Episode 840 | 5 PM Revisited, Starting Over After Failure, Never Shipping, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

**Rob Walling** (0:00)
The two reasons to Vibecode something are probably to save money, or because you need it highly customized, and if I was growing, I wouldn't be doing anything to save money, because I would just want to add more revenue and not be messing around with internal software.
Welcome back to another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I'm going to rapid fire through a handful of listener questions. I have about 10 queued up, and we'll see how many I'm able to get through. Some are earlier stage, some are text questions that have been hanging around for quite some time and I just wanted to give them their chance. Before I dive into those, I wanted to let you know that I've been writing again. So after starting as a blogger from 2005 until about 2011, 2012, I stopped writing essays and I moved to podcasting, YouTube, and writing books.
But over the last six months, I've published several essays. That's about, let's see, it's maybe 12 to 15, and I'm sending those exclusively to my email list. If you go to robwalling.com/emails, you can sign up for that list, as well as get a sample chapter of the SaaS Playbook.
I've been doing a pretty good job of sending one email a week with brand new content. Some of the concepts are things I've mentioned on YouTube or have talked about on the podcast, but these are concepts, frameworks, thought processes that I've never put into writing. So you won't find these in other blog posts, essays, or books that I've written. One of the fan favorite topics seems to be task level, project level, and owner level thinkers. And I've gotten a lot of questions about that particular email, so much so that I added another one with basically me answering questions of how do you find these folks, how expensive are they, a number of other things. So robwalling.com/emails, if you want to take advantage of that and stay in the loop. And with that, let's dive in to my first listener question. The first one is from Taryn, and they're looking for a more opinionated take on the 5 p.m. framework. And Taryn writes, Hi Rob, I made the call this year to start something of my own. I'm in the midst of evaluating startup ideas, and I found your ideas and frameworks very, very useful. You very much embody the kind of philosophy that I want to carry forward into the business or businesses I start. I've listened to episode 628 many, many times over the past couple of weeks. And for me, there were some parts that were difficult for me to pinpoint what exactly made a good or bad idea. And breaking in here for the listener, 628 is when I described the 5pm framework for the first time. Back to the email. For example, when you talked about pricing, you talked about firstly whether this can work as a subscription versus one time. And that one's clear. That subscription is what we're looking for. But when you talk about estimating the average revenue per account, it isn't clear what's good or bad. You also talk later about whether it's monthly, annual, or usage-based, it isn't clear what is good or what is bad. Market is also not so clear. You mentioned that size matters a lot less for Bootstrap Startups versus Venture-backed. It wasn't super clear if size mattered at all. After reading more of your material, I think the point is, it's got to be big enough, but it doesn't have to be VC big. My opinion is that the podcast could have been clearer if you mentioned explicitly that size is important, and maybe some guidelines as to what a good size is. I think the other P's and the M were super clear on how to use it as a valuation criteria, no notes there. I'm not asking for anything specific. I think from consuming more of your material and other podcast episodes, I think I've come to fill in the gaps in my understanding. I wonder if it's a good time to drop any new thoughts about the 5pm framework, given that it is two years old.
So thanks for writing in with this, Taron. Yeah, it's interesting, that first episode kind of happened off the cuff. I think I invented the 5pm framework like 20 minutes before that episode. It all just kind of came pouring out, and I realized, oh, this is really something. I was trying to outline a podcast episode about evaluating ideas, and I thought, what would be the things that I would want to look at? So a couple things. Number one, I am finishing up my next book, and I believe it addresses everything that Taron has asked for. And the next book is called SaaS Launchpad. You've heard me say SaaS Launchpad over and over because I have a course by the same name, saaslaunchpad.co, and while there will be a decent amount of overlap between the course and the book, the book is what really started it all. I had a decent manuscript, we needed a course, and we adapted the book into the course. Since then, I've added another, I think, 30, 40% to the book, tweaked it, actually pulled stuff back from the course to make the original book manuscript better. Ultimately, the course is going to remain kind of the source of truth. It has so much more information, so many more interviews, more depth and all that. But the book is going to be a nice 200, 225-page treatise on early stages. SaaS Launchpad, it's about how to get your business off the ground, how to come up with ideas, validate and all that. And so in that book, I did go deeper on market sizing. I talk about pricing, what's good and what's not. I mean, I think the thing I struggle with is, you're asking for if monthly, annual, or usage-based, what is good and what isn't. Like, it does kind of depend in a perfect world. Obviously, you do annual, but you don't need that to make a great business. I've seen monthly-plus usage-based businesses be incredible. And similar with average revenue per account. I mean, I built an awesome lifestyle business with $10, $20, $40, and $80 price points. And the average revenue per account was probably $30, if I were to guess, between $30 and $40 maybe. And it was such a great business, but it was never going to be a multi-million dollar business. It just couldn't, the turn was too high, the price points were too low, etc.