# My 3-Step Method to Start a Million-Dollar Business

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuIKavtqWT4
Duration: 11 min
Language: English
Words: 2302
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/nuIKavtqWT4

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[0:00] You got to quit your day job and go allin. It's the dumbest startup advice I've ever heard, and I'm begging you to ignore it. It sounds brave. It sounds romantic. It sounds like something a real entrepreneur would say. It's also survivorship bias that destroys first-time founders. I'm Rob Walling. I've spent 20 years building and investing in startups. I've watched

[0:20] thousands of founders launch businesses. And the ones who quit their jobs too early, they fail a lot. Not because their idea was bad, but because they ran out of runway before they figured anything out. The ones who do survive, they don't [music] leap, they climb. I call it the stairstep method. It's how I built a business that I grew and sold for life-changing money. By the end of this video, you'll have the exact framework to build your way out of your job without ever betting everything on a dream that isn't ready yet. But before we get to step one, let's talk about why quitting your job to start a business is

[0:51] a really, really bad idea. Quitting your job sounds brave, but let me show you how it usually pans out. Quitting your job makes a great story. You know, you hear people say, "Yeah, I quit the day job and then I built this multi-million dollar company." The press loves to quote that. You see it in movies and biopics all the time that the the entrepreneur made the big bet and put all the chips on the table. It feels like commitment, right? If you're not

[1:14] allin, maybe you don't want it enough. Successful founders love telling this story cuz it's more interesting than ah I worked nights and weekends while I had a day job for 3 years. It just sounds more interesting. It sounds like weren't they brave and super interesting and took a big risk. You've probably heard the story of Cortez burning his ships when he landed in Mexico. No retreat, no

[1:35] plan B. You either conquer or you die. And that's the energy people are channeling when they tell you to quit your job and go allin. Sounds brave and it sounds committed. But here's the thing. You're not a 16th century concungistador with an army. You're a firsttime founder trying to figure out if anyone will even pay for your idea. And if you quit your day job, you're going to have the runway problem. This is the moment that you quit and a clock starts because you have limited financial runway. Your savings divided by your monthly burn rate. First-time founders underestimate how long it takes to get to real traction, which is often

[2:09] 1, 2, even 3 years. So unless you're sitting on a pile of cash, you don't have 2 to 3 years when you quit. You probably have months plus anxiety making you desperate. And desperation often leads to poor decision-making. This leads to things like launching too early, chasing customers who aren't a good fit. Pivoting too much, not enough. You don't have enough time to learn and you're forced to give up before you can find that breakthrough, before you can find out what's working. And the challenge is that every I quit and made

[2:38] it story. and their survivorship bias. So for every I quit and made it story, what do we think we have? 99 that quit and failed, 999. I mean, it's probably somewhere in there. You don't hear from the thousands who quietly went back to their jobs depleted and sad and disappointed. These people don't write blog posts or give conference talks. So,

[2:59] if quitting isn't the answer, what is? I'm going to show you how I actually did this by talking about step one, the small win. Step one isn't about building your dream business. It's about proving you can sell anything at all. So in step one, you pick a product that is intentionally small. Maybe it's an ebook. Maybe it's a plug-in for an app

[3:19] marketplace like Shopify or Heroku. Maybe it's a template, a WordPress plug-in template, a WordPress landing page template, a course, a simple tool, or maybe you start selling on a platform like Etsy or eBay. Something you can build nights and weekends that has a clear existing audience. You're not inventing a market. You're not trying to get rich. What you're actually learning are a handful of skills that you didn't have yesterday. You're going to learn how to ship code into production or ship an ebook into production, how to do things in public. You're going to get over that initial fear. You're going to learn how to market. Now, maybe you only

[3:54] need a single marketing channel if you're in a plug-in marketplace, but maybe you learn to run ads. Maybe you learn to do SEO. You're definitely going to learn how to do some type of customer support and interacting with people who buy from you. Maybe the lessons are just shipping and getting paid. The idea is that this is low stakes and you're learning real things. So, you're getting paid to learn while keeping your day job, your insurance, your runway, and your sanity. Success in step one does not look like six figures or seven figures of annual revenue. It might be a few hundred. It might be a few thousand

[4:27] a month, but it's proof that you can do this. You've built confidence. You've built skills. And you've built a little bit of a financial engine. This is a foundation that you can then go build from. But here's the thing. Your first business probably isn't going to be the one. And that's the point. Step two is where you start stacking cuz one small win probably isn't enough to buy your freedom. So the stacking strategy involves having multiple products in a small portfolio. There's a lot of products or plugins or ebooks that they

[4:56] just plateau at 500 or $5,000 a month. But depending on how much you need to live in a given month, having a handful of these two to 10 can stack up to thousands or even in some cases tens of thousands of dollars. And so the idea is that you take your first win, you get the second win, you get the third win, and you slowly buy out your time with the money that you're making from these products. And along the way, of course, you're learning new skills. You're swinging a little harder, maybe looking at slightly bigger or more ambitious opportunities and learning things that are just a touch more complicated. And

[5:31] you apply everything you learn from round one to round two or three or four. And so your skills compound, right? By product three or four, you're a different founder. And your confidence also compounds by the time you have two, three, four products. You start to just become more confident in your own ability. And the goal, of course, is to own your own time, to buy your time out

[5:51] so you're not relying on an employer. Multiple small products that together replace your salary, allow you to walk away from your day job. Pretty powerful. And you stack the skills that you need in order to be successful. These are usually things like marketing, product decisions, support, operations, hiring and managing contractors, copywriting. Sometimes there's sales involved, but you are stacking these skills slowly instead of having to learn everything at

[6:18] once, like drinking from a fire hose. When I was at this stage, I wasn't working on anything that exciting. I had a few ebooks. I had a small app that wasn't even SAS. It was onetime purchase, downloadable invoicing software. But together, these all stacked up enough to pay my bills. And they allowed me to keep looking for real opportunity and to own all of my own time. And I remember that first day after quitting my last contract because I was a contractor at the time when I woke up and I thought to myself, I now have 40 hours a week that's all mine and if I need it another 10 to 20 hours a

[6:47] week that I've been working nights and weekends for years. It's an incredible feeling to have that freedom to be confident that you didn't just get lucky that you've done it once, you've done it twice, and you've built up this tool belt of skills that would allow you to do it again. Some of those early products that I was selling are still alive and kicking today. You can check out robwalling.com/books to see start small stay which is the first book that I ever sold. You can also download a free copy of Start Marketing the day you start coding from that page. So if you're into books you

[7:19] can buy any of those directly from me in PDF or audio formats or you can head over to Amazon, get a physical copy. So once you've built enough revenue that you can leave your day job, that's where step three becomes much more feasible, becomes within reach. Step three is when you finally swing for the fences. This is where you go for something bigger, something that's going to scale, but now you're doing it from a completely different position than you would have been a year or two earlier before you stacked all these small wins. What's different now? Well, you've replaced your income, so you're not bleeding savings. You have a ton of skills,

[7:54] marketing, product, customers, maybe hiring and managing contractors, even just managing money and bookkeeping and you know all the stuff that goes into building a small business and you have the confidence from having done this multiple times at smaller scale. And if you have a spouse or significant other who is relying on you for income, your experience and successes have been building confidence in them as well that you can do this. So now you can take a

[8:17] real swing. Now, maybe it's SAS for you. Maybe it's a service business with a team. Something that scales. That's the idea here is that you now have the freedom and the 40 plus hours a week and you control your own income to do what you want to do and pursue the more ambitious project that you want to pursue. And there are many different ways that opportunities can reveal themselves at this point, right? So maybe you've built a small product in one area and you start seeing bigger problems and you want to kind of pivot into that. either take something existing, one of your step one or two

[8:46] businesses, and make them step three. Or maybe you see a brand new problem that you've encountered and you want to uh to enter that space. Maybe customers complain about the same things over and over and gaps appear. There are opportunities that are invisible to people who haven't been in the trenches like you have. And by this step, by step

[9:03] three, you don't guess what to build. You've discovered it. In addition, you have the option to let go. Maybe sell some of your step one and step two products. That's what I did. They served their purpose. You can cash out, simplify, and focus more powder on the real thing if you want. Or you can keep running those small products, quote unquote, on the side as you build your bigger effort. You just have a ton of optionality and a ton of experience, confidence, and skills. At this point, it's a great place to be. All of this is exactly what I did. I built small for years. I stacked wins. I was working on

[9:36] one of these ideas, which was hit tail. It was doing 20 to $30,000 a month by this time. I'd stairstepped my way up that high and that's when the right opportunity showed up. That's when I decided to build a little email capture widget that could send email sequences to my website visitors that later became an email service provider called Drip that eventually became a marketing automation provider that competed with billiondoll companies. And there were 10 of us bootstrapped in a little closet in Fresno. And that is the product drip that I sold for life-changing money and

[10:10] allowed me to never have to work again. And of course, I'm not the only one. If I was the only person to have done this, I wouldn't call this stairstep method. I would just call it my story. But I've seen dozens if not hundreds of other founders do almost exactly this same path. After watching this video, if you're looking to launch your first SAS, I put together the most comprehensive

[10:26] course out there at saslaunchpad.co. It's everything I've learned from two decades of building companies and helping founders. There's over 9 hours of videos walking you through validation, building your MVP, and launching strategically. Check it out at saslaunchpad.co. But here's the thing. Often the hardest part of all this isn't the building. It's finding a great idea. And great

[10:47] ideas don't just hit you in the shower. You're better off finding a real problem that someone is already trying to solve. I just put out this video where we surveyed hundreds of founders about where they actually found their ideas. Even if SAS or software isn't your thing, these patterns apply to any business. I'll link it on screen and in the description. And if this was helpful, I'd love it if you'd give it a thumbs up. Subscribe if you want more like this, and I'll see you in the next

[11:11] one.

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