Rob Walling
General Partner & Co-founder, TinySeed. On 3 shows, 315 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorhostauthor@robwalling ↗LinkedIn ↗robwalling.com ↗
Rob Walling co-founded the accelerator TinySeed and the founder community MicroConf, after bootstrapping email marketing platform Drip to acquisition. He also hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us and has authored multiple books on SaaS.
3shows
315appearances
1,542statements
145resolved
106supported
17contradicted
73%fully supported
12said about them ↓ Everything Rob Walling said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Privacy purists on forums are 'assholes' about bulk email being spam
“There are privacy purists on the internet who say anytime any bulk email is spam, and they're just assholes about it, you know, and we would get this complaint all the time, and we'd have these people who were either, they were so far off in their perception o…”
Startups sacrificing code quality for speed often stall at $1M–$5M ARR
“Who hires a dev or has kind of a minority technical co-founder and they drive them and push them to write code faster and faster and faster and the code is and then they get to a 1,000,003 1,000,005 million in ARR and they stop. They lock up. You can't build f…”
Walling: Lifestyle bootstrapped businesses should never take outside investment
“If you're, if you truly want a lifestyle bootstrap, go do that, but know that your co-founder should be on the same page and don't take investment. If you're going to do that, just don't take it. There is no, the numbers don't work.”
Acquirers value growth over profitability for break-even, multi-million ARR SaaS
“Private equity and strategic acquirers, they don't care very much at all about profitability. Now, if you lose, if you're losing buckets of money, of course, but if you're running at break even and you're doubling every year and you're in the millions, people …”
Walling: TinySeed Considers a $10M Exit an Acceptable Minimum Outcome
“I like to think of our minimum as around a ten million dollar exit. If you decide to sell 10 twenties that that works, right? We'd love to see fifty million, but yeah, if you sold for ten million, well, all right, cool.”
Walling: Solo founders cannot successfully build a Drip competitor today
“To build Drip today, years of development as a solo developer, that you cannot get anyone to sign up. So that, those are amazing markets if you have funding or if you have, you know, multiple people working on it.”
Walling: Bootstrappers should avoid B2C subscriptions due to high churn
“Like, I just am so bullish on B to B and really bearish on B to C. Not only because I've owned, I think, two or three products or companies, one was an e-com site, that served consumers, but because every B to C company, specifically a subscription company tha…”
Walling: TinySeed will generate venture-like returns from $10M–$100M outcomes
“I don't think we will have a billion dollar outcome. I just don't see that being reasonable. I think we'll have a lot of 10 to 50, 10 to a hundred million dollar outcomes, and the number, we've run a bunch of models, and in fact, if you go to tinyc.com slash t…”
Walling: 100x pricing when enterprise buyers demand redlines and SSO
“The moment someone approaches you, a potential customer, and says, Cool. We like your software. We need to redline your terms of service, or we need to invoice with POs, or we need single sign-on, or we need a Salesforce integration, or we need, there's this w…”
QuickBooks and most Intuit software products are 'pretty crappy'
“I think QuickBooks is a really crappy piece of software, and I think most of what Intuit makes is pretty crappy”
Walling: Toptal founders extracted profits while early noteholders received no equity
“There's actually, isn't it, it's top towel, I believe, where they, Raise money on safe's convertible notes. They never raised another round. They haven't sold. And so all the investors don't technically own the equity and the founder can actually literally leg…”
Walling: Steve Jobs was not a great product person early on
“He was not a great product person in the early days. It was Wozniak, and obviously Jobs learned this and did become that over time.”
Walling: Clubhouse will fail because Twitter already has network effects
“My prediction is Clubhouse will be done. I know they have this amazing valuation right now, and I say amazing, what is it, billions of dollars, but it's just, for me, it's this typical Silicon Valley FOMO investor thing of everybody wants a piece of it now bec…”
Walling: Forking an enterprise SaaS plan into a separate entity is catastrophic
“To Matthew's question of forking off this higher price plan and making it its own entity. I think that is an absolutely catastrophic idea. I hate it. I hate it with the heat of a thousand burning suns.”
Walling: Selling SaaS lifetime deals penalizes your valuation during an acquisition exit
“Don't sell lifetime deals if you're in SAS. I mean, AppSumo is probably the one exception I would say. And if you're gonna sell, then you disclose when you exit that, Hey, we do have these users and you can, Give reports of this is how much they use on a whate…”
Walling: Info product audiences rarely convert smoothly into SaaS customers
“If you have an audience and you've been selling them books and courses and stuff, and you think that you can sell them software in the same way, almost without exception, it doesn't work out that way. It is much, much, much, much harder to sell a SaaS or softw…”
Walling: Perpetual SaaS affiliate commissions severely erode net profit margins
“SAS net margins kind of at scale are, let's say 30, they're 20 to 50%, 30 to 50%. I mean, if you build a SAS company that's doing ten million bucks a year and it has a 50% net margin, like you are doing very, very, very well in terms of profitability. And if y…”
Avoid business advice from founders who mistreat others
“Don't take business advice from people who have crappy personal lives, and my addition is, or who treat people in a way you don't want to treat people. And the reason I've added that is because, from what I've seen, you can be successful in business and treat …”
Rob Walling: Drip will never become a billion-dollar business
“So yes, drip, I do want to get it bigger, but drip will never be a billion dollar business. It's not, it's just not designed to do that.”
Hired employees cannot find product-market fit for part-time founders
“I haven't seen a company be started by a founder and then part-time focused and just have it magically find product market fit. Team members, employees are not founders unless they are founder level, right? They're, if they're founder level thinker and they ar…”
Aspiring founders without startup ideas should get a day job
“Well then go get a day job. Like, don't make the excuse that you haven't gone and put in the work to get some industry experience, and to get some exposure to problems day to day so that you know how a company works, and that you will inevitably see problems t…”
Founders building 10 products simultaneously to see what sticks will fail
“Don't try to build 10 things and see what sticks, because none of them are going to stick. Surprise! None of them are going to magically take off, and you're not going to learn anything if one of them does.”
Walling: Building 10 Products to See What Sticks Is for Inexperienced Founders
“I don't know of any successful founders who are on their second, third, fourth Effort that build 10 things and see what sticks. I know literally zero. That is an approach for someone who I would say just doesn't know any better.”
The other half of the tape: Rob Walling's own voice is left out of every number here. 12 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Rob Walling, by other people (12)
Steers: Founders under $300K in revenue must handle all sales personally
“If you are in the zero to 300 K, the only things you should be outsourcing are tasks that don't have to do with sales. This is you doing bookkeeping, automation stuff, like you should be doing all of the selling if you're at that level.”
Martell: Intentionally stalling business growth slowly kills the company
“And the truth is, and this is the big one, Rob, as you know, it's like your team wants more opportunity. So if you decide that you want to stall, you're inadvertently slowly dying.”
Vincent: Early startup competition is advantageous because it validates markets
“Competition doesn't matter. In my opinion, when you're talking about the beginning of seeding something, I mean, look at you and drip. I mean, you went into a space that had an insane amount of competition and you just executed and executed and all of a sudden…”
Clouse: Niche content creators typically transition from high-demand one-on-one consulting
“A lot of the times the pathway is these people were known for being good at something. And so they started working with people one on one. And at some point that became unsustainable because there was just more Demand for that time than supply or interest in, …”
Heimanson: Datamove charges customers for custom features while retaining IP
“So this one around, and the way I do it now, Rob, is if someone really wants something really important, they think it's huge, I will give them a proposal for us to build it, they'll pay for it, but I will make it available for every other user of ours.”
Castro: Scripted video presenting requires acting, not just conversational delivery
“The difference between scripted and pre-recorded elements versus kind of the live conversational elements, Is acting. When you're in front of a camera and you have a script and there are peaks and valleys in the direction that that script is taking, you kind o…”
Baldacci: Stair-stepping bootstraps recurring revenue through progressive product complexity
“Stair stepping is an incremental approach to get you to the point of replacing your income and quitting your job with a higher than normal success rate. As Rob laid it out, it starts off with one off sales using a single channel and works up to the holy grail …”
Rob Walling's SaaS Playbook Kickstarter surpassed $80,000 before campaign ended
“I mean, you've got like, I think another week to go on the Kickstarter, and it's already at 80,000 dollars, so it's more than recouped your initial investment.”
Wensing: Summit V2 rewrite immediately converted target-persona founders into customers
“So I think the short answer is yes, but I'll qualify that by saying I took it then to the customers that I was essentially targeting with this rewrite, right? I took it to them basically as soon as it was ready. And I said, aha, here's the flexibility you've b…”
Gall: Drip reached $10k MRR in about 60 days
“To watch you get to 10 K and MRR in like 60 days really showed the power of an audience, you know, and we still see that these days.”
Cabasso: Postaga free plan uses email signature footers for viral growth
“So for everyone listening so in Postaga's free plan, there is a footer in your email signature that says P.S. Sent with Postaga, and some people have pitched Rob to be guests on this podcast using Postaga.”
Suhm: TinySeed backed WP Pusher after Walling passed in 2015
“Five years ago in 2015, I pitched him on investing in WP pusher when I hit one K. And the funny thing is I got a very nice reply back that said, Congrats on the progress. Hit me up when you reached 10 K, but today Rob is kind of actually an investor in WP push…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Rob's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | General Partner & Co-founder, TinySeedhost | 313 | 1,523 | 73% 103/141 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
 MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | General Partner & Co-founder, TinySeed | 1 | 16 | 67% 2/3 | full record on My First Million → |
 MIXERGYLEDGER | General Partner & Co-founder, TinySeed | 1 | 3 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Mixergy → |