125: Rob Walling - Choosing the Right Product Idea

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talked to Rob Walling about choosing a product idea that actually has a chance of succeeding. This is Fullstack Radio episode one twenty five. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Waddan. And today, it's my pleasure to be speaking with Rob Walling. How's it going, Rob? It's going really good, man. Thanks for having me on the show today. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. So, for anyone who's not familiar with you, I first kind of got introduced to you, I think, through the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, which you've been hosting forever now. And And I think at the time, you were sort of early off in the drip days, which is an email marketing automation, SaaS app, sort of like a Mailchimp on steroids sort of thing that, you built together with Derek Reimer, actually, who's been a guest on the show a couple times, and was eventually acquired by Drip. And now you're running a TinySeed, which is I think you describe it as like an accelerator for bootstrap startups. Yep. Yep. That's right. And Drip was acquired by Leadpages. You said it was acquired by Drip. Oh, yeah. No. It's a common, I'll make you That'd be an interesting way to exit your business if you could figure out a way to do that, like a perpetual motion machine for income. Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. Yep. So that must have been around because, you know, Derek so Derek was a contractor for me, and he broke around on code in December 2012. And then we really started sharing the story in 2013. Nice. And, so that must have been around that time frame. Yeah. Awesome. So the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because, you know, you have sort of a long history of building different building up sort of different software businesses, sort of leading up to Drip, sort of being like your big sort of magnum opus, I guess. And now with, TinySeed, you're doing a lot of work, kind of working with other sort of, you know, small startups or individuals who have ideas that they've been working on and sort of trying to pick the ones that you think kind of have the most potential and, helping them get to where they wanna get to. So I thought something that would be interesting to talk to you about today is just, like, how as a developer working on a side project or looking for a side project, can you sort of find, ideas that are worth building and and what sort of things should people be looking out for to make sure they don't waste a ton of time building something that's not going to, go anywhere? How's that sound? Yeah. Let's dig into it. Awesome. So I guess maybe the first question that I have for you is, I …