a lot of manual, grindy work, but AI makes it way faster. He said, “The fundamental economics have changed.” The API connectors to do new integrations, AI is actually really good at building those and writing all the unit tests and smoke tests. He was telling me, “I think this could go from 30 days down to delivering in seven days. 

(10:25): And there are some I think we could get to the point where we could deliver in a day or two, in essence.” And so that’s obvious once he said it, but it hadn’t occurred to me just how valuable this model might actually be. And so you might say, “Well, can’t anyone just spin up AI and do this?” And it’s like, yeah, but these fractional CFOs and EOS integrators don’t want to do that and they don’t want to host this software. And if you just use AI without a bunch of controls, it will hallucinate, data can be wrong, code can be buggy and insecure. And effectively BlinkMetrics is taking care of that. So not only are they generating revenue and discovering new customer channels and picking up on commonalities, but they are also turning a significant number of these projects into more SaaS-based subscriptions. 

(11:11): And if someone paid $5,000 or $10,000 upfront to have custom software written, think of how sticky that is. They’re not going to cancel in three months or six months. The LTV on this is going to be high. The churn is going to be very, very small, if not net negative. And so I wanted to call out the BlinkMetrics case study for a couple reasons. Number one, being a founder and being able to just make something out of nothing is so impressive. And I think a lot of us take that for granted. If someone came to me and said, “Yeah, I’m doing $20,000 a month in consulting work,” my initial thought would be, “Oh, I’m sorry,” because I am so immersed in the SaaS space where everything’s recurring and that’s where the value is. And that’s true, but also let’s just take a moment and be grateful. 

(11:56): If we can support ourselves with our own products or whatever we’re doing, just how impressive that actually is. And how the version of us from 10 years or 20 years ago would be so impressed and so happy with what we’re building. And then secondarily, I wanted to maybe give a bit of inspiration. If you’re out there doing consulting work and trying to get into a more SaaS-based model, I think BlinkMetrics is going to make this work. They really are on that trajectory, and that wasn’t the case even three or four months ago. It changed very quickly with a lot of focused effort: 104 coffee chats, 24 sales calls, executing with AI, and just grinding through a lot of stuff that’s probably not fun at this stage. 

(12:47): But my hope is that BlinkMetrics is going to build an incredible business. My next topic is what separates Nobel Prize winners from forgotten researchers. This is a tweet that I will link up in the show notes, and this tweet effectively tells a story of Bell Labs and a man named Claude Shannon who gave a lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work. He had spent 30 years at Bell Labs observing those who succeeded and those who didn’t. And he talked about several habits that the Nobel Prize winners had. The first one was that most scientists deliberately avoided the most important problems in their field because the odds of failure are too high. So they would pick a safe, adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it and move on. But because they never took swings at hard problems, they never knocked it out of the park. 

(13:48): That’s what it takes to win a Nobel Prize. The second habit was about doors, like the doors to their offices. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over their careers. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly, but they also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems that the closed-door scientists did not even know existed. The third habit was inversion. One example is a scientist who Bell Labs refused to give a team of programmers. So he flipped the question and asked why machines could not write the programs themselves, and that single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. 

(14:40): So it’s thinking about the same problem in a different way. The fourth habit was that knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10% harder than you do does not produce 10% more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn’t add. It multiplies, and it compounds silently for years before anyone notices. This last one hits me the hardest, because over my career I’ve seen founders who show up wanting that instant quick hit of success, and sometimes they get it. Sometimes you get lucky. But I don’t want to base my approaches or my advice on getting lucky. The founders I see who show up day after day, year after year, shipping and thinking in terms of years, not months, as I often say on this show, are many of the folks who have outsized outcomes. You can look at my product career in the early days, just plodding along, making nothing for several years, then making a few thousand dollars a month, then maybe $10,000 or $20,000 a month. 

(15:43): And then suddenly, after 11 years of grinding, having this massive, successful multimillion-dollar company in Drip and having that exit to where I didn’t have to work again after 2016. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but it didn’t. It was shipping software for years. It was learning marketing for years. It was shipping this podcast 52 weeks a year, running MicroConf. It was a lot of things that compounded to contribute to that success. And then even beyond that, if you look at MicroConf and TinySeed these days and the success of this podcast and the YouTube channel, all of that has taken years and years to build. So this idea that 10% harder produces 10% more: it doesn’t add, it multiplies. And obviously if you get lucky and knock one out of the park early, good for you, but that shouldn’t be your expectation going in. 

(16:45): Going back to the second habit, keeping doors open, I think of that these days as being in community with other founders. And I hesitate to say social media because social media is such fake community. I think more along the lines of actually meeting folks in person at in-person events. And not just because I run in-person events. I also think of private Slack channels where it truly is community. I’m in a few private Slack channels with other founder groups, and I think consuming content like this podcast, where there is a community of folks sending in questions and guesting on the show to give back, whether they’re being interviewed about their experience or answering listener questions, to me that is keeping your door open. 

(17:38): It allows you to absorb new ideas as they pass through the hallway, so to speak. And it’s not just this podcast. There are other podcasts that I think are good for bootstrappers and SaaS founders. And then the first habit was about not picking a safe, adjacent problem and solving it cleanly, but taking bigger swings. I think this could be looked at two ways. We could say if you’re not building a billion-dollar company, you’re being too safe, but I don’t think that applies in our space. That’s not how I think about it. I think of this as just generally staying in your comfort zone versus being willing to fail and get uncomfortable. And sometimes that means having a nice, safe business doing $10K a month and pivoting that into something that is much bigger, or at least has bigger potential, but is going to be hard and scary. 

(18:28): And that is exactly what we did with Drip: the story of the early days of plateauing at $8,000 or $10,000 a month and then pivoting into a multimillion-dollar business. That was tough. It was a lot of work and it was not glamorous, but that was the big swing that we took. I also think about it as, in your business day to day, are you working on the safe stuff? Are you staying in your comfort zone, writing the code or whatever it is that’s predictable and certain? Or are you doing the scary, risky, uncertain things: trying the new marketing approach that may never come to fruition, making cold calls and cold emails, doing the grindy thing that, if it works, has asymmetric upside and will change the course of your business and potentially your life. 

(19:16): But doing that makes you uncomfortable. It’s unlikely that the biggest risk in your business is something you can safely fix while staying in your comfort zone. And that’s what I like about this first habit. So I hope you enjoyed that walkthrough of Nobel Prize winner habits. My next topic is also a tweet. It’s from barretto@tiiny.com, but it’s T-I-I-N-Y.com. I’ll link that tweet up in the show notes. Someone had asked them, “It’s been years since you started. Most builders are launching apps like there’s no tomorrow, within 48 hours and the like. But you, years in the making. What’s your take on working on a project until it’s really successful versus launching several apps quickly?” Barretto has built Tiiny Host, which is tiiny.host, the simplest way to host and share your work online. I believe it’s bootstrapped and he’s the solo founder, and it’s doing more than a million a year. 

(20:19): And I enjoyed his response. He said, “This is one of the reasons indie hackers are not succeeding. I picked one idea, but in reality one problem space, and I dived deep into it for five-plus years. The idea didn’t instantly work out, but I learned a lot, navigated, and found product-market fit.” And then you see folks below, of course, chiming in, a thousand percent. Posted about this recently: vibe coders, focus on one problem or sector over a long time so it can compound. So obviously this depends on your goals. If you want to get a lot of things into production and potentially get lucky, then you probably want to build a bunch of things and see what sticks. But I continue to see evidence from folks who have built great things without a lot of luck and without a huge social media audience, but got in, solved a problem, and had to focus on it for a long time. It doesn’t need to be five years for you, but this continues to support that thesis. 

(21:06): And my last topic for today is around an Instagram post featuring several pro basketball players warming up on a court. Steph Curry takes two shots and misses both of them and he says, “The rim is off.” The measurements of the rim, it’s supposed to be exactly 10 feet. It’s not right. He has such confidence in his own ability and feel that he’s questioning the height of the rim. In the video they measure it and it’s off by, I don’t know, like an inch, maybe an inch and a half. 

(22:00): It’s kind of hard to tell. A very, very small amount that no one else could tell, but he is such a professional with such incredible feel that he was able to detect that with almost pure intuition. And then there are a couple other clips of folks dribbling on a court, the ball bouncing slightly different than they expect, and they say, “There’s an issue here, like under this board, it’s like a dead spot.” You see them just being really puzzled by it, and then people come out and they realize there’s a dead spot on the floor. Watching these clips on Instagram actually reminded me of when I used to run track. I ran track for nine years in high school and college and we used to run a lot of 200s in practice. In a given week, depending on the workout, you might do 10 or 15 200s, or maybe 20 or 30 in a given week, to build up speed and endurance. 

(22:49): And I could tell within about a half second how fast the 200 I just ran was. We would run as a group and I remember running a bunch of 200s with my dad timing and my brother there. We’d run one and I’d say, “28.5.” And he said, “Yeah, 28.7.” I said, “Cool.” Then we’d run another one and I’d say, “28 flat.” And he was like, “Yeah, it was 27.9.” And he said, “You really have a good feel for this.” And I remember it was just something I did so much. I wasn’t even thinking about it. It just felt that way. 

(23:31): And the idea here is that when you do something so much, you gain an expertise and an intuition, in quotes, an intuition that looks like magic to an observer. Part of it is pattern recognition, a bit of repetition, and you learn how that vibe is. How many shots do you think Steph Curry has made from the three-point line? He knows when it leaves his hand if it’s going to go in or not. He knows way before it hits the rim whether it’s going in. And so when he feels it and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s going to go in,” and it doesn’t, he’s like, “Oh, that’s weird.” He does it one more time, he’s like, “No, something’s off here.” It’s the same with any expertise. As a chef, you get the feel and taste for things. As a startup founder, you start to get the feel of where you should be focusing in your business. You start to get this feel of, “Ooh, this part’s making me uncomfortable. This is probably where I need to be focused right now.” 

(24:13): People ask, “What do the best founders you know do differently than those that fail?” And a lot of it is figuring out where they should be focusing their time and how to execute on that. And so if the biggest bottleneck in your business is marketing and sales, but that makes you uncomfortable, or you just want to post on Twitter, or you get into marketing and sales but you kind of half-ass it and you don’t really focus on anything, you don’t really do the parts you don’t want to do, you’re going to find that you’re never going to get better at those. 

(24:58): You’re never going to get this expertise that looks like magic. When you ask Derrick Reimer, “How did you decide to build that feature or not build that next feature?” it might look like magic. How do you make such good product decisions? Well, it kind of looks like magic, but Derrick’s been building products for at least 17 years, maybe more. You ask Ruben Gamez how he knows what to focus on next when he’s working on SignWell: he has a process. He looks at the business and gets a gut feel of where the bottleneck is, and then either focuses on that himself or hires someone to do it. He doesn’t half-ass it. He goes all in on it to figure it out, and he knows that if he puts effort into it, he’s just going to make it work. He has that confidence. 

(25:48): And if it doesn’t work, it’s okay, because he’ll do the next thing, and you don’t have to be right all the time. You can be right 60% of the time and be pretty well off. When you look at some of the founders who’ve come on this show who have bootstrapped to $50 million exits, $80 million, $100 million exits, literally bootstrapped with one or two co-founders, and you listen back to what they did, they generally worked on the right things. They got a lot done and they generally worked on the areas of uncertainty, and they up-leveled their skills. They didn’t say, “Well, I don’t really know how to participate in a Reddit forum or a Facebook group. I don’t really know marketing. I don’t know how to do sales. Maybe I need to read a bunch of books about it.” Maybe you do, but you also probably need to dive in and just figure it out while learning from those who have done it before you. Just having that confidence and building that repetitive muscle of doing these things often. 

(26:50): Doing new things that scare you often, and that ability and willingness to learn new things and get outside your comfort zone will build expertise in you that looks like magic. When I started Drip, I had a lot of confidence that it would succeed, and a lot of confidence it would succeed very quickly. The latter part was not true. It took us a lot longer than I thought. But I did have this confidence that I could figure it out because I’d figured out a bunch of smaller things along the way as I’d stair-stepped up. Then after Drip, I had even more confidence that whatever I did next, even if it was bigger, scarier, more stressful, with more on the line, I would be able to make it work because I had built that muscle and a bit of expertise that to an outsider might feel like magic. 

(27:42): But in addition to the 21, 22 years that I’ve been thinking about this stuff and writing about it and launching really poor ideas in the early days, I’ve been recording 833 episodes of this podcast and three or four hundred YouTube videos over the past five years, writing five books. I actually just completed the manuscript of my sixth book. And I haven’t always been right, far from it. But if you show up every day and you think in terms of years, not months, and you put in the work and work on the things, some things that scare you, doesn’t always have to be, but the areas of uncertainty in your business, I have a hard time imagining you’re not going to build some incredible expertise that looks like magic. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. It’s great to be able to talk into a microphone and know that tens of thousands of people will listen to it, and some will be impacted and some will be inspired, and for some it will change your life. 

(28:44): This is why I keep doing this: shipping podcasts, YouTube videos and books, starting TinySeed, running MicroConf. It really is the best job I’ve ever had. So thanks for being part of that. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 833.