Making Tough Design and Product Choices with Rob Walling
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This episode we had the pleasure of speaking with with Rob Walling. Rob is a maker; an entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder of Microconf, Founder at Drip (which was acquired by LeadPages) and most recently co-founder at TinySeed, a new bootstrap founder accelerator and funding program.
Rob has been building, scaling and growing software products for a long time. As a founder, he’s either built or acquired and grown multiple successful products and companies, all self funded or bootstrapped. He also runs a popular podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us which has been going for quite some time and is packed with useful advice.
Rob’s background is impressive but he may not seem like an immediate choice for a guest here on the Aurelius podcast since we tend to focus heavily on UX, user research and product management.
Here’s the thing, Rob has had to make dozens and dozens of tough design and product choices over the years in order to successfully build and grow software companies like he’s done.
He’s actually the perfect choice for us to chat with to gain a fresh new perspective on just how we can think about the balance between UX design and the business.
We had a great discussion with Rob about his background, how to make those big, hairy product decisions with confidence and an ever important topic of designing for customer on-boarding to either a new product or feature.
He shared with us his story of founding Drip, growing it to the product it became and how he personally thought about and made those tough design decisions. I’m certain you’ll have solid tips to take away from this episode.
Our chat with Rob, as most often does, eventually led to using customer feedback, research and insights from those conversations to make better informed design, product and feature decisions.
He and I talked about the challenge of organizing and acting on all the customer research and feedback insights you have. With that, I want to remind you that we built Aurelius to help you solve that exact problem. Aurelius is a user research and insights platform to help you organize, search and share all that customer research and feedback in one place. We’ve had a lot of very cool new features launched recently and we’ve extended our free trial to 30 days.
If you’re interested, head over to our website to check it out for yourself at www.aureliuslab.com.
Episode 35 highlights with Rob Walling:
- How Rob started and/or acquired multiple SaaS apps over the years and some product and design lessons he’s learned from that experience
- Rob’s background as a software engineer and what made him decide to become an entrepreneur
- The story of founding Drip and how Rob and how the team made some pretty big changes in the product
- Finding the confidence to help you figure out how, and when, to make big product decisions
- Minimum Path to Awesome and how to successfully launch new features in your product
Rob Walling is the Co-founder at Microconf, Founder at Drip, co-founder at TinySeed
You can find Rob at his website: https://robwalling.com/ or on his very own podcast Startups for the Rest of Us
This episode was originally published on the Aurelius blog.
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