125: Rob Walling - Choosing the Right Product Idea

Topics include:

• Brainstorming ideas vs. paying attention to your own problems
• Why it's smart to start with a product that might never make a million dollars a year
• Should you avoid markets with competition?
• Why it's a good idea to build something for fewer people
• Strategies for figuring out how many people have the problem you're trying to solve
• Why you should start marketing before you start building
• When should you start charging money for your product?
• Why getting 1,000 customers is extremely hard and how that affects your pricing
• Why you don't need an audience to build a software product

Sponsors:

• Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free
• DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack

Links:

• Rob's website
• Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob's podcast
• Drip, the last software business Rob built
• TinySeed, Rob's startup accelerator for bootstrappers
• MicroConf, the conference Rob organizes
• "The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping"
• "Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding"
• "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg
• "SaaS Marketing Essentials" by Ryan Battles
• "Start Small, Stay Small", Rob's book