E8: Stair Step Approach
07/29/2024, duration: 06:09
In this episode, I explore the stair-step approach by Rob Walling from “Startups for the Rest of Us.” This strategy involves three phases: starting small with your first product, owning your time as your business grows, and achieving recurring revenue. I discuss my struggles with side projects and how this method could help gain traction. Moving forward, I plan to focus on smaller initiatives and leverage SEO for long-term growth. I’m excited to apply the stair-step approach and see where it takes me.
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Transcript
Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job and side projects. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in.
The topic I'd like to talk about today is the stair-step approach. It's a concept that I learned a couple of years ago while listening to Startups for the Rest of Us, which is presented by Rob Walling, a well-known entrepreneur, an author, and a podcast host. But he's also responsible for MicroConf and I believe also TinySeed. And he coined the concept of the stair-step approach. I have been struggling with my side projects and getting them to gain traction. And then I remembered this concept. Let's talk about that today, explain it a little and muse on how it applies to me.
So the stair-step approach is a strategy for building a business incrementally. The idea is it consists of three phases. Your first product, own your time, and then recurring revenue. So your first project is about starting small. Since you're starting with your first thing, you don't know everything. You're not familiar with the concept. You don't know what to pay attention to. So you start small and so that you can iterate fast. You can pivot. You can learn a lot of things by doing and just starting your product. And it could be anything. It could be an e-book. It could be a course. It could be a small tool. It doesn't really matter what it is. Just start doing something and then you will learn about doing marketing, what works for that product, what doesn't. And slowly you will try to gain traction, get more users, and hopefully eventually get some income.
And then slowly when that grows, you get to phase two, own your time, where you are going to be responsible for your own time. It could be that in phase one, you do the side project really as a side project, so you're not relying on its income yet. And when you get to phase two, it means that your product or products have grown enough to really start doing it on your own time. Give up your job or something else and really focus on the product itself and try to let it grow. That's the idea. You own your time. You grow, you learn more, and you do more, and you just continue. And this is also the point where you learn what the maximum growth is of the current iteration of your project. Whether you need to do another pivot as you gain more information, what works, what doesn't work, how to obtain more users. That's what you're finding out in this phase.
The third phase is recurring revenue, and that's, as Rob calls it, the holy grail for every entrepreneur. So in the phases before, you had to scramble every month to get paying users, get income, as you were selling your course or your e-book or your product. But as your product has grown, you could start offering subscriptions. Recurring revenue is the goal. You don't have to really do something for the users that have already obtained a price plan or a subscription. It's just there are some new factors that you need to play into, like churn, people leaving your product, canceling their subscription. But the people that stay, they're basically free money. You put in the energy to make them a user, and then after that, they hopefully stay that, and you don't really need to put a lot of time into that. They are already a user. They're locked in, and continue from there.
In short, it's the stair-step approach. Read up on it. If you want to know more about it, this is how I interpreted it from the information from Rob. And reading up on it this morning, and how it applies to me, I've always kind of been going two steps faster. So I always try to get to step three at once. So I've been building, the stuff that I've been building, and that's probably also experience from my work, are bigger products that take time to build, but do a lot of things at the same time. Well, following the stair-step approach, that's too much. It's difficult to find your market, find your audience, so start smaller. That's what I'm realizing now, and maybe in the coming months, I will be scaling back to things that I'm doing, and more focusing on building products, multiple ones, trying to find the audience, trying to market them, see what works, what doesn't. And if one of them gains traction, or multiple of them, I could try to use those to move to step two, and really start growing those and improving them. That's what I will be focusing on for the coming months, to find smaller things that work, that I could iterate fast on.
And I'm also going to be learning more about SEO, so search engine optimization, because if I'm building multiple stuff, I also need to find sources where streams of people that are able to find my product. And SEO is the long game, but it's also the free game. So I don't have any budget for running ads or stuff like that, and I kind of like the idea of SEO, it's a way to kind of gamification, new gamification for keywords and stuff like that. And if you're successful, you're able to get more people to your webpage, and hopefully convince those people to start using your product. That's what I wanted to share with you today. Let me know what you think. Do you agree with the stair-step approach, or did you take a different approach? Let me know, and I'm wishing you a good day. Bye.
Thanks for tuning in to Debugging Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Stay curious, and see you next week.
