Episode 854 | How to Find Startup Ideas (Sneak Peek Chapter from My New Book)

Rob Walling (0:00)

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 read a chapter from my new book. It's called Idea to Traction, Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants in the Age of AI.

Today, I'm going to be reading the chapter on how to find startup ideas. So I've been getting questions about why I decided to write another book. It's my sixth book. Haven't you already said everything you need to say, Rob? Here's the thing, 16 years ago, I wrote Start Small, Stay Small. I actually wrote it in 2009, so it was 17, but published it 16 years ago. And that book contained everything I had learned, transitioning from developer to entrepreneur. So it was all the stuff I learned about marketing, product last market first. There was some stuff about virtual assistants. There were things about building an email list and the value of an email list. I mean, this is 16 years ago. This stuff was new and novel. It was everything I knew at that time about the earliest stages of building a great software product. It wasn't even focused on SaaS. It talked a little bit about SaaS, but just any type of software company. It included WordPress plugins and all that. And that book, I self-published and it changed my trajectory. Like it got me a lot of speaking invitations. It has actually made me a significant amount of money because I self-published it. And so I keep the vast majority of the revenue and it sold. I'd have to look exact numbers. I think it's about 35,000, probably approaching 40,000 copies. And it has really good reviews on Amazon, although if you look at the low reviews, it's all like this is out of date. And it is. I went so far in depth in terms of the details of how to start it that it was out of date within a couple of years. And so I've had literally hundreds of people ask me to update it.

And that's what Idea to Traction is. It's everything that I know today about the earliest stages of building a great software company. And of course, these days, I'm focused on SaaS. And so Idea to Traction, which publishes on November 10th, is finally ready to get into your hands. Pre-orders are open today. And I would love it if you would pre-order, because I am this time trying to hit some of the lists, the bestseller lists, because I've had Amazon bestsellers. I have done a six-figure Kickstarter for one of my books, the SaaS Playbook, but the idea of getting on some broader lists is really intriguing to me. And so I'm going to be taking pre-orders starting today. And I'm going to talk a little more about the book before I get into the chapter. But if you just want to jump in and pre-order it and help me out and get something super valuable like my books, I think these are my best thinking on these topics. It's ideatotractionbook.com if you want to jump straight there. So in writing this book, I really did start from, not from start small, stay small because the concepts and the tools are so different that even just covering the same material and modernizing it would not be doing you justice. But while the tools and the steps are unrecognizable, the hard part of building a SaaS company have been mostly the same. It's how do I find ideas? How do I vet ideas? How do I know someone is willing to pay for what I'm going to build before I waste time? And even in the age of AI, when it takes a lot less time to build a product, how do I not waste my time? And how do I think about the market first? And how do I market a product as a maker? Most people don't know marketing and sales. And so the book covers a range of topics. It has a foreword by Derek Sivers who says some very kind things about me. And then I dive in, like talking about the early days being hard, how to find startup ideas. I talk about the DNA of a great SaaS business. I give 13 things that I would look for in a SaaS business, six traps to avoid, how to validate. I go deep, deep into the 2200 framework you've heard about on this show. Talk about go to market, preparing for launch, SaaS pricing, like fundamentals of how, you know, I wrote about SaaS pricing in SaaS Playbook, but this is about how I would think about coming up with my initial SaaS pricing. Then of course, start marketing the day you start coding, right, building your launch list, launching, building that early customer base, finding product market fit. And then I have a whole chapter, Building SaaS in the Age of AI, where I talk about how AI is impacting SaaS, but it's not going to kill it. What I'm actually seeing on the ground, talk about moats, a handful of SaaS moats in an AI world. And then the final chapter talks about signs it might be time to throw in the towel, right? It's deciding when you should move on, when you should pivot or just abandon things altogether.