Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Rob Walling.
Rob is the founder of email marketing tool Drip and the owner of SEO keyword tool Hittel.
He's also the author of the book Start Small, Stay, A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup.
And his blog, Software by Rob, is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Walling (00:54.090)
Thanks very much for having me.
It's my pleasure, Omer.
Omer (00:56.250)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and your business.
Tell us a little bit more about yourself personally, who is Rob when he's not working?
Rob Walling (01:05.530)
Well, I have been married for almost 15 years.
I have two young boys, 4 and 8 years old, and I live in Central Valley, California, in Fresno.
And when, you know, when I'm not working, I love, I like playing my guitar.
We go to the coast a lot and hang out by the beach and spend a lot of time with my kids, to be honest, teaching them.
And love playing games, tabletop games and card games.
Omer (01:29.910)
Great.
You know, I've got two kids, a boy and a girl, who are six and nine, so they're kind of a similar age.
And I don't know about you, but ever since I've had kids, it just feels like the clock is ticking and time seems to pass faster and you suddenly have this sense of urgency and you want to spend as much time with them as you possibly can.
Rob Walling (01:49.030)
Absolutely.
Omer (01:50.550)
Until they drive you nuts, then.
Rob Walling (01:52.310)
Yeah.
My wife keeps reminding me, like, we only have these few years and then they're, you know, by the time they turn certain age 15 or whatever, they're just not going to want to have anything to do with us for a while.
So, like, take advantage of this time while we can, so.
Omer (02:03.640)
Exactly.
All right, now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Rob Walling (02:12.520)
I like this quote from Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, and he says, don't play games that you don't understand, even if you see other people making money from them.
Omer (02:22.920)
Why is that an important quote for you?
Rob Walling (02:27.830)
You know, I think there's, there's a lot of kind of quote unquote magic that goes on certainly in the, in the financial world in general.
And the business world, but specifically in the startup space, there's a lot of people that start apps with the idea that it's going to be sold to Google at some point or that it's going to have a multimillion dollar exit.
But it's kind of a just a wispy, no revenue model, business to consumer idea that, that needs a hundred things to fall into place in order for it to work.
And yes, 1 in 10,000 of those actually works and someone from them.
But I don't understand how that works and I just don't think that it's a viable solution or viable entrepreneurial approach for 99.9% of people who actually want to start a company.
Omer (03:08.050)
Yeah, I like that quote.
And I actually met him, Tony Hsieh, on a Alaska Airlines flight coming back to Seattle.
And surprisingly, he was sitting in the middle seat in coach.
Rob Walling (03:21.650)
I was like, wow, that sounds like him though.
Like he has that, that down to earth nature, you know?
Omer (03:27.240)
Yeah, yeah.
All right, let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of Drip.
Who are your target customers and what are the pain points that you're trying to solve for them?
Rob Walling (03:40.200)
Sure.
So Drip is software as a service application.
It's lightweight marketing automation.
So it's email marketing ratcheted up to 11.
And the markets that it's resonated with the most are other software founders, entrepreneurs, SaaS, companies.
There's a lot of software as a service, companies using it and then folks who are selling like training, you know, used to call them info product marketers, but it's people selling, you know, that have a blog and then are marketing, you know, an ebook or some type of monthly meal plans and that kind of stuff seems to really work, work well for those bases.
And then consultants are also a pretty big piece of it.
And I'll stop there.
Omer (04:26.920)
So how is Drip better or different than what's already available in the market today?
Rob Walling (04:32.440)
Sure, yeah.
You know, email marketing has been around for what, 15, 20 years now.
And it's been pretty stagnant.
Like there really haven't been very many dramatic changes recently.
And this move into marketing automation is I believe, the next wave of email marketing.
And so Drip kind of sits on the shoulders of the, you know, a lot of the email marketing stuff we think about like mailchimp, aweber, constant contact.
And it uses things like tagging where you can, you have a single big list of subscribers where an email address equals a person, it's not their email address.
On five different lists in your account, it looks like Five different people and you can't reconcile all their actions.
Like Drip puts them all in one big bucket.
You have a single list for your whole, your whole thing.
And then you can tag them, you can track events that they do.
So if someone visits your pricing page, if someone buys something from you, all that goes in and kind of builds a, like a profile, it builds activity and shows you things they've done.
Then you can use that to, to segment them out.
You can send a one off email only to people who have visited your pricing page but not become a customer.
And you know, you send them a Black Friday this and that and you can give them a discount or you can send it to all of your customers who have visited your upgrade page but have not upgraded.
You can set that up to do one time or you could frankly do it, you know, every week I want anyone in the last week who's done this to, to receive something.
So it's, it's adding intelligence to email marketing.
It's not sending static email newsletters anymore.
It's actually allowing us to have much more insight into what people are doing and to move from this one to many communication to one to few, where you can personalize the message based on who they are and what they've done.
Omer (06:13.450)
So it sounds very similar to something like infusionsoft but without the price tag.
Rob Walling (06:21.350)
Exactly.
That's right.
So marketing automation is a, is a, you know, a whole segment.
Right.
And you have HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Ontraport, Marketo Pardot, there's, there's several of them.
They have traditionally started in the.
Most of them started about $800 a month and go up.
Infusionsoft is one of the less expensive tools and I'm pretty sure it's still $300 and up.
And there's a $2,000 upfront fee to get started.
So that's the gap between mailchimp and infusionsoft is where Drip fits.
It has a lot, you know, it has all the marketing, most of the marketing automation stuff that infusionsoft does, but it's without the price tag.
And we try to make it much simpler and easier to use.
I mean, I know that's overused, but we are, we're a software shop.
Like we know how to build really good ux and that's what Drip focuses on.
Omer (07:10.590)
Yeah, and I think that's one of the, some of the feedback that I've heard about something like infusionsoft is, you know, people, people sort of are behind the idea of market automation and see the value.
But they also, you know, quite often talk about having to hire a consultant to come in and help them get it set up before it really works for them the way that they want.
Rob Walling (07:32.110)
Right.
And we're trying to bridge that gap and just bring the barrier down a little bit, you know, in price point and in terms of complexity of getting set up.
And we have a, I mean we start at 50 bucks and we have a lot of folks using it who, you know, are new to marketing automation and they're just getting into it for the first time and, and we're kind of helping them along.
Omer (07:49.470)
Now you bootstrapped and launched Drip near the end of 2013.
How much money did you put into launching the first version of the product?
Rob Walling (08:00.910)
You know, it's, it's hard to say because my salary is come comes out of the parent company.
Like my company is called the NUMA Group and it owns a number of things.
You know, it owns half of a microcon and it owns, which is a conference for self funded startups and it owns Hit Tail and it owns this other stuff.
And I work on all of those things.
So.
But I did spend a lot of time working on Drip.
And so if you include my salary and the developer who worked full time on it and all the other marketing stuff, I would say I was in about 100, more than $100,000, maybe 150.
Omer (08:38.730)
Okay.
Why did you decide to get into this business, into this particular product?
Rob Walling (08:44.670)
Yeah, that's a really good question actually, to be honest.
I saw a market need and it was not in the marketing automation space because I really wasn't that familiar with it, but I wanted to do something much simpler and I was trying to go after a single feature SaaS app and I just wanted to be able to easily capture emails.
Like this was before Sumo me, you know, the little sumo pop up come out.
It was before OptinMonster.
So it was actually kind of a pain to easily capture emails without going and editing every page on your site.
And so I wanted to build this little pop up toaster widget in the lower right, it's like an Olark chat window and allow it to capture emails and then have you super, super easy be able to get an email mini course up lead, just a lead nurturing mini course.
And that was the original idea.
So I wanted to get into that space because I knew like we had a need for it.
I had asked 17 different founder friends of mine if they had a need and 10 of them said yes.
I would pay for that service.
And so that's the original product that launched at the end of 2013.
Omer (09:44.090)
Okay, so in your first month, you generated over $7,000 in recurring revenue.
Rob Walling (09:50.650)
Correct.
Omer (09:52.810)
How were you able to generate that much in your first month?
Rob Walling (09:57.050)
It's because I started marketing the day we started coding.
And really, you know, co development took a good solid.
It was halftime for a while, but it was, let's say it was about six months before we really started getting a customer into production.
And then there was a slow launch period of about four and a half months where I was getting one new customer a week into the product, but it was not live during that entire time.
So say that's 11 months, 12 months.
I was marketing.
I mean, I was running Facebook ads to a landing page.
I was talking about it on podcasts.
I was writing about it.
I mean, just everywhere I could spread the word, I was doing so and so I had an email launch list of interested people that was about 3,500 people.
And so when, when I launched to them, that's why the revenue spiked up so quickly.
Omer (10:48.120)
That's awesome.
Yeah.
You know, I think that, you know, personally, for me, I've probably spent the last four or five years really trying to get deep in marketing
Rob Walling (11:02.870)
and, you
Omer (11:05.310)
know, just, just basically trying to, to, to, to get some mastery there.
Right.
I mean, it's such an important part of, of running any business.
And I would say that I credit my, you know, my background was initially as a developer.
I worked them most of my career as, you know, in product management.
And I got into marketing because of this guy called Rob Walling, I think.
Rob Walling (11:30.550)
Oh, wow.
Omer (11:31.190)
You know, I read your book years ago and I still, I mean, I probably paraphrase it badly, but I think there was something in there about, hey, you know, your priority should be like 1, 2 and 3 should be marketing, and then you should be thinking about the product.
And that one, I think was like the first wake up call for me.
So always want to thank you for that.
So I finally got the chance to do that.
Rob Walling (11:49.380)
Thanks.
Wow, I really appreciate that.
That means a lot, actually.
I mean, that's.
That means a lot to hear, you know, when it impacts someone's life like that.
That's really cool.
Omer (11:58.700)
All right, so the next few months you generated, you know, pretty decent revenue as well.
And I think most entrepreneurs would have been really happy about that.
But you realize you started to see a problem.
What was that?
Rob Walling (12:12.600)
The problem was that I continued to market.
People continued to come in and sign up for Drip.
But there was enough churn that there was no growth.
And I knew that the PR I couldn't scale the product up from 7,000.
Maybe I could pump a bunch of trials into it and get up to 10 or 15, but I knew that it would never scale up to where I wanted it to go.
And so the churn issue, the cause of that was it just wasn't solving enough of a pain point that there was enough overlap with existing tools that there wasn't a compelling enough reason for everyone to stick around, which is really what you need if you're going to get to that point of starting to ratchet up marketing and actually scale a business.
Omer (12:57.830)
So how did you go about figuring that out?
Rob Walling (13:00.630)
Well, you mean figuring out how to fix it?
Omer (13:02.870)
Well, I guess figuring out exactly what the problem was.
You saw the churn and how did you figure out it was because it wasn't a painful enough problem for these guys.
Rob Walling (13:13.350)
There were two things that kept happening.
One, we would get a lot of pre sales emails for people asking would I use this, Should I use this with mailchimp or.
Or should I use it instead of mailchimp or you know, should I use that?
How does this compare to aweber or how are you different from constant contact?
And so we get questions like that.
And it made me realize that we weren't differentiated enough in the space that even if I could explain all of that in a couple of paragraphs, that's just, it's too long.
Like the fact that we were getting all of those questions and then I didn't have a simple answer showed me that we had a bit of an issue.
The second thing is whenever anyone cancels, we fight, you know, using marketing automation.
We fire off an email from me and it says, hey, just I have a quick question.
If you could just reply even with one sentence and let me know why you decided to cancel.
It would be really helpful to me as the founder to figure out how to improve the product.
And I was getting.
And that's a really effective way to do it by the way.
I have.
Since I have, I stick with that.
I've abandoned the whole thing of having the text area, you know, required text field when they cancel.
Because a lot of people are mad when they're canceling or they're just in a hurry and they want to cancel.
But if they get an email later, they will often reply to that.
That's just kind of our nature.
So I've had better results with this approach.
But a lot of those responses were similar.
They Were kind of like, don't see the difference, you know, don't see the value over mailchimp.
And you know, you're charging 50 bucks a month and I can get, I can cobble this together with some other tools.
Right.
So it just, it wasn't quite differentiated enough.
Didn't, I don't think it solved a big enough problem.
Omer (14:44.050)
So, okay, so you figured out that it's not painful enough, it's not a big enough problem, and then what did you do next?
Rob Walling (14:51.430)
Well, I really listened to the customers because there are some knowledgeable folks that are going to be using your product when you launch it.
And those knowledgeable folks tend to have some pretty decent insight into where the product should go.
And so I was getting feedback both from colleagues I knew, but also from people I didn't know.
But I knew they were, I knew they were smart and I knew that they were good marketers.
And they were saying, have you thought about moving into this space?
You know, could you come in under, under priced of infusionsoft, you know, and build a better version of it?
Could you.
Or even there were simple requests like I want to move people from this one campaign to the other based on them clicking a link.
Right.
So that's like a core tenet of marketing automation is like being able to automate people and move, move or I'm sorry, automate a movement like that.
And so I saw it coming from all these different angles of like basic feature requests saying people want some simple things and then more knowledgeable people saying, hey, this market, it's, it's growing and there's really no great competitor at this price point.
And so that was a big decision because to be honest, I did not, I didn't want to go into the marketing automation space.
Omer (16:00.170)
Why not?
Because of the investment in.
Required in something like.
Rob Walling (16:04.650)
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, if you look at that space, it's a, it's, it's a mess.
I mean there's, it's a lot of very well funded competitors, many of whom, I mean, the Infusionsofts raised $46 million or something.
I mean, it's nuts, right?
And a lot of these guys are doing big time outbound sales.
They just, they chew up all the AdWords.
I mean, AdWords are 25 bucks a click.
You know, it's that, it's that kind of market where it's really just a shark and shark infested waters.
And I also looked at it as a pretty complex thing to build.
I mean, it was it was, you know, wound up taking about four or five full time months of engineering to get it done.
I thought it would be a little shorter than that, but I just didn't know if I wanted to go down this road, to be frank.
Omer (16:47.460)
So looking back, do you feel that there was something that you wish you could have done differently to figure out this issue sooner?
Rob Walling (16:59.620)
Possibly.
I've traced it back because my lead developer, Derek and I had a call every week and we recorded all of them and then I edited all those calls down into about a two hour, essentially like an audio documentary of our time.
I released that.
It's@startupstoriespodcast.com if folks want to hear it.
But it's pretty an interesting journey.
It's about 10 months and it's two hours.
So it just skips, you know, there'd be a five minute conversation and then it skips to the next one and I put music in between them and stuff it's.
But I've listened to that and then I listen through all the audio and I genuinely don't know, maybe I'm not smart enough.
I just don't know what I would have done differently to suss this out.
Like I validated the idea people in the end did buy.
I did get to 7,000 in revenue which you know, had I been working a full time job I probably would have quit my job at that point.
So I feel like it was a success in terms of what I know how to do, which is launching small bootstrapped apps that make a small amount of money.
But it was, I guess with every product I've ever had there's three phases to it and there's always the building and then there's learning and then there's scaling.
And so I like to validate and then build something and however many months that takes, that's always pretty fun.
The learning part is always agonizing.
That's pretty much once you get people starting to use it until you get to the point where you, where you have reduced churn and you've really built something people want.
It's commonly known as product market fit, so I can use that term here.
But that learning phase is agonizing no matter how short or long it is.
And every product I've had, I don't know how to do it without having that phase.
And for me launching to 7,000 and then the next five and a half, six months as we did like this mini pivot into marketing automation, that was my learning period.
So I, I did expect that it was coming, didn't know how long it would be.
Doesn't make it any easier than I expected it was coming.
But it did make it possible for me to persevere through it, you know, and not, not kind of give up.
A few months in.
Omer (18:59.190)
Did you do a talk, was there a microconf video where you talked a little bit about the building, learning, scaling?
Rob Walling (19:05.030)
Yes, that's right.
I talked about it in the context of hit specifically, which is the previous SaaS app that I did the same thing where I built it.
And then learning is just like learning who your market is, who does this resonate with, what positioning do you need, what headlines work, how do you retain people, all that stuff.
And then once there's a certain point where it just feels right and it's like, wow, all this stuff's firing.
All the metrics are in the right place from there, that's when you really try to scale it up.
And so yeah, it's from Microconf Vegas 24, 2013 I think.
Omer (19:37.700)
Okay, cool, I'll find it.
I'll include it in the show notes.
Okay, so you, you know, revenues flatlining, you're getting this feedback for maybe a different type of product or a different type of problem.
What did you do next?
Rob Walling (19:57.460)
Well, I mean I had a lot, I did a lot of soul searching and a lot of conversations with my lead developer, Derek and we just talked about, you know, do, do we want to do this?
I mean, do, do I want to bite this off?
And in the end I realized that, that there was a real opportunity here.
To be honest, I think I could have grown drip without going into marketing automation, but I would have had to do something right.
I would have had to pivot into some market.
And I saw that marketing automation, I did some research, it's growing very quickly and it seemed like there was a lot.
I actually went to microconf and there were a lot of people that were just getting into it that were.
It was just starting to enter my space, this self funded startup space.
People were signing up for Infusionsoft, looking at OnTraport and that kind of keyed me in of like, oh, I think this is a coming wave.
You know, this is something that's, that I'm, I could potentially get just out ahead of.
And so that's when I took the plunge and I just made the decision that like, we're going to go all in on this and let's start, let's map out what we need to build to get a basic 1.0 and then let's start writing code.
Omer (20:59.290)
And when was this?
Rob Walling (21:00.890)
That was, I think it was late December of 2013.
We essentially launched to the public in late November.
And it was either late December or maybe the first couple weeks of January that we really specced everything out and started coding it.
Omer (21:15.210)
Okay, and then so you started working on drip 2.0, which you launched later in the summer.
Rob Walling (21:23.770)
Yeah, yeah, it's.
We released it over time as we built different rules, but I really publicized it and went public with the whole marketing automation thing.
I think it was the end of July, so that would almost be what, seven months.
But we really, it was really around May where we started pushing it to existing customers and the uptake was, was noticeable.
People churn actually started going down.
People started getting more value out of it right away.
And we got positive feedback instantly.
That was very helpful.
Right.
To have spent this 5 months kind hacking away at this thing and then right away to start getting some positive feedback was, was good for my psyche.
Omer (22:00.630)
Now you wrote a blog post back in July where you said that, you know, I'm in the midst of the biggest gamble of my career.
For folks who haven't read that, what was going through your head at the time?
Rob Walling (22:15.270)
Well, it was a little bit of what I've been talking about so far.
I mean it was, it was like, here I am, a self funded mini startup, just two of us really, plus our support guy, and I'm going to enter this market against giants infusionsoft and Pardot and Marketo and all these things.
And it's frankly the biggest, most competitive market I've ever entered.
It's probably the most ambitious project I've ever undertaken in terms of building an app from scratch that's this complex and this large.
We run on, I think we now have 10 different servers, you know, running on Amazon EC2.
We spend a lot of money on infrastructure.
I mean it is a, it's not a traditional, you know, Solo founder SaaS app.
I mean this is much more of a, of an actual complex application.
And so all that was going through my head and I was just kind of, I was thinking that through and obviously that creates anxiety in you as you think about it.
And so that's, I was putting that on paper and that's what that blog post was.
Omer (23:19.430)
What was the most challenging time for you over the last year?
Rob Walling (23:25.670)
Well, it would have to be.
Right around the December, January time frame where we decided to make this, to make this move because at that point I'm making a big commitment that I'm not going to know and I'm not going to know when it pays off.
I mean, it's months down the line where I'm going to see if I'm right.
And I hate that kind of stuff.
I like to validate as much as I can early on and I just, I didn't know how else to proceed so I kind of had to take a gamble.
And that was tough.
It was tough to wait that it was about 90 days to 120 days before we started getting a feature out.
And I didn't have much to do because as a marketer I didn't want to drive traffic because it's all just going to bleed out the bottom of the funnel.
So that was, it was kind of like I did stuff, but I felt like I was sitting on my hands a little bit and just waiting to see if it worked.
So those were tough days.
Omer (24:20.660)
Okay, so you launched in July.
Early feedback was good.
And then what happened?
Rob Walling (24:28.500)
Things took off like a rock.
Like a rocket.
Yeah, it was noticeable.
I mean, I think it started growing by 2 and $3,000 a month of recurring revenue every month since then.
It was substantial.
And I put the pedal to the metal.
I mean, I don't want to act like just releasing the feature was enough, you know, releasing this marketing automation stuff.
I mean, we've been working hard.
My team is now, it's five of us full time.
There's three full time developers like we are.
We release multiple features per week, sometimes multiple per day.
So we are hustling here.
It's not like it was done in July and then I was behind the scenes for most of that seven months.
I was preparing tons of marketing stuff, you know, email sequences and blog posts and getting content set up and getting my ads, you know, set up and retargeting and I mean, just all this stuff.
So when it came time to do that, I just let the crossbow, you know, I had pulled back on the crossbow for months and I just let it go and that it was, it was definitely vindication.
My biggest concern was that it wouldn't continue.
You know, I had this great spike, end of July, August, awesome growth.
But then I was like, is it going to, is this sustainable?
Because that's the real challenge, right?
It's easy to do some big launch and get a bunch of trials in.
But can you reliably bring new trials in and continue to convert them and not have churn spike through the roof?
Omer (25:48.660)
What's your monthly recurring revenue looking like right now?
Rob Walling (25:51.620)
It is, should be about it's February.
I think It'll be at 26,000 by the end of the month.
Omer (25:59.300)
Wow, that's a huge improvement.
Rob Walling (26:01.980)
It's doing really well.
I'm feeling good.
Omer (26:04.500)
And is it still continuing to grow?
Rob Walling (26:06.660)
It is, yeah.
It grew by 3,000 last month, 3,000 the month before.
I don't know that, you know, I'm.
I don't like to project, so I'm not going to say it's going to keep doing that because I'm pretty conservative.
But I see the path of how to continue that for the foreseeable future.
I will hit a.
You hit a plateau eventually, right?
Because your churn will just at a.
At a certain tri level.
With a certain level of churn, you just mathematically can't get past it.
And I.
But that level's, you know, 3 or 4x where I am now.
So I think I'm going to keep hitting it hard with what I'm doing because it's certainly working.
Omer (26:38.420)
Is there one particular thing in your business that you're most excited about right now as you look towards the rest of 2015?
Rob Walling (26:51.140)
That's an interesting question.
I'm excited that we.
I love actively developing new things, meaning within the product itself.
Like we just launched lead scoring a week or two ago and it is so cool.
I love that I'm using my own product.
Like, I'm such a, you know, a marketer anyways and I love email marketing and so be able to just flip the switch on a thing that we just worked on for six weeks and to have it show up in my account.
And my, you know, all my emails are now being lead scored based on how much they interact with my website.
And this is across, you know, my podcast website, you know, and the blog and my book and both Drip and hit Tail so I can see what people are doing.
That is like really exciting to me.
And we have more stuff like that on the way, so I think I'm excited just to be able to use it myself.
And then it's a truly an added bonus when it, you know, hits the hearts of the other customers and allows us to continue growing.
Omer (27:45.110)
So thinking about the.
This, this what you described as to me as a semi pivot, it, you know, it paid off for you and it looks like it's, you know, things are just moving upwards here.
What advice would you give to somebody who is maybe in a similar situation and, you know, maybe is kind of at the stage where they're thinking they may need to pivot, but they haven't quite got there yet.
Rob Walling (28:14.790)
It is a hard time, I'll admit.
I really feel for folks at that point because I was just there, you know, a year ago.
I think the advice I'd have is probably since what I did worked and I would advise to do that, and that is listen to the customers that are requesting things and you think the customer knows what they're talking about, because there were a bunch of.
By the way, I make it sound pretty clear like there were.
We had 100, 200 customers.
There were people requesting off the wall things that had nothing to do with marketing automation.
So we.
There was a job to do there of filtering and trying to focus the request and figure out what the pattern was.
And that's kind of the advice I would give is if people are already paying you, try to figure out which of these are your best market, which of them are most likely to stick around, and which of those, you know, you want to continue working with.
An example is like, we had some bloggers who are just, you know, bulk.
They have these huge lists and they make money with ads or whatever, and they were requesting things that were completely different than say, a SaaS company, you know, or an info marketer who's actually selling products, you know, selling books and ebooks and such.
And we had to make a decision, who do we want to go after, you know, and who do we really want to cater to.
And obviously we went after, you know, the SaaS guys and the consultants and software products and such.
So that I think that's my big piece of advice.
The other one is to try to, as much as you can, once you get this feedback, try to validate as much, you know, as much as possible before you go and spend a bunch of time building things.
Omer (29:44.470)
Yeah, that's great advice.
Or just listen to what Rob tells
Rob Walling (29:47.030)
you to do, and I hope it helps.
Omer (29:50.950)
All right, Rob, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Are you ready?
Rob Walling (29:58.870)
I am.
Omer (29:59.830)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Rob Walling (30:05.440)
It's not to let someone else, be it the media or tech blogs or the cool kids or whatever, set the agenda for your life to figure out why you're.
Why we're doing all of this, figure out why you're doing all of this, and stick to it.
Omer (30:20.240)
I love that one.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Rob Walling (30:25.520)
I actually have two recommendations.
One is called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maris.
And the other is called SaaS Marketing Essentials and it's by Ryan Battles.
I recommend both of them because they're highly, highly focused.
I still listen to business books, high level business books.
They're fun.
They don't actually help move your business forward.
In general.
These books, if you really are growing like a SaaS app or a B2B app, these things will give you actual tactics that will move you forward.
Omer (30:56.840)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Rob Walling (31:02.920)
It's obsession.
It's being obsessed with details, so making screens look amazing, making sure there aren't bugs.
And it's being obsessed with pushing something forward.
Right.
Being obsessed with the product.
I think about my product when I'm doing dishes, when I'm in the shower, on my drive into work.
I think that's a big piece of it.
Omer (31:24.040)
That's great advice.
You know, I interviewed Peter Coppinger the other day who is the co founder and CEO of Teamwork.
They're an Irish based company and you know, they bootstrapped that this business and they're on track to do, I think like $15 million this year.
And, and he kind of talked about something similar, what you were talking about where, you know, I just said, you know, hey, you know, you see an opportunity and you kind of think you can, you know, a lot of people see opportunities that they think they could do better, but doesn't mean they can actually execute on that.
And what makes you think that you could do that?
And his answer was pretty much the same in terms of, you know, I would eat, sleep, kind of this thing until I got it right, you know, so it's a very powerful attribute to have.
Rob Walling (32:10.160)
Yeah.
And it's interesting because I don't, I don't actually work that many hours in a week.
Right.
I look, I work less than full time and I have for the past five or six years because that's a personal goal of mine and a personal, just a thing, a choice I've made to be with my family.
But I am still obsessed with my product.
Even though I'm not working 70 hour weeks.
I'm all over it and I think about it a lot.
Omer (32:31.040)
Which leads nicely into our next question, which is what's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Rob Walling (32:36.960)
The one that I pull out the most when I find that I'm not being productive or I'm procrastinating is I take a measured dose of coffee or cappuccino and then I loop a single song over and over and over and loop it and it gets me into the zone and I can lose hours and hours and just fall into total work mode when I do that.
Omer (32:59.040)
You think it's the music or the coffee?
Rob Walling (33:00.880)
I think it's the combination of both.
Omer (33:04.800)
All right, if you had to start over tomorrow, how would, what type of business, market or problem would you go and tackle?
Rob Walling (33:16.320)
This is a tough one for me.
I mean, I, I really enjoy like working with interesting people doing interesting things like that just excites me.
And so that group that I resonate with, that fits that description is really people starting things as founders.
So I would want to somehow be involved with that market kind of like I am today.
So it's like educating and mentoring.
I believe we are at an unprecedented time in history.
Founders are the people who are changing the world.
Even those of us who are doing these small, tiny, self funded business like we're still making a difference.
And those are the folks who I want to be around and associate with.
Omer (33:55.870)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Rob Walling (34:00.750)
Well, I mean, I've played the guitar for about 20 years and I've been a guitarist and a lead vocalist for a couple of different bands.
An acoustic rock band in Sacramento and then a punk band down in Pasadena.
A very short lived punk band, but we did play out.
Omer (34:15.550)
Wow.
Rob Walling (34:16.220)
I don't talk about that much.
Omer (34:18.860)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Rob Walling (34:23.980)
It is going to sound cheesy, but it's.
It is spending time with my kids and, and being able to be there for them, you know, by not working full time.
I spend a lot of time with them and I'm just teaching them.
My wife and I both teach them the life lessons and that's.
That's something that I would.
I will never.
I can't imagine I will ever regret this time of my life and this decision that I've made to not go after the big moonshot startup, but instead to focus on the folks that are at home.
Omer (34:54.530)
Great answers.
Robert, I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
As I mentioned, I've been following you for many years, so it was really nice to be able to actually get some time and talk with you at length.
So thank you.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Drip, they can go to getdrip.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Rob Walling (35:25.510)
Twitter is a great place.
I'm on it once a day and I'm obwalling.
Omer (35:31.670)
Awesome.
Rob.
Thanks again.
I wish you continued success.
Rob Walling (35:35.430)
Indeed.
Thank you for having me on.
Cheers.
