Episode 846 | Snail Mail, Cold Calling, Regulating Your Nervous System, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

Is your nervous system sabotaging your best decisions?

In this episode, Rob mixes a solo adventure with listener questions. He answers a reader who asks why he still shows up to write, record, and build, then digs into regulating your nervous system when you have to do something that scares you. He wraps with two listener questions on direct snail mail outreach and on cold calling in an industry you know nothing about.

Want to get your question answered? Submit your question for an upcoming episode.

Topics we cover:

• (04:41) – Why does Rob still write, record, and build?
• (08:55) – Regulating your nervous system under fear
• (15:55) – Direct snail mail outreach for SaaS
• (18:44) – Cold calling an unfamiliar industry
• (20:27) – How to learn a new skill fast
• (21:08) – Finding trusted sales resources
• (27:01) – Learning Facebook ads the hard way

Links from the show:

• Idea to Traction: Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants (book wait list)
• The SaaS Playbook
• Rob Walling | YouTube
• Rob Walling Newsletter
• MicroConf Masterminds
• TinySeed Mentors
• Close CRM (Steli Efti)
• SalesMVP Lab (Daniel Hebert) 
• Ben Hyneck, B2B sales coach 
• Stephen Steers, B2B sales and storytelling 
• Outscraper

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you'd like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We'd love to hear from you!

Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Rob Walling: Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I'm going to mix a couple formats. I have some listener questions, but I also have a solo adventure topic that I want to talk about. And so I'm going to combine those along with a really interesting question, kind of an inside baseball question I got from a reader of my email newsletter where he asked, "Why do you do what you do? Why do you still do it?" And it was a fun question for me to ponder. I think we should all be asking ourselves why we do what we do. Before we dive into those topics and questions, I am launching the wait list for my next book. I've been talking about this book for a few years. It was previously titled The SaaS Launchpad, but I have changed the title. 

It's now titled Idea to Traction: Stop Building SaaS Nobody Wants, Even in the Age of AI. And this book covers from coming up with ideas to validating them, to building a launch list, to launching and getting some early traction. You can think of it as, honestly, it's an updated version of Start Small, Stay Small 16 years later and updated for the age of AI. It's also the prequel to The SaaS Playbook. The SaaS Playbook says you have a product in market, you have some weak product market fit, some traction. Idea to Traction covers the steps before that. So if you want to get to it right now, it's ideatotractionbook.com. So as I think about Start Small, Stay Small and all of the requests that I've received to update that book over the last 16 years, I tried to start with Start Small, Stay Small and just edit it, but you can't do that. 

So much has changed. So much has changed. The philosophy of bootstrapping and mostly bootstrapping still holds, but everything else, all the other pieces and parts just had to be disassembled. So even these days, a lot of folks who aren't developers are now building software and building SaaS, right? And Start Small, Stay Small was a developer's guide to launching a startup. That was the title. It didn't say anything about bootstrapping. It certainly didn't say anything about SaaS, but these days, whether it's no code or vibe coding or partnering, there's a lot of non-developers. And Idea to Traction is focused on SaaS, as you can tell by the subtitle. Even in the age of AI though, some SaaS will succeed. We know that SaaS is seeing headwinds, but there are a lot of types of SaaS companies that are going to be okay. And that's what Idea to Traction covers. 

I've spent the last two months really focusing in on adding all types of comments and thoughts around how AI impacts each of the steps. There's a validation step and I talk about why AI doesn't mean that you can just skip it. I give examples of that from real life founders who have validated recently in the past six months. So the approaches are battle tested recently. These are not five or 10 year old approaches. And it's all of my current thinking on how to go from idea to launch and gaining early traction. And of course, product-less marketing first [VERIFY: "product glass marketing first"] is something that I haven't said since Start Small, Stay Small. And I bring it up in the book, in the introduction actually. I'm really excited. I've been working on this book for too long. Since The SaaS Playbook, actually. It was originally part of The SaaS Playbook, but The SaaS Playbook is what, 210 pages maybe? 

And Idea to Traction is I think 260 or 270 pages. It's long and I didn't want a 500 page book. So I broke it out and I've had to continuously update it as AI has come out and affected everything. So I just submitted the manuscript to my editor a few days ago, and that's how hot off the press this is. If you want to get on the wait list, I'm going to notify you as soon as the book is ready for pre-order. And you're going to get access to a live Q&A that I'll be doing all about early stage SaaS. You will only get access to that Q&A if you are on this wait list. And I'm also going to send you some pretty important resources like worksheet and checklist type things that you can use straight away without the book, but they are pulled from the content of the book. 

And it's not AI slop crap. We've spent a lot of time, my team and I, putting together something that we hope can be genuinely useful. So that's ideatotractionbook.com. And if you enter your email there, you'll be the first to know and you'll hear about the live Q&A and receive all of those resources. 

I'd like to dive into my first topic of the day. This was in response to an email that I sent out. If you go to robwalling.com/emails, you can get on my email list where I am sending out essays with original think pieces. It was every week and now it's about every week or two, but I'm hoping to get back on the weekly train soon. And I'm going to keep this responder anonymous because I did not get permission to share their name. But they said, "I'm excited to read the book." I think this is The SaaS Playbook. "For $10," because you can get it on Kindle or I think I saw PDF for $10. "For $10, it was a steal given the value I got from watching your content. The video, What SaaS Buyers Actually Want in 2026, and the great conference video on content marketing strategy." 

So these are a couple videos that we can link up in the show notes, but if you go to youtube.com/robwalling, you can see both of those. And so this person says, "I was just wondering, why do you do this? As in, do you derive the most pleasure from your conference, your accelerator, or just getting your content out there? I'm curious what inspires you today?" And it's such an interesting question, right? I've answered it a bit on the show before in the sense of I don't need to work. I could retire. I could have retired years ago actually. And yet I keep doing stuff. Since being able to retire, I've written three or four books. I've recorded at least 400 podcast episodes and hundreds of YouTube videos and started the Accelerator, continued to run and grow MicroConf. So why do I do it? There's a couple things for me. 

One, I love having an impact on people, like a positive impact. And I really enjoy putting out a book and having the SaaS Playbook I think has sold 55,000 copies. And for a self-published book, that's not bad. It's really not bad. It's my best selling book of all time across all my books. Sold well over a hundred thousand copies. That's fun to me. As hard as writing books is and creating all these podcast episodes and the YouTube videos and such, it really does bring me joy to put things out in the world and then hear people put them to use and have it change their lives. That is probably what gives me the most joy of anything that I do today. And for me, I'm wired that there also has to be some financial tie to it. If I'm not making money doing it, I struggle to stay motivated. 

That doesn't include my hobbies. I play the guitar. I don't make money on that. I play tabletop games. I definitely lose money on that because I spend so much money on these games. I hang out with my family. I love going out to eat. I hang out with friends. Obviously I don't need to make money doing those things. But if I'm doing something in the professional world where perhaps people are taking my advice and using it to make money, it feels like I should be in on that transaction. And even if I give away far more value than has come back to me, I'm okay with that. But as long as some comes back to me with selling conference tickets and there's sponsorships on this podcast and potentially making money from a TinySeed company's exit and we get carried because we run an accelerator as well as SaaS Institute, the coaching, the premium coaching program we have, we get money on a recurring basis for that. 

But that's not why I do it. That's just a need or a desire that I have in order to be fulfilled and to justify the time, effort and energy that I spend creating all of this content and thinking all of this through. So that's why I do it. It's to have an impact on a lot of people that brings me joy. And I've figured out a way to do that and make enough money to justify it and to hire the team, frankly. Between MicroConf and TinySeed, I think there are 10 of us and people make full-time salaries. These are mostly W-2 folks living in North America, so it's not cheap. And if I want to put out content and run an accelerator at the quality that we run, MicroConf as well obviously, and write books at the quality that I want to, that takes money. 

It takes a lot of time, money and effort. So I appreciated that question and hope you enjoyed hearing me talk it through. And if not, I hope you started hitting the 10 second skip button at some point. My next topic is one that I bet more people will skip than the topic I just covered. I want to talk for just a couple minutes about regulating your nervous system while you're doing something that scares you. And even to be honest, just noticing when your nervous system is flipping out. I didn't learn this skill until the last probably 10 years, which is way too late. I remember being so tied to whatever my body was doing, like anxiety, fears when I was 17, when I was in college, just these intense swaying feelings and I was my feelings. And I still know some people like this and it sucks when you don't recognize that a feeling is not you, a feeling is not permanent and it's not who you are, and that you should not be making big decisions when your nervous system is dysregulated, when you feel that tightness in your chest, when you're really concerned and worried and you're thinking in a pattern that really isn't that healthy. 

It's certainly not calm and it's certainly not a rational or a stable, grounded place to be, which is where you want to be to make decisions. So it wasn't until the last 10 years of therapy and really getting to know myself and really feeling those days when I would wake up and just feel massively anxious or wake up and feel a bit depressed. I don't have clinical depression, but some days I wake up and I feel melancholy. And on those days I would wake up and I used to say, "Everything sucks. Everything's going to zero. Why am I even doing this? Maybe I should sell the company. Maybe I should shut it down. Nothing's working." And now when I wake up and I feel that way, I think this is probably just for the first few hours of the day. Or maybe even if I feel this way the whole day, it's not real. 

Like that's not my reality. My feelings are not my reality. I didn't know that until 10, 12 years ago. And obviously if you're well adjusted and you don't have issues regulating your nervous system, good on you. Congratulations. That is not me. I should say that was not me. It is at this point, but I had to learn it. And I think the important thing I wish I'd known a lot earlier, even before I could regulate it, is to identify when I was feeling out of sorts and to realize, oh, this isn't normal. This feeling in my chest, this tightness in my chest or this anxiety or this fear or this, again, depression, whatever these swaying emotions are, these aren't a good place to make a big decision and they don't represent me. They just represent a feeling. That's the first step. The second step is to learn to regulate it yourself. 

And you might need help. You might need a therapist. You might need medication. And I'm sure there are other approaches that I could probably get Dr. Sherry Walling on the show to talk about. This is not something I'm an expert in other than I've gone through it myself. And I know some folks at different stages of this. I have a friend I was talking to and they actually inspired this segment. They've been really trying to push through nervous system scariness, basically. When you get scared to do something risky, but you know you need to do it anyway and you resist it, but you should be doing it, that's a problem. That'll keep your life small. You won't ask for the raise. You won't ask the person out that you want to date. You won't stand up to someone at work. You won't stand up to your spouse or the person you're dating. 

There's a lot of things that you want to do, but if you're scared to do them and you let your nervous system override them, it will hold you back both personally and professionally. And so developing this skill is something important. And in order to do it, this friend of mine is practicing and doing things that scare them over and over. And it gets a little easier each time. You've heard me talk on the show about the first time I ever published a blog post back in 2005. I was terrified, which is just laughable now. Why would I be scared of publishing a blog post? For some reason, writing an essay and publishing it on the internet terrified me. Hair stood up on the back of my neck. I got cold sweats. I thought, what if people judge me? What if people hate me? All these things. 

And it got a little easier with the second one and the 10th one and the 100th one. Honestly, by the 50th one, I just didn't care anymore. I wasn't worried. Same thing, first podcast episode of the show. I was terribly, terribly nervous. Yeah, it terrified me. First time I got on stage to do a talk, completely dysregulated. First time I emceed one of my events, completely shattered. First YouTube video I did. I've been recording this podcast for years. And the first YouTube video I recorded was a mess. I was so nervous being on camera. It's such a trip how these things change. And you know how I got through each of them? By doing them over and over. Repetition. By standing up, being scared and doing it anyway. And sometimes you can just do it through brute force. You just do it over and over and you become accustomed to it. 

And now when I get on stage at MicroConf to MC the event, I'm nervous a tiny bit before I get up and for about 30 seconds and then it's done. And that did not used to be the case. And if you've ever MC'd a big event, it can be nerve wracking. But through repetition and through learning how to regulate my nervous system, that's the other thing. The brute force is just doing it over and over, but also learning the slow breathing and the self-talk of, "Hey, it's going to be all right. This is not reality right now. This is just how you're feeling." And honestly, for me, it's music. So I have a handful of songs that I can play and I will play them on loop if needed that pull me back into a place of calm. And I can feel the warmth fill my chest and I can feel my body relax and enter into a place of calm and peace and grounding. 

And if you think that I sound super woo-woo and new age, I would not classify myself as someone who is new age or woo or whatever term you want to put on it. I would classify myself as someone who for most of my life struggled with anxiety massively and figured out how to manage that and to regulate my nervous system over the last 10 years. And again, to reiterate, the reason this is important, to learn to do this, is A, so that you can do new things because doing new scary things is how you grow. It's how you get better. It's a huge part of entrepreneurship. It's a huge part of being a human who gets better over time. I think all of us should be growing and looking back six months ago and saying, "Wow, who was that person? They're so different than I am now," because you are learning and expanding and becoming a better human each day. 

And because this can help you both personally and professionally to take the risks and stand up for yourself and do things that are scary, but you do them anyway. And each time you do it, you're going to get a little better at it and it's going to be a little easier. My next topic is a listener question. Just going to have a couple more listener questions and then we'll wrap up. But this one is from March of 2025. It is a text question. And of course, text questions go to the bottom of the stack, which is why it has taken a while for me to get to it. Question comes from Jeremy Oakes. It's about direct snail mail. Jeremy asks, "I run SaaS for managed IT companies and I'm having trouble with marketing problem awareness through product awareness. And I think the use of ad blockers and email rules by my target market is part of the issue. 

However, I can identify potential clients using public data. My question is, is direct snail mail outreach, either letters or gift boxes, something you've seen work well before?" And Jeremy is with automationtheory.com. The answer is, I have seen this work for folks. The first question is, do you have the annual contract value to support this? Because if you're selling something for $5,000 a year and you're trying to do direct snail mail, which will likely be accompanied with cold calling, if you're going to spend this type of money to send a gift box, I think I would want to educate myself on ABM. And there are books out there on this topic that you can look at and I'm sure there are influencers. What's the Startups for the Rest of Us equivalent for sales folks and ABM folks? It has to be out there. So the answer is it can work. 

The couple of challenges are you need a high enough annual contract value to justify it and you need cash upfront because especially at the start, you're going to send a lot of letters or gift boxes that aren't going to work as you optimize your process. And so you are going to need a significant amount of capital before you start getting a return. And in that return, you're probably going to want to charge annually, by the way, annually only because you are going to need that cash to feed back in. But this is why a lot of companies raise money. And even if you only raised a few hundred thousand dollars, it's going to be easier than if you are trying to bootstrap. And I'm actually going to put out a call. If you have used direct snail mail, letters, gift boxes, anything else to sell SaaS specifically and you have had success with it and you have a camera and a good microphone and you're good on the mic. 

I'd love to have a little podcast segment where we call in a remote correspondent who gives us, I don't know, four to six minutes of audio about how they've done it, what worked, what didn't. I have seen TinySeed and MicroConf companies do this. I say I've seen, I have heard, I've been told that they did it with some success. And I'm curious if anyone out there is doing it. So thanks for that question, Jeremy. Little bit of TBD on part of the answer, but I hope it was helpful. And my last question of the day is about cold calling in an industry you are unfamiliar with. 

Speaker 2: Hi, Rob. I'm relatively new to the pod. However, I love your insight into the SaaS world and bootstrapping. I am someone who heavily believes in providing value in exchange for receiving value. So if there's any way I could potentially provide value to you, I'd love to do so. With that said, my question is, how can one overcome the hurdle that comes with cold calling strangers in an industry you're unfamiliar with? For context, I'm based in the UK and I built an automation system to help small cleaner company owners avoid losing potential clients due to slow response times from an inquiry. My primary way of reaching them is cold calling, where I find that most of the owners I call don't even entertain the conversation or some don't even pick up the phone. I've got a list of around 400 plus companies in London alone because that's where I'm trying to get my target ICP that I scraped from a software called Outscraper for the purpose of the cold call. 

So how do I figure out, one, why I'm not able to have decent conversations with them? And two, how do I convert more of the calls I have into booked demos? Because I feel I may be struggling a bit on that front. So when you started out with yours, how did you overcome that hurdle? Or do you know anyone who has tried that and actually overcome it? Thanks for the support and all the messages you've given in your podcast. I hope you're able to answer this question in your following episodes. I could have an idea on how to resolve mine. Once again, if there's any way I can provide value to you, please do let me know. I'll be happy to do so at any time. Thank you. 

Here's why I like this question, because I have never made a cold call, but I can tell you that if I had to, I would have and I would have learned how to do it. So you and I right now are in the same boat. So what I'm going to talk you through is how I would learn to do it myself. As a 20 year SaaS entrepreneur who's invested in a gajillion companies and done the podcast and YouTube and all the other stuff and come from someone who used to be so anxious I couldn't publish a blog post on the internet to where I am today. I've gotten pretty good at learning things quickly and at getting good at things that I don't know how to do. So today, if I was going to try to answer your questions, which are how do I cold call? 

How do I get better conversions? What do I do? I would go to Google and I would type in Steli Efti cold calling. Steli Efti is a friend of mine. He's a many time MicroConf speaker. He's been on this podcast a couple times. He is a supporter of MicroConf and TinySeed. And he is a sales consultant and has been advising founders on sales for I think 15 years, maybe a little more. Go to Google, type in Steli Efti cold calling. You'll see some podcasts and some articles and there are some golden rules. I'm sure there are YouTube videos. You could ask ChatGPT or Claude what advice Steli would give you, any of that. He's just a knowledgeable person. And you could say, "You be Steli Efti and tell me what he would tell me to do about these things." So that's one step I would take. The other thing I would do is I would go to close.com, the CRM, and I would look for cold calling resources there because they have an amazing blog and they have a bunch of free eBooks, free or low cost ebooks. 

Just because they're free does not mean they're not valuable. They are basically funded by Close. And Close is an exceptional CRM for SaaS companies. And they have a ton of great content they've been putting out for well over 10 years. Again, maybe close to 15. So that's the second thing I'd do. And I would consume all of that content. I mean, you could consume all of it in like a few hours. Then I would go to a reputable source for folks who talk about this type of thing. And the place I would go to is tinyseed.com/mentors. And then you can command F, type in sales. Who are the sales mentors for TinySeed? Oh yeah, Steli Efti here is a TinySeed mentor. Yay. So his just says co-founder of Close. But when I type in sales, three mentors come up. I think there are a few more that maybe don't have sales in their title. 

Daniel Hebert of SalesMVP Lab, Ben Hyneck, B2B sales coach, Steven Steers, B2B sales and storytelling expert. I know that those three plus Steli, those four are exceptionally good at sales and at coaching sales and that any advice they give you or any content that they put out, I'm going to trust. They're vetted. They're vetted by me personally or folks on the TinySeed team, Tracy and Alex, who've been on this podcast and on the YouTube videos. We do not let people in that we do not trust to give advice to founders that we are invested in. So we have a very vested interest in having only exceptional people on this mentor list. So I would copy paste each of them into Google and look at what they talk about. Each of them has a different specialty. Each of them has a different mode of engagement. 

I think one of them is only a coach. And I don't think he's written a book. So if you want coaching, then you hire him. Other folks have put out content and I'm sure they have podcasts and YouTube and you just go down that rabbit hole. That's basically the first step I would take because for me, I know almost nothing about cold calling. And the first thing I want to do is get some frame of reference. But the thing is, you can spend a day or two or you can spend six months consuming this content. Err on the side of a day or two. Once you're a day or two into it, and I don't mean spending two eight hour days to do this, it should not be that much. I mean in the background while I'm doing dishes, I mean an hour or two or three during my workday if I'm working full-time on my product, not if I'm working for someone else. 

And I am going to be learning enough to then pick up the phone and make my first cold call. That's what I'm going to do. And I'm going to make one and I'm going to realize that was really hard. That was very scary. And did I screw up? What happened? And then maybe go back to the resources. Go to, is there a subreddit? Do I have this coach who can help me? Am I recording these so that he can help me get better at them? And another thing to do, of course, is to get into a peer group, like a mastermind group. We have MicroConf Masterminds. We match founders with other founders. And you could bring this to your mastermind group and be like, who here has done cold calls? Because there are a lot of folks who have. And selling over the phone is a thing that you will get better at, you can get better at if you do it over and over. 

So that's how I attack something that I don't know anything about. I would also these days use Claude and ChatGPT quite a bit. I mean, I mentioned them early on, but I prefer to listen directly to the humans unless I need stuff maybe aggregated a bit more because I don't love the averages. Like you ask ChatGPT or Claude how to cold call and it's going to give you average answers. But if Steli Efti is directly telling me or Ben Hyneck, any of these other mentors that I mentioned, to me, it's a bit closer to the metal and closer to the source. The last thing I'll say about it is there is certainly software out there that helps you make cold calls. And I think close.com is one of them, but I know for a fact there are others, I just don't know them off the top of my head. 

Those, if they're SaaS companies, they are likely putting out content on how to make cold calls because they want to rank in Google for all five stages of awareness around cold calling. The thing is, finding which one or two or three are reputable and that you think are actually putting out good content and not just SEO crap that is these days you call it AI slop, but even five years ago, kind of pre the LLMs, people were putting out kind of crappy articles. And you're either going to recognize it, maybe you'll recognize it, maybe you won't. But that's why I look for trusted sources like I'm saying right now. But these are not the only sources that are going to have good knowledge. And so if you can get in and get a feeling of like, oh, these people know what they're talking about, this particular app, then that's another place that you could look. 

You can obviously look at, go to Amazon and type in books on cold calling. That works fine too. I'm an audiobook person, so I could imagine. I mean, I remember learning Facebook ads in 2011, 2012. And there were only a handful of books, maybe like four or five. And I think most of them weren't even print. They were like Kindle only. I bought all of them and I consumed all of them in a matter of hours. There's a bunch and you kind of start seeing repeating patterns. I went to a Starbucks, I remember this in Fresno when we lived there, and I was just skimming through them trying to figure out, okay, what's the head space here? Now these days, are there video courses? Are there experts you can hire, other coaches? Of course. There were almost none back in 2011-ish. And so I just had to learn it. 

And then I spent about a day trying to consume it, taking notes, opening up the interface, the interface that's so ugly that you can't unsee it. That was the Facebook ads interface back then, very complicated. And I started running ads. And that's not as scary as cold calling by the way, but I was spending money and this was for HitTail. And over the course of probably six months, I grew revenue significantly using Facebook ads and Facebook retargeting. I had a bunch of other marketing approaches in place, so it's hard to know exactly what ads did for me. It was at least 10K MRR that I added to that business and it might have been 15 plus K MRR. This was a business where it was just me and a couple contractors. I had 90% net margins on this. So at a certain point I was doing 30 grand a month and three grand was going to all expenses and all the rest of it was going to my bank account. 

It was a life changing moment for myself and my family. And that came through me learning how to run Facebook ads myself. And this is effectively the process that I went through to do that. So thank you for that question, Michelangelo. I hope that was helpful. I'm getting low on listener questions. You can email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or go to the website, click ask a question in the top nav. Audio and video questions, of course, go to the top of the stack. If you want to send a text question, that's fine too. It just might take me a little while to get to them. Later stage questions also go to the top of the stack. Early stage stuff, eventually I answer, but I really like those intermediate to later stage questions. Thanks for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 846.