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

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. Also, I think, you know, part of the text interviews was that you have to share your revenue, so everyone is completely transparent. The number of people that I reached out to with Dot 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.

So I kept getting tired of people saying, you know, I'm not gonna come on if I have to share my revenue. You need some other way I can come on, share my story. So the podcast kind of, you know, helped me to kill that bird. And also, you know, it appeased people who wanted me to do a podcast. But I was terrified of it because, like I said earlier, I don't, I've never done a podcast.

Were there people you admired at the time? You're like, I want to make a podcast like X? Yeah, I was just like, you know what? I'll try this. I had a very like lazy approach to it, like I'm not gonna do a ton of research. I'm just gonna 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 the skills you've developed, you think? I think I've gotten a lot better at preparing efficiently. I like reading there, 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 the question if you get an unexpected answer. I'm some kind of a control freak, I'm like okay here's exactly what's in the beginning. You know, I'm gonna ask question ABCDEF and this is how it's gonna go. And like, you know, you ask the question and they start giving your answers all over the map and suddenly your perfect plan is starting to disarray.

So I think just like having the composure and the ability to calm down and be like okay, it's okay just listen to what they're saying and have a normal conversation was difficult at first. Other things, like I don't know if you'd call this a skill, but just being comfortable like in my own skin, like not cringing at the sound of my own voice. Because you got at your own voice, yeah, I don't know, podcast.

But yeah, I mean, I would go back and listen. It's like I don't know, like if you hate the sound of my first now, I'm fine with it, but in versa, I sound awful. Like, who's gonna listen to me now? It's not a problem. Yeah, you can only spend so much of your time cringing at yourself. I mean, like the amount of hours I've seen myself on video and listened to myself on a podcast, whatever. It's fine.

Yeah, like 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.

What um, what was your favorite episode? I haven't listened to all of them yet, it's hard to say if they do more. It's like I'm gonna hurt somebody's feelings, okay? And then I forget too, you know what happened in that episode. But some of the coolest ones, I don't know, my friend Julian Shapiro, who's got a growth consultancy called Bell-Curve. And he just like deep dived, and there are like a bunch of different kind of stories of him working with different clients and he was not afraid to share like times what he just messed up. So I thought that was really cool.

Hmm, I really like the episode I did last week with Wes' boss. That was a good one. Yeah, he's a great guy. I mean, he gets an enormous amount of work done to be just one person. He's got an email, it's like 170 thousand developers on it that he's built by himself in like five or six years. Twitter following, about hundred thousand people. And he's just trucking along. He works 9:00 to 5:00, puts his laptop down and then goes to hang out with his wife and his kids. He's got it together.

I wondered about that, like is there a list of people that you admire, man, that that person has it 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, and the next week I've totally forgotten about it and moved on to other things.

Yeah, Wes' boss guy looks 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, exercise. Yeah, yeah, exercise, take some time off. Like 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, I've 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, have I internalized this? Alright, like to think I have it. 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 just 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.

We posted a bunch of questions, or other people posted questions to Twitter for you. You have a lot of fans online. Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt asked, what do you believe that most others do not?

Shrink acquired 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 Thiel, 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’d be able to have like a monopoly and 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. Yep, so when I was in YC, five years ago, I asked Paul Graham, that's like I think 2011. I was like hey PG, you know, 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 he ended up coming up with an answer and it was controversial, like I don’t think anybody would, very many people would agree okay I can’t say what it was out of 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 are other things that 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 are motivated by 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’ve got a few others, but let’s start with those two. Yeah, no, I completely agree, and I think your or everyone’s ability to rationalize is unbelievably powerful. Yeah, 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 why do they care about this? Why do they do that? No, it’s because they’re really good at it. Yeah and it stimulates your brain.

Absolutely. Was there a point at which that you kind of turned on the interest in VC-backed companies? Did something happen? It was before I even got into YC, funnily enough, I went to startup school in 2009, and Jason Fried was there from 37signals, they called it at the time. And he was like, he stood out like a sore thumb, he was completely different than everybody else. He 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 bored. They say I kind of do, I see for inviting like a, you know, like 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 Y Combinator, and we had the weekly, you know, Tuesday dinners where founders at the time. In the 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 Wufoo, and he was like the only person, he was kind of an Indie 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.

But it wasn’t until like recently, 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 enjoy doing, and if that idea was that Indie Hackers or was that okay. So, I mean the company that I did Y Combinator with, Taskforce 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 gonna go anywhere. I wasn’t enthusiastic. Three solid days, I wrote 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? Whereas like the reality is, it’s like anything other creative endeavor. If you practice for long enough, you will create a good idea.

You know, you don’t try to like paint the Mona Lisa in like 15 minutes and if you don’t get it, you give up. So I was like, alright, I’m gonna push through this. I’m gonna 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 much better ideas than I had before. And I was just reading through Hacker News threads. These people would ask like every month, you know, ask HN, what’s your profitable side project or ask AJ, how much money are you making from your, you know, your business.

And people would share all the details. I figured okay, there are 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 that’ll help me come up with an idea. Hmm, and that’s literally exactly what happened. I mean, the idea of Indie Hackers was based off of the realization that hey, I’m not the only person who’s researching all this stuff. 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 there’s been a rise in the popularity of indie hackers, right? But I think there’s also a rise in just a 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. My takeaway from Sapiens was 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. 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 stories 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 are 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. A good one is if I look at the Indie Hackers traffic stats, something like 60 percent of the traffic is from outside of the United States, let alone Silicon Valley. People are all over the world starting these companies.

And it 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 over all else. Hmm, and have you seen that there’s a common trend in folks just getting started, like starting similar kinds of software businesses? Yeah, 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, it’s venture capitalists want a massive return. You really want to be number one. You want to destroy the competition. So it’s social things like Facebook or search, you know, applications like Google versus things that are profitable like 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, you know, in a zero-sum game where everyone else has to lose for you to win.

And so people end up starting businesses that are very related, like how many profitable analytics companies do you know? Like email marketing companies, there’s a ton. Hmm, 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, right? Some people want to go to college, some people wanted like a classroom setting, some people want to read, some people want video courses, some people want an email newsletter, some people want to learn through games, right? Like there’s no reason why you have to, you know, right completely differentiate from everyone else. 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 and doing things that kind of tread that path before you.

Well, I’ve been wondering that with all 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 refused to come on because they say, what’s the benefit of me revealing my secrets and I’m going to copy me?

Yeah, and then I’ve had people who revealed their secrets that have actually been copied, and it’s always hilarious because if you think about it, think about the kind of person out there who’s gonna like just listen to your podcast at region or interview that’s 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. Hmm, okay, even more questions from Twitter. There is a David Adamu 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.

Yeah, I do remember doing this on the YC application. My answer now I think would be more interesting if I related it to Indie Hackers. But early on in Indie 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 very poorly written.

With to edit and to follow up with the person. So they took hours and hours. Did you do it solo? Yeah, I did it solo and I was sending a newsletter and I was trying to grow the business as well. And so my trick early on was like I’m just gonna work 80 hours a week. It was not much of a trick.

Yeah, but eventually I realized like okay, this is not gonna work. You know, 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, you know, increase or at least maintain the level, the quantity of content that I was putting out without having to interact on quality.

And so I wanted to, like 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 to 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 text-based 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 a follow-up question? What did they leave out that they probably should have included? You know, how could their answer have been better? Like why did I go to them and give me a better answer?

And after a few months of 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 factored that into my interview questions. So I have like a question followed by like 10 or 11 bullet points for like here’s how you should answer, here’s what you should avoid in your answer, here are things that people like listening to you.

And so I started sending that to people and you know, instantly the interviews that I got back were much more entertaining and they required less effort. Like it’s on the same pack of questions to everybody. Hmm, so it’s kind of a, you know, I guess it qualifies as a hack where I no longer have to do as much work. But they’re handwriting, they’re well, they’re typing these, the answers, they’re typing the answer.

Some, you know, every email and every now 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. I took up like half of my time. Yeah, etc.

Hmm, yeah, because I found that the best hack for me, we did a bunch of interviews with the first employees at 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’m like I want to talk to people. You know, I just like the whole programmer behind the computer typing on my keyboard and that’s it.

Yeah, it worked out. I mean now we’re doing, I think when we launched Indie Hackers last, last I, when I launched the 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 an interview and one of them was me. So it was really only 9 people and now we’ve got like 200. I think we just hit 200 this week. Interviews, 30 podcast episodes. Yeah, and I’m working, you know, 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. Okay, so Indie Hackers really, it started off as a content site, really a showcase for these types of profitable internet businesses, but today it’s, 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? Did I change this? What I think about my idea? You know, how do you people find, you know, time to work on your projects? We have a family or a full-time job, etc. 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. You know, what can they all work together on to to make their lives easier? So, it could be something as simple as, you know, maybe a crowdsource list of like the best podcast episodes for this month. Just ‘cause, you know, I don’t want to dig through all the podcast episodes to find out what’s worth listening to.

I want these other people to tell me or 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 like almost all of the editing for the interviews and tour anything with interviewees and handling like the articles and finding people to write for Indie Hackers.

Okay, so that now is just like growth tactics, right, to get people into the forum? Yep, exactly. And it’s kind of automatic. I mean, I’m not doing many tactical things. Things get submitted to Hacker News. I think that’s probably our number one growth channel. People in Hacker News reading interviews, which is how the site got launched. So it’s not, you know, particularly nothing has changed very much in the last year.

Yeah, it’s more about like products, like what’s the right decision, like what’s worth building and what’s not. It’s a tricky decision because obviously, you know, 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 don't know if you’ve seen this before. It’s basically their cat 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, but a bunch of like calculators and stuff. So basically these tools that folks who are interested in real estate investing need.

Yeah, and they’ve like figured it out like after someone asked the same question 400 times in the forum, be like oh, maybe there’s some amount of interest here. Exactly, I think that’s a cool model too. Like when I was scouring Hacker News trying to come up with an idea, the company that I saw then inspired me the most and actually the first version that I reached out to for an interview afterwards was a company called Nomad List started by this guy Peter Levels who’s always on Hacker News.

He’s like a, you know, crazy personality on Twitter as well. But what he did was basically built a resource for digital nomads. I was basically a list of all the different cities in the world and you might want to travel to you and then just common stats that you would like to research. Like how fast is the internet? How safe is it? You know, how expensive is it? And so people who are digital nomads are like, of course, they want to do this research. They’re gonna go to this site rather than scouring the web.

And once he got them all in one place, he built a community and he started building tools for that community that are just for digital nomads like himself. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty cool model. It sounds like this real estate site is the same. And he actually, I’m very similar. Yeah, and so because that was a handful of people on Twitter asked this question. So you know, Tom for instance, you know, & Pratik, I’m getting their name wrong, basically how do you grow for him is the question, right? Like 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 Indie Hackers, I had a link on the site that said forum but the forum wasn’t built yet and it just had like a sign-up list. You know, so we just go to a like a MailChimp list. Yeah, I’m just getting my MailChimp list and I wanted to see okay how many people sign it from the man list on this page. It’s some sort of rough indicator whether or not people want there to be a forum or a community, which I wasn’t sure of.

You know, you could, people are already talking on Reddit, they’re already talking in Hacker News, like maybe this is a big question for a lot of people. They’re like why would I build a forum when I could get discussion, you know, even with like my own Facebook group? Like what motivated you to do it? Yeah, I did a lot of things early on that I think 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? I wanted to just use a Medium blog. You know, why isn’t Indie Hackers, you know, this dark blue website and what’s ridiculous, you know? Why would you do, why are you building your own forum? Why don’t you use Discourse? So why don’t you just use Facebook?

And my thinking from the very beginning was like your product, whatever you do, you should probably take, if you’re gonna 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 like I’m a computer programmer. The other ideas on my list before I chose Indie Hackers were all like kind of SaaS businesses that involved a lot more development.

And I regrettably chose the idea that was a blog, and Indie Hackers 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 gonna do a blog, I’m gonna allow myself to like 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 you know, the worst thing about blogs is when you go to something and you read something good on it and then you come back a month later, you don’t even remember that you were there. Yeah, there’s no way you’re gonna go to Indie Hackers and not remember that you’ve already been there because it’s a quirky dark-blue website that looks like nothing else on the Internet.

You know, you might as well stand out. So I decided early on that I didn’t want to do, you know, the standard thing that other people were doing. I didn’t want to, you know, use Facebook for my community groups. You know, I wanted to do it all in-house and do it myself. Hmm, and so if someone were to start a community, like 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 thinking about 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, how do I incorporate? Mmm, yeah, well you can’t really have a community around how do you incorporate because people ask that question, it’s answered, and then they’re out, right? So not only do people need to enjoy talking about it, they need to actually, it needs to be substantive enough that they can come back and continue talking about it.

Yeah, starting a business obviously qualifies because there are 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 form with Indie Hackers.

If you would, if you were to think about the form as like the core product of Indie Hackers and the interviews as content marketing, I think that’d be a good model for how it works. So I’m constantly doing these interviews every week. The interviews themselves are really entertaining. Proved early on that people in Hacker News and Reddit and other websites, Twitter enjoy sharing them.

So I could do the interviews, you know, get people on my mailing list and then send out links to the community on my mailing list and continually drive traffic and kind of kickstart it over and over and over and over again for weeks. Mmm, 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 gonna be sort of just having to peddle faster every single time you want to get, you know, more traffic. I didn’t have to do that. It was easier because I started with my content marketing strategy first. Yeah, 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 heard other people doing. I was like, alright, 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 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 gonna come back.

Yeah, no one wants to see an empty forum. No, it helps to think of interesting discussion topics, etc. 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 will grow.

So to kind of boil it down, there were no crazy growth-like hack type things. 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, the crazy growth hacks, so overrated.

Yeah, I mean even if I sometimes do an Indie Hackers interview, people who read it like on Hacker News will say, oh you know, just bore down to this one trick that this person did and it’s like, that’s never the case. You know, I think we all want it to always be like oh, was this one thing that they did that’s responsible? But it’s not, it’s almost always just like they got the basics right.

They made something that people actually wanted. Branches like deceptively simple advice. 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. And 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 it’s the, I mean people call it like a leaky bucket, all this stuff, it’s continually a piece of advice. And when we’re talking about like content or content marketing with any YC startup, make something that you’re gonna 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. I know I did the same thing to my YC company. We just slapped a blog on their website, it was so boring. We announced new features every now and then, it would be empty for like six months.

Or I think some of the most interesting content online is, it’s treated as if it is the product. And Indie 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. Like content doesn’t even have to necessarily look like content. The content on Nomad List was like a database of cities with information about that, right? That’s not like traditional content but it’s interesting.

Yeah, how many interviews do you cut? Text interviews with podcasts. I mean the answer is, it’s actually hozier, they all go, they all go to print or publish or whatever. I don’t think I’ve ever conducted a text interview that I didn’t end up putting up. You know, there might have been like one or two where someone was just a complete jokester. I get like one-sentence responses and I was like, I send it back to them, and they just never responded.

Well, I mean that wasn’t me cutting, and that wasn’t 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 text thing is what kind of strikes me. Because in person, you just like, you get the vibe, you’re like okay, they’re gonna be a little bit difficult, but you kind of like warm up the room and 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… I mean, well we also do sometimes is we’ll put their interview on the site as a draft, which is inline comments like oh, this is a really interesting answer. Like here, give us some details besides what you gave us. Or like it would be awesome if you add like a chart or a graph here in your interview.

So I think, you know, from the outside looking at, 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, 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. Alright, so question from Tom: what was the hardest? So, I mean the question is what was the hardest with Indie 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 filling Indie Hackers? I think doing it alone is difficult and I’m super lucky because the site itself a very meta way is about building startups. It's about starting companies. The way that I look at it is my mental model for building a startup is that essentially your whole goal, it’s 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.

Alright, 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, the 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 quitting way too early just because they’re not prepared for that. They think that the typical startup story is that you just succeed and you’re like yeah, that’s from there.

It’s like I’ve failed enough times to know 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. No, never, right?

And so content can feel like a treadmill. I mean, yeah, totally feels like a treadmill. And I think that’s why I was talking about earlier. It was 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 under control and never felt like I was on a treadmill, I thought okay, that’s fine.

I just need enough time per like every week to work on pushing the business forward. So I would have, you know, 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’ve never done any sales before.

But after like two months of trying, it was like hey, I’m pretty good at this. I’m like sending cold emails to people and you know, getting them on the phone and like making friends and like people were buying ads on my website. It’s working out. Same with the podcast, you know, like I’d never done it before.

It ended up going pretty well, but you know, back to what was hard about it. I think any time where I let myself dwell, you know, in solitude for way too long, it was when I would think about like this is hard. When I would open up to the community and send an email saying hey here’s what I’m working on, here it’s hard and get support, 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 gonna quit if it’s hard, right? But if like a whole bunch of other people are running with you, you know, then suddenly the social proof of that just helps you continue.

So by kind of, you know, forcing yourself to work in public, you can stay motivated. Exactly, that’s a good reason why, you know, I push people to be transparent. 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 won’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, and this whole corporate feel like always saying we never sharing any numbers, it’s just so boring.

Who connects with that? No, nobody 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.

The Internet’s pervasive, 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 Indie 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? I do tchau very little, actually. I was worried about it because I’ve been a member of Hacker News for like eight or nine years. I have mixed feelings about it. I love it because the content there is good. People are surfacing really good links. The discussion is very interesting. There are 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 gonna get all the upvotes.

There’s almost everything that gets submitted, so I was worried about the same thing with Indie Hackers, especially since so many people from Indie Hackers came from Hacker News. But I think it’s naturally a little bit self-policing because these are all people who were 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 you know what it feels like, so they’re the last people who are gonna like bash what other people post. Like they’re not gonna be negative because they know what it feels like to be on the other side of it, like they have, you know, if not the emotional intelligence, at least the experience to be like, oh that sucks. You know, maybe I should be careful and just give positive feedback or like constructive criticism.

So I’ve luckily not have to be very much at all to prevent people from being negative. And I also think the community, it’s not a link posting community. You don’t go on Indie Hackers and share a link to something and say nothing else. You actually have to have a discussion. And so you’re actually, you know, from a personal perspective saying here’s what I built, here’s what I did.

And I think it’s a little bit harder to be a negative person who wrote, you know, the post is also the person who submitted it. Yeah, I think that’s, um, it de-arms people. Even on Hacker News, 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 I 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, essica delete account? So, someone asked an interesting question, which is would you advise starting Indie Hackers? Meaning like a person who’s getting started to join an accelerator? Yes, I would. I think, okay, so I haven’t, I’ve only done YC. I can only really vouch for YC and you know the boring answer obviously depends on the accelerator.

If it’s Y Combinator, undoubtedly yes. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages tenfold and it really goes back to like you know, what is it that kills startups? People quitting. Mhmmm, what do people very rarely do? Quit out of an accelerator. Well, they’re surrounded by other people who are doing this and investors or you’re 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 gonna get, the advice that you’re gonna get. I’m really big on founders running any sort of community. If you can find a way to position yourself around other people doing what you’re doing, then you’re gonna increase the chances of your business succeeding.

The caveat is, you know, usually accelerators come with like investment terms and investors and you need to be aware of me to go into that with both eyes open. I spent some time doing contract work and I worked for a lot of like VC-funded startups for a few years and it was so interesting and talking to like the other employees there. Sometimes the founders there, they would build like a very good product that maybe twenty, a hundred thousand people are using.

People were paying for and then sometimes just crash and burn because you know, the level of success they needed to reach in order to meet their investors’ expectations was so high. Mhmmm, right? And so I think if you go into any sort of accelerator, if you accept money from investors, you need to be aware that they’re not, yes, the money might help you, you know, succeed and grow faster, but at the same time, it’s also raising the bar for what like the minimum bar for success.

And if that bar gets raised too high to a degree that’s like unrealistic for your product to hit, if you’re building a to-do list app and you know you need to be a billion-dollar valuation, like good luck. There aren’t very many bucket to-do lists now.

Yeah, so I think you should be aware that if you’re gonna join an accelerator, yes, that is a pro tip from Silicon Valley. It’s like know just know the terms of the deal and know the expectations. It’s not crazy, but I think it’s one of those themes that people are really attracted to with Indie 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, you’re not gonna hit that.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is, I mean like I said earlier, people just like hear one story, you know. 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 you know, I agree with you as well, like the VCs aren’t like super nefarious and like I want to trick everyone, right? But at the same time, like their incentives are such that, you know 90 percent of the time, they would rather have a whole bunch of people fail and a few people who make it big and have everybody have kind of a middling result, right?

And so if you’re a founder, you have to ask yourself, you know, do I want to have a high risk of failure to have that one shot at the top? Or do I want to, you know, maybe make 10 or 20 thousand dollars a month or, you know, a small exit or something and then maybe go for the big shot? I think is probably the more rational decision for most people, I would imagine so.

Yeah, alright, so there’s another question from Bert. Are there other recipes for folks growing a side hustle or you know, small business, whatever you want to call it, in Europe compared to the U.S.? I don’t think so. The reason is because if you compare, you know, it’s working on a side hustle to, you know, building more of like a high-growth startup.

If you’re trying to like hit a billion-dollar valuation, what you care about, you care about really what you need is like this potent confluence of factors all pushing in the same direction. Like you need the best idea ever, you need the best team ever, you need like a growing market that for some reason has like 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 like to help you whereas if you’re building a side hustle, if you’re building a smaller business that like still might be life-changing but it’s like, you know, it doesn’t need like all the luck in the world and every factor to line up, then really all you need to like just some solid business fundamentals.

It’s definitely learn about, and those are gonna be the same no matter where you are, whether you’re in Europe or the U.S. Like you still need to build something that people want, you still need to have some sort of market and distribution strategy, you still need to be able to manage your time and like not run out of money, etc. That doesn’t change from place to place.

The only thing that really changes is, you know, the number of people in the community who understand what you’re doing, your access to capital if you want to raise money, you know, legal things and then taxes. But everywhere I’ve been, I mean I went to South Africa, I talked to some Indie Hackers there. You’re building a business for the internet, you know, your customers are everywhere. They’re not, it doesn’t matter where you live.

Yeah, are you only interviewing SaaS companies? No, I interview the most random variety of companies. I tried early on to have like some sort of rubric and generally if somebody emails me and they’re like, hey, I’ve got a consultancy, you know, like I tried it, I guess, and you know, it’s not the best fit because you’re really just trading dollars for hours.

However, I think SaaS companies are kind of the most interesting. Okay, you know, they have the kind of the dream, but people who want passive income and people who want like the freedom that come with that lifestyle.

But there are 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 Indie Hackers. It’s basically this guy Scott who found like super cheap flights for himself and all of his friends were like, hey I want cheap flights to, like how did you go round trip to whatever?

It’s like this diagram of like nerds and like airline hacking things, like you wouldn’t believe how many YC applications like we’re gonna blow your mind with this new mileage plan. People really like saving money on flights and yeah, and it’s, it’s a little insane. Like people will spend way more money saving money on like time saving money on flights than they could like earn if they just like what?

Yes, yeah. But anyway, Scott like was super good at it. He built this email list of, you know, his friends and colleagues. Really he was just sending the flight deals and he was finding for himself and it turned from like that tiny side project into like this massive business that’s doing like 4 million dollars a year.

It’s not SaaS at all. It’s Scott and his friends now and the people he’s hired scouring the internet and manually selling it. There’s no, but there’s no, even more – I mean that’s, that’s it. And people pay to be part of this mailing list.

Like they pay to be like frequently sent cheap flights so they can go. It’s really 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, make something people want, right?

He had to find a way to actually advertise his mailing list and get people on it. You know, his marketing site is so psych, it’s super slick, super streamlined, like the conversion rates are extremely high. Super transparent about everything. You know, like and it makes his emails fun because it’s like, hey, it’s Scott here because he’s getting an email from 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 when you were? Because I completely agree, it's so important. We’re having Pete Adney, Mr. Money Mustache, yeah on the podcast. Oh, cool, and he’s awesome.

But I think his whole deal was so influential anymore in that he’s just like a software engineer for 10 years, saved up like six or seven hundred K, was like about yeah, I like index funds, 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 Heinemeier Hansson from Basecamp was a big one and Jason Fried. So I went to Startup School ’09 and saw Jason Fried talk, but my favorite talk was DHH’s talk the year before. He was just like, it was super entertaining. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it.

But he completely just like, just 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 low, I would watch, I’d rewatch that talk like 50 times just ‘cause it’s so inspirational that one.

It’s a really good one. Who else? I think, you know, Peter Levels. That was a big one. I mentioned I didn’t have that many influences. I, you know, I when I was reading through the Hacker News threads to find examples, I found a lot of really cool examples and people are always like oh, you know what they’re doing is awesome that inspired me to know that it was possible and keep going.

But there isn’t any one person. What about the just the idea of making a content site? Was that like you were reading some? Because Hacker News is an aggregator, right? So was there one site that stood out like oh, this is cool?

No, I mean, I think this is a big thing I tell people all the time. Like your product, you shouldn’t start by thinking about what your product is gonna be and then, and then, you know making that. You should start by figuring out what people want, and then based on what people want, you find the best possible way to give them that.

When people want it, in the situation, which there’s 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.

And so like the conclusion I came to you after seeing that was like, okay what people, if I want to really provide what people want, it’s gonna be some sort of content site, right? Whether it’s interviews, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s videos, is 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? Just 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 are like absolutely required. And so I made sure to just do those things.

But like I said, like I was, I’m a developer. Starting a content site’s not, it’s 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 backend of the site user-friendly at all? Are you like publishing from the terminal?

It’s not, it’s not user-friendly at all. It was like the whole bus factor. I’ll get you if you get hit by a bus, you know, how can, can you know that your product stay in that, can someone else come in and Indie Hackers?

Yeah, I know, yeah. I’m just, I just, I look both ways when I cross the street. Exactly, yeah, we were WordPress now for that exact reason. Alright, are there common failures with a lot of these Indie Hacker founders that they describe? You know, like maybe something in the early days that they struggled with and that that’s common between many of them?

Yeah, 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. Like the ultimate like top of the funnel, most failures are seen 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, or they are mostly 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 at with an idea because it’s this inflection point that’s gonna control the next few years of your life.

You know, and 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 Stripe has Atlas for example to help people out with that and make it super easy.

You know, not not having traction in the early days is 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 my idea is so flawed. I’ll type in a video like that’s a great idea. You just have to actually execute.

And 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 like actually start a successful startup, then you’re probably not going to like quit because you spent too much time reading up front.

Like that’s not gonna be what stops you for that type of person. But the benefits are meaning they’re like massive because starting a startup is not intuitive. If it was intuitive and there wouldn’t be so many guides and books to doing it, everything you did that felt right would just work.

Yeah, right? But any time 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. Yeah, so what do you tell someone when they’re like okay, I’m in, like I’m subscribed to your workout plan. I’m gonna spend four days and get my idea. Mhmm, what are you telling them to read?

I tell them to read the Indie Hackers interviews, which are just a better version of the same Hacker News posts that I was reading. Though 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 do that guy never did find an idea.

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 about what you should do next, etc.

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 Indie Hackers forum said earlier that they wouldn’t like it if I made the forum a little bit more structured and they created a specific way to ask for feedback because he felt spammy. Like 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. Uh, yeah, 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, 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 gonna 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 stuff that books from Lean Startup is great about Eric Ries. I like Crossing the Chasm. It’s a little bit older. It was like the kind of a 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 gonna 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 there that’s terrible if you’re trying to bootstrap your way to success. And so people will come in and they'll say you know like right I did this thing and it’s not working. Why isn’t it working? Because that advice does not apply to you.

But I think if you’re careful and you understand, okay, who was this reading for and what, you know, nuggets can I take away? Then almost all these books have some negative advice that’s useful. Hooked by Nir Eyal is a really cool book. Talks all about the psychology of habit-forming products and like what people look at, people coming back.

Why don’t we form how I have habits, etc. Totally unaware of that until I had them in my podcast and I read the book and Ryan Hoover helped like edit it as well. That’s probably why Product Hunt is so addictive.

Yeah, 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, Cortland, I’ve got this idea for a, you know, an app that will let you like place an 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 have all the same inputs, you’re gonna have like the same ideas as everybody else.

Totally. So like if you really want to come up with something creative, like not only should you invest the time to think about it, but like travel, you know, 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 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 camera Reynolds, how often do you see Indie Hacker projects transitioned from lifestyle businesses to startups or do they ever? Yeah, all the time. I mean, Scott’s Cheap 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 someone who’s raised a lot of money from venture capitalists.

Actually, don’t see that very often. Very rarely does somebody who is killing it and making millions of dollars decides they can raise a ton of capital. I think most of those cases are pretty famous.

Hmm, but I see the opposite actually often, which is companies will raise one round and then they won’t raise any more money. Okay, 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. I had Wade on the podcast. They’re doing extremely well. I just need to raise any money. Kevin Hale who 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 I’m quitting my job, this is it.

This guy Mike Param that you 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, but he was kind of mixing it with this business.

And then he quit his job and was like, I’m not gonna work my full-time job anymore. This is like taking off. Right? And that’s kind of a 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. 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 that.

That’s a real struggle. Like I know a bunch of software developers that have, they’re like, you know, cushy internet job and have a side thing and they struggle to figure out like at what point do you really switch?

Yeah, like is there like an advice section in the forum that people like struggle with this question or is this actually more rare? Yeah, oh, it’s very common. Indie Hackers as it exists right now is not very prescriptive.

Like it’s not organized into, you know, 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. And it’s harder once you’re a developer or even a non-developer and some job or it’s cushy and making money. Like when I first moved out here, I was 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 shopping at Whole Foods and, you know, got a better apartment. 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 under, I have 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 for you to leave your job.

Right? Get every software engineer really likes coding on their own thing. It’s fun, but you really need to get to the point where you’ve found a way that to get people to your app and you’ve found a way that you know to actually grow your revenue and you can say okay at this rate it’s a matter of time.

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 it means to do business.

Well, he’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. With Mike Parham, it was like hey, making 50k a year from my app, 100k a year, now it’s only been two months or, you know, with Scott Cheap 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 the, 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 with it.

I mean, that’s what I did. I was contracting. 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 back-up 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 was a great company.

It’s so funny because acquisition happened completely out of the blue. Yeah, that’s like, oh, how did you set up the acquisition? Blah, blah, blah. Like I started a blog, you know, one starts a blog to get acquired.

You know, like the Indie Hackers 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, won’t be skeptical especially in hacker news about any sort of acquisition.

Like I mean, you know, what’s the real play here? I think it was obviously good for me, it’s good for Stripe, it’s good for the Indie Hackers community for Indie Hackers to be under Stripe.

Yes, definitely. If you look at like Stripe's goals and incentives here, I mean Patrick Collison came in on the Hacker News thread that announced acquisition and made the top comment.

We just said flat out, here’s why we’re requiring Indie Hackers. It was super straightforward, which is Stripe does better if more people are starting companies and those companies are more successful and Indie Hackers’ mission is to help more people start companies and be more successful.

Mmm, there’s no, you know, there’s no man behind the curtain there, there’s no sort of secret thing going on, you know. And also just examining like a world, you know, Indie Hackers without Stripe versus Indie Hackers at Stripe.

So what I was doing, you know, back in February, March is spending an inordinate amount of my time finding advertisers, putting ads in my newsletter, putting ads on the website, putting ads on the forum.

Ads, you know, as much as they might fund a site, they don’t make a site wet. Like they may better now. What is happy to get a newsletter that’s got to add tonight? It doesn’t help anyone, right?

It didn’t help me to do anything other than pick up the ability to do like home sales and pay rent, right? But ultimately at Stripe, I guess salary, I don’t have to worry about paying rent.

You know, I’m not like worried about Indie Hackers gonna 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 percent 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.

Hmm, so Stripe’s wood is 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 super smart.

Dots, I can just brainstorm together and think about how to make the site impactful. So it’s really the perfect acquire and the incentives are aligned perfectly, but 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.

Okay, if you could start any side