A Solo Rob Adventure!  During this episode, we are answering listener questions live from our MicroConf Connect members.  Rob answers questions about:  - Early Stage Validation- Competitive Markets- Youth Entrepreneurship- Key Insights Around the TinySeed Portfolio - Retirement Planning MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️  https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Heyhttps://hey.com@heyhey   MicroConf On Air Question and Answer Episode Rob Walling: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob walling live streaming direct from my bunker library here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So every Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern and producers, Andrew and I stream for 30 minutes and we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom and purpose and allow us to value and maintain healthy relationships. We believe that showing up every day and shipping that next feature, that next piece of marketing copy closing that next sale is the way to build a sustainable company. Thanks so much for, for joining me today. Today is an all ask Rob episode. We're going to be doing a live Q and a, we have some good questions coming in on Twitter and in the MicroConf on air channel in MicroConf connect. If you're not part of MicroConf connect already should into Microsoft connect.com. We have more than I believe it's over 1600. Founders of bootstrappers and mostly bootstrapped founders in there hanging out and having conversations like this every day. And what I love is when I get into connect and there's a solid thread where I see a question and I go to, I know the answer to this, or I have a thought on this and I go in and there's already five amazing answers from other experienced founders who have done. Exactly this and I don't even need to weigh in, because the answers are, are good and they're all, and they're all legit. So I am checking out some questions. So today, yeah, I normally intro my guest here, but you'll know me as the co founder of drip and MicroConf and tiny seed. Startups for the rest of us host and author starts small, stay small. So I'm going to be answering a bunch of questions today. what are the, Oh, what are those books behind me? Yes. So it is definitely, a, a really nice book case here. I'll just show you a poll one book off the shelf, just so you can see. So here we are with the, this tome of no title, that actually, holds some silver age comic books for those who, are in the now missing Spider-Man number two there from 19, 63. I think so. Yes. All questions today can be startup related, silver age comic book collecting related, and of course, Dungeons and dragons related. we really do, in all seriousness have some really good questions coming in and, It's nice that we have a producer, Sandra says so smooth. It's nice that we have such a, it's a really good audience. It's a really great group creators that are here in microcuff connect and participating on Twitter. And just in this MicroConf averse. and I did an interview last week. If you haven't checked this out on indie hackers, Courtland Allen and I had a conversation for, yeah, it was about an hour and 10 minutes, really solid stuff. Good questions from Portland. Good thoughts from him. And I was just weighing, and we were just talking about frameworks and advanced, and opportunities for launching SaaS in October of 2020. It was very specific to now, not five years ago, not 10 years ago. And that's actually spring on a few of the questions that we have today. So I'm going to dive in there, but first I've had a request already for, tell a joke. So in true MicroConf dad joke, A tradition, this Fibonacci, Joe, coming to tell you it's as bad as the last two you've heard combined. So with no laugh track, it just normally, so at MicroConf there's all these groans and that there's groans and laughs and some people, clap, slow clapping, golf clapping me. But without that, it loses a little bit. So my first question today is from no, we're BRAC. Thank you producers. And they're only a little bit. It's about 20 seconds late. So Noah Bragg from MicroConf connect asks. If you were starting a business today, I'm gonna assume it's a SaaS company and you were earlier on in your career. Would you try multiple business ideas at once or go all in on one? This is a good question. So personally I would go all in is a. Is a deceptive phrase because I wouldn't just dive in and say, Oh, I have this idea. Oh, I've done some validation. Now I'm going to spend the next six months going all in on this idea. That's not what I would do, but I would focus on launching and, validating. One idea at a time personally, I have a huge belief in focus, and I'm not saying you can't own multiple products at a time because I was the King of these micro portfolios back in the day where I had 10 different products generating revenue for me, but I didn't launch and grow 10 at once I launched or acquired and grew one at a time. And then I figured out a way to make it sustainable and more, say more autopilot's at a misnomer, but. Mostly on autopilot for now is how I'll phrase it. It's on autopilot for the next three to six months until something happens that I have to circle back. But focusing on one thing, you get into the head space of it, all the information and content that you're consuming, you can adapt or think through how you can apply it to that one thing. And I would be doing a ton of validation at every step. And so when I first come up with an idea, I always think 90%, this thing's going to work. And then with my 24 to 48 hour cooling off period, before I register any domain, which is what I do these days, I wind up falling down to 10 or 20%, certainty that this thing's going to work. Then typically I say, okay, what's my next step to validate, how can I get myself to 25 or 30%? Oftentimes, it's sending a few emails to people. I know it's putting something on Twitter, asking opinions, it's having, face to face or in this case, these days zoom conversations might be putting up a landing page, driving traffic to it, whether it's from my podcast, whether it's from Twitter, whether it's from running cold ads, which I did back in the day when we were validating drip. And I would just try to get that validation one step further, one step further. Now that's if I'm going to build. Maybe a larger, more novel product that doesn't exist in the space today. And I'm trying to validate the idea itself, but what if I know that there's a gap in the WordPress plugin market or that all the plugins that do polls on WordPress is just an example that they aren't very good or that I know that I can rank, it's not that hard to rank high in the WordPress repository is just a little bit of WordPress SEO. The algorithm is not, it's not as complex as Google. It's not actually that smart. So maybe I don't want to validate that everybody needs a Poland plugin. Maybe I want to validate that I can just rank higher. So I get something in there or I email the top 10 poll plugins, especially the ones that haven't had been updated in two or three years. And I say, can I adopt your plug in or can I buy your plugin? So these are ways that I would be going about, you don't always have to build the thing from scratch. but I think the question of multiple or one, which should you focus on, in my opinion, Unless you're stair-stepping. And even with stair-stepping I would focus on that. I was going to do an info product that the bottom end or I would do, or that WordPress plugin or something, as step one. And then I would build on it from there. All right. How do you get your hair looking so good during a pandemic from Pat Foley will. Thank you, sir. I did wear a mask and I get haircuts. That's the honest answer. So I didn't have, I had pandemic hair for the first four months because everything was shut down here, but we are still in, I don't even know what it's like stage one lockdown where you can go to places. Like I went to the gym the other day and we were a lot of face masks, but, knock on wood. Minneapolis is not in, It's not doing as poorly as many of the States around us. And so I