125: Rob Walling - Choosing the Right Product Idea

Topics include: Brainstorming ideas vs. paying attention to your own problems Why it's smart to start with a product that might never make a million dollars a year Should you avoid markets with competition? Why it's a good idea to build something for fewer people Strategies for figuring out how many people have the problem you're trying to solve Why you should start marketing before you start building When should you start charging money for your product? Why getting 1,000 customers is extremely hard and how that affects your pricing Why you don't need an audience to build a software product Sponsors: Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack Links: Rob's website Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob's podcast Drip, the last software business Rob built TinySeed, Rob's startup accelerator for bootstrappers MicroConf, the conference Rob organizes "The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping" "Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding" "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg "SaaS Marketing Essentials" by Ryan Battles "Start Small, Stay Small", Rob's book