#35 - Rob Walling of TinySeed and MicroConf
[#35] - Finding people who care with Rob Walling
“The biggest risk is not can you build this? The biggest risk is that no one cares. So how do you validate that someone will care? And how do you validate that someone will be willing to pay for what you are selling?” – Rob Walling.
Calling all bootstrap founders! Joining us on today’s masterclass on launching and growing a business is special guest Rob Walling. Rob is an admired serial entrepreneur, investor, author, and host of the popular podcast ‘Startups for the Rest of Us’. Since 2005, Rob has guided thousands of startup founders through his widespread books, recordings, articles, TinySeed and MicroConf discussions.
In this episode, Rob kindly lends us his time to openly share his experience of finding people who care when starting and growing a business. Rob also reveals how to communicate with your customers and unpacks the magic within collecting customer feedback. This episode may seem short and sweet but trust us when we say it is stuffed with brilliant insights and actionable nuggets of advice for you to take away straight from the master of startups. Key points throughout the discussion include:
An introduction to Rob Walling.
When is the right time for building an audience?
The art of selling: warm VS cold leads.
Business development and the magic of customer feedback.
The early day selection process: unlocking product-market fit.
Smashing sales as an introvert.
The key to capturing clients and communicating effectively.
Sustainable marketing in a tech-savvy world.
How to avoid an unprofitable business.
Book recommendations for business builders.
Rob’s top two sales techniques for obtaining your first 10 customers.
Why a landing page is a must!
The rhythm of business growth from beginning to take-off.
Connect with Rob Walling:
https://twitter.com/robwalling
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robwalling/
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/about
Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy:
https://www.first10podcast.com
https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/
Resources:
Book: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
http://momtestbook.com/
Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/Traction
Book: How the World Sees You by Sally Hogshead.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/how-the-world-sees-you
Book: Fascinate by Sally Hogshead.
https://www.howtofascinate.com/store/books
Check out my podcast partners!
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931
Otter:
https://otter.ai/referrals/ETRNKY16
Calendly:
https://calendly.grsm.io/ilev18qxpn1e
Produced in partnership with podlad.com
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, founders, customers, build, called, email, podcast, landing page, rob, mailchimp, sell, drip, book, pay, conversations, saas, domain knowledge, software, launch, sales
SPEAKERS
Conor McCarthy, Robert Walling
Robert Walling 00:01
The biggest risk is not can you build this? The biggest risk is that no one cares. So how do you validate that someone will care? And how do you validate that someone will be willing to pay for what you are selling? And how do you validate that you can reach them in a sustainable fashion?
Conor McCarthy 00:21
Hello, and welcome to season four of the First 10 podcast. I'm your host, Conor McCarthy, and I help people start and grow their businesses. I do that through joint ventures, collaborations, coaching and online workshops. In each episode of this podcast, I interview business builders about the early days of starting a business, about how they found their first 10 customers and got off the ground so that you could learn what works and what doesn't. Check out my website Conormccarthy.me for more details. My guest today is Rob Walling. Many of you may recognize Rob's name as he has created some really well regarded businesses and projects over the last few years. He started and sold Drip, an email marketing software platform. He then went on to create Microconf, which is a conference focused on SaaS entrepreneurship, and also Tiny Seed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. Rob also hosts one of the most popular and long running podcasts for non venture startups, called Startups for the rest of us. And somehow in there, Rob has found the time to also write three books, including one of the cornerstone works on bootstrapping startups, called Start small, stay small. This episode is short and sweet. And Rob really has a ton to share from his extensive experience starting and growing businesses. We cover how a simple landing page might be all you need to get started on your next big idea, how to talk to customers before building anything, the power of warm emails and the importance of distribution. Lastly, Rob has some really great advice on the thing you may not want to do on your next sales call, as well as two key things you need to find your first customers. Please do enjoy this episode with Rob Walling and thanks for listening. First of all, Rob, thank you very, very much for taking the time to be with us here today.
Robert Walling 02:11
It is my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on.
Conor McCarthy 02:13
Do you want to just tell the listeners what exactly it is that you do at the moment?
Robert Walling 02:19
I do three things. I whisper that because it's it's a lot and I tell founders, you should really focus but you'll once I describe these three things you'll see they are actually focused on the same thing. So the first is I've I've had a podcast about bootstrapping startups for 11 years now no 12 years, it's called Startup for the rest of us, about to hit the 600th episode and that is to help entrepreneurs and founders. The second thing is Microconf, which is an online and in person community for bootstrapped startup founders, as well as Tiny Seed, which is the first startup accelerator aimed at bootstrap startup founders. So you'll see that the mission of all those three is aligned. And I of course, have great, you know, great teams that we've hired to help us run that.
Conor McCarthy 03:06
It's yeah, you you, you spread yourself across a lot of different domains. But bootstrappers and the kind of I suppose the non VC people are your they're close to your heart.
Robert Walling 03:17
It's my jam, bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap founders is how I phrase it.
Conor McCarthy 03:21
Okay, nice. Nice. So yeah, so this, this podcast is all about starting off, it's the first 10 customers. So I mean, you can jump into any one of what you just mentioned, like in jump into the conference, or your seed fund. Or you can go even further back. Do you wanna tell us about a time that you started something off, the the early days of a project?
Robert Walling 03:41
Yeah. So that the interesting thing is a lot of what I've done, has been based on building an audience. And that's, that's good and that's also not good in the sense of, I don't want to tell I never want to come on a show and tell people you should build an audience first before you do it. Because I for info products and courses, hey, build an audience, you should, if you're going to go and build a software company, SaaS company, and you don't already have an audience, I don't think it's worth the time for you to go out and do that. So. But if you have one, which I did from blogging, and then podcasting, you should absolutely use that as an unfair advantage. And so the first 10 customers about last SAS app I built was called drip, and it is still around, I sold it in 2016. It's an email service provider. And it can be with MailChimp. And you know, Infusionsoft and such, the first 10 customers for that were me basically warm emailing is what I call it. It's it's emailing people that I knew who I thought could use drip. And before we wrote a line of code, I sent out these emails saying I'm thinking about building this thing. It's like MailChimp, but it's different. If we built it, would you think that'd be well, you know, would you be willing to pay $100 a month for that? And I emailed actually 17, it was like founders that I knew. It was a couple kind of course creators. It was a blogger. And I got 11 yeses on that. 11 yeses. And then I said, Let's do it, that's validation enough for me to start, you know, basically having a developer write code.
Conor McCarthy 05:14
That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, the, at the time, what was the market for, like email service providers, like email newsletters, what is that like?
Robert Walling 05:25
It was 2012 when we were doing this, is that right? Yeah, it was, we broke ground on code in December 2012. So it would have been the fall of 2012 that I was doing it. So it was basically MailChimp is the 900 pound gorilla and Aweber was the info product. So like startups use MailChimp. And there were still I mean, there were 100 200 DSPs already. But there was no automation, you know, now everything has like this marketing automation. The only tools that did that were these expensive tools like Infusionsoft Pardot Marketo silverpop, I think HubSpot didn't have automation in their email yet, either. So that was it. There was no ConvertKit there was no drip, obviously, because we were about to build it. And it was, I was kind of crazy to go into the space. It was it was a bit of an accident. I mean, basically, I had another SaaS app that was a longtail keyword tool SS subscription service. And, there was no OptinMonster there was no sumo as well, because that was the thing that we really wanted was an email capture widget that could appear I wanted to drop JavaScript into a footer and have a widget appear on every page of the website, there was nothing that did that. Like if that's how crazy is 10 years ago. So I had my developer build that for hittail. And we had a couple 100 pages. And suddenly, you know, you have this pop, it was a little toaster pop up widget. And it worked great. It really, really increased the number of emails that we got, we wrote a little mini course. And so then I said, Why don't we productize this because no one else is doing it. And so we forked out, that's all it was, was just email capture and a like a secret email sequence, then, like a campaign tied to it. You couldn't even send like one time broadcast to this list. It was purely the whole tool was capture, send a sequence? And at the time, it was it was a very simple tool.
Conor McCarthy 07:13
Mmhmm. And do you remember beyond those, those warm leads, do you remember getting the first cold leads, I suppose. What was that process like?
Robert Walling 07:22
Yeah, I do. Basically what I did, because we it took us about took my dev about six months to build that product. And so I had six months where I was still working on the old product, you know, because that was throwing given the cash, giving us the cash to basically build this one. And I was doing my typical podcast interviews, where I go on shows I was, you know, I don't know doing written interviews, I actually ran some Facebook ads just for fun. So I set up a landing page. And originally it was it get drip.com and I was basically just every podcast interview I got on, I would mention Drip, oh, yeah, so what's what's your new project, I'm working on this thing. It's called Drip. It's I'm kind of trying to, you know, they have a real unique take on email capture, and blah, blah, blah. And then yeah, there'd be 10, 20 30, people show up on that email list. And then I was bored. And so I ran Facebook ads for the same thing, I had had a bunch of success with Facebook ads with the prior SaaS app. And so I did that and got that list, that email list, kind of a launch list up to about 3400 3400 people 3400. And that was a nice little asset to have, not only for the launch itself, but along the way, I started emailing screenshots of that, hey, this is what's gonna do. And people started giving feedback of like, this is great, or I don't understand what this does, or is it going to have? And then I started doing questions, is this gonna have automations in it? And at the time, I was like, what are those? I didn't know what I know, all I ever used was MailChimp and Aweber. They didn't have automations built in. So then people start explaining to me, oh, there's this really expensive tool, there are these really expensive tools. Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, you know, that do all this Ontraport was another one that do this complicated stuff. But they're like, 400 500 a month and up. So if you add it just yet, it became really interesting, where the feedback loop so that launch list wasn't just, oh, I can sell to them. It was actually cut. It was a customer development. It was really powerful.
Conor McCarthy 09:17
That is, what an amazing I was gonna say, an amazing resource. I mean, they were customers, but the feedback is, I mean, that's that probably guided every decision from then on.
Robert Walling 09:28
Kind of Yeah. And I eventually sent, I started getting some individual feedback like that. And then I sent the whole list again, 3400 people, a survey that I later dissected on my podcast, I went through every question and talked about what people answered, but I kind of asked like, what's your role at a company? You know, are you like a solo founder, a solopreneur, info product, SaaS founder, you know, I just kind of wanted to know and that's like, what do you currently use for email marketing? What do you hope Drip will do and I had some aw esome choices and with an other and like it gave me a good lens on A - which market should we focus on first because eventually we want to get everybody but you can't you can't do that from the start. And also, then what should we build first? Because it's so so hard to decide what features to build in the early days.
Conor McCarthy 10:09
Yeah and that I mean, two things you said there, yeah, deciding what features to build? And also, you can't and shouldn't try to sell to everybody. Yeah. How do you I mean, you interact with so many bootstrappers and entrepreneurs and founders, etc? How, how does that conversation go down? When someone comes to you and goes, this idea? It's gonna be big, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get everybody on board. What's the conversation like?
Robert Walling 10:31
Well, usually I say, Oh, how do you know that? how do you know that? Right? Who? And then it whatever the answer. It's like, well, who have you talked to? Like, do you already have an audience in that space? And if it's yes, then like, okay, cool. Yeah. How big is it? And how have you communicated that? What's been the feedback? Or if you don't have an audience in that space? Who have you talked to in that space? Have you tried running ads to a cold landing page, some products, you know, that smoke test is still a thing. Other folks, it's just a lot of, I encourage them, I think you should have a lot of conversations with potential customers and see what they say. And these can be face to face conversations, they can be zoom, they can be email, I pre sold those 11 you know, drip customers via email never did a call with any of them. And in the end, the question I often get is how many of those 11 converted to paying customers and it was less than half? If it was like five? Everybody tried it out the way they said they would? And then it just didn't do? You know, a lot of times people would say, Well, I can kind of cobble this together with MailChimp, plus this J S form thing. I don't know what I want to, you know, pay for this on a monthly basis. And so that was great feedback for me of like, okay, we haven't built something valuable enough yet. And that's where we kept adding, you know, more features and automation. And that's eventually when we hit product market fit.
Conor McCarthy 11:41
Do you find there's a kind of a reticence? Or what's the word? You know, if you were to say to someone who's about to launch a business, or has an idea, and they come to you that they need to go out and talk, talk to people just and have conversations with potential customers or with anybody? You find people are always up for that? Are they a bit like, I don't know, that feels weird.
Robert Walling 12:01
Yeah, some people say it feels weird, especially like software developers, you know, and more introverts. I'm an introvert, I'm not a salesperson at all. So me, that's why my conversations were via email, because I prefer for them not to be in person. I don't like rejection. And so yeah, people do have resistance to it. And then that part of that conversation is, well, here's how to do it without feeling like, you know, like, feeling like you're putting pressure on someone or feeling awkward is you just say, look, I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, or I am a founder, I'm a developer, or I'm a whatever, I do my day job, but I'm also trying to launch this thing on the side to help insert their role here, you know, it's to help HR execs, it's to help hair salons, it's to help, whatever, I have nothing to sell you. I've not built anything. I just wonder if you know, I could have 15 minutes of your time. I wonder if you could answer a couple questions. That it's that kind of thing, right? I've heard that people ranging from offering, you know, $50, amazon giftcard, or a Starbucks card for each conversation, I heard that when Jason Cohen did this for WP Engine, his now literally billion dollar web hosting platform. He wanted to talk to a bunch of agencies and consultants. And so he basically said, I'll pay your hourly rate for an hour. Right? So if they want to charge him 150 - 200 an hour, he just said, I'll pay that I don't I'm not gonna waste your time. I genuinely want it, you know? Yeah, so it depends on the resources you have, of course.
Conor McCarthy 13:28
I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that there's some actionable and insightful advice that you can take out to your business, helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast and want more information, including a bunch of free resources on how to find your first 10 customers and grow your business, check out first10podcast.com That's 10 one, zero, or find me on Twitter @thefirst10pod. Now, you probably hear what I'm about to say on every podcast you listen to and it makes a really big difference to the show. If you find this podcast in any way useful or enjoyable, I'd be so grateful if you left me a review on iTunes, it really does make a big difference in terms of other people discovering the podcast. Also, if you leave a review, you will get to see your name and the review in lights. What I'll do is I'll design your words and post them online, tagging you and your project along with it. I know it's a pretty sweet deal! Okay, let's get on with the show. If there were cardinal sins or warning signs for when people you know, tried to launch a SaaS just for, for example, like you know, having domain knowledge really, really key talking to customers is super, super important. Are there any of the things that you would look out for or would advise for or against?
Robert Walling 14:46
Yeah, domain knowledge is really nice to have, but it's not required. I have seen we have several successful companies that we have funded, where the founder was purely a software developer and stumbled into an idea in a space, they had no relation to whatsoever, one founder made 70 cold calls before he figured out that there was a need for software in the senior placement space where it's just where, you know, if my mom's getting older, I'm going to place her in a senior assisted living facility, there are senior placement agents who I can call and they're like a broker, and they know all the local things, and they know all the local, you know, local businesses, or whatever they do the placement, the actual living facilities. And so there was like, no good software for them. And so the software developer built that, right. So domain knowledge isn't required, and he's having success. There's a handful of others. But it is, to me, it's a leg up, if you haven't right, it's a perfect thing, I think that the talking to customers thing is something that so few people do. And in addition, even when they do it, they often do it wrong, where people will kind of try to be nice or tell you what you want to hear, which you should ask are3 the questions that are in this book, the Mom Test, where they're not leading questions like so here's some mock ups, what do you think? Because no one wants to be a jerk, right? But what you do is you say, this idea I have does this, it solves this problem? Do you have that problem? or what have you done to solve this problem in the past? You know, and you start to get a feeling of not only do they need it, but how badly do they need it? So I think those are, those are some big ones. The other one, I mean, I used to launch all my, I launched a book, conference, several apps, with just a landing page where I didn't want to write the book, I didn't want to book a conference venue. I didn't want to build an app, you know, but I can build a landing page and the accelerator tiny seed was a landing page when we launched it. And all it said was, you know, it's the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. And here's our plan. And if you're interested, this is me, you know, we really want to rock the world or whatever, and and then it had an email capture, and it doesn't work for everything. And email capture doesn't, it's like, oh, I got 500 emails, it's a successful idea. That's not true, either. What we then do is, you know, you then go through and you have conversations and figure that out. But before I wrote a word of my book, I put up a landing page and I blogged about it, tweeted about it, you know, got it on Hacker News, and wanted to gauge was their interest? Could I sell at least a few 100 copies of this book to make it worthwhile?
Conor McCarthy 17:23
Yeah, I think that's a smart thing to do. Because again, there's, there's a, probably a fallacy of build something. And spend money and time creating the thing. Without actually just asking people it's it's interesting, you know, asking your audience, your people, your friends, your relations, your customers like, right? Is this something you want to see in the world
Robert Walling 17:41
The biggest risk is not, can you build this? That's a yes, you can you can build this, that's not the hard part, the biggest risk is that no one cares. So how do you validate that someone will care? And how do you validate that someone will be willing to pay for what you are selling? And how do you validate that you can reach them in a sustainable fashion? Those are really the three things that are difficult about starting.
Conor McCarthy 17:42
So that's, that's a really interesting point. They're like reaching people in a sustainable fashion. Could you just double click on that? And just describe what that looks like? In the world?
Robert Walling 18:19
Yeah. So imagine you built an amazing piece of software for, you know, for senior placement firms, for example. And it solves a problem. Absolutely I product market fit, because it does exactly what they need, and they're willing to pay the price that I want. But imagine that they're not online. None of them are online. And, you know, imagine none of them have emails, and none of them have phones. That's bizarre, but like, so I can't reach any of these customers. This business doesn't work, you know, but I know they have phones. So maybe I'm cold calling. And I do know, they have email, so maybe I'm cold emailing or cold outreach, or do they attend events. So maybe I'm going to those events, maybe I'm sponsoring those events, maybe I'm trying to speak those events, it's that people don't think through these distribution channels in advance. They think I can build it. And maybe I, maybe I validated that these people need it. But if they're really hard and really expensive to find and to close, you can build a business that is unprofitable. Be even with a good product, if people are really hard to reach and, you know, close sales, in essence, and that's why a lot of their early, you know, I come from the tech world SaaS world, not the venture funded space, but a lot of bootstrapping. And a lot of the early SaaS that was coming out of bootstrappers was stuff that we knew about because we were online. It was for designers, it was for developers, it was for founders, because all of them were online in the mid 2000s. It isn't until now that a lot of this other stuff like for construction, you know that there's a CRM for home improvement contractors that we funded and it's like, I don't think that would have worked 10 years ago, I just don't think enough of them were on line, you know? But it's 2022 now and there's a bit more, there's a bit more, I guess, tech savviness, you know, bit more people looking for that looking for these solutions similar to that senior placement?
Conor McCarthy 20:13
Like that. Yeah, there's just to switch gears slightly when with the first 10 customers, or the first 100, or whatever, there's, there's a heavy sales element, let's say. Do you have any sales techniques as to stronger sales tips that you give out to founders, or just ways to go about the the art of selling?
Robert Walling 20:35
I do and I actually steal these from Einar Vollset, he's my co founder at Tiny Seed because he's a good sales guy and he's done a lot of sales. And he says think about sales, like you are a, an expensive, high paid consultant, except you're not getting paid, you're getting paid in the sale, but not, you know, actual hourly rate. Think of yourself as that, that you're basically truly trying to understand what does this customer need? And what is the best solution for them. And to that end, when I used to sell Drip, which is email service provider, I used to get on some calls. And I would say, You know what, MailChimp is actually a better fit for you. I don't you don't need Drip, you know, and I would just send them off to a competitor. So I think that's a good one. I think the other one is that a sales call is not a demo of your software, they don't want to see the settings, they don't want to see the checkboxes, what they want to see is how does this solve my problem? So the first several minutes should just be what, what problem do you hope this solves? What problem do you have today? You know, what do you know about the software? What do you think it does? How do you think it will help you? And then you kind of go from there to be like, cool. So instead of running through the whole app, I'm just going to show you these three screens that are going to solve exactly the problems that you said.
Conor McCarthy 21:45
That's genius, because I have been demoed, I have been demo'd alot, where it's like, yeah, hey, sign up for demo and you just get a very standard issue.
Robert Walling 21:54
It's lazy. It's lazy and it's easy. And you can just get a call you can pay someone minimum wage to demo through your software. But that's that's not how that's not the how to best do it. You know, if you get if you get really well trained salespeople, they, they go after it, they personalize it and try to understand the customer's needs.
Conor McCarthy 22:11
Apart from the Mom Test, are there any books that you recommend to early stage business builders?
Robert Walling 22:18
I like the book traction by Gabriel Weinberg, which is a it's not the one by Gino Wickman. Net, that's about Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's same title, but it is about marketing approaches. And it has like 21 chapters. And each chapter is a marketing approach that you can consider for your business. And it gives you some they interviewed someone for each chapter, and it gives you some criteria of when to use each one or when to consider using each one.
Conor McCarthy 22:45
And inside of, inside of a business context, I suppose. Are there any books or resources that have helped you understand people more?
Robert Walling 22:53
There's two books. Well, this is even still it one's called fascinate. And the other is called how the world sees you that same author, it's Sally Hogshead. And they're both about it's a lot in the context of business but it's about, fascinate is the seven different elements that a brand or a person can have and leaning into one or more of these makes you unique and intriguing. And then how the world sees you is you read it then you take a personality test and it tells you which of the seven you have you know or which of the seven you should lean into or are naturally yours. And so it's in both a personal and a business context, right of like, they talk about how Jägermeister has you know that awful tasting, you know, alcohol, but there but she's like, but that's that's why everyone talks about it because it's awful tasting. And that's the there's like an intrigue of like if you're told it tastes awful, you want to taste it. So intrigue is like one of the seven. And then she was talking about how I don't know if you know there's like trust right of like the the stalwart right of like, I don't know, GM, maybe a, you know, automaker, maybe they have trust. I don't know, but it's that kind of stuff. Is that what you meant about? Are you meaning more like psychology of people?
Conor McCarthy 24:09
Oh, like anything that isn't, you know? Yeah, just a straight up business book. But they're two really good examples. That's a great title how the world sees you. That's an, yeah I better pick up a copy of that. As a last question, I always ask my guests, what would you say to someone who's going out to find their first 10 customers today? What would you say to that?
Robert Walling 24:32
I would do two things. I've done these two things over and over and over. And they've worked for me. So I would absolutely 100% have some type of landing page with some type of email capture on it. And as you go through anything you're doing online, if you have a chance to do it in a non salesy way, the non crappy way. You mentioned it, you know, you're in you're answering a question on Quora, and it's like, oh, this happens to be real full disclosure. I'm going on this project, so I have kind of an inside, look at this right bing! drop your link, if you're on Twitter, do a little bit of building in public, hey, I'm working on this project, it's pretty cool. But if you're interested to keeping up with it, head over here. If you're on a podcast, if you just wherever you are, you're kind of you either casually mention it, or you intentionally, you mention it. And then the other thing that I would be doing is, I want to figure out where my customers hang out. Sometimes, I'll give you an example. I am not only in the business world, but I collect signatures, autographs, and I collect from like, you know, I've an Alexander Hamilton, for example, like old, you know, it's not modern people. It's like, oh, and I collect expensive comic books, right? So I'm in these groups of people talking about comic books. And so if you would 10 comic book collectors, you would want to be in these groups, they are on Facebook, almost all of them. And then there's one forum on this grading website called CGC. So I literally know all of them. There's only like, you know, 10 of them. So if you wanted to do that you would go and participate. But if I was going to go sell b2b, if I wanted to sell email marketing, you know, ESPs, probably not many Facebook groups. They're probably hanging out in private slack groups, or in communities like Microconf has almost 3000 founders in our online community. It's called Microconf Connect happens to be a Slack channel, but it could just be a forum, right? The software itself doesn't matter. But if I wanted to talk to aerialists, my wife does aerial circus stuff with slings and hammocks, and she does trapeze. They're all on Instagram. So I would if I wanted to sell them, I would get on Instagram, I would start following them, I would start interacting, you know what I mean? So if you're gonna find your first 10 customers, where are they now? Where are they already? Or maybe a lot of them probably listen to podcast, or what blogs do they read? Are they on Hacker News? Or are they on, you know, growthhackers.com or are they on Pinterest? That's what I would be thinking through as they're already gathered somewhere. Everyone gathers right even my brother runs a construction firm, and says construction is so old school, you know, so slow to adopt. And there are places where they hang out. I guarantee you there's some online and then there's a lot offline. There's in person events, they have trade pubs, they have trade magazines, and that kind of stuff. So that's what I would say is I would have a landing page and then I would figure out where they hang out and then I would go be among the people in a non douchey, non salesy way.
Conor McCarthy 27:28
That is a great answer. Sorry, I realized there was one question I forgot to ask you earlier, if you don't mind me popping it in now. It's about so the first 10 customers is one stage of the journey. And I think you meet a lot of bootstrappers, who go beyond that early kind of struggling to get the first customers and they reach a place of Oh, actually, this isn't working. What is the main difference after that inflection point of okay, we're doing okay, we're confident we can bring in some more sales, what changes? What's the main thing that changes do you find?
Robert Walling 28:00
Usually, it goes from spearfishing, which is one at a time just dragging a man down in this really laborious process, to oh, oh, we kind of now start having a brand and a little bit of recognition. And oh, wow, our brand is getting mentioned in the Facebook groups without me being in there. There's a little bit of word of mouth from existing customers. And we've, the product is better now. And even our marketing copy is better, you know, just your whole process there gets better. And oftentimes you find a sustainable, sustainable channel where it's no longer I'm looking in the groups, it's, oh, we figured that we found out that we can run ads on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords, and one of these gets us, you know, 10 leads a week at a cost that we can afford. Or we've started writing content, it's getting picked up and now we get 100 uniques you know, from Google and that's turning into five leads a day or whatever. So something clicks with that where there's it goes from spearfishing to, I think it's what they call it net fishing with a net in essence, right where you're doing a whole group at once because they're they're coming at you faster.
Conor McCarthy 29:13
Hmm. Okay. I love that. Rob, thank you so much. You've got so much deep experience with so many people and through your own personal experience. Thank you for sharing all that. All that wisdom today with us. I will of course include links to microconf and all your projects in the in the shownotes for people to check out. And yeah, thank you very much for for sharing your time today.
Robert Walling 29:36
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.