(2026-02-12) Walling As A Founder Heres What You Should Be Focused On

Rob Walling: As a founder, here's what you should be focused on versus hand off to someone else.*

There are two kinds of work in a startup: work where you're relatively certain what the outcome will be, and work where you're not. (uncertainty)

Email support is a certainty. You're going to get some tickets, and you're going to respond to them.

You build out your knowledge base, create canned responses, and it becomes a repeatable process.

Building a known feature is similar. Once you've decided to add a settings page with a checkbox, getting that built is predictable.

A good example of uncertain work is answering the question: which features should you build to get closer to product-market fit? You don't have complete data. You're probably going to build some things that nobody ends up using. The question isn't whether you'll make mistakes, it's whether you'll get enough right to keep pushing the product forward.

Marketing is the same way. When you don't have any channels sending consistent leads, the uncertainty is unnerving. You pick an approach, go deep on it for months, and it may work or it may not

Being a founder means working on uncertain tasks and making hard decisions with incomplete information.

Here's the problem: most founders hide in areas of certainty.

The uncertain work is uncomfortable. There's no guarantee that the time you invest will pay off. So founders hang out in areas of certainty for too long. They keep writing code when they should be figuring out positioning. They keep tweaking the product when they should be testing marketing channels

The good news is that uncertain things don't stay uncertain forever.

There's maturity, and with maturity comes a certain level of certainty.

When I was running my last SaaS, we didn't hire our first product manager until we were doing a few million a year. Before that point, there was too much uncertainty for anyone other than the founders to navigate those decisions.

This certainty/uncertainty framework gives you a clear rule for delegation: when you have the money to hire, offload the areas of certainty first.

Customer support is usually the earliest handoff.

Software development is next

Marketing follows the same pattern.

Run Toward the Fog