Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 762 | Doing Great Work, Hierarchy of SaaS Skills, and Public Deadlines (A Rob Solo Adventure)
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
Are public deadlines a double-edged sword for startup founders? In episode 762, join Rob Walling for a solo adventure where he covers several topics. Rob breaks down Paul Graham's essay, "Doing Great Work" and focuses on how the steps apply to building real businesses for real customers. He also discusses the hierarchy of skills necessary for success in the SaaS space, sharing his thoughts on the critical roles of marketing, product development, engineering, and effective team management. Topics we cover: (2:07) Doing great work (5:20) Identify the gaps (11:51) The SaaS skillset hierarchy (18:28) Publicly committing to a feature release (23:05) Maintaining enough rigor to hit deadlines Links from the Show: MicroConf Connect Applications are open now through March 5th How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham Start Small Stay Small by Rob Walling Episode 756 | Why Great Product Management Is Critical for Your Startup 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
What is Paul Graham's 'Doing Great Work' essay about?
It's another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I'm on a solo adventure where I'm going to walk through Paul Graham's, I was going to say recent essay, but it's over a year old now. It's called Doing Great Work. I think it's a fascinating look at the steps that it takes to ship amazing things and to build incredible things. on this planet.
And I'm going to focus that a little bit more on being an ambitious bootstrapper rather than Paul Graham thinks of things like probably Airbnb and what, DoorDash did they invest in or Instacart? You know, these really kind of game-changing apps that everyone winds up using. But for the purpose of this podcast, we want to build real businesses for real customers that pay us real money, which look...
Stripe and DoorDash, and those actually are as well, but that's not the focus of this show. And so I'm going to edge that or focus it more on things that relate to what you're probably building. Then I'm going to talk about whether there's a hierarchy to skills if you're building a SaaS. This is based on an ex-Twitter conversation, and I've been to a couple other solo topics.
But before I do that, applications for MicroConf Connect... which is our online community and forum, are open today, and they close March 5th. Since we do custom group onboarding for new Connect applications, we take folks in batches once every month. And if you get in now, you will have access to our MicroConf Connect live session, which happens next month in March with Asia Arangio.
She's going to be talking about, well, all types of amazing stuff that Asia talks about. So if you're interested in potentially becoming part of MicroConf Connect, you want to dip your toe in the water, microconfconnect.com. It's only open for a few more days and closes on March 5th. Let's dive in to my first topic. I'm gonna link up this essay, How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham.
And when I noted down this essay, I put a couple bullet points. I said, doing great work isn't easy and you must be ambitious and hardworking to even consider it. Paul Graham has four steps to do great work. And he says, this is how practically everyone who's ever done great work has done it, from painters to physicists. And obviously he includes startup founders in this, I would assume.
So step one is to decide what to work on. Step two is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. The third step is notice the knowledge gaps. And the fourth step is boldly chase outlier ideas.
And the reason I wanted to talk about this in this episode is whatever you are building, whether it's a lifestyle business or an ambitious SaaS startup, I think the first three steps probably apply to that. I think only applies if you want to build really ambitious products or companies that get really big.
But deciding what to work on, learning enough about it that you get to one of the frontiers of knowledge, and then noticing the knowledge gaps, to me, is a fundamental part of building something that other people will value and businesses will pay for.
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