Is your nervous system sabotaging your best decisions?

In this episode, Rob mixes a solo adventure with listener questions. He answers a reader who asks why he still shows up to write, record, and build, then digs into regulating your nervous system when you have to do something that scares you. He wraps with two listener questions on direct snail mail outreach and on cold calling in an industry you know nothing about.

Want to get your question answered? Submit your question for an upcoming episode.

Topics we cover:

(04:41) – Why does Rob still write, record, and build?
(08:55) – Regulating your nervous system under fear
(15:55) – Direct snail mail outreach for SaaS
(18:44) – Cold calling an unfamiliar industry
(20:27) – How to learn a new skill fast
(21:08) – Finding trusted sales resources
(27:01) – Learning Facebook ads the hard way

Links from the show:

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!

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Rob Walling: 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 mix a couple formats. I have some listener questions, but I also have a solo adventure topic that I want to talk about. And so I'm going to combine those along with a really interesting question, kind of an inside baseball question I got from a reader of my email newsletter where he asked, "Why do you do what you do? Why do you still do it?" And it was a fun question for me to ponder. I think we should all be asking ourselves why we do what we do. Before we dive into those topics and questions, I am launching the wait list for my next book. I've been talking about this book for a few years. It was previously titled The SaaS Launchpad, but I have changed the title.

It's now titled Idea to Traction: Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants, Even in the Age of AI. And this book covers from coming up with ideas to validating them, to building a launch list, to launching and getting some early traction. You can think of it as, honestly, it's an updated version of Start Small, Stay Small 16 years later and updated for the age of AI. It's also the prequel to The SaaS Playbook. The SaaS Playbook says you have a product in market, you have some weak product market fit, some traction. Idea to Traction covers the steps before that. So if you want to get to it right now, it's ideatotractionbook.com. So as I think about Start Small, Stay Small and all of the requests that I've received to update that book over the last 16 years, I tried to start with Start Small, Stay Small and just edit it, but you can't do that.

So much has changed. So much has changed. The philosophy of bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping still holds, but everything else, all the other pieces and parts just had to be disassembled. So even these days, a lot of folks who aren't developers are now building software and building SaaS, right? And Start Small, Stay Small was a developer's guide to launching a startup. That was the title. It didn't say anything about bootstrapping. It certainly didn't say anything about SaaS, but these days, whether it's no code or vibe coding or partnering, there's a lot of non-developers. And Idea to Traction is focused on SaaS, as you can tell by the subtitle. Even in the age of AI though, some SaaS will succeed. We know that SaaS is seeing headwinds, but there are a lot of types of SaaS companies that are going to be okay. And that's what Idea to Traction covers.

I've spent the last two months really focusing in on adding all types of comments and thoughts around how AI impacts each of the steps. There's a validation step and I talk about why AI doesn't mean that you can just skip it. I give examples of that from real life founders who have validated recently in the past six months. So the approaches are battle tested recently. These are not five or 10 year old approaches. And it's all of my current thinking on how to go from idea to launch and gaining early traction. And of course, product-less marketing first [VERIFY: "product glass marketing first"] is something that I haven't said since Start Small, Stay Small. And I bring it up in the book, in the introduction actually. I'm really excited. I've been working on this book for too long. Since The SaaS Playbook, actually. It was originally part of The SaaS Playbook, but The SaaS Playbook is what, 210 pages maybe?

And Idea to Traction is I think 260 or 270 pages. It's long and I didn't want a 500 page book. So I broke it out and I've had to continuously update it as AI has come out and affected everything. So I just submitted the manuscript to my editor a few days ago, and that's how hot off the press this is. If you want to get on the wait list, I'm going to notify you as soon as the book is ready for pre-order. And you're going to get access to a live Q&A that I'll be doing all about early stage SaaS. You will only get access to that Q&A if you are on this wait list. And I'm also going to send you some pretty important resources like worksheet and checklist type things that you can use straight away without the book, but they are pulled from the content of the book.

And it's not AI slop crap. We've spent a lot of time, my team and I, putting together something that we hope can be genuinely useful. So that's ideatotractionbook.com. And if you enter your email there, you'll be the first to know and you'll hear about the live Q&A and receive all of those resources.

I'd like to dive into my first topic of the day. This was in response to an email that I sent out. If you go to robwalling.com/emails, you can get on my email list where I am sending out essays with original think pieces. It was every week and now it's about every week or two, but I'm hoping to get back on the weekly train soon. And I'm going to keep this responder anonymous because I did not get permission to share their name. But they said, "I'm excited to read the book." I think this is The SaaS Playbook. "For $10," because you can get it on Kindle or I think I saw PDF for $10. "For $10, it was a steal given the value I got from watching your content. The video, What SaaS Buyers Actually Want in 2026, and the great conference video on content marketing strategy."

So these are a couple videos that we can link up in the show notes, but if you go to youtube.com/robwalling, you can see both of those. And so this person says, "I was just wondering, why do you do this? As in, do you derive the most pleasure from your conference, your accelerator, or just getting your content out there? I'm curious what inspires you today?" And it's such an interesting question, right? I've answered it a bit on the show before in the sense of I don't need to work. I could retire. I could have retired years ago actually. And yet I keep doing stuff. Since being able to retire, I've written three or four books. I've recorded at least 400 podcast episodes and hundreds of YouTube videos and started the Accelerator, continued to run and grow MicroConf. So why do I do it? There's a couple things for me.

One, I love having an impact on people, like a positive impact. And I really enjoy putting out a book and having the SaaS Playbook I think has sold 55,000 copies. And for a self-published book, that's not bad. It's really not bad. It's my best selling book of all time across all my books. Sold well over a hundred thousand copies. That's fun to me. As hard as writing books is and creating all these podcast episodes and the YouTube videos and such, it really does bring me joy to put things out in the world and then hear people put them to use and have it change their lives. That is probably what gives me the most joy of anything that I do today. And for me, I'm wired that there also has to be some financial tie to it. If I'm not making money doing it, I strugg...

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