Episode 841 | One-time Payments, Growing a Step 2 Business, Positioning, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

Should you keep pouring time into a business that will probably never be huge? In this episode, Rob Walling answers listener questions about whether to keep growing a "step two" B2C business despite platform risk, when one-time payments make sense versus subscriptions, and how to price and position a Shopify app that needs custom implementation work. Want to get your question answered? Drop it here. Episode Sponsor: What if you could go from idea to your first real user in 30 days? Not a prototype, not a promise, but an actual working app. Designli will put that in writing. Their TractionLab is a 90-day plan that takes you from idea to first paying customers. By Day 30, v1 of your app is in your users' hands, guaranteed. Miss that deadline and your next month is free. It starts with a free 30-minute call where you share your idea and they tell you exactly what they'll build and what it costs. No surprises. You get a full senior team: product owner, engineering lead, full-stack developer, senior UX designer, and solutions architect. They use AI to ship faster, but senior engineers own every architecture decision and review every line of code. The result is yours, and it's built to last. Go from idea to revenue in 90 days: designli.co/gettraction Topics we cover: (2:06) – Growing a "step two" business (5:11) – Momentum vs. market size (9:16) – One-time payments vs. subscriptions (15:11) – Why recurring revenue teaches faster (18:22) – Mixing one-time and subscription pricing (20:28) – Pricing a custom Shopify app (22:31) – Building a $49 vs. $249 tier (24:47) – Protecting margin on custom work Links from the show: TinySeed SaaS Institute Rob's Weekly Newsletter Youform The SaaS Playbook SaaS Launchpad SignWell 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