Episode 762 | Doing Great Work, Hierarchy of SaaS Skills, and Public Deadlines (A Rob Solo Adventure)

It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I am your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I'm on a solo adventure where I'm gonna walk through Paul Graham's I was gonna say recent essay, but it's over a year old now. It's called Doing Great Work. I I think it's a fascinating look at the steps that it takes to ship amazing things and to build incredible things on this planet. And I'm gonna focus that a little bit more on being an ambitious bootstrapper rather than Paul Graham thinks of things like probably Airbnb and what DoorDash did they invest in or Instacart. You know, these these really kind of game changing apps that everyone winds up using. But for the purpose of this podcast, we wanna build real businesses for real customers that pay us real money, which look. Stripe and DoorDash and those actually actually are as well, but that's not the focus of this show. And so I'm gonna edge that or focus it more on things that relate to what you're probably building. Then I'm gonna talk about whether there's a hierarchy to skills if you're building a SaaS. This is based on an ex Twitter conversation, and I've been to a couple other solo topics. But before I do that, applications for Microsoft Connect, which is our online community and forum, are open today, and they close March 5. Since we do custom group onboarding for new connect applications, we take folks in batches once every month. And if you get in now, you will have access to our MicroConf Connect live session, which happens next month in March with Asia Aragio. She's gonna be talking about, well, all types of amazing stuff that Asia talks about. So if you're interested in potentially becoming part of MicroConf Connect, you wanna dip your toe in the water, microconfconnect.com. It's only open for a few more days and closes on March 5. Let's dive in to my first topic. I'm gonna link up this essay, How to do Great Work by Paul Graham. And when I noted down this essay, I put a a couple bullet points. I said, doing great work isn't easy and you must be ambitious and hardworking to even consider it. Paul Graham has four steps to do great work and he says this is how practically everyone who's ever done great work has done it from painters to physicists and obviously he includes startup founders in this I would assume. So step one is to decide what to work on. Step two is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. The third step is notice the knowledge gaps and the fourth step is boldly chase outlier ideas. The reason I wanted to talk about this in this episode is whatever you are building whether it's a lifestyle business or an ambitious SaaS startup I think the first three steps …