#276 – SaaS Trends, Crowdfunding a Book, and Life After Success with Rob Walling of TinySeed

Sup, dude? Hey, man. What's going on? We are talking to the one and only Rob Walling today. I'm excited. I'm excited. I I feel like I haven't seen him or talked to him in, what, like, five years? When did we last go to, MicroConf? Not. Well, MicroConf. Right? It's probably been, like, two or three years. We haven't I haven't done a MicroConf since the pandemic started. Mhmm. But I'm pretty sure we went to Emery MicroConf before that, so 2019. I mean, four years. Yeah. But he's also been on the podcast a couple times. I mean, he's doing everything. Right? He started since then, he started TinySeed, which is the first accelerator for Bootstrap founders. He's still running MicroConf. He is writing a book, the SaaS playbook. We're gonna talk about that today. He also started five or six bootstrapped companies in the past, including one that he sold for millions, presumably, tens of millions of dollars, drip. It's interesting talking to Rob because I think he's just been around for so long that just, like, the thought of Rob makes me think of, like, all the different phases that, like, a a tech founder has gone through, especially being an indie hacker. Like, when he first started, he was writing Start Small, Stay Small, which is basically a book to be an indie hacker well before anybody else was, like, doing this. You know? So he's kind of seen the different trends. And I feel kind of like an old man because I was around then, you know, and, like, doing this stuff back then. And, like, the scene today is unrecognizable. Do you feel like this? It's, like, it's hard to keep up with, like, what all the changes are and how how the landscape has evolved. I do feel that way, and I think it's the natural consequence of starting indie hackers and, like, kind of, entering this community of bootstrappers where there's a bit of a who's who. Right? You kinda know the the people who have been successful. But if you keep playing in that arena for long enough, like, the faces change. Right? And, like, the sense of, like, not even just who's doing really well, but also, like, what kinds of products are the things that are gonna play well, you just lose track of that. I mean, we've been through the crypto phase. Right? We went through, like, the Web three phase. We would now we're sort of in this weird AI phase, the no code phase. Creator economy phase. Mhmm. Like, there's, and it's, like, the thing is none of these phases have gone away. They're still there. They're just getting layered on top of each other more and more. And each of them probably has, like, its own set of superstars. Right? And it's Yeah. It's hard for us to always be in the weeds about about who those superstars are. Do you see Amy Hoyt's …