Episode 858 | How to Build Products People Want

Rob Walling: And it is a framework. It is not a detailed guarantee of 100% success if you use it, because that doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean it can’t help you. That doesn’t mean that it can’t get you there faster. That doesn’t mean that it can’t get you from 0% validation or confidence up to 40, 50, 60%, which is better. 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 be talking about my new book, Idea to Traction: Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants in the Age of AI. This is my sixth book, and the book is available for purchase today from Amazon and directly from me. You can head to ideatotractionbook.com and see all the links we have posted there for how to get it. Today is the last day to get the bonuses that I am offering with the pre-release.

If you purchase directly from me, you’ll get them automatically. If you buy through Amazon, you just come back to the site, you enter your order number, and I’m going to send you four resources that cover concepts found in the book, a practical tool for finding an idea, one for evaluating its potential, one about speaking with customers, et cetera. And I’m going to be doing a live Q&A where you can bring your questions about ideas, validation, MVP scope, early customers, all that kind of stuff. So today’s the last day to get that, hopefully pre-ordered before now. I’ve been watching the book’s ranking. I’ve never done a pre-order like this through Amazon and I’ve been watching it climb the rankings in certain categories and it’s been kind of interesting. Actually, side note before I dive in, Amazon really screwed me on this. We had a plan to do pre-orders on Amazon and we spent, I don’t know, three, four weeks and dozens of hours just trying to prove that I’m a legitimate publisher.

This is my sixth book. I’ve sold them all on Amazon, just never done pre-orders and nothing we did worked. Sent copies of my ID and the business paperwork and it just kept being another block and another blocker. So really quite the hassle on this one. If you’re going to try to take pre-orders on Amazon, I’d say be careful because they just do not care. They really don’t care about making your book easy or available. So I’m really excited to have this book out. And obviously a question that I’ve received multiple times is like, why did you write another book? And part of it is that Start Small, Stay Small, my first book. And up until I wrote The SaaS Playbook, that was my most popular book that came out in 2010 and it has sold almost 40,000 copies. It may be over that now, but last time I checked it was probably 38 and change and it sells a bit every month.

So literally every few months, at least someone reaches out to me and says, “Hey, when are you going to update Start Small, Stay Small?” It’s a great book, but it’s dated because it’s 16 years later. And 2010, there was no no code, obviously no AI, but even just all of the tools that I mentioned in that book are basically most of them are just gone. They’re just 404s on the internet and so much has changed in that time, but there are fundamentals that hadn’t, right? In Start Small, Stay Small, I talk a lot about moving from developer to entrepreneur and the mindset shift that requires about how you should go with product last marketing first. That was pretty novel back in 2010. These days I think we all know it, but probably need to hear it more often. And in addition, with Start Small, Stay Small, I was talking about how to look for demand first and to feed that demand, a lot of it via search engines.

This was before the Stair Step Method. It wasn’t even solely focused on SaaS at the time. Yeah, it was really interesting. So what I realized is I actually read through Start Small, Stay Small. And when I thought about updating it, I realized it actually just needed a complete rewrite. And I took some elements of it like measuring demand and building an email launch list and thinking about how to launch. I mean, this time in Idea to Traction, I call it go-to-market and I talk about how I don’t like that term, but I do like the idea that go-to-market includes five separate factors. It’s like positioning, pricing, the product, marketing approaches. I forget. I don’t remember off the top of my head, but they’re in the book. And I feel like I certainly have a more developed and nuanced sense of what it takes to build something from scratch, having now done it again after Start Small, Stay Small, and then watching 241 startup investments and 16 more years running MicroConf and doing this podcast and all that.

So there’s just so much more that I wanted to communicate about how to get started in this day and age. And so that’s why I wrote it. I felt like there was still a gap in the market because The SaaS Playbook starts when you have some semblance of product-market fit. You have a product in the market and maybe you have $5K or $10K of MRR. And I was getting the question of, hey, where’s the book that comes before The SaaS Playbook? How do I go from zero to The SaaS Playbook? And that’s effectively what Idea to Traction is. One interesting part about Idea to Traction is it was originally part of The SaaS Playbook. When I was writing the original manuscript, I was going to go all the way from zero, no idea, all the way to what The SaaS Playbook covered. And I got maybe halfway and I realized this is going to be a 500 page book and I don’t want to do that.

So I pulled all the early stage stuff, put it in a separate Google doc. And this was probably, it was 21, 22. And then 23 is when The SaaS Playbook was published. So I was thinking about just publishing that stuff, the early stage stuff like it’s a free ebook. I was kind of noodling on it and I realized this feels very similar to Start Small, Stay Small in the concepts it’s covering and the thought process and the high level philosophies, not the details. And so I worked with my writing coach and I got a first draft that I thought was in really good shape. Then it was called SaaS Launchpad at that point, not Idea to Traction. And then we built and designed the course around it. You’ve heard me talk a lot about saaslaunchpad.co, which is the course that we sell through MicroConf that was based on this unpublished book.

So then I came back to the book in 2025 to kind of revamp it and rewrite it because as I read through, I was like, oh man, this stuff’s out of date already. That’s the brutal part about books is they do go out of date. So I won’t say I rewrote it, but I probably rewrote about 40% of it and spent a ton of time getting it better, improving it. And then AI, SaaSpocalypse, all of that really kicked up. Obviously AI was around before that, but it started getting much better with the coding. It started becoming just a more viable force. And so earlier this year, really it was in January, I started reading through it again. I talked to a few founder friends of mine and showed them the manuscript and they’re like, “You have to mention AI.” The book I think in January, I don’t believe it had a single mention of AI and LLMs and it would’ve felt so instantly dated if I published it then.

I mean, I’m calling this out. This isn’t just me retelling old war stories. This is me telling you that even after you’ve put hundreds and hundreds of hours, because that’s what it took me to write this book, into something that oftentimes the market can shift and you either have to start over or you have to do a significant investment of time, effort and energy to get it back to a point where you can ship it. And that’s whether it’s a book or a product or video course or whatever it is that you’re putting into the world. Each of these times felt like a huge setback because I thought I was done. I remember the last time, and there were a couple people that mentioned it, but specifically Ruben, founder of SignWell, he’s like, “You got to put some examples in here about AI.” And I was like, “I just don’t.

I’m just all done with this.” So I took a deep breath and in January of this year, because I was thinking about publishing it in the spring, like seven months ago, it just wouldn’t have been great. And I don’t like shipping things that aren’t great. I don’t like having podcasts that are mediocre. I don’t want to have a YouTube channel that is so-so. I don’t want to start companies, TinySeed, MicroConf, Drip, that are not having a major impact on people and doing good in the world for entrepreneurs, for the internet, for whatever we’re going to talk about. And so I have a really tough time shipping something that I don’t believe in, that I don’t believe in 100%. That was the struggle I was having. So then I spent the next, it was probably six months, I think. Yeah, six months going back through. I got a bunch of great examples from Jordan Gal about validating in the age of AI, why he still, on his third startup, has a bunch of funding and he was pivoting, he still went out and did quite a bit of validation and he had an idea that didn’t survive validation.

I mentioned it in the book. I interviewed him and put it in there. And then a story from Bryan Shankman of LeadTruffle, a story from Ruben on all these on validation and on finding product-market fit and that kind of stuff. And the reason that I wanted to include them is I’ve started hearing, look, builders and coders, they want any excuse not to go out and do validation. And they say, validation doesn’t work or you don’t need it. Now the age of AI, I can just build a product in a day and ship it. I should just build 12 products in 12 days and ship those and that’s better. I don’t need to validate. It’s just the constant refrain. And the reason that I know the validation is smart and works, I use the 2200 validation framework. You don’t have to do that exact one.

Just pick something. Just have some conversations, do some research that can be your validation. But as I was saying, the reason that I believe in it and that I know is every second, third, fourth time founder that I see starting a company, they go out and validate. They do the research upfront. They have in-person conversations or email conversations, Zoom conversations, whatever. They don’t just go into a basement and build even if they could build it in a day. And there’s this great quote from Ruben in the book actually where he says, “Yeah, you can go build it without talking to anyone and it will be the worst version of the product that it can possibly be. So why do that? Why not take the time and have some conversations?” I really appreciated those insights and it made the book so much better. And I remember there’s always this point, I don’t know if this happens to you when you’re building something, but I used to write songs.

I was in bands and I would just be grinding on a song and it just wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. And I was like, “This song sucks. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” And then eventually I’d either throw it away and never bring it to the band or it would hit a point where I’m like, “Oh, I like this. That melody is great. That’s really cool.” That happens to me with slide decks and talks for MicroConfs. That happens to me with books. And there was this point where even in, let’s say April or May of this year where I was like, “Oh, I do not like this book. I don’t want to publish this book. It’s not doing it for me and therefore I can’t put it out in the world.” And it flipped another few weeks. And I remember starting, I had some friends I was telling, I was like, “Oh, this book is really good now.” And I’m my own worst critic.

So when I speak highly of something and feel highly and think highly of something that I’ve created, I think it’s pretty good. And as long as my taste aligns with yours, I think that means this book’s going to do well. That’s how it feels. So anyways, yeah, rewriting it that third time was something I certainly didn’t want to do, but it was 100% worth it now that it’s done. And that’s the thing when we’re building startups or when you’re writing books, it’s like you got to grind at a certain point and do stuff you just don’t want to do if you want to create something great. And I’m not saying the book is necessarily great. That’s for you to decide. You might read it and think two stars would not recommend, but at least I put out the effort to get all the knowledge that I have in my head on this topic into this book.

It’s interesting, I almost wasn’t going to email people to get their quotes, like the cover quotes where they’re endorsing it. And it just always, I hate asking if I’m being honest, but I did it anyway. And that’s when I started realizing Jason Cohen wrote back and he said, “Oh, this is the stuff we’re always saying, but no one’s put it in a book. This is great.” I’m paraphrasing him. That’s obviously not an exact quote, but part of his quote is on the cover. It says, “I’ve never seen so much detailed advice and data about exactly how to validate a business idea.” That’s cool. Jason Cohen does not say things he doesn’t mean. And you should check out Smart Bear Live, his awesome podcast and YouTube show. And then Derek Sivers, who again, I’ve known Derek for, I don’t know, 15, 16 years since Start Small, Stay Small was published and he read that and was a big fan of it.

And the kind words he says in the foreword are just, they just blow my mind. And that was a moment that I was like, oh, I actually, I was proud of it for myself. And then I realized other people reading it and it helped that I believe them, right? I don’t think they’re just making stuff up to make me happy or whatever. And I don’t know, I got all kinds of feedback on it. So I’m really proud of this one and I hope that it will help a lot of people. The SaaS Playbook has sold something around 60,000 copies. I need to check that exact number. High 50s for sure. And whether Idea to Traction does that or not, I don’t think is important, but I do know that the most common questions that I receive are, how do I find an idea? How do I get set up with marketing?

How do I validate? How do I not validate? That’s a common question. It’s like, don’t do that. And so my hope and my goal is that this book is something that I can hand to people or that they can buy on Kindle or audio. I did read the audiobook for this one again. So you get to hear my dulcet tones for however many, eight or nine hours talking this through. This is the longest book I’ve ever written. I believe it’s 302 or 303 pages versus The SaaS Playbook is 205, I think, 210. Start Small, Stay Small is about the same, 200 pages. So this is longer. I often say you can’t prescribe this. There is no blueprint. The SaaS Playbook, it’s blueprint-ish. It is a playbook of things to do. Talks about marketing and market and hiring and metrics and this and that. Idea to Traction, which is like early stage, it’s finding startup ideas.

How do you framework that? I mean, I do have eight kind of mental exercises to help you identify startup ideas, but I can’t just say, here’s how to do it. There’s no formula. There’s no one plus one equals three in terms of finding startup ideas. And same with validation. I have a framework, you’ve heard me talk about it ad nauseum on this podcast, 2200, and it is a framework. It is not a detailed guarantee of 100% success if you use it because that doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help you. That doesn’t mean that it can’t get you there faster. That doesn’t mean that it can’t get you from 0% validation or confidence up to 40, 50, 60%, which is better. So if you’re wondering who the book is for, I mean, it’s for early stage entrepreneurs, folks who want to start a software company or an AI or agentic company, founders who are starting from zero with no idea or you have an idea and no customers.

It can be both technical founders and non-technical founders, obviously with no code and AI being able to write code these days. It’s not a slam dunk, but it is more possible than ever to be a non-technical founder and do this. And there’s nuance to it. If you go back a year or two when I’m like, look, if you’re not a developer, basically don’t start a SaaS unless you can find a co-founder. I think I still feel that way, but I will admit right now I’m kind of like, I don’t know. It depends. It’s less complicated than it used to be to get it going. Now there’s the DevOps and the hosting and the security and all this stuff. I mean, there are still concerns and I’m not suddenly saying, oh, non-technical founders, it’s easy street for you because I don’t believe that either, but it’s easier than it ever has been.

And I think there’s more nuance to that. If you’re in the market and you have decent product-market fit and you want to market and scale, buy The SaaS Playbook. That’s the book for you. Idea to Traction is if you’re starting over or starting for the first time. I kind of talk a little bit about it, but it covers finding an idea worth pursuing, how to do some validation before you build. That includes just research, keyword demand, going out onto the internet, having conversations via Zoom, putting up landing pages, stuff I’ve talked about on the podcast, but it’s stuff we’ve talked about in the past, but I wanted to codify it and put it in a single place where it’s easy to access and it’s $10 for PDF and Kindle. I talk about building a launch list even when you have nothing to sell yet, having customer conversations, launching early, landing your first customers, finding product-market fit, knowing when to throw in the towel, because I get asked that question all the time.

How do I know when to quit? How do you know if you’re in a dip or it’s a cul-de-sac? That’s Seth Godin’s language. And I was just asked that question a couple episodes ago on this podcast, so I wanted to give more thoughts and insights, write them down, take the time to put it in a book. And I talk a lot about AI not making validation obsolete, even though we want it to be obsolete, that you still have to learn between your ears. Eric Ries was on the show a few months back and I specifically asked him about this and he said, “Oh, AI makes a lot of things faster. It does not make learning faster. Learning has to happen in the human’s head and AI speeds up the build and the measure, but it doesn’t do the learning for you.” And that is why I specifically added “in the Age of AI” in the title because I wanted people to know, A, it was written in the modern age, but B, most chapters mention AI.

Probably every chapter has some mention of AI, whether it’s like this makes this faster or be careful falling into this trap, don’t go to AI and be like, how do I market my SaaS? I mean, you can, but don’t follow exactly what it says. It’s just not that good at this yet. This stuff’s too nuanced. And if you’re listening to this show, hopefully I don’t have to convince you that SaaS isn’t dead. SaaS is still alive. And if I were still in the SaaS game, I would be totally open to launching another SaaS company. And I feel like there’s a lot of success to be had and a lot of people that are moving really fast in this space. As I’ve talked about, I think 10 to 20% of SaaS companies will heavily plateau or go to zero. It’s obviously being majorly impacted by AI.

Einar and I recorded a one hour episode of the show just a few episodes ago about our thoughts on that. But SaaS is far from dead and we are gearing up to run another TinySeed batch here in a few months in the spring or I guess it’s late winter, early spring, because there is absolutely still so much opportunity out there for folks who are starting SaaS, agentic SaaS, AI focused SaaS, however we want to call it. It’s all just going to, maybe there’ll be a new term for it, but it’s going to all get blended into one thing. It’s software that gets things done for businesses. I made this prediction that it’s completely false or it just never came to be a couple years ago, I think. And I said AI is not even going to be in H1s anymore. We’re not going to say it’s AI enabled SaaS.

You’re just going to assume all SaaS has AI in it. That has not come to pass yet. That’s the kind of thing that I’m thinking. It’s just going to be obvious. We don’t call it database driven web software because every piece of web software has a database in it. I guess we never called it that. That’s a terrible example, but you get what I’m saying? When things are so obvious and so ubiquitous, you’re the fish in the water, you don’t even realize you’re in water anymore and that is what’s happening to software and SaaS. So I was reading the audiobook, the audible version, and I also sell MP3 versions you can buy direct from me once the book is available, which I guess is today as when this episode comes out. But I was reading the audiobook and as you do that, you get to revisit all your thinking in grim detail and you get to ask yourself, do I still believe all of this?

And I still believe everything in the book except one thing has already gone out of date very slightly. And in fact, don’t tell anyone, but the audio version is the most up-to-date thinking just on this one piece. There’s a chapter about building SaaS in the age of AI and I added commentary. I actually did some riffs throughout the audio version. That was kind of fun. Just at different times I would realize that I wanted to add more, add an anecdote or I don’t know. It didn’t change the meaning of things, but add more clarity, add more clarification. I especially did that in the chapter on building SaaS in the age of AI because that was only finished a few months ago and that had six moats that Einar and I were talking about at the time. And if you have listened to this podcast or watched my YouTube video, my MicroConf talk from Iceland that went live a couple weeks ago, that video has I think like 200,000 views.

It’s by far the fastest launched video on the MicroConf or Rob Walling channel. But if you watch that, you know that we had eight moats and we’ve changed those over the past several months. That’s how kind of bleeding edge that topic was. And so in the Audible version, I say, “You should go watch this talk video for more thinking on exactly how the moats work.” The moats are only like a couple pages of that chapter. Again, the challenge of writing books is they always go out of date no matter how much you try to have your best thinking and ideas and data on the day that you close that manuscript. And every day after that can change things. And I saw that with Start Small, Stay Small. Over the past 16 years, a lot has changed and it’ll be fun to watch the other books age too, The SaaS Playbook and Idea to Traction.

So if you haven’t bought the book, it would be amazing if you’d head to ideatotractionbook.com. And if you can buy it direct from me, you can buy it on Amazon. It is charting already, as I said, on Amazon and that feels great to have another Amazon bestseller. But if you’d like to help give me a little bump, launch week decides the best seller list for making other, I guess, non-Amazon bestseller lists. So buying now definitely helps me more than later. And if you have the book, leaving an honest Amazon review in this first week would be a huge help. I would love to get some five star reviews, honest five star reviews if you enjoy the book and you think that it helps you out and that it’s worth the $10 to $30, depending on which format you get. Oh, and I didn’t even mention, if you pre-order the hardcover, you get a free copy of the e-book version.

I think I have PDF and EPUB or a free copy of the audio version. It’s MP3s for me. I can’t give you a credit for Audible, unfortunately. And that ends today when this episode comes out. I think, I don’t know, I really like that perk because I was like, if I have a physical book, I want at least one of the electronic copies. So that’s another reason to order today. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. I have enjoyed letting you know about the new book. I’ll certainly have updates for you as things progress, like I’ve done with The SaaS Playbook, talking about sales numbers and talking about the revenue shares of when I sell direct, I make 97% because I’m paying Stripe 3% plus it’s 30 cents. But with the worst is Audible where I think I make, I need to look for The SaaS Playbook.

It’s really opaque, but it’s like $3 or $4 per Audible version of The SaaS Playbook that I sell. It’s insanely low given that the Audible price is 13, 14 bucks. So I’ll be giving updates on that in the coming months. And if you have any questions for me about the book, even if it’s like inside baseball stuff, how I wrote it or I don’t know, any questions you have about the material in the book now that it’s out, I’d be happy to answer them here on the show. Thanks again for joining me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 858.