Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hello, welcome Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Here. Each episode I'm gonna be sharing a nugget and a piece of wisdom that I'm learning from growing my business. CAOs from seven to eight figures, and hopefully beyond, you know, business is tough. There's no easy button to push to take all the right answers in the shortcut to, to GED success. But I truly believe that with the collective wisdom we have from this tech community, we really can do better and easier than we could alone. You know, I'm basing a lot of this on an amazing amount of help and feedback I've gotten from other podcasts and other founders and other YouTube channels, and, and this is my attempt to give back a little bit to the community to help you grow your business more sanely to a higher level, more profitably, to where you're having a better experience in this journey. I sincerely hope you like the new format here. You want to connect with me, head over to Twitter, I'm at the Craig Hewitt, and for show notes for this and every episode, rogue startups.com, let me know what you think. Hello. Welcome back to Rogue Startups. Today I am chatting with Rob Walling. Rob, how's it going? It's
Speaker 2 00:01:06 Going great, man. Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 1 00:01:07 Yeah, totally. Uh, I think you are, are, uh, what is most frequent, uh, guest on the show. Yes. Keep my unlocked, but, but it has been a hot minute since, uh, since we chatted. You know, I think, uh, followers of the show and, and certainly of startups for the rest of us would know that, like you were, um, you were a mentor or a coach of mine before a tiny seed. I'll never forget this, <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:01:32 That
Speaker 1 00:01:32 Was fun. You saw Drip and, and I had reached out to you before and was like, Hey, what do you think? And you're like, I'm too busy, and you sold Drip. And I think like, ah, maybe I gave you two weeks. And I was like, Hey, <laugh>, what do you think?
Speaker 2 00:01:42 <laugh> not too busy anymore, I guess, do you think? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:01:45 Um, and then like yeah. Being, being like the first batch of Tiny Seat I, what I'm getting at, I think, you know, my business more than probably anyone else outside of the company. Um, and so it's super cool and I know you and Tiny Seed and all the stuff that you're doing with Micro cof and everything really well. And so it's cool to be able to, uh, to chat with someone where you don't have to explain all of that stuff. Yeah. And we can, we can bypass and get into the meat of, of things, which, uh, I'm excited about.
Speaker 2 00:02:11 Yeah. You don't have to ask me. So how did you get into entrepreneurship? So, when I was in sixth grade, it's like, I don't know, I don't wanna hear any of that. Actually. We have the, the context and the Yeah. You know, the, the, the jargon, so to speak. So those are the best episodes I find on my own show, you know, is when people come on. Like, you, you've been on startups for the rest of us at I'd say half dozen times now, and those episodes wind up being really good for exactly the same reason.
Speaker 1 00:02:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for folks who don't know Rob Walling, uh, previously founder of Drip sold to
Speaker 2 00:02:42 Lead Pages, in essence
Speaker 1 00:02:43 Lead Pages. I'm sorry, <laugh>. Yeah. But then,
Speaker 2 00:02:46 But I
Speaker 1 00:02:46 Wanted to prov, I wanted, I wanted to say something else that would've been the ultimate faux pa, but, but I didn't sold the lead pages. That's fine. Um,
Speaker 2 00:02:54 <laugh> I know left
Speaker 1 00:02:55 There after a year or two, um, started Tiny Seed, uh, which is a startup accelerator for bootstrap companies mm-hmm. <affirmative> Companies, and Yep. Um, CAOs was one of the, the members of the inaugural batch there, which was three years ago now, which is amazing. Um, and yeah, so tiny Seed MicroComp startups for the rest of us. Anything else? Those
Speaker 2 00:03:20 Are the three things I do these days. I just wrote a book called The SaaS Playbook. That's probably the fourth. Yeah. Fourth big thing. That was a heck of a lot of fun in quote. Let's
Speaker 1 00:03:28 Talk about the book, man. <laugh>, I, uh, I got, I got a digital version of it and, and on, on audiobook. So like, uh, <laugh> should have
Speaker 2 00:03:36 This ready, see, if I was a pro this would've been Ready <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:03:40 So for those of you watching on YouTube, uh, so first of all, check us out on YouTube, youtube.com/book startups. Uh, so, so tell me about the book, man. Um, the SaaS Playbook, uh, yeah, how'd it come about? I know you said before you'd never write a book again. Um, like what, what, I think like, at a really high level, what, like, why write a book, man, you've already written a book, successful Exit startup, accelerator investor, all this kind of stuff. What, what's the impetus there?
Speaker 2 00:04:07 Yeah, that's a really good question. So this is my, depending on how you count, it's my fourth book. Okay. So start Small Stay Smalls the one everyone kind of knows me for. Sh sherry and I co-wrote a book called The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together, uh, which still sells quite well and a lot of, I think a lot of people could use it, but she did 80 plus percent of the writing, and I was, I'm a, with, I'm a with on it, so it's like I'm a co-author. And then my third one was a collection of like all my writings, all my essays for my blog. So it's a 250 page book called Start Marketing The Day You Start Coding, and you can actually, it's just a P D F, you can download that for free, uh, at rob walling.com in your email and get it.
Speaker 2 00:04:43 Um, but it's two 50 pages and it's, it's still holds up reasonably well. There's a few examples that are dated, you know, 'cause it was, it's stuff from 10, 15 years ago. Um, but the reason I wanted to do the SaaS playbook <laugh> was actually because I was ranting to a mutual friend of ours one day on a call, Ruben Gomez, founder of Sewell <laugh>, and I was like, what are the good books? I said, people keep asking me what are the good books they should be reading for SaaS founders? And I'm like, grasping, right? I'm saying, well, traction by Gabriel Weinberg because that, and if you read that, it's a good book, but it's a decade old now. And even just the marketing approaches I read through and it's like, well, that really doesn't really work anymore and that doesn't work like that anymore. And so Reuben said, man, you really got there. He said, I've read them all the ones that are out today, they're not good. You the no. And, and I think the phrase that got me to do it is he said, our community needs you to write a book about sas. And
Speaker 1 00:05:36 I was like, Ooh, no pressure man. <laugh>. Dang it. <laugh>. So
Speaker 2 00:05:39 That was it. And of course, that was two and a half years ago, and I was like, I can crank this thing. My first book I wrote in like three or four months, I can do that again. Not realizing that my first book I wrote when I was working like 10 hours a week, you know, on, I was doing the four hour work work week at that time. Now I run Tiny Seat Marker Gump the podcast. So it, it took me a long time to get this one done.
Speaker 1 00:06:02 Yeah. Uh, I heard of an episode of Startups for the Rest of Us where you talked about, um, content repurposing, I mean, whatever. Mm-hmm. You, you've talked about everything there is to talk about <laugh> and, and startups and sas. Right. And so, like, there's not anything at a high level. There are no totally new ideas in this book, I'm sure that you haven't talked about on your podcast or YouTube channel or something before. But to, to, like what extent did you try to take your existing content as a basis for the book, I guess is what I'll ask?
Speaker 2 00:06:32 Yeah. So here's what's interesting. When in the original conversation with Reuben, I said, oh man, I think it should cover the, it's gotta have pricing and market and you know, product market fit and marketing and these other things. Right? I started just sketching out high level in my head and I said, I've kind of recorded episodes or YouTube videos or whatever on all this topic. I bet, I bet. Like 75% of it is already down somewhere. Yeah. And if I get it transcribed and then have a writer kind of repurpose it, you might call 'em a ghost writer. But I struggle with that. 'cause a ghost writer to me sounds like they're doing the writing and it's not your stuff. These are all my ideas and my concepts. Right. Turns out I did try to do that and not even with a ghost writer. I just pulled stuff in and was rewriting it and doing it, and it wasn't very good.
Speaker 2 00:07:16 And I got about 30,000 words in most of my books are about 200. They're pretty compact, but they're about 200 ish pages 2, 2 0 5, whatever. It's about 40,000 words. I got 25 or 30,000 words in. And I read through it and I was like, this is just a, a disjointed mailage of a bunch of crap, you know? Yeah. And so I actually yanked 15 plus thousand words out of it into another Google Doc. And then I said, what do I real, what should I really write about whether I have existing content or not? And that was the thing is there was, in fact, if you go in this book, more than half the book was new thinking that doesn't exist anywhere else. Surprisingly enough. Yeah. Like the whole chapter on team building team and hiring that now exists as a MicroComp talk, because I repurposed the chapter from the book into that.
Speaker 2 00:08:06 But that chapter started when a tiny seed founder, and this is the best way to, to create content. Tiny seed founder, it, it was, uh, Iran with Gym Desk. He asked me a pretty in-depth question about hiring and how to think about it. And I said, well, gimme all the details. He gave this thing, and I wrote him back a 2000 word email, you know, where I was like, Hey, are you, and I told him in advance, like, are you cool if I give you a lot of thoughts on this? And he said, yeah. And I wrote this super long thing. And I was like, that's the start of a chapter. Because it was all new. It was new frameworks that I was pulling outta my head. Yeah. So that's how it wound up being, again, more than have to book Wound up being responses I'd posted on Indie Hackers or, or in conversations with actual founders, which I, I think is why the book is resonating with people because it's not just pie in the sky. Oh, here's an example from how Intuit and Microsoft would do it, or look what Basecamp did. It's like, no, this is the advice that like, I'm actually giving to founders. And so I really, you know, I really believe in it.
Speaker 1 00:09:01 Yeah. Yeah. I, I can totally relate because I mean, like you, I create content on a handful of different channels now. And even though the topics I talk about are similar between long form YouTube and short Form YouTube and here and LinkedIn and God forbid, Twitter, like, it's all different, man. Even if it's the same topic, the depth and the format and the approach that I take to talk about our team retreat, you know, I talked a lot about that really. 'cause we just did it about a month ago. It's all entirely different. So it's not surprising that then a book, uh, is different yet again. Because That's right. It's just such a different, I I even think it's like one, it's a different format 'cause it's written, but long form. But then it's like you're not gonna talk the same way in a book as you do on a YouTube video. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:09:44 No. And even, so another example of where repurposing we've struggled with is I have almost 700 episodes of startups for the rest of us. And for the past several hundred, we've recorded video for all of them. So it's like, well, why not repurpose it? I do q and a episodes where there's a question, a video question from a listener, and then I answer the question, isn't that amazing YouTube content? Let's just repurpose all that. And we spent dozens of hours doing that and just zero traction because the format doesn't fit the medium. Yeah. And so if you look, if you go to microcomp.com/youtube and actually look at our YouTube channel and you can see the views, obviously, you see what's successful. It's all YouTube native stuff that I ever, even, again, it, it covers the exact same topic as the podcast, but in a, it has to be tighter, it has to be more poppy. Yeah. Yeah. Has to have more camera angles, you know, or just whatever. It's the MTV version of the topic. I'll admit.
Speaker 1 00:10:36 It's exhausting just talking about it. It really is <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:10:39 Too old guys being like, oh, <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:10:41 Alright, so I want to talk, I wanna talk about YouTube versus podcast. 'cause I think that's, that's, that's a huge topic. But, but just staying on the book, um, when does it make sense for someone to write a book? Like you're talking to Johnny SaaS founder like me mm-hmm. Um, been in this a while, thought leadership personal brand. Mm-hmm. All that's important can actually have a business impact because, you know, it can drive for you leads to companies signing up and becoming tiny seed companies or investors or whatever. When, when would you say, okay, I've exhausted <laugh> the blog and social and YouTube and podcasting and community, and now it's time to write a book. Hmm.
Speaker 2 00:11:16 That's a good, that's a good way to think about it. First of all, I don't want any more books in the world from people who don't have some unique perspective. So I think until you have that, and that usually comes with experience. Just 'cause you've read 10 books on email marketing does not mean you should write a book about email marketing. I know you, you know, there's certain people who debate that, but I think like, have a unique take in how you do it that is different than what's already there. 'cause otherwise it's just noise. So to me that's the table stakes. But really to get to your question is, okay, let's say I have that because you do mo most SaaS founders you and I hang out with at Microsoft have a unique take on something, you know. Um, so then the, the interesting thing is, back in 2010 when I published my first book, I, and I've self-published. Yeah. I've self-published all, all my, all my books. But back then I already had a blog audience. I had a membership website, uh, that was training. It was kind of like marketing for developers. This is really what it was. I was, um, I had videos, I had all this stuff, and I felt like, oh, I'm like pretty popular here in the, it is like kind of more, it's pre-social media really. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:23 Nothing got me on everyone's radar more than this stupid book. And you know what the book, it's Start Small, stay Small, which is now like my legacy, that book was really just a compilation of like the first three months of my membership website. It was like a quarter of the content I created. And I pulled it in and I paired it down and a bunch of it was already written. So it was, well, you know, it was well written. 'cause I'm, I was a blogger, but I was kind of repurposing stuff thinking, eh, I'll sell like five or 10 grand of this book just to kind of do whatever, you know, to kinda make some money on it. And, and then it took off and it sold like a hundred copies the next month. And then, like Patrick McKenzie tweeted about it, and then Pedy tweeted about it.
Speaker 2 00:13:05 And then suddenly it was this momentum. And then I started getting these invitations to speak. This was a self-published book. I was paying Amazon $2 a copy to print that existed in a membership website where I was charging way more for it. You know, I was charging like between five and 500 and a thousand dollars a year to access this membership website. And I was like, this book's a $20 thing. What? But somehow it led like led to this credibility that I, I hadn't anticipated. And ever since then I've been like, well, I think every x amount of years I need to just take everything I've learned, no matter if I've put it on a podcast or already set it on a YouTube channel or set it on Indie Hackers or responded told it to a sign seed founder or done it in a MicroCon talk. And I do think I need to somehow figure out a way to package that up in a book because of the packaging of a book is even. I mean, and I feel the same way when I see a book. I'm like, oh, it's a book that's way more, if you can hand me a hundred YouTube videos Right. That cover the exact same topic. And I'd be like, oh, whatever. But like a book is a, it's a big deal, man.
Speaker 1 00:14:04 Yeah. That's crazy, isn't it? Because Yeah, I'm the same way. I mean, like, when I, when I heard you, you did the book, I was like, oh man, that's, that's a lot of work. Like, that's amazing. And, and really, I mean, not to minimize it, but it it you're doing a lot of work every week anyhow, right? Yeah. So like, um, like the, the, the cumulative work you do over a year for everything else has to be more than the work you put into the book. But definitely, yeah. The book, the book carries you years, um, yeah. And, and totally makes sense about the credibility stuff. Um, credibility.
Speaker 2 00:14:32 And it's evergreen if you write it smart this way. Yeah. This one's more evergreen than my first one. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:14:38 Yeah. Yeah. How do you, um, <laugh>? I, I'm laughing, I'm laughing 'cause like every, every podcast episode I do now, I hear, I hear the voice of Andy Baldacci in my head, <laugh> saying, no, and that's wrong. And you shouldn't focus on that <laugh>, but, but something that doesn't matter. Um, something I've been focusing a lot on recently is like, um, I'll call it founder marketing maybe, right? Like me as the voice of the brand talking about what we do, either, either at a meta, at a meta level, like we help, you know, companies become media brands in our cast of production service or talking about podcasting and, and about marketing in general. Um, you are definitely that, right? For startups, for the rest of us and for tiny seed and for micro conf, like, like where are you? And I listen to startups, the rest of us today, and it was your most recent episode talking about like, getting tired of it. I won't call it burnout necessarily, but like
Speaker 2 00:15:34 I use the word in the episode.
Speaker 1 00:15:35 So yeah. Ki kind of saying like, you know, this is tough. Like, I, I guess like aside from attribution and tracking and metrics and, and seeing all that stuff, like, just how do you view the input side of that to say like, this is important and I should keep doing this and everyone should keep doing this. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, or there are times and places where it's not important. Like I, I, I just generally, how do you think about like mm-hmm. A founder being the face of the company? Um, and I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll say that I think the most interesting part of this right now is freaking Mark Zuckerberg <laugh>, right? Because like for so long he was just totally transparent to the company, right? Invisible to, to the company. And now fucking he's on threads and he's talking and everyone loves him. Um, none of us are are him obviously. But like, how do you, how do you view that for a founder who's not just starting out where that's the only asset they have, but like you're doing a million or two or five or whatever. Um, still necessary. Is it smart? Like, I dunno, just how do you think about it?
Speaker 2 00:16:36 Yeah, I think about it in a few ways because I've seen, you know, HubSpot is a media brand, right? And they've bought the hustle. Yeah. And you might say, I am assuming Salesforce has some type of media brand. I don't follow them, but these big billion dollar companies, Shopify, like they're, you'd be dumb not to have a presence everywhere. They're big. They're, they have money, they're just trying to get more people. They know their lifetime value. I think the danger is a lot of early stage bootstrappers, like, I'm doing a thousand dollars a month, I'm gonna start a media brand, and that's how I'm gonna grow my sass. I think that's terrible, terrible advice. Unless there's a couple exceptions. If you're starting a podcast hosting company, well of course you need a podcast. 'cause you should be, I think you should be, you know, kind of eating your own dog food, so to speak.
Speaker 2 00:17:18 Or walking the walks. A better way to say that, if you are like Wistia, you should be putting out video content, you know? Yeah. If you're Vimeo, like there are certain, if you're podcast editing, like there's, there's a bunch of exceptions, but like, if I'm gonna start, you know, a B two B analytics platform for blah, blah, blah, like, do I need to be a made of brandand? No, you do not. In fact, I think it's a big waste of time and resources in the early days unless you have a cajillion dollar budget. Okay. But the answer, that's not what you asked. You said, what if we're at a million or 5 million or 10 million a r r? So we do have the budget and resources to actually reasonably do this. Should the founder be the face of it? And at that point, I would say, does the founder wanna do it?
Speaker 2 00:17:59 Is the founder good at it? And if you try it for three months, does it bring enough results to it? To it at a minimum be inconclusive and at a, you know, at a, at a positive end, like actually be, be driving stuff. I mean, that's, that's really how I think about it. No matter what company I start, I could start a B two B analytics app, and I would probably wanna start a YouTube channel in, in a, you know, in a podcast. Um, yeah. That's just who I am now. But I don't want people to look at, at me and say, well, Rob does it, therefore I should, because I'm not running a B two B analytics app. I'm running MicroCon and Tiny Seed. And for those content marketing in this fashion and, and becoming a media, you know, media brand is a good idea.
Speaker 1 00:18:41 Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny, I think about Patrick Campbell as, as you're saying this, and, and yep. They're literally a B two B <laugh> analytics company. But he likes it and he is really good at it. Um, which is surprising and not surprising because he's such like an analytical dude, but, but is just like, he has such a great way of, of like relaying that information. Um, yeah, I, I really like that perspective because one thing I'm kind of coming to believe is any company can grow in almost any way in it via any channel. I mean, like, you, you can, you can probably make, you know, whatever the common kind of channels you can probably make them work. Um, and, and I think that's just nice kind of grace to give folks to say like, Hey man, if you want to just freaking own podcasting and that be the way that you grow your network and your, and your business, like you probably can do it. Um, right. It might not be the most effective or efficient way for everybody. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 2 00:19:38 That's, I, so I agree with you and I think that if I had, let's say I had landing page B two B landing page software these days, a commodity obviously, and built in everything else, but could I grow that by becoming a media brand? I I probably could. It's a lot. I'm not, it's probably not the most efficient way. But if that was, if that's my hammer, then I would do what Clay Collins did. That's how we grew Lead pages. Yeah. And, and was doubling year over year at some of the fastest sa uh, maybe the fastest growing SaaS com bootstrap SaaS company ever. I don't know. It's hard to know. We don't Basecamp and MailChimps, but Leadpages had this crazy growth trajectory. Interesting point of fact. He burned out on creating the content. He hired someone to start creating the content and that it fell way off because it wasn't the founder.
Speaker 2 00:20:23 He didn't have the same passion. He didn't have the brand recognition. Yeah. I mean, it's the same struggle I have where I don't want to record 52 YouTube videos a year, and I don't want to go to all the micro comms in mc them, but I also have a tough time replacing myself because for better or worse, people want to see me, you know? Yeah. And I mean, that's weird for me to say, but like, that's the, that's the two-sided, that's the other edge of the, the coin in what you're saying. 'cause I know you're leaning into to content and it's like, I don't know anyone who will do it better than you for CAOs, but realize what you're getting into. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And you have to weigh that and really wanna do it.
Speaker 1 00:20:59 Hey, it's Craig here. You know, while I love podcasting and long form conversations like this, also really love writing and really love email newsletters. I have a newsletter called Founder Insights, where every Saturday morning I share something I'm learning in my business that I think could help you grow your business sustainably, insanely and profitably as you go along in this journey. If you're interested, head over to Craig hewitt.me/join to get founder Insights my newsletter along with your cup of coffee this Saturday morning. See you there. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I, I view this as, um, I don't say temporary, but, but like, there's a time bound to me being this involved and Yeah. And, and it is, you know, bring someone on to help. And, and we've had that before. Um, and, and in a lot of ways it's great. But then also there's, there's like, I think one of the most challenging things when you hear about it and you say, God, that's such bullshit, <laugh> is like, transfer the vision from your mind to your team's mind.
Speaker 1 00:21:57 And I think that the challenge there is, there's just so many levels to that and depth to it that like, to, to, to take my brain of what I think content should be and put it in someone else's is easy to get, like halfway there and, and kind of hard to get 80% away, but that's get like a hundred percent of the way there is so hard without being fricking involved every podcast episode on every Yeah. Every video that, like, I think, I think you gotta stay involved just like I'm in all of the product and dev meetings. 'cause I want to keep, you know, my, my take on where that's going. Um, yeah, I think it'd be hard to completely let go of that.
Speaker 2 00:22:31 It's hard enough to do it in writing. Like to write up a brief for a blog post and say, here, writer who, who knows about cast os I'm the founder. I'm gonna write up the brief and I'm gonna be really opinionated in that brief because I'm the founder and that's what I do. And you give it to them and it's like, as you said, 70%, 80% of the way even harder to get someone to do that on a, on audio or video. Yeah. It's just not gonna happen the same way. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1 00:22:56 You know, it's a trip, man. I haven't had input on a single blog post of ours in probably four years. Oh, that's great. But, but like all the other content, like social, uh, you know, podcast, YouTube, like I'm involved a ton now. Um, it's crazy. That's,
Speaker 2 00:23:12 It's really nice though.
Speaker 1 00:23:14 Yeah. Yeah. On the
Speaker 2 00:23:15 Blog
Speaker 1 00:23:16 Side. Um, alright, so, so like, we're going to the, we're going to the cage match now. Um, you're heavily involved in, in both podcasting and YouTube. Um, how do you think about your investment and, and like how you, how you position your brand between the two and then like what you're hoping to get out of 'em. It's a really, or contact let to, to, to, to bound this a little, let's say just for MicroCon, because I know you have have the MicroComp channel and you have, uh, the MicroCon podcast mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and you probably put stars the rest of us on YouTube, but like I know that you're more YouTube centric for MicroCon.
Speaker 2 00:23:54 Yeah. Here's, here's how I would frame the cage match is the MicroComp YouTube channel. 'cause that's really where I spend my time building and then startups for the rest of us as
Speaker 1 00:24:03 The podcast. Okay. Okay,
Speaker 2 00:24:04 Fine. Because the problem with the Microcom podcast is it's repurposed content. It's repurposed from YouTube, it's repurposed from talks and other things. Ah, okay. It's not right. I don't record 52 new episodes a year like I do with it. So I would put those two Okay. Startups for the rest of us versus microcom.com/youtube. Here's how I think about it, man. I think of our podcast much more like, I think of our email list in the terms of its owned media. I know that technically CAOs, you own our feed <laugh>, you know, you host our feed. So there's platform risk there.
Speaker 1 00:24:35 And we tried to break it a few weeks ago, but
Speaker 2 00:24:37 This No, that was, oh my gosh, that was us and freaking Feed Blitz. I cannot, I, I don't <laugh>. Anyways, now that we're here, like, um, and I know that Apple and Spotify, you know, there's all these podcast providers. There is platformers there, but to me, the podcast is long form deep, direct relationship. That's how I think about it. I've, and, and that's how I think about our email list. Not necessarily long form, but it's like this direct connection, right? Yeah. Is how I can reach people. Now the podcast is anonymous, but people who listen to the podcast, I mean, they are diehards, you know, it's like 30 minutes every week for 52 weeks, a year for how many years people listen. Yeah. And that is, it's a big deal. Like you're in their ear. I can't, I can't underscore that for, as a guy who blogged, like I blogged strong for six years, hundreds and actually probably into the thousands of hours that I spent writing.
Speaker 2 00:25:31 And the reason I stopped was because I was, and I would get to the top of, uh, I would get to the top of acronym news pretty regularly. I get to the top of Dig Back when that was like number one on Dig, and I'd get 50,000 uniques in a day. And I figured I could, I could do it probably one outta three posts, one outta four posts. And at one point I surveyed my audience and I was like, what do you like most about my blog? You know, Rob Wallings writing. And a bunch of people said, I don't know, because I read your stuff in a bit in an r s s feed in Google Reader, and I don't really know what you write. I can't remember stuff that you write versus stuff that other people write. And I was like, interesting. I'm a fricking commodity.
Speaker 2 00:26:11 I'm spending all this time and no one cares. That comes back a little bit to, well put it in a book, dummy. 'cause then you're at least you're not a commodity. Yeah. And b we had just started the podcast, right. I stopped blogging Really? In 2011. Podcast started in 2010. That was when people, like, they don't confuse me with the other podcast anymore because they know it's Rob. And at that time it was Mike and they know my voice. Yeah. And when I wrote into 'em, I got recognized in like, this is weird, but I got recognized in like a Starbucks like a month ago. I recognized in an airport for, I was talking, well this was from YouTube, so they saw my face. But like I was ordering at a Starbucks and someone's like, are you Rob Walling? And I was like, how'd you know? And he's like, your voice, I li you know what I mean? Like, that would never
Speaker 1 00:26:50 Happen
Speaker 2 00:26:51 As a blogger. So to me that's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love the podcast. Now the problem with the podcast is it, I've been doing it for 13 years and it's, you know, it is, it has tens of thousands of listeners and I've been doing YouTube for 18 months and it has tens of thousands of listeners approaching six figures. We're at like 63,000. I mean, it is growing 10 times faster than the podcast. But I view YouTube huge platform risk. And I view it as social media. It is like, it is like Twitter, YouTube to me is like long form video on Twitter or on Instagram. It's just another, it's hub and spoke. Right. So interesting. It's, I don't view it as the, as the hub of anything, but I do view our email list and our podcast is that, I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's how I feel about it.
Speaker 1 00:27:37 Super interesting. Yeah. Uh, it's funny 'cause so like we talk with our customers, but you, you mentioned like media brand, like that's the angle that we're taking on like Casto Productions these days. It's not, we're not a podcast editing service. We transform companies into media brands. Right. So, and it's holistic, it's social, it's YouTube, it's podcast, it's written content, it's a newsletter blurb. Um, and to where, like this, right, we're gonna sit down and talk for an hour, and then we have fucking 15 pieces of content that I can put out over the next week that are all super high quality at oh my God, a fraction of the price of hiring a marketing person. Right. By the way. Um, yeah. And what, um, what I struggle with a little bit, and, and I, it's funny, I use the exact same words. It's like, you want to take people from borrowed media, social media to owned, which is website, podcast, and email.
Speaker 1 00:28:29 And I don't know where to put YouTube <laugh> because, because I mean, what is it? Right? In a way it's a search engine in a way. It's, uh, a content aggregator, right? Like, um, if you write for Forbes or something, or I don't even know what medium, you know? Um, and, and in a way it's a social network because there's, there's comments and, and shit like that. Um, I don't know man. I I just will tell you that like yeah, we're the, we're the same way that like, YouTube is massive, massively important. And it is, the thing I think about it, <laugh>, is there is such a barrier to entry to do really well. That, that, I think that is where a lot of the opportunity is, is you, you gotta buy <laugh>. You gotta buy the $500 mic, and you gotta have the big ass light that's hot as hell.
Speaker 1 00:29:17 And you gotta have the nice looking backdrop where like, I mean, a podcast, we could turn the camera off right now and no one would know, and it would still be great. And my $70 microphone is perfectly good for, uh, you know, a 20,000 download an episode podcast. Um, but to do a YouTube channel really well is mean, not just that stuff I mentioned, but like the fucking effort to like make an interesting 10 minute YouTube video is, is incredible. Um, huge. And then the, the editing afterwards, I mean, it's just, it is, it is many, many, many times the effort. Um, but I agree. I think it's, I think if I had to say I'm gonna do one thing to, to grow our company, that, that, that would be it.
Speaker 2 00:29:59 So I want to agree with you and add something to that. Our fastest growing channel across everything I do is YouTube.
Speaker 1 00:30:06 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:07 Right? So that to me is, and that's, we are pumping more money into YouTube than any other single effort. It at, to your point, it is expensive and it is time consuming, but it's paying off for us.
Speaker 1 00:30:19 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:20 The reason, and I, but I wanna come back to something I said earlier, and I think to, I think you said it as well, where you're like, email and podcaster owned media, and someone might think, well, why isn't YouTube or Twitter? Anytime you're at the mercy of an algorithm,
Speaker 2 00:30:37 It's not owned to media. And I wanna give you an example. If I tell you, Hey, Craig startups, the rest of us has, let's make up a number of 20,000, 30,000 listeners. What I mean by that is that I get 20,000 downloads per episode or 30,000 downloads per episode. That's what happens. Like, those are real people that are, at least we don't know if they're listening, but we're at least getting downloads. When I tell you that I have 63,000 YouTube subscribers and then I put out a YouTube video and it gets 6,000 views, that's pretty common. If one of my, if one of our videos doesn't kind of take off, it gets 6,000 views. We're getting 10% of our audience, of our subscribers to watch a video. Mm-hmm. And that is a, right, that's a big difference. So we can say in that example, 30 to 60,000, let's just, you know, make it easy math. It's like, well, YouTube, you have twice the audience. And it's like, not really. I don't get twice the consumption. I don't get twice, you know, what, do you care about having numbers or do you care about actually having people consume the content? So that's, that's why I think about it that way.
Speaker 1 00:31:35 Yeah. Yeah. Are you, um, on the YouTube front, are you shooting shorts, like dedicated shorts? Or are you just repurposing 'em out of uh, longer form stuff?
Speaker 2 00:31:44 We have tried both. Right now we are repurposing out of long, longer form stuff. Hmm. Okay. And it seems to be, you know, actually I might need to check. We may not even be doing shorts anymore. We, I think we did a test of two or three months and we found it, it wasn't worth the effort. I think that's maybe where we landed. I would actually need to go to our own C channel. This shows you how I disconnected. I'm from actually <laugh>. I, well, to your point of like, that's
Speaker 1 00:32:11 Where you should be standing, right? Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:32:12 Right. Should be relatively expected. I should be, yep. I wanna record stuff and then I want 15 pieces of content to go live, you know, in two weeks. Yeah. To your point of like, I have, I've built that engine internally, but I think more people, of course, should come to CAOs and have you do it for 'em. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:32:26 Yeah. It's a trip, man. I'll, I'll share my, um, my process. Uh, so I wrote a blog post about this Craig hut me, uh, on, on the blog, um, where it's, it's really great now, man, I spend, so Christina, my executive assistant, we have a call Tuesday morning and I get, I do my hair and I get the light on to make sure the camera works. And we talk for about 45 minutes. And I give her about 21 minute blurbs and she takes those and cleans 'em up and edits 'em. And I get portrait and I get square. And then that's my content for the next two weeks. Wow. It's awesome. That's great. It's so awesome. Now that, that's for my personal stuff on. And the cool thing about that, we talk about batching. Like I, that could be all of my social media for two weeks, you know?
Speaker 1 00:33:14 Um, I do a little bit of like, text based stuff just on LinkedIn right now. Um, but I do, I do the same. I've played around both ways. I do the same thing on the CAOs YouTube channel and we we're just starting to pull stuff. 'cause we've got like 180 videos there. Um, starting to pull some stuff there from the most recent videos, uh, for shorts and, and haven't seen how they perform yet. Um, I don't know, I I think kind of talking about the how, how, like you pulled stuff from like a YouTube's transcript or a podcast episode into the book and it didn't work. Like, I wonder, I wonder if the same thing will happen where like, just kind of like emotionally you're halfway through a thought and you pull <laugh> and you pull that bit out. Mm-hmm. If, if like, people can tell versus if you took that same idea and just shot it at the camera for 45 seconds mm-hmm. If, if it would perform better.
Speaker 2 00:34:05 Yeah. I mean, I see people doing it with success. Like my first million pulls it just out of their interviews and some of those catch Yeah. It depends on if the content's really good. If it's Neil Patel saying he spends 150 grand a month on person, you know, on his help or whatever. I dunno if you saw that one. Like yeah, that one went viral. And so I don't know that it ma I don't know that it matters. I think it's, yeah. Here's bad advice that I've, that I have received, Craig, is people were telling me two, three years ago, like, you have to be on YouTube. And I'm like, all right, what do I need to be doing? I don't have the time or the money to, to do the full production. No, you just repurpose, you just do clips. You just do. 'cause you know, Joe Rogan, he got big based on clips and Howard Stern big on clips and whoever else insert another person who's talking about Super Gen Mark Marin super general stuff and is interviewing Elon Musk and having him smoke a doobie on on camera.
Speaker 2 00:34:53 It's like, well, if I was doing that, then of course my clips are gonna be amazing. But guess what? My topics are really fucking boring except for the, the, you know, a hundred thousand people who love what I do. So me getting a, a clip, a 32nd clip of, you know, me pontificating about the Beatles and how they relate to startups, I mean, that's fine, but I'm, it doesn't work. You can't translate what Joe Rogan is doing to what we're doing. I shouldn't say you can't, you need to be really careful about taking that. And so that's, that's I think where I stand on it is I think clips can work. I think you're probably right. Every time I've tried something to do it actually native to the format, it winds up better. I also think, um, you don't need to, the
Speaker 1 00:35:34 Marginal benefit of that is probably arguable.
Speaker 2 00:35:36 It just depends. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's where it is. Yeah. What, how much time, how much time and money do you have, you
Speaker 1 00:35:41 Know? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'm gonna take a slight detour from our planned discussions to talk about. Um, I know across the tiny seed companies and just, you know, SaaS in general, like you, you'd know more than, more than almost everyone I know about this. Like the, I'll say we're may, maybe we don't have headwinds, but the tailwinds we all experienced over the last few years are, are, are kind of dwindling. I, I think like where do you see companies who are growing fast, either in reality or kind of hypothetically, like where do you, where do you see companies executing on growth well over the next few years? Hmm.
Speaker 2 00:36:19 So I, I'll I'll say one general thing. The companies that I see executing on growth, well, at least at our stage, which is, you know, let's say six and seven figure arr, um, for the most part, the founder inevitably is pretty involved in that growth. Hmm. Um, we certainly have founders who, let's say they get to two, 3 million and then they hire a head of growth. Usually they go through one and then two and then find one on the third. It's 'cause it's so hard to find someone who's that, who's good and who can continue what the founder's doing. But a conversation I have now, and again with tiny seed founders specifically is they say, all right, we have, we, we have product market fit and you know, we're hitting that we're at 1520 K m r r. Like, we want to do what I call a escape velocity, which is where you actually have a marketing channel that works and that's scalable.
Speaker 2 00:37:10 How do we get there? Uh, who do we hire? How can I hire someone to do this? And usually I'm like, look, you can and I can give you a bunch of recommendations. I just almost have never seen it done without the founder. You're, you're a case in point here of you driving growth over the years, even though you've hired people to help you. Uh, our friend Ruben Gomez was Sewell. We have our team at Scraping Bee who's very public about their, you know, they're doing multiple seven figures in a r r they're public about their revenue. I could go on, right? I could list more than a dozen that are just some of the faster growing tiny seed companies. And in every example it's like, oh yeah, no, the founder's a really good sales person. Oh yeah. Founder knows a lot about marketing. So that, that's a general high level thing.
Speaker 2 00:37:49 I think we kind of know that at our core maybe, but I'm, the data that I'm seeing, the anec data that I'm seeing, you know, across my portfolio is, is reinforcing that to your actual question, which is really where, where do you see it going? Um, I, I mean like today, man, you know, some people will say like, cold outreach is dead and cold outreach, I think to, to people like you and I is dead. Like I don't respond to any of that. Cold outreach still works in niches that are not oversaturated with it. Right? So that's like one example content and ss e o if you're good at it, I mean chat G P T and AI gonna eliminate SS e o, I don't know. Or is it just gonna change it and is it gonna be around long enough for the next couple years that you can still build?
Speaker 2 00:38:33 Yeah. You know, we're not, you don't need to build a billion dollar company, right? If you build a $5 million company to grow fast, you can sell for a lot of money. And I still think there's room, um, for that. There's really 20 B two B marketing approaches, man, I list them in the SaaS playbook and I'm happy to, you know, you can take a picture of that page and put it in the show notes. I'm not trying to sell my book, but like there aren't, there aren't that many. Yeah. And what I see is typically it depends on your niche and, but there are five that most people try first, right? It's content. Yeah. It's SS e o, it's cold outreach, um, part partnerships, it is integrations and partnerships. Yeah. And it's pay per click, you know, whether that's Facebook ads and, and AdWord and, and stuff. Those are still the five most popular. Um, and then there's a few more stuff like podcasts and YouTube and such, but I don't know, it, it
Speaker 1 00:39:22 It, I'll tell you man, like I, I ask partly because like, you know, we, we've been fortunate and unfortunate to grow at almost the exact same kind of absolute amount for five, six and a half years now <laugh>, which is great that we've been growing for that long. But, but almost nothing we've done has changed that trajectory. Um, and, and we've, we've fucking tried it all. Tried to go up market, tried integrations and partnerships, tried growing the product, go into enterprise, all this kind of stuff. And, and like we, we kind of just like say at this point, man, like, yeah, I don't know if a AI is going to kill Google. Like, probably not, right? It's like one of the biggest companies in the world. They're gonna figure out a way for google.com mm-hmm. <affirmative> to still, you know, be <laugh> be the place to go.
Speaker 1 00:40:03 People go for answers. Um, and, and, and, and I just think that like for us, it is the only way that we can grow. You know, like we can't make P P C work. We've tried so many fucking times. Mm-hmm. And I just spent another 10 grand on it and it's not working. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, partnerships. Hmm. I dunno, some people in our space are growing via like affiliates and stuff like that, that just, like, I don't, like I wanna be a profitable <laugh> company that has actual money at the end of the day. And like, given 30 plus percent to people every month is really tough. Um, yeah. I, I, I don't know. I I just don't like, I think it's close-minded, a little bit of me, but it's also like worked to an extent so far. And so like yeah, that's, that, that's my hypothesis is that we, we have many more layers to go on this that we've, we've kind of exhausted the first one a little bit and, and, and we have this other layer of maybe YouTube and maybe like other kinds of content to, to take and to this next level.
Speaker 1 00:40:59 Um, I don't know man. Like I, I, I guess in a way I give myself some solace to say like, I don't have to go figure it out. We just have to do a better job than we're doing now. Uh, which is nice because otherwise, I think one of the thing <laugh>, one of the fucking terrible things in marketing is you have these 20 approaches and you literally can do all of 'em and you can do really shitty at all of 'em and then you're nowhere. Or you can just say, fuck it, I'm putting the blinders on and for the next year we're doing this. Right. And you'll probably be better off.
Speaker 2 00:41:25 Well, especially if that's already working for you and it's just plateaued and you just wanna expand it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's, that's the thing. And that's, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:41:33 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:41:34 Yeah. I finding a new marketing approach that works is one of the, aside from finding product market fit in the first place, finding a new marketing approach that you can make work and scale is probably one of the hardest things in growing a startup, right? Yeah. It, it is just really hard. And so if you have something that's working and you just double and triple down on it, you know, the only the danger is I think that if you are gonna try, well, you gotta look at where, not just where your customers are coming from, but it's like, where do the best customers come from? Yeah. And if the best customers are coming from that, then of course, should I spend twice as much on that all from Google
Speaker 1 00:42:07 <laugh>? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:42:07 It's crazy. So there you go. How can I, and here's things that we should all be thinking about is like, so how do I go and just try to buy websites? How do I buy competitors? How do I buy, acquire things, you know, or how do I knock everybody off the first page of Google and that just becomes my mission, you know? Yeah. These are certainly ways to do it.
Speaker 1 00:42:29 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:42:29 Yeah. It is. I think it is definitely more splintered. It's, it's hard to say 'cause it does depend. Like we have some really niche tiny seed companies and like, they can still just go in and just blow the doors off with ss e o and own most of the first page of Google and they're just like growing like a we, but let's put them aside and go with more horizontal, I would say podcast hosting or you know, something where there's a lot more competition in those spaces. It is inevitably a bunch of different channels that each bring in. I mean, even, even Drip, right? I sold this in 2016. There was no single channel that was more than maybe 20% of our new trials. It was where historically, like everything I'd done before that was always like, eh, one or two major channels. And they just drive it. It was like 15, 20% from integrations and we got like 10% a month from ads, you know? And then it was like, from the podcast, you know, and it was all these little chunks, which kind of sucked. 'cause I never knew what to double down on. But also it was pretty neat. 'cause we were really diversified. And so if we got dinged by Google, it actually didn't hurt us that much.
Speaker 1 00:43:33 Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Interesting. It's hard
Speaker 2 00:43:36 And it's, and it's worse, it's more competitive today, right? Than it was seven years ago. Oh,
Speaker 1 00:43:39 Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man. Um, always a pleasure. Thanks. Uh, thanks for coming on and chatting. It's, it's really cool to catch up. And congrats on the book. So SaaS playbook.com for folks who
Speaker 2 00:43:52 Wanna pick it up. Absolutely. Yep. Would love to have them. Thanks man. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 00:43:55 And uh, other places to connect startups for the rest of us.com, microsoft.com. Rob all.com. Twitter
Speaker 2 00:44:03 At Rob Walling.
Speaker 1 00:44:04 At Rob Walling. Cool. Alright buddy. See you.
Speaker 2 00:44:06 Thanks man.
