Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 733 | Good vs. Bad Distractions, Weaknesses vs. Blind Spots, And Everyone Struggles (A Rob Solo Adventure)
Tue, 01 Oct 2024
In episode 733, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers several topics. In this episode he differentiates between good and bad distractions, weaknesses versus blind spots, and shares personal experiences of struggle. He concludes with actionable advice – uncover the blind spots, then launch, iterate, and take feedback. Topics we cover: 2:09 – Not all distractions are bad 5:42 – The worst distractions masquerade as productivity 9:48 – Weaknesses versus blind spots 16:41 – Everybody struggles 24:40 – Launch, iterate, and take feedback Links from the Show: The SaaS Launchpad The SaaS Playbook MicroConf Connect The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books by Rob Walling Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares Episode 725 | SEO in the Age of AI, Freemium, When Brand Becomes Important, and More Advanced Listener Questions (with Ruben Gamez) Launch. A Startup Documentary. If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
And I had this epiphany on the spot, and I'd never said this before. I said, weaknesses are fine. We all have strengths and weaknesses. You don't want blind spots. A blind spot is a weakness that you're not aware of. When you have a weakness and you know about it, you can work around it. If you're the founder who bounces from one thing to the next to the next,
who follows each distraction, and you realize, you know what? I'm never going to focus on anything long enough to build something great, then you can acknowledge that weakness and stick with things longer than you think you should. But if you're not aware of it, how can you work around it? another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. As always, I'm your host, Rob Walling.
This week, I'm flying solo. As I talk through a few topics I've been mulling over these past few weeks and months. The first one is going to be about distractions, good distractions, bad distractions, micro macro, and talking about how to avoid the ones that will derail your plans. I also want to talk about weaknesses versus blind spots.
I want to look at how everyone, even the successful founders around you, struggle. And then if we have time, I'm going to cover a topic about how you don't have to be right all the time. In fact, you don't even need to be right the vast majority of the time to be successful. Before I dive into the topics, if you haven't picked up a copy of the SaaS Playbook, it has sold just about 30,000 copies.
I actually haven't run the numbers in about a month, and last I checked, it was at about 29,000. The book is selling really well, and the reviews and ratings and comments, both on xTwitter, Amazon, and other places, are really encouraging, and it seems the book is resonating with a lot of people. If you haven't picked it up, sasplaybook.com or you can get it on Amazon or Audible.
If you have picked it up, I would love it if you'd leave me a five-star review on Amazon or Audible. That helps people find the book and it helps people gauge whether it's going to be helpful for them. And with that, let's dive in to my first topic about distractions. I was going to title this segment, How to Stay Focused, even when there are things around you that you'd prefer to be doing.
What I realized is all distractions are not bad. So I have a couple dichotomies in this section that I want to talk through. The first is I do think there are quote-unquote good distractions. There are distractions that help your mental health. There are distractions that make you happy. There are distractions that have long-term benefits that that might distract you from your goals.
Your goal is to launch a company or build a company to 5, 10, 15 million, wherever you're going. And a quote unquote distraction is anything that maybe you have to spend time doing that isn't that. And examples of good distractions are going outside, going for a walk. working out, spending time with your family, your kids.
Now, you might be saying, Rob, spending time with my family, my kids, my spouse, that's not a distraction. It's not. I don't view it as that in my worldview per se. But if we're looking at a technical definition of your goal is to do X, anything that isn't getting there is, you know, you could phrase it as a distraction from that.
Even having a lovely conversation with a friend when you should be focused on shipping a podcast episode could be a good distraction. That's actually what happened to me with this particular episode. It was Friday afternoon and I wanted to ship this episode. so that our editor could start getting it ready.
And I was having a delightful conversation that wasn't getting me towards this goal of shipping this episode. But I asked myself, what is the cost of engaging with this distraction? And that's the thing that I want you to ask yourself about every distraction that comes up from here and for the rest of your life. Can you imagine if I could actually have that impact on your life? That'd be great.
But even for the next day or the next week, what is the cost? of engaging with this distraction? And what is the benefit of engaging with it? The benefit of spending time with your spouse or your kids or people you love is scientifically proven. Humans are so community and relationship driven. There are all kinds of benefits. What is the cost?
Well, the cost is I can't spend that time working on my product or my business or getting that podcast episode shipped. And so as long as you do it in moderation, you're fine. You know, you spend an hour or two hours or three hours doing something that is quote unquote a distraction. You can get your work done. You can get your stuff done.
If you spend 30, 40, 50 hours a week, you know, you know, some folks who get addicted to video games or addicted to a substance, addicted to alcohol, and they use these things as a distraction. That's when it breaks down is when it moves from moderation to perhaps overindulgence. So when you ask yourself, what is the cost of engaging with this distraction?
Well, if it's a half hour conversation with a friend, if it's an hour or two with family, friends, or kids, in a lot of cases, that's going to be the right call. The benefit outweighs the cost in those instances. But then let's look at... playing video games 30, 40, 50 hours a week, what is the cost of that? Well, it's pretty significant. I imagine it's going to take a toll on relationships.
It's going to take a toll on your ability to push your business forward. And while there is benefit to playing a video game or having an old-fashioned on a Friday afternoon, there is benefit to these activities that make you happy. Might be good for your mental health. They might put you around people that you enjoy spending time with.
It comes back to this moderation and the cost of engaging with something for an hour versus 10 hours is much different. Now I've talked a lot about in the moment distractions. I might call these micro distractions where it's spending time with someone and playing video games, whatever, versus macro. So what are macro distractions? These are bigger decisions. Let's launch an entirely new product.
Let's translate our app into Spanish. Let's make a huge strategic decision that is going to take months and months and hundreds of person hours to implement. Even building a side project when your first effort, your startup, isn't growing as fast as you want it to be. Is that distraction a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I'll come back to this. Number one, is it in moderation?
And two, what is the cost of engaging with this potential distraction? And the macro ones are a little trickier because the worst distractions masquerade as productivity. I want to say that again. The worst distractions masquerade as productivity.
Because if I know it's a distraction, if I know, again, it's playing video games, it's, you know, anything I do for a hobby, I would say, oh, it's a distraction from work. Again, that's not my worldview, but, you know, let's be very black and white about it in this segment. And if it's obvious, and I know it's a distraction, it's okay.
But I see a lot of entrepreneurs who think that reading more business books, reading Hard Thing About Hard Things, or a biography about an entrepreneur, they feel like that is educating them on how to start a company. And to me, it's a distraction. Masquerading is productivity.
One of my most popular blog posts back when I was still blogging was called Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books. And, you know, don't take the title literally because isn't the SaaS playbook a business book? It is.
But in the post, I talked about how highly tactical, highly prescriptive books like the SaaS playbook or Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, even like EOS, like things that give you information that actually improves your business, I put those in a category of training, of actually showing you tactics and strategies that will get you there faster. Right?
Reading books by Malcolm Gladwell and even a lot of, I mean, I like Seth Godin's books, but a lot of Seth Godin and just frankly, most business books that are out there are just not going to help you grow a startup faster. Take this as someone who reads 30, 40 books a year. I have 900 books in my Audible account that I read books via audio.
Obviously, if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, I am pro book. I've just written my fifth book. But I know when I'm listening to most books and most podcasts, even if they are business-oriented, that they are, quote-unquote, a distraction. But many entrepreneurs don't, and that's when distractions masquerade as productivity.
Here's another distraction that I see masquerading as productivity in our circles of entrepreneurs. It's launching another product without marketing the one you've already launched. Or how about this? It's focusing on writing more code or answering support tickets or doing something that's certain
without selling what you've already built, without marketing and selling the thing you've already built, because that's hard. It's scary. It's uncertain. It's where the resistance lies. It's what you don't want to do as a technical founder. So what are the takeaways from this? One,
I want you to keep in mind this question of what is the cost of engaging with this distraction and what is the benefit of engaging with this distraction? Because the benefit of reading a business book might be it's just fun. It's what I do in my off time. It recharges me. And I understand and admit that this is not being productive. It's a hobby that I have.
And I think weighing the cost versus the consequences as you think about distractions and just being deliberate with your time, that's it. If you've known me for any length of time, you know the value that I put on relationships and on my relationships with my wife and my kids and my friends for that matter.
So you'll know that I'm pro you spending all the time with all the people that you want to feed your soul. I just want you to keep in mind the cost versus the benefit and to be extremely aware of distractions that masquerade themselves as productivity. And the end of that story is, I had a distraction yesterday. I knew that the benefit of it was it made me happy.
And the cost was that I might have to record this episode on a weekend. And here I am Saturday afternoon recording it. And you know what? That's the decision I made. I'm here for it. My next topic is another dichotomy. It's weaknesses versus blind spots. So I was interviewed on a podcast last week and the host started asking me about personality tests like Myers-Briggs, Enneagram.
Colby A, StrengthsFinder, we were kind of batting some stuff around. And I never remember my results from these tests. I actually have taken all of them, I believe. And what I do is I read through, I take what I can learn from them, I internalize that and say, oh, yeah, I should do that. And then sometimes I'm like, that's not me at all.
And then I kind of forget, like I don't remember what number I am on the Enneagram. I always have to look it up. But when I pull it up, I'm usually like, oh yeah, that's totally me. It describes me and my strengths and my weaknesses. I think it's pretty good at it. Now you have to take these things for what they're worth. Some of them are put together by researchers.
who have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 people take these and they normalize the results. And they are quite scientifically, I'll say accurate, you know, as accurate as you can get with something like this. And then there are other ones that are kind of made up by people, not really tested, and you got to take it for what it's worth. So I always hold them with a grain of salt.
but I have found them helpful for me over the years to learn just a little more about my weaknesses. So we were talking on this podcast and I had this epiphany on the spot and I'd never said this before. I said, weaknesses are fine. We all have strengths and weaknesses. You don't want blind spots. A blind spot is a weakness that you're not aware of.
When you have a weakness and you know about it, you can work around it. If you're the founder who bounces from one thing to the next to the next, who follows each distraction, who maybe has a little bit ADHD, whether it's clinical or whether it's just something in your personality, and you realize, you know what?
I'm never going to focus on anything long enough to build something great, then you can acknowledge that weakness and stick with things longer than you think you should. But if you're not aware of it, how can you work around it? If your weakness is that you don't like doing hard things or you don't want to do or work on anything that you don't want to work on,
and let's say you're a maker, you're a builder, and you want to write code, you want to build websites, you want to build products, if you know that's a weakness and you'll listen to this show or you'll read books about this topic or hear opinions and advice,
from folks in your mastermind, or if you're in a community like MicroConf Connect, wherever you are getting advice, if you don't realize that you're constantly doing that and avoiding the hard things and only really doing what you want to do and justifying it with, well, that fits for my personality, you have a blind spot.
And the way to know you have a blind spot usually is if you have smart people around you, successful, smart people who are kind of all telling you the same thing and you keep not listening to them and you're not finding the success that you want, you You probably have a blind spot. Blind spots are really tough. The hard part is you don't know you have them.
And turning blind spots into weaknesses and learning about a blind spot and kind of admitting that you just have that as a weakness eliminates it, right? So how do you learn about your weaknesses? Well... I think there are three ways, right? There's introspection. There's asking yourself, why do I fail at things? Am I the one that starts too many things and never finishes?
Am I the one that never starts things after I finish? Am I the one that makes too much? I avoid conflict. I avoid doing hard things, things I don't want to do like marketing or sales. Do I avoid hard work? Maybe my weakness is I just never learned how to work hard. I don't have any discipline. Maybe my weakness is I'm really disorganized. I think there's some introspection to be done here.
I do think personality tests have been helpful for me. I'm not going to prescribe them for you, but I have taken four, maybe five, and I think I listed most of them earlier in this segment, but I have found those helpful for identifying potential weak spots. I remember the Enneagram is really good at this.
It will say this is a strength and here's the shadow side of that strength because every strength we have when taken too far is a weakness. And I think the Enneagram does a good job of identifying that. So personality test is number two. The other one is people around you. And whether you need to ask them, like, what are the things that I keep screwing up that you've noticed?
And again, this is, maybe it's your spouse. These are hard conversations. I mean, it can be hard to hear this and just admit like, yeah, that's me. This is something, this is a blind spot that I have that I'm going to turn into a weakness. Again, having strengths and weaknesses is human.
Having blind spots is something that if you want to achieve and you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you can do it with blind spots, but they will hold you back. And I absolutely know founders who have blind spots, who ask opinions from smart people, hear about the blind spots, and still don't do anything about them.
And it's that same exact behavior that happens over and over and over is the reason that I see them not succeeding. And it's tough because if you just can't engage with it and admit and be okay, oh, this is a weakness, then it's going to be something that comes up over and over and it's going to be detrimental to your success.
So there was introspection, there were personality tests, and the third one is asking folks around you. And I think, look, this can be co-founder, can be folks in a mastermind, can be, again, spouse, siblings, anyone who's close to you who has watched you work and watched how you succeed and why you succeed and has watched you fail and has seen why that has happened. All of these are data points.
There's probably no one individual that knows all of your weaknesses, including you at this point. But you gather the data and, you know, and you take it for what it's worth and start to think, when I look at who I want to be, do I want to be a successful entrepreneur?
Well, look at other successful entrepreneurs, folks who come on this show, folks I mentioned on this show, you know, you're Jason Cohen's, you're Heaton Shah's, Ben Chestnut.
Dharma Shah, a lot of folks who I'll say like are successful and they're on podcasts or they speak at MicroConf, you can start to see how they operate and you can get a sense of their thinking when they're interviewed or if they write stuff or do talks. And to ask yourself, can I operate like that? Am I operating at that level? And if not, why? And it's not to copy.
I'm not trying to copy anyone or put them on a pedestal. No one is perfect. We all have strengths. We all have weaknesses. But there are always folks that are ahead of you. I know there are many folks ahead of me, and they have helped me over the years reflect on myself and say, why have I not achieved what, you know, And maybe it's just choices I made. Maybe it's I focused more on my family.
Maybe just my starting point was there, whatever. There can be a bunch of reasons. Or it may be, huh, because they overcame their weaknesses and it took me a while. It took me a long time to, I think, to turn some of my blind spots into things that I was aware of. So I hope you enjoyed those thoughts today on weaknesses versus blind spots. The next topic is the idea that everyone struggles.
And this actually came from a conversation I was having with Ruben Gomez, founder of SignWell. He's been on the podcast many times. He told me that someone else told him, they said, you're so successful, it makes me feel better that you have trouble at times, that sometimes you struggle with things.
And I thought to myself, well, of course, I've talked to Ruben almost monthly basis for 14 years or something. So I know his struggles because we talk about them. But it's so interesting on the internet how things might not come across that way. And Ruben, of all people, is not someone who is humble bragging and only talks about the good. I mean, he'll talk about all the stuff.
But it isn't always apparent just how much struggle each of us is going through. And frankly, I'm just going to mea culpa here, how many mistakes each of us makes, even once we kind of know what we're doing. Like the level of mistakes that I've made in the past 10 years is pretty incredible. So why have I achieved, you know, I would say each year I've been kind of more successful than the last.
I've had more wins than the last. I'm happier now. I make more money. Whatever measure, I've built more successful companies. I struggle less. I am less stressed. So by all measures, I would say my life has gone up into the right, and yet I've done a lot of things that haven't worked.
And I guess this is maybe more of a personal episode than I've done in a while, but I wanted to walk through a few of those failures. You know, are they failures? I don't even want to label them. They're just things that I did that basically... kind of didn't work long term. They were decisions that I made that were a lot harder than I thought or just didn't turn out the way that I thought.
One of them, man, going back to 2013, so this is 11 years, when we launched Trip, I had some hubris about the fact that it was going to work, that I knew what I was doing, that I'm a successful entrepreneur. It was my fifth company. Yeah, because MicroConf was fourth, TinySeeds sixth. Anyways, it's my fifth company. And I was like, you know what? I know what I'm doing.
I have a bit of money in the bank. I have some experience. I have a good network. I have an audience. I'm a product person. I've done this before. It's just going to work. And then we launched and it didn't work. And it plateaued at eight, you know, you've heard the story, plateaued at eight grand a month for months on end. And I was just distraught.
And I had a moment where I was like, I'm supposed to be good at this. People listen to me about being an entrepreneur. Like, don't I know how to do this? I thought I knew what I was doing. And it turns out I figured it out, right? It was grinding. It was working with Derek to figure out the next thing to launch and how to pivot the product. And we did.
And it took us, I don't know, maybe nine months from launch, nine agonizing months from launch to get to the point where we had product market fit and things took off like a rocket. And then it was like, okay, I do know what I'm doing. I was just overconfident that it would work right away. If you want to hear all that agony, by the way, go to Startup Stories Podcast.
You can look in any podcast app or you can go to startupstoriespodcast.com. Derek and I recorded like 10 to 15 minutes a week for a year. And then I cut it all to actually not all of it together.
I think it was like nine hours of audio and I cut it down to 90 minutes and kind of just packed it all in so you can hear this longitudinal agonizing trip towards product market fit as we finally did get there. But
I have a little bit of PTSD when I listen to it because it was such a hard time of not even knowing what we were building and if we were building anything for anyone and if it was all just a waste of time. So that was one, you know, like I said, 10 or 11 years ago. How about MicroConf Locals? We launched local events.
We're going to do, I'm trying to think how many we did in our biggest year, but we have our two big flagship events, right? Where we have the one in US, the one in Europe. We're going to be in Croatia here in just a week or two after this comes out.
But then we wanted to do local events, which were like these, first we're going to do one day events where it's like eight hours, four speakers and fly into some major cities. And we started doing those and the uptake was not great. And it was a lot of effort. And so we said, well, what if we just make them like three hours in the afternoon, almost like a happy hour.
I would either do a short talk or I'd interview someone. So I would fly in with a producer and we would basically produce a three-hour event. And they were fine. The events themselves were really good. And the people who came, it was awesome. But the local interest wasn't there. We couldn't charge enough even to make them break even. We were losing money on them.
And it was burning me and the producer out because we were on the road all the time. And, you know, I went to, I don't even know, it was 10 events, 12 events last year. It's just way too much travel. And it wasn't just the being there. It was getting on the plane. You know, it would wreck 48 hours, 72 hours of stuff that I could be doing that's not being on a plane, right? It's recording podcasts.
It's recording videos. It's writing another book. It's all the opportunity cost of the travel and the time. And so that was an effort that we decided to, I'll say put on pause, but like it's done. And so is it a mistake? Is it failure? Did we, well, we certainly struggled, certainly had trouble at times. Like my whole team burned out last, about a year ago, including me. And it was, it was rough.
So, but it was, it was a calculated bet of if this works, it's going to be great. We can do more. We can have local MCs. You know, we had all these plans, but the interest wasn't there. So I don't regret it. It's not a mistake, but we did struggle and we agonized. I agonized over whether to keep doing them because these are hard decisions, right? Strategic decisions are big and difficult.
And it's like, how do you make hard decisions, right? This is a question, how do you know when to quit? How often do you hear this question asked of anyone, right? It comes into this podcast. People ask Seth Godin all the time because he wrote that book, The Dip. But how do you know when to quit? And it was like, because I knew when it was time.
Maybe I waited a little too long, but I was out of ideas and it wasn't working. And I was like, I just want this to be done. And that's how we knew when it was time to quit. Another effort that certainly is not a failure, it was the YouTube channel. And the YouTube channel is still doing really well. It grew very quickly over about 18 months.
I think it went from like 10,000 to maybe 80,000 subscribers. And then it plateaued. And, you know, the worldwide audience of entrepreneurs who want to build SaaS companies isn't that big. It's maybe, I don't know, 100, 150,000. Like it's, you know, it's not millions of people. And so to plateau at 80-ish is not the end of the world, right? But the question was, so do we keep doing this?
Like we were shipping a video a week. It was an absolute grind. And the grind was worth it when it was successful. The grind was worth it when we were adding 1,000 to 1,500 subscribers every week. Love it. You see that number going up into the right? I can grind for a very long time when that's happening. But when it starts being 300 or 400 a week,
I have to ask myself, is this worth my time to outline, record, the cost to edit, producer Ron's time, just all the effort we're putting behind this? Or what if we did less? What if we didn't do any YouTube videos? What if we did half as many? So it's every other week. We could put that time... that energy, and frankly, those dollars into some other way to build the audience.
And so, you know, again, not a mistake, but it is a struggle and a hard decision. It was challenging. I think it was six, seven months ago when I finally said, man, we've been plateaued for six months. I think we just have to turn this attention to something else. And frankly, we turned that towards the course, saslaunchpad.co if you haven't checked it out.
It's all about finding ideas, validating, building a launch list, and launching. It's really the second course I've ever built. The first one was 14 years ago. This one is way, way better, more complete, more thorough. The course is $500 and it's worth it. I mean, I'll just say that.
It's the best course, certainly best course I've ever produced and one of the best pieces of content I've ever produced. It's almost 10 hours of content. It's really in-depth. And if you want to learn more about launching your own SaaS, saslaunchpad.co. So hopefully that segment makes you feel better if you weren't aware that even successful people struggle at times. All right, last topic.
This one's a quicker one. I was watching a video. I believe it was Roger Federer, who is an incredibly successful tennis player. I believe he was giving a graduation speech. He said, I've played in 1,526 singles matches. I won 80% of those matches, but I only won 54% of the points. So let that sink in, barely more than half of the points and yet won 80% of the matches.
I love this metaphor as you don't have to be right that often. I won't belabor this metaphor and start talking about baseball and how the all-time greats only hit the ball, what, 30, 40% of the time. You get the point is that successful founders aren't right all the time. They aren't right 100% of the time. They're not even right 90% of the time.
I mean, I don't know what the number is, but is it 60? It might be. It might be as low as 60, but they try enough things, they move fast enough, and enough of their things work.
You know, I was talking about this point, and Ruben actually pointed out to me that when I say enough of the things that they try work, he said, you know what you should include there is that they usually don't work right off the bat. that they do work if you iterate on it and focus on it. And I really liked that distinction.
When I say they work on a lot of things and most of the things they do work is most 55, 60, 65, 70, it's in there somewhere. Seriously, it's not 80 or 90%. 80 or 90% of things I do don't work, but the ones that do have asymmetric upside and they push the business forward and they push my life forward and They work.
And that's the pattern that I see with successful entrepreneurs and frankly, someone who's successful at all with their life. They just generally learn to make good decisions and follow through. But I want to underscore that point of for it to work, for you to be successful on 54% of those points as Roger Federer, that usually won't just happen right off the bat.
It's not like, I'm going to start this marketing approach. Yeah, it's just going to work. I'm going to launch this product. Oh, it just worked right off the bat because successful folks, 54% of the time are right. That's not how it works.
You launch something, you iterate, you take feedback, you try that marketing approach, iterate, you take feedback, and eventually you kind of grind it to the point where it works, usually 55, 60, 65% of the time. That's going to be it for me today. Thank you so much for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 733.