Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers | Transcription

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Introduction

Intro (00:00)

But yeah, why did you decide to start doing a podcast after the site was going? People were asking for it. It seemed like a good idea. I mean, the number of people who asked me to do a podcast was so much higher than people who asked for any other feature. And also, I think, you know, a part of the text interviews was that you have to share your revenue. So everyone is completely transparent. And the number of people that I reached out to, I thought, would have really good stories for the site that people can learn from, who were willing to share everything but their revenue was like pretty high. And so I kept getting tired of people saying, you know, I'm not going to come on. If I have to share my revenue, you need some other way where I can come on and share my stories with a podcast kind of helped me kill that bird. And also, you know, it appeased people who wanted me to do a podcast.

Podcasting Insights And Entrepreneurship Journeys

Improvements gained from Podcasting (00:41)

But I was terrified of it because, like I said earlier, like I don't, I never done a podcast. Was it were there people you admired at the time? You're like, oh, I want to make a podcast like X, Y, or not at all. I can barely listen to podcast. Yeah. I mean, like, I was just like, you know what? I'll try this. I had a very like lazy approach to like, I'm not going to do a ton of research. I'm not going to. I'm just going to try talking to people and see how it comes out and have my own style. I think it's worked out. I've gotten better over time. Yeah. Well, what are your, what are the skills you've developed, you think? I think I've gotten a lot better at preparing efficiently. I don't know if you're like reading their own. Yeah. Like knowing what to read and what to listen to, what kinds of questions to ask that'll be engaging and that they'll give good answers to and how to follow up on a question if you get an unexpected answer. So I'm kind of a control freak. I'm like, okay, here's exactly. It leads to the beginning. You know, I'm going to ask question A, B, C, D, E, F, and this is how it's going to go. And like, you know, you ask a question, they start giving your answers all over the map and suddenly your perfect plan is thrown into disarray. So I think just like having the composure and the ability to calm down and be like, okay, it's okay. And just listen to what they're saying and have a normal conversation that was difficult at first. Other things like I don't know if you've all this is skill, but just being comfortable, like in my own scan, not cringing at the sound of my own voice. Because you had hit your own podcast. Yeah, I had a podcast, but I mean, I would go back and listen and it's like, I don't know, like, if you hate the sound of my voice, but I hated the sound of my voice at first, now I'm fine with it. But at first I was like, yeah, I sound awful. He's going to listen to me. No, it's not a problem. Yeah, you can only spend so much of your time cringing at yourself after you're like, I mean, like the amount of hours I've seen myself on video and listen to myself on a pod. Whatever. It's fine. Yeah, that is one of the things that I thought the fear would remain and it completely goes away. Maybe to a fault. But yeah, the video element has thrown a few people.

Most unique belief (02:36)

What was your favorite episode? I haven't listened to all of them yet. It's hard to say a favorite episode. Two more is like, I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings. Okay. And then I forget to, you know, like what happened in that episode? But some of the coolest ones, I didn't want my friend Julian Shapiro who's got a growth consultancy called bell curve. And he just like deep-dived into like a bunch of different kind of stories of him working with different clients. And he was not afraid to share like times where he just messed up. So I thought that was really cool. I really liked the episode. I did last week with Wes Boss, who's- That was a good one. Yeah, he's a great guy. I mean, he's gets an enormous amount of work done to be just a one person. He's gotten emailing us like 170,000 developers on it that he's built by himself in like five or six years, Twitter following of like 100,000 people. And he's just trucking along. He works nine to five, puts his laptop down and then goes hanging out with his wife and his kids. So he's got it together. That's really- As I wondered about that, like is there a list of people that you admire? Like man, that person hasn't figured out. Like I want to do exactly what they're doing. Yeah, there's a lot of people and it's like, I always forget. I'm like, man, that person's got it figured out in the next week. I've totally forgotten about it. I've moved on to other things. And I'm like, oh yeah, Wes Boss guy. Your life's pretty good. Yeah, it's okay. I've seen a handful of like roundups of indie hacker pro tips from every episode. Are you continuously integrating their great ideas into your daily life or do you kind of just go your own way? Yeah, I think it's funny. It's one of the things I was telling a friend a couple of days ago. I think generally speaking, like all of us tend to overweight like novel advice, like things that are new or flashy or we haven't heard before. And we tend, it's like so easy to ignore the things that we hear all the time. You know, like, oh, make something people want. Talk to your customers. Like exercise. Yeah, exercise. Take some time off. Like, oh, I've heard that before. I get it. Yeah. But I try to have the discipline that when I see that kind of repeated advice to take it to heart and not look at it as something that, okay, you know, have I heard this before? Yes, it doesn't matter. But more, you know, as a reminder to myself, like am I actually living by this? You know, I've internalized this. Or I like to think I have, but like, am I actually talking to my customers? Am I actually taking time off? Am I actually exercising? And the answer a lot of times is no. So I think when people do like these roundups and people analyze things and I see this advice repeated, I take the time to ask myself if I'm doing it. And you know, I think I've gotten better at it. Just repeated reminders to myself. Yeah, I think you become conscious of it. But I agree. I don't need 12 new morning routines. All right. So we posted a bunch of questions or other people posted questions to Twitter for you. You have a lot of fans online.

What do you believe that most others do not? (05:19)

Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt, asked, what do you believe that most others do not? I'm drinking question. I heard this one. Yeah. I'm glad I got this question on Twitter rather than just being asked randomly because it's hard to answer unless you've thought about it. Yeah. Kind of a funny story. So I think this question originally comes from Peter Teal, who would ask the founders of companies that he was interested in investing in just as a way to find out if like what they're doing is truly unique and whether they're able to have like a monopoly in very few competitors. That's why he liked it. I liked it when I heard it because it's kind of a sneaky way to get somebody to say something controversial. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was in YC five years ago, I asked Paul Graham. I was like, I think 2011, I was like, Hey, PG, you know, what do you believe? I think I asked, what do you believe that other smart people don't? And it took him a long time to answer. He was just like, I don't know. My thoughts, they're not indexed that way. But then he ended up coming up then answering and it worked. It was controversial. I don't think anybody would very many people would agree. Okay. I can't say what it was because I have respect for him. I don't mean to be a tease, but luckily I've had some time to think about it. Probably the most obvious one is I think that it's probably a bad bet to start a VC funded company for the vast majority of people. You should not go that route. But there's other things I believe too. I think that and the value of kind of this culture of always talking about like, you know, what mission drives you and we kind of are not honest about the fact that a lot of us have motivated my money and financial things. I think it's probably better for the world if people can just be upfront and honest about that. I think I got a few others, but like let's start with those two. Yeah. No, I completely agree. And I think your everyone's ability to rationalize is unbelievably powerful. And you can be into anything. And if you're good at it, like just being good at the game is often enough to drive people. So you see like folks criticizing, you know, anyone who works in anything. And they're like, oh, why do they care about this? Why do they do that? It's because they're really good at it. Yeah. It's one of the things that you're good at it. You know, it stimulates your brain. Yeah, absolutely. Was there a point at which that you kind of turned on the interests in VC backed companies? Did something happen? It was before I even got into YC funnily enough. I went to startup school 2009. And Jason Fried was there from 37 signals. They called it at the time. And he was like, he stood out like a sore thumb. He was completely different than everybody else who talked. Everybody else was kind of a VC or they were a founder of a VC backed company. And he got on stage and basically said, everybody else is lying to you. Totally what they say. You kind of do what I see for inviting like, you know, like the opposite opinion there. But I was very taken by what he had to say because no one else was saying it at the time. It didn't really change my approach at that time. But then I got into YC and we had the weekly, you know, Tuesday dinners or founders come in. Same thing happened. We had a lot of VCs come in. We had a lot of founders of well-funded companies come in. And then Kevin Hale came in from Wufu. And he was like, the only person. He was kind of an Andy Hacker at the time. And he was just like, yeah, I packed up my company. We moved to Florida. Investors call us every day. We just, you know, politely say no. And we're just happy making money. You know, they're making millions of dollars a year. And I was intrigued by that. Like, huh. You know, but it wasn't until like recently, like basically last year, I really decided that's what I wanted to do for myself. Yeah. I wasn't really, you know, in the mood or really inclined to do the whole fundraising thing. And I'd rather just make money from an idea online that I enjoyed doing. And that idea was that Andy Hacker's or was that okay? So I mean, the company that I did YC with, Task Force, still exists. It's still out there. It still actually makes money passively. I kind of worked on that for a little bit, but I didn't think it was really going to go anywhere. I was confused about the idea. And so I sat around for like a couple days thinking, okay, what am I going to work on? And PG- It was about two days. Yeah. It was like three solid days. I wish you read about this like 12 years ago or something, but a lot of people when they come to the idea phase, they think that it's something that you naturally have to be good at. You know, you just get a good idea or you don't, right?

How do you come up with ideas? (09:18)

Whereas like the reality is it's like any other creative endeavor. If you practice for long enough, you'll create a good idea. You know, you don't try to like paint them on a Lisa in like 15 minutes. And if you don't get it, you give up. So I was like, all right, I'm going to push through this. I'm going to spend like two days coming up with ideas. Most of them are absolutely horrible. You know, I just deleted them immediately. But by the end of two days, I realized I was consistently coming up with like much better ideas than I had before. And I was just reading through Hacker News threads because people would ask like every month, you know, ask H&N what's your profitable side project or ask H&N how much money are you making from your, you know, your business. And people would share all the details. I figured, okay, there's like hundreds of stories here. If I read through enough of them, maybe I'll glean some insights, I'll see some patterns that I can apply and it'll help me come up with an idea. And that's literally exactly what happened. I mean, the idea for indie hackers was based off of the realization that, hey, I'm not the only person who's researching all the stuff.

Trend for non-VC-backed companies? (10:03)

The reason these threads are so popular is because everybody else is really interested. I could probably do a better version of these threads. And that's what indie hackers is. And I was wondering, is it because the, because there's been a rise in the popularity of indie hackers, right? But I think there's also a rise in just the number of those threads all over the internet. Yeah. Is that because more people are now thinking about, you know, small businesses or just non-VC backed businesses or there's more people in the software development space right now? I think it's probably a combination. So I read the book, Sapiens earlier this year and like my takeaway from, it's kind of a history of all humanity from like the beginning of evolution. And my takeaway from Sapiens was that human societies tell stories and it's tricky because it's difficult to determine whether or not something you believe is just like an arbitrary story that your society happens to tell or if it's like some immutable fact of the universe. And for the longest time, like the story around tech companies has been that like, if you start a tech company, you have to raise a lot of money and prioritize growth over funding. And you know, that's the story. And so it's amazing how much everyone just believes that and doesn't even consider the possibility that you can start, you know, a profitable company that doesn't have to be that big and you don't need any sort of investors or gatekeepers to tell you what to do. I think the story started to change a lot. And once people hear this alternative version of the story and once they see examples of it, people kind of like wake up out of the zombie like state and they're like, oh, I guess I can do that, you know, they've sort of been given permission. But there are other practical factors and reasons why the story has changed.

Traffic metrics (11:35)

A good one is if I look at the Andy Hacker's traffic stats, something like 60% of the traffic is from not the United States, let alone Silicon Valley. People are all over the world starting these companies. And it's just from a practical standpoint, it's hard to raise money if you live in like Bucharest. You know, it's difficult. You don't live in Silicon Valley. You don't have access to investors. And so your options are either you suck it up and try to raise money locally, you move to a tech hub and raise money there or you just prioritize profitability, which is like kind of the easiest of those three options. And so I think there's a lot of just natural pressure as more people over the world get interested in tech to start profitable businesses and to care less about growth overall else.

The stress of being in a winner-take-all market (12:03)

And have you seen that there's a common trend in folks just getting started like starting similar kinds of software businesses? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the other thing is like if you look at the companies that VCs tend to invest in, they're generally in winner take all markets. Yeah. Because venture capitalists want some massive return. You really want to be number one. You want to destroy the competition. So it's social things like Facebook or search applications like Google versus things that are profitable. You don't want to be on a winner take all market, right? You don't want to be fighting for your life. Every second of the day, you don't want to be in a zero some game where everyone else has to lose for you to win. And so people end up starting businesses that are very related. How many profitable analytics companies do you know like email marketing companies? There's a ton. You know, how many different ways are there to teach somebody something? I tell people all the time, if you want to start a business, just teach people. People like learning in like a thousand different ways. Some people want to go to college. Some people want to like, you know, classroom settings. Some people want to read. Some people want video courses. Some people want to email newsletters. Some people want to learn three games, right? There's no reason why you have to, you know, completely differentiate from everyone else in the market. You can do something that's similar and people will like your own unique style. So people for sure start related businesses. And I think it's a good thing because in it, it kind of fosters a sense of camaraderie. You don't have to compete with everybody. You don't have to be mistrustful of everybody. And you can get advice from people who are similar in doing things that kind of tread that path before you. Well, I've been wondering that with all of the guests you get, you know, because they're divulging most of their information, right? Like, usually like how much money they're making, all these kind of metrics. Are they worried about copycats? Or is this something that now that you have some traction, they kind of like know the deal and it's easier to get people? Yeah. I mean, people that I've talked to are generally not that worried. I've had some people who refuse to come on because they say, what's the benefit of me revealing my secrets and as someone's going to copy me? Yeah. And then I've had people who reveal their secrets and have actually been copied and it's always hilarious. You think about the kind of person out there who's going to like just listen to your podcast and read your interview and just waiting for someone to reveal all the details. And then they clone everything that you've done and like make some like crappy version of your website, but that's, you know, different in no way at all except that it's two years later. That's not the most competent person that you should be afraid of. So I think generally it's a non-issue, especially if you're not in some sort of winner take all market. Okay. So, even more questions from Twitter. There is David Atamu asked this question to both you and Ryan, which is part of the YC application. It is, tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage.

The hack for getting high-quality interviews (14:44)

Yeah.

How I spent my time when I was building Indie Hackers (14:50)

So I do remember doing this on the YC application. My answer now I think it would be more interesting if I related it to ND hackers, but early on in ND hackers history, I was kind of running myself ragged. I thought that, I mean, I really wanted to put out a lot of content. I wanted to do three or four or five early on interviews per week and these are not small interviews. So like sometimes a thousand, two thousand words, sometimes every poorly written one to edit and I have to follow up with the person. So they took hours and hours. You did the solo? Yeah, I did solo and I was sending a newsletter and then I was trying to grow the business as well. And so my trick early on was like, I'm just going to work 80 hours a week. It was not much of a trick. Yeah. But eventually I realized like, okay, this is not going to work. It's okay to do things that don't scale, but you can't do that forever. You need to figure out a way to make it work. And so what I wanted to do was increase or at least maintain the level, like the quantity of content that I was putting out without having to drop in quality. And so I wanted to like, you know, the ultimate would be to have some sort of interview system that like worked for everyone. It was generally applicable and yet still got interesting answers and didn't take me very long until you do. And the answer that I hit on, I kind of stumbled into it. I just started doing it naturally and it ended up working out was every time I would do a tech space interview. And I did these interviews over email. I would ask pretty much the same questions. And then I would look at the responses and ask follow up questions. And then I would take a note, okay, why did I have to ask that follow up question? What did they leave out? They probably should have included. You know, how could their answer have been better? Like why did I go to them with giving a better answer? And after a few months of like interviewing companies from all sorts of different industries and verticals, I had a gigantic list of ways that people commonly gave uninteresting interviews. And so I just factor that into my interview questions. So I have like a question followed by like 10 or 11 bullet points for the keyers. I used an answer. Here's what you should avoid in your answer. Here are things that people like listening to. And so I started sending that to people and instantly the interviews that I got back were much more entertaining and they were required less effort because I can send the same pack of questions to everybody. So it's kind of a, I guess it qualifies as a hack where I no longer have to do as much work. But their handwriting, while they're typing these answers, they're typing the answers to me over email. And then also a follow up question, but it was not, it was optimized to be as little work as possible on my part so that I could do other things like start the podcast. I was selling ads at the time. That took up like half of my time, et cetera. Yeah, because I found that the best hack for me, we did a bunch of interviews with the first employees at a tech companies. And the thing that worked was just doing audio interviews, transcribing them and then doing like insane amounts of editing. Because I found that there were just issues that you have trouble going back and forth to get deeper and deeper and deeper. Maybe you figured this out through repetition, but giving someone one chance at an answer and then they like painstakingly like write the perfect answer, oftentimes it comes out kind of flat. Yeah, it doesn't work very well. No. It didn't work for me early on, which is why I had to do crazy amounts of follow up emails. And I was just resistant to doing the call. Like I didn't want to get on the phone with people. That's why I was so scared to do a podcast. I was like, I want to talk to people. I just like the whole programmer buying a computer typing my keyboard and that's it. But it worked out. I mean, now we're doing, I think when we launched Indie Hackers last last, when I launched it last August, it was like 10 interviews. And it took me three weeks, I sent hundreds of emails to get 10 people to agree to do an interview. And one of them was me, so it was really only nine people. And now we've got like 200, I think we just hit 200 this week, interviews, 30 podcast episodes, and I'm working on that part of the business less than I ever had. So what are the other parts you're working on? I'm working on the community right now. So Indie Hackers really, it started off as a content site, really a showcase for these types of profitable internet businesses. But today I would describe it more as a community of founders and aspiring entrepreneurs who are like sharing knowledge with each other and helping each other to build successful businesses. So the real core of the site is the community forum. It's just a bunch of people asking each other practical questions. "How do I market my site? What do you think about my landing page? Should I change this? What do you think about my idea? How do you people find time to work on your projects when you have a family or a full-time job, et cetera, and just helping each other out?" That takes a lot of time to grow. And I'm thinking about building like kind of harnessing the power of the community to build tools that help these makers and these Indie Hackers to actually do better. What can they all work together on to make their lives easier? So it could be something as simple as maybe a crowdsourced list of the best podcast episodes for this month. Just because I don't want to dig through all the podcast episodes to find out what's worth listening to. I don't want these other people to tell me. All sorts of tools like that I think would be interesting for this community. So I'm spending almost all my time coding and talking to people and trying to figure out what to do there. Whereas my brother who was brought on as part of the Stripe acquisition is handling almost all of the editing for the interviews and coordinating with interviewees and handling the articles and finding people to write for Indie Hackers.

How to promote a forum when promoting isn't your thing (19:36)

Okay. So that now is just like growth tactics to get people into the forum. Yep, exactly. And it's kind of automatic. I mean, I'm not doing very many tactical things. Things get submitted to Hacker News. I think that's probably our number one growth channel. People on Hacker News read the interviews, which is how the site got launched. So it's not particularly, nothing has changed very much in the last year. It's more about like product. What's the right decision? What's worth building and what's not? It's a tricky decision because obviously, as a one or two person team, building something is a humongous investment. And you don't want to spend three months building the wrong thing. We have a handful of people coming up. One guy runs a site called BiggerPockets, which I haven't have you seen this before. It's basically like a giant real estate forum. And they've created tons of educational content. And I think they also have like a bunch of, I might be mistaken this, but a bunch of like calculators and stuff. So basically these tools that folks are interested in real estate investing need. And they've like figured it out. After someone asked the same question 400 times in the forum, you're like, "Oh, maybe there's some amount of interest here." Exactly. I think that's a cool model too. When I was scouring Hacker News trying to come up with an idea, the company that I saw that inspired me the most, and actually the first person that I reached out to for an interview afterwards was a company called Nomadlist, started by this guy Peter Levels, who's always on HN. He's like a crazy personality on Twitter as well. But what he did was basically built a resource for digital nomads. It was basically a list of all the different cities in the world that you might want to travel to, and then just common stats that you would like to research. Like how fast is the internet? How safe is it? How expensive is it? And so people who are digital nomads are like, "Of course, they want to do this research. They're going to go to this site rather than scouring the web." And once you've got them all in one place, you build a community, and they started building tools for that community that are just for digital nomads like himself. I think that's a pretty cool model. It sounds like this real estate site is the same. And the Hacker News is very similar. Yeah. And so because that was a handful of people on Twitter asked this question. So Tom, for instance, in Perthique, I'm getting their name wrong. Basically, how do you grow a forum? It's the question. Had you built a forum before? No idea. I had no idea. I just kind of winged it. I knew I wanted to have a forum. So the day that I launched in the hackers, I had a link on the site that said forum, but the forum wasn't built yet. And it just had a sign up list. So I just go to a MailChimp list or something. Yeah, I'm just going to my MailChimp list. And I wanted to see, OK, how many people sign up from the MailChimp list on this page? It's some sort of rough indicator of whether or not people want there to be a forum or a community, which I wasn't sure of. You could people are already talking on Reddit or already talking in Hacker News. This is a big question for a lot of people. They're like, why would I build a forum when I could get discussion, even with my own Facebook group? What motivated you to do it? Yeah. I did a lot of things early on that I think were a lot of people found unintuitive. They're like, why would you do that? And why are you building your own website rather than using WordPress? Or why don't you just use a medium blog? Why is Andy Hacker's this dark blue website? It looks ridiculous. Why are you building your own forum? Why don't you use Discord? So why don't you just use Facebook? And my thinking from the very beginning was, your product, whatever you do, you should probably take, if you're going to be invested in it for a number of years, you should take the time to make it stand out and be different and be yours. And I knew going into it also that I'm a computer programmer. The other ideas on my list, before I chose Andy Hacker's, were all kind of SaaS businesses that involved a lot more development. And I, for grudgingly, chose the idea that was a blog. Andy Hacker's is a blog. So I was like, okay, if I'm a programmer and I really want to do these other things, but I'm going to do a blog, I'm going to allow myself to do some fun stuff and make some stuff to keep myself interested. And I also thought about what I didn't like about blogs. And the worst thing about blogs is when you go to something and you blog and you read something good on it, and then you come back a month later and you don't even remember that you were there. There's no way you're going to go to Andy Hacker's and not remember that you've already ever been there because it's this quirky dark blue website that looks like nothing else on the internet. You might as well stand out. So I decided early on that I didn't want to do the standard thing that other people were doing. I didn't want to use Facebook for my community groups. I wanted to do it all in-house and do it myself. And so if someone were to start a community, what would be your advice on getting a forum going? Okay. So number one, I think you need to organize your forum around a topic that people can actually talk about and they actually enjoy talking about. It seems obvious, but people do it all the time where they start a community and think around something that people don't really like talking about and then they wonder why it's empty. Like what? Like just like one off things like, okay, let's start a community about, I don't know, something super specific. Like how do I incorporate? Okay. Well, you can't really have a community around how to incorporate because people ask that question and it's answer than they're out, right? So not only do people enjoy talking about it, but they need to actually, these would be substantive enough that they can come back and continue talking about it. Yeah. Starting a business obviously qualifies because there's endless challenges. Right. Number two, I think you need to have some sort of strategy to continually drive traffic to it. It can't be, you launch your community on Product Hunt and then after that you've got no strategy. And this applies to any product, not just a forum. Well, the ND hackers, if you were to think about the forum as like the core product of ND hackers and the interviews as content marketing, I think that'd be a good model for how it works. And then constantly doing these interviews every week. The interviews themselves are really entertaining, proved early on that people on Hacker News and Red and other websites and Twitter enjoyed sharing them. So I could do the interviews, get people on my mailing list and then send out links to the community on my mailing list and continually drive traffic and kickstart it over and over and over and over again for weeks. So if you're starting a community from scratch and you don't have any way to consistently drive traffic to it, you're at a tremendous disadvantage and you're going to be sort of just having to pedal faster every single time you want to get more traffic. I didn't have to do that. It was easier because I started with my content marketing strategy first. And I think finally, you got to ensure that there's good content and discussions going on early on. Like I, you know, the first week created a bunch of fake accounts, which I had heard other people doing. I was like, all right, this seems cheesy, but you know, I'll try it and I would have conversations with myself. Yeah. I would have conversations with other people. I'd never let anyone make a thread that I didn't respond to and try to give them like a valuable response because otherwise they're not going to come back. Yeah. If anyone wants to see an empty forum, no, it helps to think of interesting discussion topics, et cetera. So as long as people like talking about what you're doing, as long as you have a way to drive traffic there consistently and as long as you ensure that the conversations that are interesting, I think over time, the forum that you start with. So to kind of boil it down, there were no crazy growth, like hack type things.

The product should be good. (26:09)

It's just you figured out a market where people are interested in reading a bunch of content about and made a bunch of content. Yeah. And then they just ended up on your site and following you. Exactly. And like the idea of like the crazy growth hack is so overrated. Yeah. I mean, even when I sometimes do an Andy Hackers interview, people who read it like on Hacker News will say, oh, you know, just boil it down to this one trick that this person did. And it's like, that's never the case. You know, I think we all wanted to always be like, oh, was this one thing that they did that's responsible? Or is it not? It's almost always just like they got the basics, right? They made something that people actually wanted, which is like deceptively simple advice. You know, it sounds simple, but people always subtly do other things that aren't making something that people want. And wonder why no one uses their product. So the tricks, I think, are overrated. Make sure that you've built something that people want that's good. And then make sure that you're actually thinking about how to get people in the door. You're not obsessed with the product itself. Right. Yeah. I mean, people call it like leaky bucket, all this stuff. It's continually a piece of advice. When we're talking about content or content marketing with any YC startup, it makes something that you're going to want to read. Right. You know, doing these like listicles that no one really cares about and your site looks like medium. So no one remembers what it is. I guess it's kind of just wasting time. Yeah, I know. I did the same thing too with my YC company. We just slapped a blog on our website. It was so boring. We announced new features every now and then it would be empty for like six months. Whereas I think some of the most interesting content online is it's treated as if it is the product. The only hackers that content was like the only thing on the site for months. Yeah. You know, I think you need to put that level of detail and thought into it. And you know, like we were just talking about be creative too. Content doesn't even have to necessarily look like content. The content on Nomad List was like a database of cities with information about them. Like that's not like traditional content, but it's interesting. Yeah. How many interviews do you cut? Tax interviews or podcast? I have. I mean, the answer is actually. Those are, they all go to print or publish or whatever. I don't think I've ever conducted a tax interview that I didn't end up putting up. You know, there might have been like one or two or someone was just complete jokester. And they gave like one sentence responses and I was like sent it back to them and they just never responded. But I mean, that wasn't me cutting it. That was a never responding. Okay. I think a good interview, you could really coax it out of anybody if you're willing to like put in the time and the effort. Well, so that's the the text thing is what kind of strikes me because in person, you're just like, you get the vibe. You're like, okay, they're going to be a little bit difficult, but you kind of like warm up the room and they're they're good. When someone's not responsive over email or not, I don't know, not as specific or not as interesting as you think they could be, how do you get better answers out of them? Follow up endlessly until they either quit or they give you an answer. I mean, what we also do sometimes is we'll put their their interview on the site as a draft, which is online comments like, Oh, this is a really interesting answer. Like care to give us some details besides what you gave us. So like it will be awesome if you had like a chart or a graph here in your interview. So I think, you know, from the outside looking in, maybe it looks like people are magically just giving good answers, but sometimes you just have to coax them. And like you said, like in person, you do that by filling out the room and just like, you know, vibing off the other person over text. You just take the tedious time to point out what's wrong and how it can be better. Okay. Fair enough. All right.

What was the hardest within The Hackers? (29:39)

So question from Tom. What was the heart? So I mean, the question is what was the hardest within the hackers? But I think what he means is what was the hardest thing about building indie hackers? Managing my time early on, but I already kind of talked about that. What else was difficult building indie hackers? I think doing it alone is difficult. And I'm super lucky because the site itself in like a very meta way is about building startups. It's about starting companies.

Transparency And Differences In Tech Space

It takes time (30:05)

And the way that I look at it, like my mental model for building a startup is that essentially your whole goal is not to quit. I saw a really good tweet the other day that was, here's the secret to success. Pick any idea, work on it for 10 years. You will succeed. Just don't quit. All right. So the way I look at a startup or any sort of company is like imagine a race or marathon where if you get to the finish line, you win, you know, depending on how skilled you are and how much you learn and how good your product is, if finish line might be further away or closer, but all you have to do is keep running and not quit. And I think when you are a solo founder, it's really easy to quit. I mean, every time you run into a hurdle, you're like, I could quit here. You know, I don't know how to get past this. And a lot of people end up putting away too early just because they're not prepared for that. They think that the typical startup stories that you just succeed after a couple of weeks. And then you're like, yeah, set. And then it's that from there. And it's like, I've failed enough times to that that's not the case. Yeah. You don't win by quitting. You don't win by succeeding overnight. You just, it's a slog. But the content thing is, it's new for you, right? Like you hadn't done a content thing before. Yeah, never. Right. And so content can feel like a treadmill. I mean, yeah. Yeah, it totally feels like a treadmill. I think that's what I was talking about earlier with like having like that kind of rubric that I sent out. It really helped with that, but it never felt like as long as I got the content, like under control and never felt like I was on a treadmill. I felt like, okay, that's fine. I just need enough time per like every week to work on pushing the business forward. So I would have three or four days a week to work on advertising. And like that was like a huge hurdle. Like I almost quit when I had no idea how to do ad sales because I'm not a sales person. I never done any sales before. But after like two months of trying it, I was like, hey, I'm pretty good at this. I'm like sending cold emails to people and getting them on the phone and like making friends and like people are buying ads on my website. It's working out. Same with the podcast, you know, like never done it before. It ended up going pretty well. But you know, back to what was hard about it. I think anytime where I let myself dwell, you know, in solitude for way too long, it was when I would think about like, this is hard. And when I would open up to the community and send an email saying, hey, here's what I'm working on. Here's what's hard and get support.

Being transparent : Deepa definitely finds it important (32:06)

And it suddenly was, you know, much easier. And to go back to the marathon analogy, you know, if you're sort of running this marathon by yourself and you look around like no one else is running, of course, you're going to quit if it's hard, right? But if like a whole bunch of other people are running with you, you know, then suddenly you're the social proof of that just helps you continue. So by kind of, you know, forcing yourself to work in public, you could stay motivated. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a good reason why, you know, I push people to be transparent and come on the site. You have very little to lose. You have a lot to gain because people will, you know, identify with you. You'll make friends, people like your personal story. They want to know what's going on behind the scenes. And this whole corporate view of like always saying we and never sharing any numbers, it's just so boring. Like who connects with that? You know, the one who wants to read that kind of stuff. Yeah, especially when you're on your own and like, you know, just working at your little tiny bedroom office. Exactly. Yeah. And like unless you live in some sort of tech hub, most people around you like don't know what you're doing. I mean, they don't have to pervas it, but like starting an internet business is still a pretty rare thing to do. And so I think being able to rely on some sort of online community, whether it's on ND hackers or another site, like if you can go somewhere and people are also doing what you're doing, and you can tell them what you're up to and they can give you feedback and, you know, really just identify with you, then you're much less likely to quit. How do you maintain a positive community? That's what I do challenge. Very little actually. I was worried about it because I've been a member of hacker news for like eight or nine years. I've mixed feelings about it. I love it because the content there is good.

Why NdHackers isnt like Hacker News (33:35)

People serve for really good links. The discussion is very interesting. There's a lot of smart people in the comments, but it's also super negative. I mean, the vibe is who can say the most contrarian negative thing first, that's going to get all the outputs to almost everything that gets submitted. So I was worried about the same thing with ND hackers, especially since so many people from ND hackers came from hacker news. But I think it's naturally a little bit self-policing because these are all people who are very serious about building businesses. They're people who've done it before, who've perhaps shared their project on hacker news or product hunt or something and got negative comments and they know what it feels like. So they're the last people who are going to bash what other people post. They're not going to be negative assholes because they know what it feels like to be on the other side of it. If not the emotional intelligence, at least the experience to be like, oh, that sucks. So maybe I should be careful and just give positive feedback or constructive criticism. So I've luckily not had to do very much at all to prevent people from being negative. And I also think that community, it's not a link posting community. You don't go on ND hackers and just share a link to something and then say nothing else. You actually have to have a discussion. And so you're actually from a personal perspective saying, hey, here's what I built and here's what I did. And I think it's a little bit harder to be an asshole than a person who wrote the post is also the person who submitted it. Yeah, I think that's it dearms people even on HN when you get into the thread. I advise people this all the time, just like get into the comments. Yeah. I think people respond much more positively when they know you're in there. And you really sincerely want to engage. But it's weird. They're like, oh, this person made it onto the internet. Like what do I do? It's like a delete account. So someone asked an interesting question, which is, would you advise starting ND hackers, like a person who's getting started to join an accelerator? Yes, I would. I think. Okay, so I've only done YC. I can only really vouch for YC. And so the boring answer is obviously it depends on the accelerator.

The value of joining an accelerator (35:28)

If it's Y Combinator, undoubtedly, yes, the advantages outweigh that this advantage is tenfold. And it really goes back to like, what is it that kill startups, people quitting. What do people very rarely do quit out of an accelerator when they're surrounded by other people doing this and investors are pushing you along? So for no other reason than that, I think it makes sense to join an accelerator. But also like the mentorship that you're going to get, the advice that you're going to get, I'm really big on founder showing any sort of community. If you can find a way to position yourself around other people doing what you're doing, then you're going to increase the chances of your business succeeding. The caveat is, usually accelerators come with like investment terms and investors. And you need to go into that with both eyes open. I spent some time doing contract work. And I worked for a lot of VC funded startups for a few years. And it was so interesting in talking to the other employees there, sometimes the founders there. So they would build like a very good product that maybe 20, 100,000 people were using, people were paying for it. And then sometimes just crash and burn because the level of success they needed to reach in order to meet their investors' expectations was so high. And so I think if you go into any sort of accelerator, if you accept money from investors, you need to be aware that yes, the money might help you succeed and grow faster. But at the same time, it's also raising the bar for the minimum bar for success. And if that bar gets raised too high, do a degree that's unrealistic for your product to hit. If you're building a to-do list app, and you need to be a billion dollar valuation, like good luck, there aren't very many billion dollar to-do list apps. So I think you should be aware of that if you're going to join an accelerator. Yes, that is a pro tip from Silicon Valley. It's like, just know the terms of the deal, like know the expectations. It's not crazy. But I think it's one of those themes that people are really attracted to with ND hackers, because it's this unsaid, like, I don't think VCs are ever trying to be in the gotcha position, because it doesn't work out for anyone if the company doesn't work. But like when you set your expectations in life to like build this billion dollar company and you raise the money, and then you realize that you're making a to-do list app. You're not going to hit that. I think a lot of it is, I mean, like I said earlier, people just like hear one story. They don't really think about what kind of deal they're making or why they're knowing that route, or why they feel the need to build a billion dollar company. And I agree with you as well, like the VCs aren't super nefarious, and I'm like, I want to trick everyone, right?

Tech Validation (37:50)

But at the same time, like their incentives are such that 90% of the time, they would rather have a whole bunch of people fail and a few people make it big than to have everybody have kind of a middling result. Right. And so if you're a founder, you have to ask yourself, do I want to have a high risk of failure? Do you have that one shot at the top, or do I want to maybe make $10,000 or $20,000 a month, or a small exit or something, and then maybe go for the big shot, which I think is like probably a more rational decision for most people. I would imagine so. Yeah. So there's another question from Bert. Are there other recipes for folks growing a side hustle or small business, whatever you want to call it, in Europe compared to the US? I don't think so. The reason is because if you compare, working on a side hustle to building more of a high growth startup, if you're trying to hit a billion dollar valuation, what do you care about really what you need is like a potent confluence of factors all pushing in the same direction. You need the best idea ever. You need the best team ever. You need a growing market that for some reason has no real competitors or a bunch of bumbling competitors. You need the best investors, the most money, a little bit of luck. You need everything to help you. Whereas if you're building a side hustle, if you're building a smaller business that still might be life changing, but it doesn't need all the luck in the world and every factor to line up, then really all you need are just some solid business fundamentals. It's eminently learnable. Those are going to be the same no matter where you are, whether you're in the US. You still need to build something that people want. You still need to have some sort of marketing and distribution strategy. You still need to be able to manage your time and not run out of money, etc. That isn't change from place to place. The only thing that really changes is the number of people in your community who understand what you're doing, your access to capital, if you want to raise money, legal things and taxes. But everywhere I've been, I went to South Africa, I talked to some Mandy hackers there. You're building a business for the internet. Your customers are everywhere. It doesn't matter where you live. Are you only interviewing SaaS companies? No.

Saas and Baby Pull Due (40:00)

I interviewed the most random variety of companies. I tried early on to have some sort of rubric. And generally if somebody emails me and they're like, "Hey, I've got a consultancy." I tried it. I say, "I'm going to ask not the best fit because you're really just trading dollars for hours." However, I think SaaS companies are the most interesting. They're kind of the dream of people who want passive income, people who want the freedom that comes to that lifestyle. But there's lessons to be learned from other companies too. A good one is Scott's Cheap Flights, who did one of the coolest tech interviews on NdHackers. It's basically this guy, Scott, who found super cheap flights for himself. And all of his friends were like, "Hey, I want cheap flights too. How did you go round trip to whatever it points you about?" Dude, the Venns diagram of nerds and airline hacking things is so like, you wouldn't believe how many YC applications. It's like, "We're going to blow your mind with this new mileage plan." People really like saving money on the flight. It's a little insane. People will spend way more money saving money on time, saving money on flights, and they could earn if they just like work. But anyway, Scott was super good at it. He built this email list of his friends and colleagues really, who were just sending the flight deals that he was finding for himself. And it turned from that tiny side project into this massive business that's doing like $4 million a year. It's not SaaS at all.

Entrepreneurship Challenges And Advice

The Nomade List (41:15)

Scott and his friends now, and the people who's hired, scouring the internet and manually sending people in. There's no bot. There's no bot. No, that's it. And people pay to be part of this mailing list. They pay to be frequently sent cheap flights so they can go. It's totally worth it for them. So that's not a SaaS company. One of the coolest interviews ever. And again, it's like all the same business fundamentals. It makes something people want. He had to find a way to actually advertise this mailing list and get people on it. His marketing site is so like, it's super slick, super streamlined. The conversion rates are extremely high, super transparent about everything. And it makes his email fun because it's like, hey, Scott here, if you're getting a email from just a person that you know, who's trying to help you out. That is really cool. You spoke of the Nomad List guy before. Were there other role models for you? I completely agree that it's so important. We're having Pete Adney, Mr. Moneymoustache on the podcast. And he's awesome. But I think his whole deal was so influential with people in that he's just like software engineer for 10 years, saved up like 600, 700k. I was like, I'm out. Yeah, like index fun, rely on the income from that. But I think he's just another example of just showing people the way. Were there other people that were kind of like showing you the way? Yeah. David Heinemare Hanson from Basecamp was a big one in Jason Free. So I went to start up school 09 until Jason Free Talk. My favorite talk was DHH's talk the year before. He was just like, it's super entertaining if you haven't seen it. You should watch it. But he completely just like dissed everybody there. And he was just like saying common sense things. Like, you know, you can build a business and telling people things they hadn't heard before. So whenever I felt below, I would watch, I probably seen that talk like 50 times, just because it's so inspirational. I watched that one. It's a really good one. Who else? I think, you know, Peter Love was a big one that I mentioned. I didn't have that many influences. You know, when I was reading through the Hacker News threads to find examples, I found a lot of really cool examples and people are like, you know, what they're doing is awesome. And that inspired me to know that it was possible and keep going. But there isn't any one person who... What about the... Just the idea of making a content site. Was that like you were reading some? Because HN is an aggregator, right? So was there one site that stood out? And like, oh, this is cool. No. I mean, I think this is a big thing that I tell people all the time. Like, your product... You shouldn't start by thinking about what your product is going to be and then, you know, making that. What you should start is by figuring out what people want and then based on what people want, you find the best possible way to give them that. What people wanted in this situation was really two things. They wanted to do what I was doing and like have some sort of easy way to research ideas for products. And number two, like, I think people just found it entertaining to read these stories, right? And so like the conclusion that I came to after seeing that was like, okay, what people... If I really want to provide what people want, it's going to be some sort of content site, right? Whether it's interviews, whether it's a podcast, whether it's videos, it's like completely up in the air. Like all of those are valid solutions to that problem. But like, you know, I for sure need to include some transparent revenue stats, right? For sure need to get some like behind the scenes details. Like, there are things that if I really wanted to get people what they wanted were like, you know, absolutely required. And so I made sure to just do those things. But like I said, like I was... I'm a developer, like starting a content site sounded so boring to me and I was so upset that that was the best idea that they came up with, but I was also excited about it. Is the back end of the site user-friendly at all? Are you like publishing from the terminal?

What failures do aspiring entrepreneurs experience, and how can they avoid them? (44:38)

It's not user-friendly at all. It was like the whole bus factor. Like, if you get hit by a bus, you know, how can, you know, your products stay enough when someone else come in and with the ND hackers? Yeah, no. Yeah. I'm just... I look both ways when I cross the street. Exactly. Yeah. We're WordPress now for that exact reason. All right, are there common failures with a lot of these ND hacker founders that they describe as, you know, like maybe something in the early days that they struggled with that's common between many of them? Yeah.

Why arent most people starting successful businesses? (45:13)

You hear the stats all the time, like you know, 90% of businesses fail. Yeah. But I think like the earlier and earlier you go and the funnel, the more failures you see. And like top of the funnel, most failures are sees as people who are interested in starting a business but never get started. Not for lack of motivation or care but because they don't know what the first step is, right? Are they grossly misinformed about what the first step is? So they, for example, like I said earlier, spend five or ten minutes thinking up an idea every now and then. It doesn't come to them and they conclude that they're just not, you know, they just can't do it. Or it's like, actually you should probably dedicate like three or four days to point up an idea because it's this inflection point that's going to control the next few years of your life, you know? It's not easy to come up with one off the top of your head. So people will get kind of frustrated by that and stop. Or they won't be able to figure out the legal situation early on and so they'll stop, which is why Strypass Atlas, for example, to help people out with that and make it super easy. You know, not having traction in the early days, super frustrating to people and they quit. So consistently, I mean, I sound like a broken record here but it's like, you know, the more times I say it, hopefully the more it will sink in. People quit way too early, way before they should quit, you know? Like your idea, some people think their ideas are terrible. Like, like, guys, my idea was so flawed and I'll tell you the idea. I'm like, that's a great idea. You just have to actually execute on it. So I think that hurts. The other thing is, I think people don't read enough and I get the opposite of this often. I hear people say, oh, stop reading and just start doing. That's true. But I think if you're the kind of person who is going to have the determination and the grit to like actually start a successful, successful startup, then you're probably not going to like quit because you spent too much time reading upfront. That's not going to be what stops you through that type of person. But the benefits from reading are like massive because starting a startup is not intuitive.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to find a successful business idea? (47:00)

If it was intuitive, then there wouldn't be so many guides and books to do again. Everything you did that felt right would just work. Yeah, right. But anytime you see an industry that's populated with intelligent people and yet most of them are still failing, it's probably worth taking a step, like a step back to say like, there's something going on here that people don't, you know, realize and I should read and learn from other people's mistakes instead of repeating their mistakes and learning from my own horrible experiences. And that's not to say that experience is not a good teacher. So what do you tell someone when they're like, okay, I'm in, like I'm subscribed to your like workout plan. I'm going to spend four days and get my idea. What do you tell them to read? I tell them to read the Andy Hackers interviews, which are just a better version of the same agent posts that I was reading. I tell them to post on the forum, share what you're doing, right? Don't go into a black hole and then, you know, emerge two months later and be like, I never did find an idea. Like, why don't you just keep a list of what you were saying coming up with and post them on the forum and people are happy to tell you what they think, what you should do next, et cetera. And I think there's this kind of overwhelming assumption that we're just alone and that you can't share because there's not that many communities where people do this. I mean, I get it. It's not a common thing. You just aren't used to it. So I'm trying to reverse that. Someone on the Andy Hackers forum said earlier that they would like it if I made the forum a little bit more structured and created a specific way to ask for feedback because he felt spammy. He's like, oh, I don't like spamming people and asking like, that's the entire point of this forum is for you to ask these questions and it feels spammy. So I think I've underestimated a little bit how much it can be scary or feel like not just not normal to ask people for like transparent advice on what's going on. But that's my advice to people.

What are some good books for entrepreneurs? (48:35)

You know, as long as you have mentors and people who know what they're talking about who can help you out and as long as you don't quit, you know, then even if you do things wrong, you're going to get some good advice and you'll be able to correct. Hmm. Okay. Were there any books that guided you? I love like all the most popular startup books. Oh, for lean startup, it's great by Eric Ries. I like crossing the chasm. It's a little bit older. It was like kind of the lean startup of the 90s, I think, but still great advice there and then talks about, you know, the early adopters and all the way through like the mainstream and late adopters and the difference between appealing to those different segments, which I think is extremely important for people to know. I like Peter Thiel's Zero to One. I think the thing that trips a lot of people up while I'm talking about these books is that not every book is going to tell you who it's written for. If you read Zero to One, that book is written for like high growth startups. It's got a lot of advice in it. It's terrible if you're trying to bootstrap your way to success. And so people will comment and they'll say, you know, like, I did this thing and it's not working, it's not working, like, because that's advice that does not apply to you. But I think if you're careful and you understand, okay, who was this written for and what, you know, nuggets can I take away, then it almost all these books have some negative advice that's useful. Hooked by Nerea, you all, really cool book. Talks all about the psychology of habit-forming products and like what people look at people coming back, why do we form habits, et cetera. Totally unaware of that. Until I had them in my podcast and I read the book. Ryan Hoover helped like edit it as well. It's probably my product on it's so addictive. But a really cool book, definitely worth a read for everybody. And also books outside of the startup Echo Chamber. I have so many people who say, you know, "Korlin, I've got this idea for an app that will let you like place and order at your local coffee shop before you get there." And it's like, I hear this idea like seven times a week. And the reason is because everybody's reading the exact same books and the exact same blog posts and living in the exact same place. And so if you all have the same inputs, you're going to have the same ideas as everybody else.

Creative Ideas (50:31)

Totally. So if you really want to come up with something creative, not only should you invest the time to think about it, but like travel. Go visit a different culture, read some fiction or sci-fi or something like to get your creative juices flowing. Don't only read startup books. Yeah. I think you have to have an opinion. Like outside of the norm. You do. Because it's true. Like, yeah, just hang out here long enough and it's the same ideas. Exactly. Yeah. Do any of the, so this is a Cameron Reynoldson. "How often do you see indie hacker projects transition from lifestyle businesses to startups or do they ever?" Yeah. All the time. I mean, Scott's Chief Flights, great example. Totally. Okay. So it depends on your definition of lifestyle business. If you mean lifestyle business is any business that makes money and a startup is somebody who's raised a lot of money from a major capitalist, actually you don't see that very often. Very rarely does somebody who is killing it and making millions of dollars decide that they're going to raise a ton of capital. And I think most of those cases are pretty famous. Mm-hmm. But I see the opposite actually often which is companies will raise one round and then they won't raise any more money. I'm like, yeah, we're killing it. We don't need to raise any more money. We understand like what level our investors expect us to get to. We're comfortable with that. Zapier is a good example. Yeah. Like I had Wade on the podcast. He, they're doing extremely well. He doesn't need to raise any money. Kevin Hale and Lou Fu did the same thing back in the day. And I also see a lot of like side projects that start off as, you know, I just want to supplement my income and make a few thousand bucks a month that turn into, you know, I'm quitting my job. This is it full time.

Fundraising And Job Transition

Raising Investment Capital (52:04)

This guy Mike Parham, it's created an app called Sidekick. It's basically like a background job processor for developers so that they can run tasks in the background on their server and make their websites faster. He was doing it on the side of his business and he was kind of mixing it with his business and then he quit his job and was like, I'm not going to work by full time job. And this is like taking off, right? And that's kind of the dream because now he's got the freedom to work on whatever he wants, from wherever he wants for whatever hours he wants. And like there's no upside on his income. He's making something like a million something dollars a year as a solo developer just doing what he likes. There you go. So not a typical story. Like not everybody makes a million dollars a year. But that definitely went from like side project and hobby into like more than a full time. But that's, that's a real struggle. Like I know a bunch of software developers that have their like, you know, cushy internet job and have a side thing and they they struggle to figure out like at what point do you really switch? Yeah. Like is that a is there like an advice section in the forum that people like struggle with this question or is this actually more rare? Yeah, I don't know. It's very common. And Andy Hackers as it exists right now is not very prescriptive. Like it's not organized into an answer to every specific question you might have. It's more free flowing. And so every now and then a topic might pop up about that and people will get all sorts of good responses. But my personal advice would be it really depends on the level of risk that you want.

Risks of Leaving Your Job (53:24)

And it's harder once you're a developer or even a non-developer and some job where it's cushy and you're making money. Like when I first moved out here, I was like the stereotypical like, you know, 22 year old eating ramen noodles. Like I didn't care what kind of apartment I lived in. Yeah. And then I started chopping at Whole Foods and you know moving better apartments. Yeah. Now it's like, okay, I can't, I can't quit my job or you know, do something less. I have a really good idea that's really working out. And I empathize with people who are in that situation. I really think that you should have some sort of product market fit. Like you should be confident that your product can work. Right. If you've launched a side project and there's no one's using it yet and you're just excited to code on it, that's probably premature if you leave your job, right? Every software engineer really likes coding their own thing. It's fun. But you really need to get to the point where you found a way that, to get people to your app. And then you can run away that, you know, to actually grow your revenue and you can say, okay, at this rate, it's a matter of time. You know, I think that's helpful. And I realize that it's kind of intimidating if you're not, if you're, if you're not a person who would describe yourself as like a business person, right? If you're like, I write code, I have no idea what like, what did it means to do business? Well, it's really, there's no such thing, right? It's just a collection of individual tasks. Like finding people to come to your app, right? Which is, if you read enough examples, like you'll start to see the patterns. You'll start to see what options are available to you. And so I would encourage people not to be worried that they don't have experience here. Just make sure to read and learn from what other people are doing. Make sure that you are persistent and you don't quit at the first sign of distress. And then, you know, if things start working, it'll be pretty obvious. Like with Mike Parham, it was like, hey, I'm making 50K a year from my app. You know, 100K a year now, well, it's only been two months or, you know, with Scott, with Scott Sheep Flights. It's like, you know, suddenly I'm making like thousands of dollars. I can hire somebody. You know, why do I need to work my job? Yeah, also like, if you're a talented developer, the downside is pretty low, right? You know, ideally it makes enough money to sustain you. You spend six months on it. And if it doesn't work out, you can get another job. Exactly. I mean, that's what I did. I was contracting.

Working at Stripe (55:26)

I quit and I had enough savings to live for like a year or two in San Francisco, which could have got me much further in any other city. Like, I do not recommend trying to bootstrap in San Francisco paying ridiculous rent here. But ultimately it's like, okay, I'm confident that if things don't go well. Like, I'll have a backup plan. It's much harder if you're in a different situation. Yeah, for sure. How are things going now that you're at Stripe? Awesome. They're not watching. Stripe is a great company. It's so funny because the acquisition happened completely out of the blue. You asked me, like, how did you set up the acquisition and blah, blah, blah. I started a blog. You know, no one starts a blog to get acquired, you know, like the email came completely out of the blue from Patrick. But it's really the perfect union. Like, I think some people, you know, every now and then will be skeptical, especially in Hacker News, about any sort of acquisition. Like, you know, what's the real play here? I think it was obviously good for me. It's good for Stripe. And it's good for the ND hackers community, for ND hackers to be under Stripe. Specifically, if you look at like Stripe's goals and incentives here, I mean, Patrick Colson came in on the Hacker News thread that announced the acquisition and made the top comment where he just said flat out, here's why we're acquiring ND hackers. And it was super straightforward, which is Stripe does better if more people are starting companies and those companies are more successful. ND hackers' mission is to help more people start companies and be more successful.

Working at Stripe (56:46)

There's no man behind the curtain there. There's no sort of secret thing going on, you know. And also, like, just examining, like, a world, you know, ND hackers without Stripe versus ND hackers at Stripe. So, what I was doing back in February and March is spending an inordinate amount of my time finding advertisers. Putting ads on my newsletter, putting ads on the website, putting ads on the forum. Ads, as much as they might fund a site, they don't make a site web, they don't make it better. No one is happy to get a newsletter that's got ads in it. It doesn't help anyone, right? It didn't help me to do anything other than pick up the ability to do, like, some pay rent. Yeah, and pay rent, right? But, like, ultimately, at Stripe, I've got a salary. I don't have to worry about paying rent, you know, like, word, ND hackers are going to go under. They're not going to shut the website down. They did not buy it to shut it down. They did not buy it for it to become some super profitable thing in the next, like, six months or anything. So, the long term is pretty much set. And now I can just focus 100% on my original mission, which is just helping people start companies and showing that there's another way to do it that's not, you know, the story that we've all heard. So, Stripe's been super fun. They're really hands off. I think I've met with Patrick, like, three times since I've joined in, like, the last six months, and he's a super smart guy. Like, we'll just brainstorm together and think about how to make the site impactful. So, it's really the perfect acquire and, like, the incentives are aligned perfectly. Like, there's nothing that I want to do that they don't also want to do. That's great. Do you have any side projects going on right now? No. If you could start any side projects, which one would you be jumping on? Oh, would I start? It's so funny to me. It's going to be a coin. It needs to be a... It would be an ND hackers I-CO, really. I don't know, actually, you know, I think I would... My side project would be... I would follow the same formula I followed last time. I need to spend four days getting my brand into that mode where it's actually good at this. It's like riding a bicycle. If you haven't ridden a while and you're going to suck, but after you pedal for a while, you get good. Coming up with an idea, you need to take the time to do it. That being said, I think if you run a business for a while, you start to see, like, opportunities for things where, if that existed, you would pay for it for sure. You know, like, I'm trying to manage my Twitter account. It's just a hassle to do that and also do all the other things. Like, I really want, like, better tools for social media. A lot of tools for social media already exist and a lot of them are wildly popular, like, and profitable. So I've got some ideas in that area and it's hard to say, but I think maybe the day will come where I work on a side project on the side of ND hackers, we'll see. I have way too much to do now. A lot of the stuff that I'm doing for ND hackers is almost side project-ish. My life hasn't changed very much at all. I'm still working at home on ND hackers. It's still working on schedule. It's so long for real. Yeah, exactly. So it's not too different. Cool. All right. I don't have any more questions. Thanks for coming in. Yeah, it was fun. Cool.

Experiences At Stripe

Working at Stripe (55:26)

I quit and I had enough savings to live for like a year or two in San Francisco, which could have got me much further in any other city. Like, I do not recommend trying to bootstrap in San Francisco paying ridiculous rent here. But ultimately it's like, okay, I'm confident that if things don't go well. Like, I'll have a backup plan. It's much harder if you're in a different situation. Yeah, for sure. How are things going now that you're at Stripe? Awesome. They're not watching. Stripe is a great company. It's so funny because the acquisition happened completely out of the blue. You asked me, like, how did you set up the acquisition and blah, blah, blah. I started a blog. You know, no one starts a blog to get acquired, you know, like the email came completely out of the blue from Patrick. But it's really the perfect union. Like, I think some people, you know, every now and then will be skeptical, especially in Hacker News, about any sort of acquisition. Like, you know, what's the real play here? I think it was obviously good for me. It's good for Stripe. And it's good for the ND hackers community, for ND hackers to be under Stripe. Specifically, if you look at like Stripe's goals and incentives here, I mean, Patrick Colson came in on the Hacker News thread that announced the acquisition and made the top comment where he just said flat out, here's why we're acquiring ND hackers. And it was super straightforward, which is Stripe does better if more people are starting companies and those companies are more successful. ND hackers' mission is to help more people start companies and be more successful.

Working at Stripe (56:46)

There's no man behind the curtain there. There's no sort of secret thing going on, you know. And also, like, just examining, like, a world, you know, ND hackers without Stripe versus ND hackers at Stripe. So, what I was doing back in February and March is spending an inordinate amount of my time finding advertisers. Putting ads on my newsletter, putting ads on the website, putting ads on the forum. Ads, as much as they might fund a site, they don't make a site web, they don't make it better. No one is happy to get a newsletter that's got ads in it. It doesn't help anyone, right? It didn't help me to do anything other than pick up the ability to do, like, some pay rent. Yeah, and pay rent, right? But, like, ultimately, at Stripe, I've got a salary. I don't have to worry about paying rent, you know, like, word, ND hackers are going to go under. They're not going to shut the website down. They did not buy it to shut it down. They did not buy it for it to become some super profitable thing in the next, like, six months or anything. So, the long term is pretty much set. And now I can just focus 100% on my original mission, which is just helping people start companies and showing that there's another way to do it that's not, you know, the story that we've all heard. So, Stripe's been super fun. They're really hands off. I think I've met with Patrick, like, three times since I've joined in, like, the last six months, and he's a super smart guy. Like, we'll just brainstorm together and think about how to make the site impactful. So, it's really the perfect acquire and, like, the incentives are aligned perfectly. Like, there's nothing that I want to do that they don't also want to do. That's great. Do you have any side projects going on right now? No. If you could start any side projects, which one would you be jumping on? Oh, would I start? It's so funny to me. It's going to be a coin. It needs to be a... It would be an ND hackers I-CO, really. I don't know, actually, you know, I think I would... My side project would be... I would follow the same formula I followed last time. I need to spend four days getting my brand into that mode where it's actually good at this. It's like riding a bicycle. If you haven't ridden a while and you're going to suck, but after you pedal for a while, you get good. Coming up with an idea, you need to take the time to do it. That being said, I think if you run a business for a while, you start to see, like, opportunities for things where, if that existed, you would pay for it for sure. You know, like, I'm trying to manage my Twitter account. It's just a hassle to do that and also do all the other things. Like, I really want, like, better tools for social media. A lot of tools for social media already exist and a lot of them are wildly popular, like, and profitable. So I've got some ideas in that area and it's hard to say, but I think maybe the day will come where I work on a side project on the side of ND hackers, we'll see. I have way too much to do now. A lot of the stuff that I'm doing for ND hackers is almost side project-ish. My life hasn't changed very much at all. I'm still working at home on ND hackers. It's still working on schedule. It's so long for real. Yeah, exactly. So it's not too different. Cool. All right. I don't have any more questions. Thanks for coming in. Yeah, it was fun. Cool.