Show notes
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: Idea to Traction: Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants (book wait list) The SaaS Playbook Rob Walling | YouTube Rob Walling Newsletter MicroConf Masterminds TinySeed Mentors Close CRM (Steli Efti) SalesMVP Lab (Daniel Hebert) Ben Hyneck, B2B sales coach Stephen Steers, B2B sales and storytelling Outscraper 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! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify 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 struggle to stay motivated. That doesn't include my hobbies. I play the guitar. I don't make money on that. I play tabletop games. I definitely lose money on that because I spend so much money on these games. I hang out with my family. I love going out to eat. I hang out with friends. Obviously I don't need to make money doing those things. But if I'm doing something in the professional world where perhaps people are taking my advice and using it to make money, it feels like I should be in on that transaction. And even if I give away far more value than has come back to me, I'm okay with that. But as long as some comes back to me with selling conference tickets and there's sponsorships on this podcast and potentially making money from a TinySeed company's exit and we get carried because we run an accelerator as well as SaaS Institute, the coaching, the premium coaching program we have, we get money on a recurring basis for that. But that's not why I do it. That's just a need or a desire that I have in order to be fulfilled and to justify the time, effort and energy that I spend creating all of this content and thinking all of this through. So that's why I do it. It's to have an impact on a lot of people that brings me joy. And I've figured out a way to do that and make enough money to justify it and to hire the team, frankly. Between MicroConf and TinySeed, I think there are 10 of us and people make full-time salaries. These are mostly W-2 folks living in North America, so it's not cheap. And if I want to put out content and run an accelerator at the quality that we run, MicroConf as well obviously, and write books at the quality that I want to, that takes money. It takes a lot of time, money and effort. So I appreciated that question and hope you enjoyed hearing me talk it through. And if not, I hope you started hitting the 10 second skip button at some point. My next topic is one that I bet more people will skip than the topic I just covered. I want to talk for just a couple minutes about regulating your nervous system while you're doing something that scares you. And even to be honest, just noticing when your nervous system is flipping out. I didn't learn this skill until the last probably 10 years, which is way too late. I remember being so tied to whatever my body was doing, like anxiety, fears when I was 17, when I was in college, just these intense swaying feelings and I was my feelings. And I still know some people like this and it sucks when you don't recognize that a feeling is not you, a feeling is not permanent and it's not who you are, and that you should not be making big decisions when your nervous system is dysregulated, when you feel that tightness in your chest, when you're really concerned and worried and you're thinking in a pattern that really isn't that healthy. It's certainly not calm and it's certainly not a rational or a stable, grounded place to be, which is where you want to be to make decisions. So it wasn't until the last 10 years of therapy and really getting to know myself and really feeling those days when I would wake up and just feel massively anxious or wake up and feel a bit depressed. I don't have clinical depression, but some days I wake up and I feel melancholy. And on those days I would wake up and I used to say, "Everything sucks. Everything's going to zero. Why am I even doing this? Maybe I should sell the company. Maybe I should shut it down. Nothing's working." And now when I wake up and I feel that way, I think this is probably just for the first few hours of the day. Or maybe even if I feel this way the whole day, it's not real. Like that's not my reality. My feelings are not my reality. I didn't know that until 10, 12 years ago. And obviously if you're well adjusted and you don't have issues regulating your nervous system, good on you. Congratulations. That is not me. I should say that was not me. It is at this point, but I had to learn it. And I think the important thing I wish I'd known a lot earlier, even before I could regulate it, is to identify when I was feeling out of sorts and to realize, oh, this isn't normal. This feeling in my chest, this tightness in my chest or this anxiety or this fear or this, again, depression, whatever these swaying emotions are, these aren't a good place to make a big decision and they don't represent me. They just represent a feeling. That's the first step. The second step is to learn to regulate it yourself. And you might need help. You might need a therapist. You might need medication. And I'm sure there are other approaches that I could probably get Dr. Sherry Walling on the show to talk about. This is not something I'm an expert in other than I've gone through it myself. And I know some folks at different stages of this. I have a friend I was talking to and they actually inspired this segment. They've been really trying to push through nervous system scariness, basically. When you get scared to do something risky, but you know you need to do it anyway and you resist it, but you should be doing it, that's a problem. That'll keep your life small. You won't ask for the raise. You won't ask the person out that you want to date. You won't stand up to someone at work. You won't stand up to your spouse or the person you're dating. There's a lot of things that you want to do, but if you're scared to do them and you let your nervous system override them, it will hold you back both personally and professionally. And so developing this skill is something important. And in order to do it, this friend of mine is practicing and doing things that scare them over and over. And it gets a little easier each time. You've heard me talk on the show about the first time I ever published a blog post back in 2005. I was terrified, which is just laughable now. Why would I be scared of publishing a blog post? For some reason, writing an essay and publishing it on the internet terrified me. Hair stood up on the back of my neck. I got cold sweats. I thought, what if people judge me? What if people hate me? All these things. And it got a little easier with the second one and the 10th one and the 100th one. Honestly, by the 50th one, I just didn't care anymore. I wasn't worried. Same thing, first podcast episode of the show. I was terribly, terribly nervous. Yeah, it terrified me. First time I got on stage to do a talk, completely dysregulated. First time I emceed one of my events, completely shattered. First YouTube video I did. I've been recording this podcast for years. And the first YouTube video I recorded was a mess. I was so nervous being on camera. It's such a trip how these things change. And you know how I got through each of them? By doing them over and over. Repetition. By standing up, being scared and doing it anyway. And sometimes you can just do it through brute force. You just do it over and over and you become accustomed to it. And now when I get on stage at MicroConf to MC the event, I'm nervous a tiny bit before I get up and for about 30 seconds and then it's done. An…
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