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[00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:08.960] All right, we should probably introduce you.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:12.160] You are Yahia Bakur, the founder of StockAlarm.
[00:00:12.160 --> 00:00:13.600] Am I pronouncing that right?
[00:00:13.600 --> 00:00:14.480] Yes, the boat.
[00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:17.600] You are, you're super young.
[00:00:17.600 --> 00:00:21.840] I think what's inspirational about you is the fact that you're only 23 years old.
[00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:24.160] You've been working on StockAlarm for three years now.
[00:00:24.160 --> 00:00:29.360] So you started this when you were 20 or 19 in college, and you just recently quit your job.
[00:00:29.360 --> 00:00:30.880] You're a software engineer at Amazon.
[00:00:30.880 --> 00:00:39.440] You're making $250,000 a year, and you've taken the leap to work full-time on StockAlarm, which is making $20,000 a month, so you're killing it there too.
[00:00:39.440 --> 00:00:45.040] I think that's pretty rare to hear an indie hacker succeeding so wildly at your age, and it's pretty inspirational to see.
[00:00:45.040 --> 00:00:46.640] So welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:47.040] Thank you.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:47.760] Thank you.
[00:00:48.080 --> 00:00:50.800] You know what I was doing at 20 years old?
[00:00:50.800 --> 00:00:54.080] I was going to bars with a fake ID.
[00:00:54.080 --> 00:00:57.840] I was trying to seem like I actually knew how to order.
[00:00:57.840 --> 00:01:05.520] So like I'd go there and there would be like some cute girl and like I would stand and like the bartender wouldn't see me because I was too short and I was like too timid.
[00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:13.920] And yet you're like 20 years old, like running a business, making grands, like making business decisions.
[00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:16.960] I'm happy I didn't have friends like you who made me feel like shit.
[00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:18.560] I tried to have balance, actually.
[00:01:18.560 --> 00:01:20.640] I think my idea was taken somewhere in Jersey.
[00:01:20.640 --> 00:01:23.120] So not too far off, but yeah.
[00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:25.440] So let's talk about your product, StockAlarm.
[00:01:25.840 --> 00:01:28.800] I'll try to describe it, Yahya, and you tell me if I'm getting this right.
[00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:30.880] So let's say that I'm trading stocks.
[00:01:30.880 --> 00:01:35.120] Obviously, that can be really time consuming to do, especially if I'm like a day trader or something.
[00:01:35.120 --> 00:01:39.920] I might be watching 10 or 20 different stocks and I want to buy and sell them at different prices.
[00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:45.760] And so I'm just watching and clicking refresh on the page over and over and over again all day so I know when to buy and sell.
[00:01:46.080 --> 00:01:47.600] Enter StockAlarm.
[00:01:47.600 --> 00:01:48.960] You know, that process is a huge waste of time.
[00:01:48.960 --> 00:01:53.120] But if I download your app or I sign up for your website, then suddenly I can set alerts.
[00:01:53.120 --> 00:01:56.560] I can tell StockAlarm, hey, notify me when this stock hits this price.
[00:01:56.880 --> 00:01:58.400] And then I can buy or sell it.
[00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:00.680] And I'm no longer having to do all this manual checking myself.
[00:02:00.680 --> 00:02:06.120] I'm just getting automatic notifications via email or a phone call or a text message.
[00:02:06.120 --> 00:02:11.080] And now I can just go buy stocks and not have to do this whole sort of time-consuming process.
[00:02:11.080 --> 00:02:15.880] And so that, I think, is the main benefit, as I understand it, of your app, StockAlarm.
[00:02:15.880 --> 00:02:16.920] Yep, that's pretty much it.
[00:02:16.920 --> 00:02:26.440] The whole point of it was to avoid that feeling of, you know, you're watching Tesla or whatever volatile Wall Street Bud stock was going on is popular at the time.
[00:02:26.440 --> 00:02:31.320] You're watching it for a while, you stop watching it, and your last thought before that was maybe I should buy some, right?
[00:02:31.320 --> 00:02:35.480] And then later on, you're like, oh, it spiked by, you know, 10%.
[00:02:35.480 --> 00:02:38.200] But if you had bought a call option, you would have made a ton of money.
[00:02:38.200 --> 00:02:39.560] Yeah, I get that exact feeling.
[00:02:39.560 --> 00:02:44.920] Like, maybe I should have bought some whenever I see the price spike, but not when I see it fall.
[00:02:45.240 --> 00:02:52.840] And so I have a sort of retroactive history in my mind of like, I totally would have, I totally knew this was going to happen and I would have bought if I, you know, I just thought about it.
[00:02:52.840 --> 00:02:54.520] And fun story, actually.
[00:02:54.520 --> 00:02:56.680] I was not the original founder on this.
[00:02:56.680 --> 00:02:58.440] I actually joined the party pretty late.
[00:02:59.320 --> 00:03:01.320] Okay, when did you join?
[00:03:01.640 --> 00:03:10.280] So I joined Stock Alarm when there was, I think it was under $100 MRR and it's like three, 400 monthly active users.
[00:03:10.680 --> 00:03:15.000] The story of how I joined is pretty fun, as well as the co-founders and where they are now.
[00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:18.040] I think Corlin, you might have talked to one of them a few weeks ago, Rude.
[00:03:18.280 --> 00:03:21.000] He was working on a content moderation platform.
[00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:23.640] The other one, Morgan, he recently got a full-time job.
[00:03:23.640 --> 00:03:27.320] He had a period of one year where he was going full-time on StockAlarm.
[00:03:27.320 --> 00:03:28.200] The year expired.
[00:03:28.200 --> 00:03:31.320] We didn't hit the MR that he would have wanted to stay on.
[00:03:31.320 --> 00:03:32.920] So he just went back.
[00:03:32.920 --> 00:03:33.400] Okay.
[00:03:33.400 --> 00:03:35.560] So yeah, give me the give me the rundown.
[00:03:35.560 --> 00:03:37.880] You started StockAlarm, I think, in 2019.
[00:03:37.880 --> 00:03:39.000] Was that when you joined?
[00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.120] Or is that when the first two co-founders started it?
[00:03:42.440 --> 00:03:45.000] So I joined, I think it was a few months after.
[00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:53.200] Essentially, what had happened is, you know, I was senior year of college, applying to jobs, you know, you're trying to just get in Fang, et cetera.
[00:03:54.240 --> 00:03:59.760] And I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Morgan, which had been going kind of viral, a couple thousand likes.
[00:03:59.760 --> 00:04:04.080] He had written, Hey, I started this stock market alerting app.
[00:04:04.080 --> 00:04:05.440] Check it out.
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:08.080] Been working on it for a while, et cetera.
[00:04:08.080 --> 00:04:12.400] So I opened it, and my first thought was, this would be great if it worked, right?
[00:04:12.400 --> 00:04:15.040] Like it would just, it was broken in a lot of ways.
[00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:23.360] So like, hey, I would actually pay the five bucks a month for this if only it had these features, because at the time I had my own kind of setup, right?
[00:04:23.680 --> 00:04:29.280] I thought I was doing well with options, wasn't actually, but it was fun, right?
[00:04:29.920 --> 00:04:32.960] So went ahead, sent him a list of suggestions.
[00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:35.920] I'm like, hey, I have a spreadsheet where I keep prices updated.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:37.840] I'm actually trying to build something like StockAlarm.
[00:04:38.160 --> 00:04:40.320] Please add these features, right?
[00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:41.760] One thing led to another.
[00:04:41.760 --> 00:04:42.560] We hopped on a call.
[00:04:42.560 --> 00:04:44.080] They're like, hey, do you want to join?
[00:04:44.080 --> 00:04:44.960] It's pretty early on.
[00:04:45.120 --> 00:04:46.240] You can grow this thing.
[00:04:47.520 --> 00:04:49.280] We can become co-founders.
[00:04:49.280 --> 00:04:52.000] So essentially, that's what happened and grew it for a period of one year.
[00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:55.680] I think by the end of the year, we were chilling at 10K MRR.
[00:04:55.680 --> 00:04:56.320] I love that.
[00:04:56.320 --> 00:05:08.240] It's like, in a way, your story is like the way that I ended up as one of the founding members of this product is I noticed what was wrong with it and I kind of like politely shat on it in certain ways.
[00:05:08.240 --> 00:05:10.080] Like, here's what would make your app good.
[00:05:10.080 --> 00:05:18.560] It kind of reminds me of when tech companies like for like hackers to hack in and like show security vulnerabilities.
[00:05:18.560 --> 00:05:24.320] And then they end up bringing on those hackers to run the security team and like kind of show them how to do it in a better way.
[00:05:24.320 --> 00:05:39.560] I've never hired anybody who's complained about my apps, but I've become good friends with people who have, like Julian, who's been on the podcast a few times, messaged me in the early days of indie hackers to be like, hey, your site's cool and all, but like, here's like 15 things that you could be doing better that are wrong with it.
[00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:44.760] And I think when you're an early stage founder, like that kind of feedback is extremely appreciated.
[00:05:44.760 --> 00:05:49.400] Like usually you're just kind of like in a bubble where nobody's talking to you and nobody cares.
[00:05:49.400 --> 00:05:56.840] So if somebody's like taking the time to go through and pointed out all the things that could be better, you're probably thinking like maybe I should talk to this person or hire them.
[00:05:56.840 --> 00:05:57.480] Yep.
[00:05:57.480 --> 00:05:59.480] And I think at the time they had full-time jobs.
[00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:00.920] They were like Facebook.
[00:06:00.920 --> 00:06:06.200] I was in senior of college, which yes, technically I have things to do, but not really, right?
[00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:08.920] So yeah, I had a bunch of spare time to work on this.
[00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:13.320] Got a lot of beer pong to play, homework to do, not much else.
[00:06:13.640 --> 00:06:23.080] I mean, for you to give them suggestions on how they could make this better, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like you just said you thought about how you would do the app the same way.
[00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:25.960] So I would assume that you were stock trading already.
[00:06:25.960 --> 00:06:28.440] You had like, what was your background with trading?
[00:06:28.440 --> 00:06:31.240] Like, how long, how did you even get into stocks?
[00:06:31.960 --> 00:06:34.120] I really like to read books in college.
[00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:38.360] So I read a bunch of, you know, trading books as well as stuff on derivatives.
[00:06:38.360 --> 00:06:41.000] One of my favorite books actually is The Random Walk Down Wall Street.
[00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:50.360] Like it's they're really simple books to read, but you know, it introduces you to all the lingo, all of the concepts, and also it was perfect for our target market, right?
[00:06:50.360 --> 00:06:59.400] Which is mostly retail traders as well as professional traders that just want the really easy UI to use to complement whatever they're doing on a day-to-day basis.
[00:06:59.720 --> 00:07:06.920] I'm going to have to say, like in this in this situation, I actually don't know hardly anything about stock trading, even to this day, right?
[00:07:06.920 --> 00:07:13.000] Like, you were nerding out at age 20, and I'm 35, and like, I've got like Robin Hood.
[00:07:13.000 --> 00:08:51.960] I think I've got some Bitcoin locked up in one of these apps like i bought them because i was quote supposed to i never looked into it i don't open those apps so i'm gonna kind of like use you in this interview at least if nothing else like i need to figure out like books and stuff to read but i'm gonna keep mining you for information so i'm taking notes yeah what are your recommendations you said random walk uh down wall street what else have you like read to like learn more about trading and what'd be your advice to somebody who's like you know sort of a noob like you were at some point i mean i wouldn't say that i'm necessarily you know i i think the standard advice of index funds and don't trade applies to the best majority of people right there was that one study of like it wasn't a study it was this famous article about how a monkey picked out random stocks and it performed better than you know a bunch of uh mutual fund managers and whatnot so i think trying to actively trade is not usually the move but you know if what most people tend to do um especially you know tech people that i was working with is they would have fun money right so they'd be like hey this is money i would spend going to vegas instead i'm just going to spend it at home trading options right so they say okay i have this much money i'm going to spend on trading and then usually that's also part of who our users are right because they're like hey if i'm spent trading with a couple thousand dollars i don't mind spending five bucks a month on this app to actually keep me on top of everything so i don't right so i can go to class or go to work or etc i like that point of view basically this is fun money but on the flip side of that like you have to understand like your personality type like are you an addictive gambler right yeah is this fun money going to suddenly turn into like your rent money and suddenly turn into like your mortgage payment?
[00:08:51.960 --> 00:08:57.640] Like, I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that control, but um if you do, I think that's a really good way to look at it.
[00:08:57.640 --> 00:09:03.880] And there's people that trade, you know, on like a monthly basis or they rebounce their portfolios every six months, right?
[00:09:03.880 --> 00:09:08.200] But they have so much money in there that you know, it's still useful for them.
[00:09:08.200 --> 00:09:11.000] I'm not supposed to talk about like our target users, right?
[00:09:11.400 --> 00:09:12.760] What we've learned from them.
[00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:21.800] A lot of them, they only do a couple of trades a year, but the volume is so large or the amount of money they put in is so large that they're like, okay, I need to be on top of this thing, right?
[00:09:22.360 --> 00:09:29.560] And then in terms of what you should actually do, everybody has their own opinions, I think, but whoever's making money is probably the right one, right?
[00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:30.200] Yeah.
[00:09:30.200 --> 00:09:41.320] I know a lot of friends who are like YOLO crypto traders, and they're just putting money into every single coin, putting half their net worth into that, making and losing millions of dollars and living that kind of lifestyle.
[00:09:41.320 --> 00:09:45.800] But I think that you're sort of right about the probably the right move is not to be an active trader.
[00:09:46.040 --> 00:09:50.200] I remember when I was in college, I graduated in 2009.
[00:09:50.200 --> 00:09:54.920] And so 2008 was sort of like the financial crisis due to like the housing bubble bursting.
[00:09:54.920 --> 00:09:56.760] And right after that, I started trading stocks.
[00:09:56.760 --> 00:09:59.640] And I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing.
[00:09:59.640 --> 00:10:07.240] So I was just doing a lot of day trading, you know, just like buying and selling stocks like three or four times a day for months on end because it was fun to do.
[00:10:07.240 --> 00:10:14.360] And if I had just like held any of those stocks that I had bought and just not sold them and literally just done nothing, like the easiest, I could have just forgotten about them.
[00:10:14.360 --> 00:10:16.280] It would have been the easiest, dumbest thing to do.
[00:10:16.280 --> 00:10:21.400] And yet it would have been the smartest and would have made way more money than all the buying and selling that I did.
[00:10:21.400 --> 00:10:24.600] Which is kind of funny because then I probably wouldn't have needed stock alarm.
[00:10:24.600 --> 00:10:26.120] I wouldn't have needed to know any alerts.
[00:10:26.120 --> 00:10:29.800] I just would have completely forgot about it, set it and forget it and profited.
[00:10:29.800 --> 00:10:34.840] There's also like that whole like, the whole hodling thing for the crypto community.
[00:10:34.840 --> 00:10:37.320] Yeah, that uh that's so bad.
[00:10:37.320 --> 00:10:38.360] That's a matter of what.
[00:10:38.360 --> 00:10:38.920] Yeah.
[00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:39.720] Kind of is.
[00:10:39.720 --> 00:10:44.600] I don't see that as much with stock traders, but I think it's for some reason very popular in crypto.
[00:10:44.640 --> 00:10:56.640] So, I mean, you knew you knew a bit about stock trading, you knew enough to criticize and like poke holes and like an actual new startup for it, but that startup was like new.
[00:10:56.640 --> 00:11:01.120] You said they only had only been around for a couple of months and you were looking for a job.
[00:11:01.120 --> 00:11:06.960] So, I'm kind of curious, like, why was that like an option that seemed like why go work for a broke startup?
[00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:11.200] So, here's the fun thing: I wasn't even trying to get into the startup space.
[00:11:11.200 --> 00:11:18.480] Like, for some reason, in my head, to build a startup, you needed to raise money and have this grand idea, right?
[00:11:18.480 --> 00:11:21.120] Like, building this thing that'll immediately help billions.
[00:11:21.120 --> 00:11:32.320] I didn't understand this concept of like indie hacking, where it's like, okay, you see a niche market where, you know, there's only the potential for to make a couple million or which is a lot of money, right?
[00:11:32.320 --> 00:11:40.560] But the point is, I didn't think that you could build a small product that kind of worked in that market and it could fund your lifestyle, right?
[00:11:40.560 --> 00:11:42.800] Which is what a lot of indie hackers do.
[00:11:42.800 --> 00:11:45.440] So, in my head, I was like, okay, I'll give this guy suggestions.
[00:11:45.440 --> 00:11:49.200] I could use this app and then I'll keep looking for a full-time job, right?
[00:11:49.520 --> 00:11:54.320] So, my priority was getting into a big company, getting to Amazon.
[00:11:54.320 --> 00:11:59.040] And, you know, I was working on Stock Alarm at the site, and I'm like, wow, I really like doing this thing.
[00:11:59.280 --> 00:12:00.400] It's fun to work on.
[00:12:00.400 --> 00:12:01.680] You get recognition, right?
[00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:02.560] People reach out.
[00:12:02.560 --> 00:12:09.360] They're like, hey, surprisingly, people feel very strongly about their money and things related to their money.
[00:12:09.360 --> 00:12:15.200] So if, you know, Stock Alarm works the way it's supposed to, people get an alert, they leave really positive reviews.
[00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:20.080] So if you check the App Store, we have like 6,000 reviews with 4.8 stars.
[00:12:20.080 --> 00:12:23.120] And, you know, some people are very angry, some people are very happy.
[00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:25.600] But I think the nice part is people feel strongly about it.
[00:12:25.600 --> 00:12:27.040] So, I think that was cool.
[00:12:27.040 --> 00:12:36.360] And somewhere along the line, I was like, hey, what I'm doing at Amazon is fun, but it's getting old very quickly.
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:41.880] Meanwhile, every time I work on StockAlarm, I'm up till like midnight and time just flies, right?
[00:12:41.880 --> 00:12:45.480] And, you know, I do Amazon during the day, Stock Alarm at night.
[00:12:45.480 --> 00:12:48.760] And my main goal at the time was, okay, get promoted to Amazon.
[00:12:49.080 --> 00:12:53.640] I did that in 10 months, and I was like, okay, I feel nothing, right?
[00:12:53.640 --> 00:13:00.120] Like, I could gun for another promotion or could gun for more money, which I tried, did the whole diamond save thing.
[00:13:00.120 --> 00:13:03.320] But I was like, okay, what do I actually want to do with my life?
[00:13:03.320 --> 00:13:08.040] So StockAlarm seemed like a very good option because, you know, here it was.
[00:13:08.040 --> 00:13:18.760] I had this sort of gem that could fund an indie hacking lifestyle and I could try to grow it and expand it beyond alerting and what it currently does.
[00:13:18.760 --> 00:13:28.280] Let's go to the beginning, though, because I'm curious about this transition that you made from early employee, basically, or maybe late co-founder to founder.
[00:13:28.280 --> 00:13:30.360] Like, that's one of the most baller movies you could possibly make.
[00:13:30.360 --> 00:13:32.200] Like, hey, you guys made this app.
[00:13:32.200 --> 00:13:35.240] I'm just, you know, part of the peanut gallery on LinkedIn telling you what you need to do.
[00:13:35.240 --> 00:13:40.840] To like, today, you're like, I'm the founder of StockAlarm, quit my job running this.
[00:13:40.840 --> 00:13:42.360] How does that happen?
[00:13:42.680 --> 00:13:50.200] So, initially, it happened by initially Ruben Morgan did not really believe this thing would grow past the QK MRR, right?
[00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:55.880] They're like, hey, if you, you know, manage to grow to this point, we'll give you all this equity.
[00:13:55.880 --> 00:13:58.920] And later on, they told me they're like, we never actually thought it would happen, right?
[00:13:58.920 --> 00:14:00.760] So, which is funny.
[00:14:02.200 --> 00:14:05.800] Yeah, I met, I actually only met them a year and a half after working.
[00:14:05.800 --> 00:14:07.400] We hope we all took a trip to Tahoe.
[00:14:07.400 --> 00:14:09.160] We're like, hey, company off-site, right?
[00:14:09.160 --> 00:14:11.240] So it was a full thing.
[00:14:11.240 --> 00:14:22.880] But yeah, the way that happened was I joined on initially, started trying all these growth tactics, started actually building up a product and whatnot, grid, grid, grid.
[00:14:22.880 --> 00:14:35.440] And then once I got all the equity I wanted, I'm like, hey, guys, I'd love to keep going on this, but I'll need more until eventually I got to like co-founder status and everybody was cool with it and amount of equity that's respectable and whatnot.
[00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:36.720] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:14:36.720 --> 00:14:39.840] I mean, in that sense, it's worth it to them because they own equity in the company.
[00:14:39.840 --> 00:14:45.360] And if you are making the company more valuable, then like the value of their equity is going up.
[00:14:45.360 --> 00:14:58.640] And I'd rather own like 40% of a company that's like making 20 grand a month and you know, somebody's working on it full time and own 100% of a company where I'm not even believing in the product really that much and don't have time to work on it and I don't have anyone else.
[00:14:58.640 --> 00:15:05.120] So I think that's like a smart move on their part too, to recognize that you had the ambition and the skills to like sort of take it to the next level.
[00:15:05.120 --> 00:15:07.680] But I also get like maybe why they didn't feel that way in the beginning.
[00:15:07.680 --> 00:15:10.080] Like you said you joined and they had like 100 MRR.
[00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:13.120] It's not exactly a huge company.
[00:15:13.120 --> 00:15:19.440] And I think that very first like phase where you're not, no one's really using the app and it's not that big and it's not making that much money.
[00:15:19.440 --> 00:15:21.520] It's like, it's easy to be like, this is never going to work.
[00:15:21.520 --> 00:15:22.720] Like how could this ever get big?
[00:15:22.800 --> 00:15:24.240] How do you get out of that first phase?
[00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:31.920] How do you like take something that's making 100 MRR and like find your first real paying customers and your first sort of growth wins and build the right features?
[00:15:31.920 --> 00:15:36.480] I think what worked for us super well at the beginning was trying to make super fans out of people.
[00:15:36.480 --> 00:15:40.320] So they'd reach out, they'd be like, hey, can you please build me this feature?
[00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:40.560] Right.
[00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:48.720] Normally when someone reaches out to support asking for something, for some reason they don't expect it to happen, especially for like bigger products.
[00:15:48.720 --> 00:15:51.360] But for us, we're like, okay, you get a request on Monday.
[00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:52.880] It'll be built in by Wednesday, right?
[00:15:52.880 --> 00:15:59.520] Especially if it's a new alert type, like, hey, can you create a trigger type based on RSI or something?
[00:15:59.520 --> 00:16:07.960] So we would get to work, build it by Wednesday, emails in back, and suddenly, you know, they post positive views, they'd refer a bunch of people.
[00:16:07.960 --> 00:16:13.000] So initially, it just grew by word of mouth from customers that we gave specific attention to.
[00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:14.920] And we did that for months on end.
[00:16:14.920 --> 00:16:20.280] Because like paying customers tended to be friends with other paying customers.
[00:16:20.280 --> 00:16:21.880] That makes a ton of sense.
[00:16:21.880 --> 00:16:23.080] Like you're sort of a unique case.
[00:16:23.080 --> 00:16:28.200] You're a software engineer and you have experience and growth and marketing.
[00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:31.080] Most software engineers are like only software engineers.
[00:16:31.080 --> 00:16:33.960] They have no desire to do any of the growth stuff.
[00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:34.760] Like they don't want to market.
[00:16:34.760 --> 00:16:39.080] They don't want to message anyone or send a cold email or even really submit their app to product hunt.
[00:16:39.080 --> 00:16:40.520] They just want to code stuff.
[00:16:40.520 --> 00:16:50.120] And so I think the fact that you were looking at it with the sort of growth hat on makes a lot of sense for why you're able to break out of these early stage doldrums that it's hard for a lot of early founders to break out of.
[00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:51.080] Yeah.
[00:16:51.080 --> 00:16:55.560] And then all the usual stuff like posting product hunt, beta list, subreddits, right?
[00:16:55.560 --> 00:16:58.840] I think we went viral on the React.js subreddit, right?
[00:16:58.840 --> 00:17:04.840] Which is not necessarily our target market because all the trading ones ban any spam or self-promotion.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:07.400] But we did that for a while.
[00:17:07.800 --> 00:17:11.400] Another thing we did, if you look at our Twitter, like there's a bot there.
[00:17:11.560 --> 00:17:15.960] I wrote like 10 lines of code three years ago and it tweets still today.
[00:17:15.960 --> 00:17:23.640] It tweets out the latest news for stocks on our platform as well as top upcoming earnings, dividends, et cetera.
[00:17:23.640 --> 00:17:31.080] So it kind of reuses our infrastructure that we've already built up for the product to help with growth.
[00:17:31.080 --> 00:17:43.480] I'm interested in that early phase where clearly the other co-founders weren't that confident that this thing was going to be like a long-term success early on.
[00:17:43.480 --> 00:17:48.160] What was the point where some of these tactics that we're using to grow are working out?
[00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:51.600] Like, when did it legitimately become validated?
[00:17:52.800 --> 00:17:57.440] When we hit a few thousand MRR, we're like, hey, this actually has potential to grow, right?
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:17:59.120] Because we've gotten to this point.
[00:17:59.120 --> 00:18:00.720] Why couldn't it hit 10k MRR?
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:02.400] Why can't it hit 20?
[00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:07.120] So I think around that point, we were all still putting in time at the beginning, right?
[00:18:07.120 --> 00:18:13.680] We were all still building and trying to figure out what to build by asking people who were paying, hey, why are you paying?
[00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:14.240] What do you want?
[00:18:14.400 --> 00:18:16.000] What else do you want us to build?
[00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:16.880] And whatnot.
[00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:20.640] But it only really got validated once more people were paying for it.
[00:18:20.640 --> 00:18:29.280] And we saw that it could actually grow because with this type of thing, especially for retail traders, they tend to cycle in and out of trading during the year.
[00:18:29.280 --> 00:18:31.840] And when they're in, they're spending a bunch of money.
[00:18:31.840 --> 00:18:35.840] And when they're out, they cancel their subscription and then say, hey, we're coming back later.
[00:18:35.840 --> 00:18:36.320] Right.
[00:18:36.640 --> 00:18:47.360] So we needed to make sure that our churn rate would stay low enough that the business could actually grow and the MR would not be just flylining or declining over time.
[00:18:47.680 --> 00:18:52.240] I think there's like two types of people, or maybe two types of approaches to starting a company.
[00:18:52.240 --> 00:18:53.680] And you're definitely doing the second.
[00:18:53.680 --> 00:18:57.120] So the first approach is like what I call the master plan approach.
[00:18:57.120 --> 00:19:02.640] You sit down from day one, you get your blueprints, like an evil, you know, mad scientist, and you're like, this is what we're going to do.
[00:19:02.640 --> 00:19:04.240] And you have it all charted out.
[00:19:04.240 --> 00:19:05.680] You know, where are you going to be in 10 years?
[00:19:05.680 --> 00:19:06.720] Where are you going to be in five years?
[00:19:06.720 --> 00:19:07.680] Where are you going to be in one year?
[00:19:07.680 --> 00:19:10.320] And you draw it all the way back to today and you have a master plan.
[00:19:10.320 --> 00:19:12.960] And then you have the opposite, which is more of like a bottom-up approach.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:14.320] You're like, what are we going to do today?
[00:19:14.560 --> 00:19:17.600] Today I'm going to send these guys a message about how their app is buggy.
[00:19:17.560 --> 00:19:18.560] You know, okay, now I'm here.
[00:19:18.720 --> 00:19:20.920] Today we're going to do some influencer marketing because that seems good, right?
[00:19:20.920 --> 00:19:21.440] Oh, now we're here.
[00:19:21.440 --> 00:19:22.080] We're making some money.
[00:19:22.080 --> 00:19:23.480] Like, maybe we should try to make more money.
[00:19:23.360 --> 00:19:23.560] Right.
[00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:29.440] And you just follow the path and you see where you are now and you see where you could get to in the next step.
[00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:40.920] And I think that second path, like, that's not what I like to do because I like to be super meticulous in planning, but I think it's honestly the better way to go because it's more motivational and you end up seeing more realistic opportunities.
[00:19:40.920 --> 00:19:51.240] Like a lot of your story at this point is you figuring out what to do next based on like where you are right now, which means you're always going to have kind of a clear vision of where you can go.
[00:19:51.240 --> 00:19:52.920] And like maybe you'll hit a dead end, right?
[00:19:52.920 --> 00:20:01.720] Maybe you get to some point and you follow the wrong path and you have to backtrack a little bit, but it seems like that never really happened with you and you've just been figuring it out one step at a time.
[00:20:01.720 --> 00:20:02.040] Yeah.
[00:20:02.040 --> 00:20:06.120] I mean, in general, we try to have a long-term plan of where this thing is going.
[00:20:06.120 --> 00:20:18.040] Like, hey, we want to, you know, build these additional features that all tie into an overarching theme that people are willing to pay either more for or stick around longer for.
[00:20:18.360 --> 00:20:27.320] But yeah, they, you know, week by week, month by month, we tend to be like, okay, this is the most important thing to work on right now, and this will help us in the long term.
[00:20:27.560 --> 00:20:28.040] But yeah.
[00:20:28.040 --> 00:20:32.680] Okay, so like you have a sort of a master plan, you're saying like there is, there's a rhyme and reason there.
[00:20:32.680 --> 00:20:38.840] There's an idea of where we're going there, but the day-to-day, what to do, priorities can change pretty fast, right?
[00:20:38.840 --> 00:20:43.400] Like what do you think is like the part of your master plan that has worked out the best?
[00:20:43.400 --> 00:20:49.080] The prediction that you've made or the strategy that you guys have had that actually you've been able to make into reality?
[00:20:49.080 --> 00:20:57.080] I think one thing that's worked really well for us is keeping the app really simple and making decisions on how to limit the app, right?
[00:20:57.080 --> 00:21:06.040] So, hey, we're going to have the most common RSI as an option for alerts, but we're not going to have like a million options in a million different time periods and whatnot.
[00:21:06.040 --> 00:21:08.600] Make it really intuitive, user-friendly.
[00:21:08.600 --> 00:21:13.080] And, you know, one of the reviews that really made me happy, right, was this guy reaching out.
[00:21:13.080 --> 00:21:14.520] He's like, hey, I'm 70.
[00:21:14.520 --> 00:21:15.840] I love using your app.
[00:21:15.840 --> 00:21:16.880] It's really simple, right?
[00:21:16.880 --> 00:21:18.480] Because you open it, there's a big button.
[00:21:14.760 --> 00:21:21.760] It's like, hey, Tesla, here's the stock graph.
[00:21:22.080 --> 00:21:24.720] Here's a big button that says add alert, right?
[00:21:24.720 --> 00:21:27.200] You click on it, it says can't really mess it up.
[00:21:27.200 --> 00:21:40.400] And that's something we iterated on a lot, and something we try to keep up on a daily basis is, hey, cut the crap, even if we wrote some, even if we built a feature that, you know, turns out it isn't working, we just remove it, right?
[00:21:40.400 --> 00:21:42.320] So try not to get attached to stuff.
[00:21:42.320 --> 00:21:51.040] I think one of the things that's kind of impressive about your idea is that I saw you posting about it on Indie Hackers, and then one of the responses was, doesn't this already exist?
[00:21:51.040 --> 00:21:55.280] You know, aren't there already stock alerting apps and options?
[00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:56.480] And I had the same thought, right?
[00:21:56.480 --> 00:22:00.080] Like, yeah, it's probably like, there probably already are alternatives to this, right?
[00:22:00.080 --> 00:22:02.080] I use Robinhood for the limited trading I do.
[00:22:02.080 --> 00:22:05.120] I've never set an alarm, but like, there probably is an alarm there.
[00:22:05.280 --> 00:22:08.960] Or if we use like some other, you know, app or something, they probably have alarms.
[00:22:08.960 --> 00:22:12.880] But like, what you're basically proving is that like the market's big.
[00:22:12.880 --> 00:22:17.680] Just because someone has done something doesn't mean they've done it well or doesn't mean they've done it in the way that you're going to do it.
[00:22:17.680 --> 00:22:29.920] And if you have these sort of guiding principles, like we're going to make it super duper simple, like that's going to appeal to enough people that you can build a business out of it, despite the fact that other people have stock alerts or stock alarms.
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:34.960] I remember that comment actually, because I actually took like a good 20 minutes to write that response.
[00:22:34.960 --> 00:22:36.800] I was like looking at alternatives.
[00:22:36.800 --> 00:22:43.600] But I remember one of the examples I used was, hey, Google Analytics is a thing, but it sucks to use, right?
[00:22:43.600 --> 00:22:46.320] Like it's just plain too many options.
[00:22:46.320 --> 00:22:50.480] It's, you know, the thing you want to find is very hard to find.
[00:22:51.040 --> 00:22:53.120] So now there's plausible, right?
[00:22:53.120 --> 00:23:03.880] I mean, Notion's a pretty good example, but I think there's a lot of small startups that can just take one aspect of a bigger product and do it really well, which is what most people want out of that bigger product, anyways.
[00:22:59.600 --> 00:23:04.440] Yeah.
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:15.080] I think that's kind of like one of the biggest misconceptions about startups and businesses in general, especially for people who are doing it for the first time, is that you have to solve an unsolved problem, right?
[00:23:15.080 --> 00:23:19.560] If someone has already solved, if people are already eating at restaurants, like you can't make another restaurant.
[00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:23.720] If people are already staying in hotels and Airbnbs, it's a solved problem.
[00:23:23.880 --> 00:23:26.200] You can't solve a problem that people have already solved.
[00:23:26.200 --> 00:23:28.200] But it's actually not true at all.
[00:23:28.360 --> 00:23:35.160] The vast majority of the biggest startups in the world, even the newest startups, are just solving a problem that has already been solved.
[00:23:35.160 --> 00:23:36.680] They're just doing it in a new way.
[00:23:36.680 --> 00:23:39.800] The creativity comes not in the problem that you pick.
[00:23:39.800 --> 00:23:42.120] The creativity comes in your solution to that problem.
[00:23:42.120 --> 00:23:48.200] Like with the Aiya's app, the creativity comes in making it super niche, super specific, and then super simple.
[00:23:48.200 --> 00:23:54.280] And that allows you to solve a problem that's already being solved, but in a different way, and to reach a new group of customers.
[00:23:54.280 --> 00:23:56.840] Because I think growth is the hardest thing for indie hackers.
[00:23:57.080 --> 00:24:02.360] The number one thing is building your app or having an idea, but that actually turns out to be not that hard.
[00:24:02.360 --> 00:24:05.000] People figure out how to hack it together, even if they don't know how to code.
[00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:06.680] But then once it's built, people are like, oh, shit.
[00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:08.360] No one knows about it.
[00:24:08.360 --> 00:24:09.000] No one's using it.
[00:24:09.000 --> 00:24:10.040] No one's, they have no customers.
[00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:11.240] We have no revenue.
[00:24:11.480 --> 00:24:13.160] But it's been pretty smooth sailing for you guys.
[00:24:13.400 --> 00:24:19.640] Getting to, I think you said you got to 10K after a year and revenue, that's pretty quick for an indie hacker.
[00:24:19.640 --> 00:24:28.680] And so I kind of want to walk through some of the things that have worked for you from a growth perspective and just break them down so others can learn a bit about what you've learned, if that's okay.
[00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:29.160] Yeah.
[00:24:29.400 --> 00:24:35.160] So you mentioned doing marketing on forums and websites like Reddit and stuff.
[00:24:35.160 --> 00:24:35.800] How does that work?
[00:24:35.800 --> 00:24:38.440] What's your playbook for marketing on internet forums?
[00:24:38.920 --> 00:24:43.480] There's a few posts actually on Indie hackers about this that say it pretty well.
[00:24:43.480 --> 00:24:50.160] It's finding where your customers currently hang out and then going and hang out in that area as well.
[00:24:50.160 --> 00:24:53.040] And then not necessarily shilling your app and spamming it, right?
[00:24:53.040 --> 00:24:58.960] But suggesting it every once in a while and being like, hey, I built this, full disclosure, use it, right?
[00:24:59.120 --> 00:25:04.320] One thing that worked for us, actually, Quora really hates spam, right?
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:10.080] But if you're just totally upfront and honest about the fact that you worked on this, it works pretty well.
[00:25:10.080 --> 00:25:14.640] So if you look up like what stock, what's the best stock alerting app on Quora, right?
[00:25:14.640 --> 00:25:18.160] There's like, if I remember correctly, there was like 60 questions or something.
[00:25:18.480 --> 00:25:20.240] I check it every month or so.
[00:25:20.240 --> 00:25:21.360] I just post an answer.
[00:25:21.360 --> 00:25:23.280] I'm like, hey, try this.
[00:25:23.280 --> 00:25:24.320] Disclosure.
[00:25:24.320 --> 00:25:25.440] I built this.
[00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:33.360] And then I think at one point, I was getting like 10K views on my answers per month, right?
[00:25:33.360 --> 00:25:35.200] And then it leaks straight to our app.
[00:25:35.360 --> 00:25:42.720] It does a deep link where it's like, depending on your device, Android or iPhone or you're on a computer, right?
[00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:46.560] It just goes to the correct client, whether it's web, iOS, or Android.
[00:25:46.560 --> 00:25:48.960] So that worked pretty well, actually.
[00:25:49.280 --> 00:25:51.440] Just answering questions on Quora straight up.
[00:25:51.440 --> 00:25:51.840] Reddit.
[00:25:51.920 --> 00:25:52.800] I just Googled it.
[00:25:53.120 --> 00:25:56.400] Like I said, what's the best stock alerting app, Quora?
[00:25:56.400 --> 00:25:58.560] And the very first link on Google links to that question.
[00:25:58.560 --> 00:26:00.160] Is there any app that provides stock alerts?
[00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:01.840] And then I see answer number one.
[00:26:01.840 --> 00:26:04.800] You hear Bakor, StockAlarm sounds like it fits.
[00:26:04.800 --> 00:26:06.320] And you just sort of talk about Stock Alarm.
[00:26:06.320 --> 00:26:07.760] And then at the very end, you're like, disclosure.
[00:26:07.760 --> 00:26:10.800] I work on Stock Alarm and truly think it's one of the best out there.
[00:26:10.800 --> 00:26:12.480] And you're probably getting a lot of clicks from that.
[00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:13.840] So it makes sense.
[00:26:13.840 --> 00:26:19.760] Yeah, you can see the number of views at the bottom, and I hope that's one of the ones that have quite a bit of views.
[00:26:19.760 --> 00:26:20.080] Yeah.
[00:26:19.960 --> 00:26:21.920] Yeah, yeah, so that worked pretty well for us.
[00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:24.000] SEO was huge, right?
[00:26:24.000 --> 00:26:26.960] So, static marketing website, stockalarm.io.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:29.440] That was literally just HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
[00:26:29.440 --> 00:26:31.560] I put it together in like a day, right?
[00:26:31.560 --> 00:26:42.040] Just a lot of templates, swapped out all of the text and the images, threw in all of the meta tags, picked a few high picking keywords, was pretty difficult.
[00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:45.880] Like, one thing we did was pick a high-intent keyword, which was stock alerts, right?
[00:26:45.880 --> 00:26:50.440] It has pretty low volume, but people who click on that tend to actually download the app.
[00:26:50.440 --> 00:26:56.920] So, if you look up stock alerts on Google, we're number one ahead of like articles from Schwab and Fidelity and whatnot.
[00:26:56.920 --> 00:26:58.200] Yeah, how do you get to be number one?
[00:26:58.200 --> 00:27:00.040] Because, like you said, it's not high volume.
[00:27:00.040 --> 00:27:05.320] There's not a ton of people searching for this, but like there's a lot of other companies who are writing about stock alerts.
[00:27:05.320 --> 00:27:20.760] Yeah, I think backlinking worked pretty well for us in the sense that you know, we posted links on this from a bunch of other websites and reached out for people to actually like, hey, you know, we'll write you an article, but we'll drop a link to back to here.
[00:27:21.080 --> 00:27:22.760] And at some point, it kind of took off organically.
[00:27:22.760 --> 00:27:28.840] Like, the balance wrote a few articles about tools to help with the stock trading, and they linked to us.
[00:27:28.840 --> 00:27:32.600] So, we started getting links organically from people, which is great.
[00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:35.880] Another thing is, you know, just writing content.
[00:27:35.880 --> 00:27:47.320] We have a ton of blog posts all around RSI alerts or why you should set stock alerts for something, or you know, how income statements work or whatnot.
[00:27:47.320 --> 00:27:53.560] So, they're all kind of around the stock market and the stocks financials and technicals and whatnot.
[00:27:53.880 --> 00:28:01.240] Another thing is our web app has, you know, I think we support right now around 40,000 or 60,000 assets.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:04.680] I need to check, but it just automatically fills them in.
[00:28:04.680 --> 00:28:07.320] So, you know, we have new web pages for those all the time.
[00:28:07.320 --> 00:28:14.040] So, when you look up Tesla stock alerts on Google, the first one's from our web app, app.stockalarm.io, right?
[00:28:14.040 --> 00:28:16.400] So that also helps out a lot.
[00:28:14.200 --> 00:28:23.840] SEO was probably the biggest thing, like just focusing on that, because it took a few months for us to see any results from there.
[00:28:23.840 --> 00:28:25.200] So that was nice.
[00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:30.720] Yeah, that's one of the things I think discourages a lot of indie hackers from doing SEO, especially if they're in the ideation phase.
[00:28:30.720 --> 00:28:33.840] Like if you're just starting an app and you're like, I don't know if this is going to work.
[00:28:33.920 --> 00:28:38.320] If this doesn't work, I want to abandon it and move on to something new, you know, next month.
[00:28:38.320 --> 00:28:56.240] Then SEO doesn't enter most people's minds because it takes months to like write these blog posts and create these pages and then get other people to link to them and then have them start rising up the ranks in Google and like prove that they're going to do anything and generate any amount of traffic or that that traffic's going to convert to like paying users.
[00:28:56.240 --> 00:29:00.160] And I think a lot of people just don't have the patience or the time for that strategy.
[00:29:00.160 --> 00:29:02.160] But it seems like you were just committed early on.
[00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:03.840] And so you're like, why not?
[00:29:04.160 --> 00:29:06.960] It just felt like something like get it out of the way early.
[00:29:07.280 --> 00:29:08.800] It's going to help eventually.
[00:29:08.800 --> 00:29:09.760] It can't hurt, right?
[00:29:09.760 --> 00:29:13.840] Like, and how much time does it take to really bang out these articles?
[00:29:14.160 --> 00:29:21.280] Ironically, the person who runs the stock, the stock alarm app thinks about investing in SEO.
[00:29:21.280 --> 00:29:21.680] Yeah.
[00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:23.120] Who would have guessed?
[00:29:23.120 --> 00:29:25.440] Well, it seemed like a win.
[00:29:25.680 --> 00:29:29.440] And I think we ported up over our, I mean, I know we did this.
[00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:33.360] Like last week, I ported over our web app to Next.js for more SEO games, right?
[00:29:33.360 --> 00:29:38.240] Just because we built the Create React app first, and that was not doing too hot on Google.
[00:29:38.560 --> 00:29:49.280] One thing I want to slightly dig into, just because I'm completely unfamiliar with it, and I know a lot of other people probably are too, is like, I know plenty about just like generic SEO for a website.
[00:29:49.280 --> 00:29:51.760] We've done a little bit for indie hackers, not nearly enough.
[00:29:51.760 --> 00:29:53.200] We need to invest more.
[00:29:53.200 --> 00:29:59.360] But I read that a lot of your search volume is coming to your iOS app.
[00:29:59.360 --> 00:30:01.160] So what's the difference?
[00:29:59.600 --> 00:30:10.280] Like, what learnings have you come across that like help you to rise in your search rank on app stores as opposed to just like your websites, your landing pages?
[00:30:10.280 --> 00:30:10.840] That is right.
[00:30:10.840 --> 00:30:12.360] Most of us come from our iOS app.
[00:30:12.360 --> 00:30:17.080] But you know how you can track where your refers come on iOS for people who download the app?
[00:30:17.080 --> 00:30:22.840] So I remember very, very clearly when I started, there was just one page for stocknime.io.
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:25.560] It was, maybe if we use Wayback Time Machine, you can see it.
[00:30:25.560 --> 00:30:29.640] But at the time, only 5% of our traffic was coming from web.
[00:30:29.640 --> 00:30:32.360] Like web refers on the app store was 5%.
[00:30:32.360 --> 00:30:36.280] And then after doing all of the SEO stuff and waiting six months, it was 20%.
[00:30:36.600 --> 00:30:41.480] So now a lot of our traffic was coming from web straight into iOS.
[00:30:41.480 --> 00:30:51.160] And then also this was pretty useful because people coming from web, you know, a lot of them only, you know, might have had Androids or were on their laptops, right?
[00:30:51.160 --> 00:30:55.560] So when we built our Android app and our web app, they started going there as well.
[00:30:55.560 --> 00:30:59.960] Before that, we had, I think we built our web app before the Android app.
[00:30:59.960 --> 00:31:03.080] And on the web app, we had a button that said download for Android.
[00:31:03.080 --> 00:31:05.560] And when you clicked it, it said, oh, sorry, we don't have Android.
[00:31:05.560 --> 00:31:06.280] Put in your email.
[00:31:06.360 --> 00:31:07.640] We'll email you when it's out, right?
[00:31:07.640 --> 00:31:10.440] So we had like a wait list thing going on.
[00:31:11.720 --> 00:31:13.240] That was a pretty good move, actually.
[00:31:13.240 --> 00:31:14.440] What about your newsletter?
[00:31:14.440 --> 00:31:19.880] You mentioned on the Andy Hackers website that you guys have a newsletter that you try to put all of your existing users on.
[00:31:19.880 --> 00:31:21.560] Does that help you grow in any way?
[00:31:21.560 --> 00:31:23.720] Or is this help you re-engage existing users?
[00:31:23.720 --> 00:31:26.760] Like, what's sort of the focus of having a newsletter?
[00:31:26.760 --> 00:31:28.920] And how big is it, if you don't mind sharing?
[00:31:29.400 --> 00:31:33.720] I think right now it goes out to 170K people, right?
[00:31:33.720 --> 00:31:34.040] Wow.
[00:31:34.040 --> 00:31:36.280] And we send it out every month and a half or so.
[00:31:36.280 --> 00:31:38.840] I mean, there is a very, yeah, it's pretty good.
[00:31:39.240 --> 00:31:42.680] We don't do any like affiliations with other startups.
[00:31:42.680 --> 00:31:46.640] So it's literally just, like, we don't promote anything on it other than us, right?
[00:31:46.640 --> 00:31:50.240] So we just say, right, hey, here's what we've worked on the past month and a half.
[00:31:44.840 --> 00:31:51.280] Here's all the new features.
[00:31:51.520 --> 00:31:52.560] Here's where you find them.
[00:31:52.560 --> 00:31:52.800] Right.
[00:31:52.800 --> 00:31:55.840] We try to limit it to like four or five sections.
[00:31:55.840 --> 00:32:01.200] And then the very last section is just a heart-to-heart, hey, we're a small team.
[00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:04.080] Forward this newsletter to anybody who might find it useful.
[00:32:04.080 --> 00:32:04.400] Right.
[00:32:04.400 --> 00:32:06.000] So we do get some downloads there.
[00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:07.760] We do get some people subscribing.
[00:32:07.760 --> 00:32:14.560] But mostly because people tend to have trading sprints and then they stop trading for a while and then come back into it.
[00:32:14.560 --> 00:32:15.120] Right.
[00:32:15.760 --> 00:32:17.600] Especially when they're doing it actively.
[00:32:17.600 --> 00:32:24.400] You know, someone who might have churned out, we send them that newsletter and like, hey, you know, it's kind of like a reminder, hey, we're still around.
[00:32:24.400 --> 00:32:24.960] Right.
[00:32:24.960 --> 00:32:28.000] We also have push notifications that go out.
[00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:33.360] I wrote some code there to send it out every once in a while based off the user's last activity and whatnot.
[00:32:33.360 --> 00:32:35.360] It's a good way to get people to come back in.
[00:32:35.360 --> 00:32:41.040] But for our newsletter specifically, it's, you know, just tell people, here's what we've been working on.
[00:32:41.040 --> 00:32:42.400] If you have any ideas, reach out.
[00:32:42.400 --> 00:32:44.640] Otherwise, forward this newsletter.
[00:32:44.640 --> 00:32:55.520] I know people who have been doing literally nothing other than writing a newsletter every day for three years and they don't have 170,000 people on their newsletter.
[00:32:55.520 --> 00:32:59.040] How do you grow a newsletter that big when that's not even your main focus?
[00:32:59.040 --> 00:33:01.840] Are these just like everybody who signs up from your app is on your newsletter?
[00:33:01.920 --> 00:33:04.640] Is like the request to forward it really working that well or something?
[00:33:04.800 --> 00:33:13.440] I mean, right now, I think we ask people on our iOS app to like, when they sign up, you know, they can click on, hey, I want to receive this newsletter.
[00:33:13.920 --> 00:33:16.320] Click by default or not and double check that.
[00:33:16.320 --> 00:33:18.560] We've changed quite a bit since then.
[00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:21.920] But essentially, we don't, we don't send it out very often, right?
[00:33:21.920 --> 00:33:23.920] So, not many people unsubscribe from it.
[00:33:24.240 --> 00:33:26.160] We're very picky about what goes on there, right?
[00:33:26.160 --> 00:33:33.080] And then, every once in a while, we send a survey to people at like a limited portion of that, to ask them, hey, what do you guys think we should build?
[00:33:33.160 --> 00:33:33.720] Whatnot?
[00:33:33.720 --> 00:33:38.680] So, eventually, all of this culminated in you getting to where you were when you quit your job.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:43.480] Last September, you made a post on Indie Hackers, and you're basically like, Hey, you know what?
[00:33:43.480 --> 00:33:44.760] Done making excuses.
[00:33:44.760 --> 00:33:46.360] I'm going to take the leap.
[00:33:46.520 --> 00:33:47.480] I'm only 23.
[00:33:47.480 --> 00:33:49.640] I'm never going to have a better time in my life to just do this.
[00:33:49.640 --> 00:33:50.840] I have no responsibilities.
[00:33:50.840 --> 00:33:52.040] You know, you don't have a mortgage.
[00:33:52.040 --> 00:33:52.760] You're not married.
[00:33:52.760 --> 00:33:53.720] You don't have kids.
[00:33:53.720 --> 00:34:02.040] And you gave up a very well-paying job at Amazon, making $250,000 a year to go full-time on this app.
[00:34:02.040 --> 00:34:02.680] What was that like?
[00:34:02.680 --> 00:34:03.960] Because that's not an easy decision to make.
[00:34:03.960 --> 00:34:09.400] Even though you're absolute making $20,000 a month, that's still like I imagine most people in your life are like, what the hell are you doing?
[00:34:09.400 --> 00:34:11.720] Like, why would you quit?
[00:34:11.720 --> 00:34:13.800] I got a bunch of mixed reactions, actually.
[00:34:14.040 --> 00:34:15.800] That was the part that confused me the most, right?
[00:34:15.800 --> 00:34:20.200] Because it was, if I was signed to somebody who was also in the space, right?
[00:34:20.200 --> 00:34:24.440] Or somebody who had started coming there, like, what are you waiting for?
[00:34:24.440 --> 00:34:26.840] Like, I would have quit ages ago, right?
[00:34:26.840 --> 00:34:31.320] So that was one reaction I was getting, which was, which made me feel like, okay, I should quit.
[00:34:31.320 --> 00:34:33.160] Parents were like, are you insane?
[00:34:33.160 --> 00:34:33.560] Right.
[00:34:33.560 --> 00:34:35.560] So that was expected.
[00:34:35.800 --> 00:34:37.000] Friends were mixed.
[00:34:37.000 --> 00:34:39.480] Like, some of them knew, but were like, you know what you're doing.
[00:34:39.480 --> 00:34:42.360] Others were like, dude, you're making a ton of money.
[00:34:42.360 --> 00:34:43.320] Why are you doing this?
[00:34:43.320 --> 00:34:43.640] Right.
[00:34:43.960 --> 00:34:47.720] I think at the end of the day, I was just like, what will I not regret doing?
[00:34:47.720 --> 00:34:51.160] And I know I won't regret taking a leap of eight on this.
[00:34:51.160 --> 00:34:54.440] And plus, worst case, you can always get a job later, right?
[00:34:54.680 --> 00:34:56.280] The tech companies aren't going anywhere.
[00:34:56.440 --> 00:34:56.920] Exactly.
[00:34:57.080 --> 00:35:03.800] When I think about it, I mean, I'm just going to go back again to when I was a total loser at your age, or even slightly before then.
[00:35:04.280 --> 00:35:08.520] Like, I was that kid in college where I would like meet with my advisor.
[00:35:08.520 --> 00:35:12.520] I remember meeting with my advisor in my third year.
[00:35:12.520 --> 00:35:16.160] And she was like, hey, listen, Channing, like, you got to make a decision.
[00:35:14.440 --> 00:35:18.720] Like, you got to choose a major or a minor.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:20.960] I'd been there for three years and I still hadn't chosen.
[00:35:21.280 --> 00:35:27.760] And for me, the entire thing was any career path that I began to go down or that I began to contemplate.
[00:35:27.760 --> 00:35:29.360] I'm like, this is forever.
[00:35:29.360 --> 00:35:36.480] It's like, what career handcuffs do I want to like cuff myself to and then just have to do that all the time?
[00:35:36.800 --> 00:35:50.960] And in a sense, the thing that is most attractive to me about being an indie hacker, doing other things that I want to do, like I want to write a novel, like I want to have all of these jobs where I get to like, A, I get to be in control of my destiny.
[00:35:50.960 --> 00:35:54.480] I get to like, you know, experiment with a bunch of other things, et cetera.
[00:35:54.480 --> 00:36:00.160] It's super intangible, but that seems like a big thing that also kind of inspires you.
[00:36:00.160 --> 00:36:01.280] Yeah, no, for sure.
[00:36:01.280 --> 00:36:09.040] For me, yes, there's always, okay, if I start my own thing and it pays off, the payout is much bigger, but flexibility is really important to me.
[00:36:09.040 --> 00:36:14.320] And even though Amazon was actually pretty flexible, like I could travel around the U.S., they were cool with remote work there.
[00:36:14.320 --> 00:36:17.040] I had the idea, I'm like, what if I want to go outside the U.S.
[00:36:17.040 --> 00:36:20.320] and just go to Europe for a bit or something and work while I'm there?
[00:36:20.320 --> 00:36:21.680] Like, I can't do that at Amazon.
[00:36:21.760 --> 00:36:29.200] For some reason, the idea of flexibility through, you know, starting your own thing just seemed super attractive.
[00:36:29.200 --> 00:36:38.000] Do you think you would have had trouble quitting if you had waited until you were 25, 27, 30 years old to take the leap?
[00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:38.560] I don't know.
[00:36:38.560 --> 00:36:45.600] I think it would have been harder to leave if I had done any, you know, I was working on another promotion at the time to get to like a senior engineer.
[00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:47.520] I knew that was a lot more money.
[00:36:47.760 --> 00:36:54.000] And I was like, maybe it would have been harder to leave that more money, but I was most certainly going to do this at some point.
[00:36:54.000 --> 00:36:57.840] And, you know, if for some reason I end up back at a job, I'm going to do it again.
[00:36:57.840 --> 00:36:59.440] So I know that for sure already, right?
[00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:01.720] Like, this is, I got a taste of it.
[00:37:01.720 --> 00:37:03.080] It's a ton of fun.
[00:37:03.160 --> 00:37:06.920] Definitely messes up your working schedule because you have full flexibility.
[00:37:06.920 --> 00:37:07.080] Right.
[00:37:07.080 --> 00:37:08.600] So that part's been interesting.
[00:37:08.600 --> 00:37:10.360] What's your working schedule looking like now?
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:12.360] Like, are you a night owl?
[00:37:12.360 --> 00:37:13.400] Oh, it's janky.
[00:37:13.400 --> 00:37:14.040] It is.
[00:37:15.480 --> 00:37:19.000] So I try to wake up early, which worked for like a week.
[00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:25.880] And realistically, like full transparency, I wake up at like 9:30, 10:30 to 11.
[00:37:25.880 --> 00:37:27.240] I get to a WeWork, right?
[00:37:27.240 --> 00:37:28.600] Because I'm like, I need to work.
[00:37:28.920 --> 00:37:31.480] Courtland's like, dude, that is so structured.
[00:37:31.480 --> 00:37:33.240] Courtland's like, that's so early.
[00:37:33.240 --> 00:37:35.720] Like 9:30, you're already awake.
[00:37:36.040 --> 00:37:39.800] I'm a night owl and a morning board, so I try to do both and it doesn't work.
[00:37:39.800 --> 00:37:41.720] But I mean, that's some structure going to a we work.
[00:37:41.720 --> 00:37:42.920] Like you sound like disciplined.
[00:37:43.400 --> 00:37:47.320] You've got some place that is a workplace for you and it's not the same as your home.
[00:37:47.320 --> 00:37:54.040] So I get it like three times a week and then other times I just go to a coffee shop, but normally it's like 11 to 5 or 6.
[00:37:54.040 --> 00:37:59.400] And then for some reason, this has been development in the past month, like midnight to 3 a.m.
[00:37:59.560 --> 00:38:01.320] has been wildly productive.
[00:38:01.320 --> 00:38:05.000] You know, something about it's just so quiet out.
[00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:08.600] You're like in that weird, tired zone where you're not anxious about what you're doing.
[00:38:08.600 --> 00:38:11.160] So you're like, I'm going to write really calm.
[00:38:11.400 --> 00:38:21.160] I love the idea of like either being mega early, up early, working early, doing stuff early, or way late because everyone else is asleep.
[00:38:21.160 --> 00:38:23.000] It's funny, Cortland is the opposite of me.
[00:38:23.000 --> 00:38:24.760] I'm sort of like the morning lark.
[00:38:24.760 --> 00:38:26.200] He's always been a night owl.
[00:38:26.680 --> 00:38:31.080] I'll point out there was some point where he crossed over and he was telling me I was right all the time.
[00:38:31.080 --> 00:38:32.680] I don't know where he's at now.
[00:38:32.680 --> 00:38:40.440] But like, yeah, there's just, there's like a magic to like, you're not getting notifications on your phone, right?
[00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:44.640] Like, you know, if you open up like social media, there's like less activity.
[00:38:44.640 --> 00:38:47.840] Like, you're just sort of there in the dark doing work.
[00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:48.640] It works either way.
[00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:59.520] Like, if you are the typical software engineer who wants to stay up late and you're working past midnight, it's like you get that exact same experience as if you wake up super early in the morning where like nothing is going on and you can just be Zen.
[00:38:59.520 --> 00:39:00.960] And in the middle of the day, it's harder.
[00:39:00.960 --> 00:39:02.640] So I can identify with that.
[00:39:02.640 --> 00:39:05.840] I was going to say, there's just a lot less services that cater to you at night.
[00:39:06.400 --> 00:39:08.880] I would love to go to a coffee shop at 1 a.m.
[00:39:09.200 --> 00:39:10.640] Like, I think that's awesome.
[00:39:10.960 --> 00:39:12.000] They just won't let you in.
[00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:14.800] Yeah, they just, everything in Seattle closes at like 8 or like 30.
[00:39:14.880 --> 00:39:15.680] It's ridiculous.
[00:39:15.840 --> 00:39:18.160] Yeah, you want groceries, it's 8:30, like you're shit out of luck.
[00:39:18.160 --> 00:39:19.840] Like, eat tomorrow.
[00:39:19.840 --> 00:39:24.800] The concept of quitting early in your 20s and doing this at a young age, I think is really fascinating too.
[00:39:24.800 --> 00:39:28.720] I think it's kind of a startup cliche that startups are a young person's game.
[00:39:28.720 --> 00:39:30.640] You know, you just like, you need less money.
[00:39:30.640 --> 00:39:37.040] And I think about myself, like, if I were to quit indie hackers today, like, I wouldn't be nearly as scrappy as I was in my early 20s.
[00:39:37.040 --> 00:39:38.800] I live a bougie ass lifestyle.
[00:39:38.800 --> 00:39:41.120] Like, I need to make a certain amount of salary.
[00:39:41.120 --> 00:39:45.520] You know, like, I just like, I would need either a ton of savings or I would need like a lot of funding.
[00:39:45.520 --> 00:39:52.560] Otherwise, I would just like refuse to reverse, you know, and go back to like eating ramen noodles and living, you know, like paycheck to paycheck.
[00:39:52.640 --> 00:39:55.280] Like, it's just hard to do that when you're older.
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:39:58.400] And so I wonder, like, Channing, I don't know if you agree.
[00:39:58.400 --> 00:39:59.680] Like, if you feel the same way, right?
[00:39:59.680 --> 00:40:01.760] Like, you've got probably a decent amount of savings.
[00:40:01.760 --> 00:40:04.720] Do you feel like at 35, you're like, nah, I got to keep my.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:07.520] I mean, you've got like this nice bookcase behind you, this nice apartment.
[00:40:07.520 --> 00:40:09.440] Like, could you give me a-I'll have a really bad example.
[00:40:09.440 --> 00:40:12.000] I mean, uh, generally, no.
[00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:13.120] I'm a weirdo.
[00:40:13.120 --> 00:40:15.280] I mean, look, Courtland, you and I talk all the time.
[00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:25.040] You know that, like, I just happened to be in this phase of life, I don't know, going back to maybe three or four years, where there was just a fire that got sparked in me.
[00:40:25.040 --> 00:40:37.000] And the elasticity, like the willingness to, like, you know, sort of live way more like a way more ascetic lifestyle that I had when I was in my early 20s and mid-20s now I kind of got that back.
[00:40:37.320 --> 00:40:47.480] But without that weird exception for me, yeah, and also I'll say there are certain things that I don't want to give up like I definitely live in like a nice apartment.
[00:40:47.480 --> 00:40:48.520] I wouldn't want to give that up.
[00:40:48.520 --> 00:40:52.680] I buy like I spend a weird amount of money on books.
[00:40:52.680 --> 00:40:55.160] Like a good buddy of mine was like why do you have so many books?
[00:40:55.160 --> 00:40:56.440] Like it's just the thing I want.
[00:40:56.440 --> 00:40:57.240] What would you give up?
[00:40:57.240 --> 00:40:58.360] Would you sell all your books?
[00:40:58.360 --> 00:41:00.360] Would you sell your expensive VR setup?
[00:41:00.360 --> 00:41:04.680] Like would you move into a shittier apartment and a worse I would not sell books.
[00:41:04.680 --> 00:41:05.960] I would not sell books.
[00:41:05.960 --> 00:41:07.240] Get a Kindle.
[00:41:07.560 --> 00:41:08.360] Get a Kindle.
[00:41:08.360 --> 00:41:09.000] It's way cheaper.
[00:41:09.080 --> 00:41:09.880] Dude, I'm so weird.
[00:41:09.880 --> 00:41:19.160] What I do, I'll admit this, but when I buy books, like I almost want it to be so easily accessible to me so I don't have an excuse to not read them.
[00:41:19.160 --> 00:41:24.360] That if I buy a book, I buy the physical book, I buy the e-book, and I buy the audio book.
[00:41:24.360 --> 00:41:25.800] Like it's just, I just do that.
[00:41:25.800 --> 00:41:29.400] So there definitely are like these weird bougie tendencies that I have.
[00:41:29.400 --> 00:41:31.400] I don't think I would give up books, Cortland.
[00:41:33.320 --> 00:41:34.280] I'm kind of spoiled.
[00:41:34.280 --> 00:41:38.600] Like I have to have a gym in my apartment like in New York City.
[00:41:38.600 --> 00:41:44.600] If it's winter, like in the winters, I just turn into kind of like a sissy and I don't like walk the 30s.
[00:41:44.680 --> 00:41:46.440] Dude, you're just saying that you wouldn't give up anything.
[00:41:46.440 --> 00:41:48.200] You're just listing things that you wouldn't give up.
[00:41:49.560 --> 00:41:52.440] But I also, it's like I don't have a car or care.
[00:41:53.400 --> 00:41:57.640] It's like the things that I just named are the things that I really care about.
[00:41:57.640 --> 00:41:59.640] Like I drink Soylent.
[00:41:59.640 --> 00:42:00.840] I don't care about food.
[00:42:00.840 --> 00:42:02.520] I don't spend crap on food.
[00:42:02.520 --> 00:42:03.960] I don't party, really.
[00:42:03.960 --> 00:42:05.800] I don't go out, right?
[00:42:05.800 --> 00:42:06.760] Like, I just hang out.
[00:42:06.800 --> 00:42:09.720] I'm, I'm a, like, I'm a, uh, like, I work.
[00:42:09.720 --> 00:42:12.680] So I like have the things that fuel the work.
[00:42:12.680 --> 00:42:14.200] How do you feel on Soylent?
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:16.720] I feel like that, that stuff just sketches me out.
[00:42:16.800 --> 00:42:18.320] It should, it should sketch you out.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:20.400] The way that I don't know, I'm not going to defend it.
[00:42:20.560 --> 00:42:24.080] Um, I don't really like eating as much as other people.
[00:42:24.080 --> 00:42:27.840] Like, that's that's really like the baseline situation.
[00:42:27.840 --> 00:42:33.520] What I do is I'll drink like a soylent a day, um, and then I'll have like two other meals, like real meals.
[00:42:33.680 --> 00:42:42.800] For me, it's like I'm such an optimizer that if there's something that I don't really care about, like, I don't really care about, like, I don't like making food.
[00:42:42.800 --> 00:42:43.520] I hate it.
[00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:46.000] I won't wait on it, like, I won't learn how to do it.
[00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:48.480] My girlfriend's an awesome cook, so that's dope.
[00:42:48.480 --> 00:42:57.040] But, like, if I, if I'm hungry right now and I also want to be like coding or writing or doing some work, like, I pop a, I just go grab a soylent.
[00:42:57.040 --> 00:43:05.600] And then the even sort of weirder thing is I also like, I like, I need caffeine, but I don't like having to make coffee all the time.
[00:43:05.600 --> 00:43:08.480] So, I'll just like, whatever, I'll just take a caffeine pill.
[00:43:08.480 --> 00:43:11.680] Like, these tiny little weird efficiencies.
[00:43:11.680 --> 00:43:12.880] Caffeine pills and the soy.
[00:43:13.040 --> 00:43:14.960] Yeah, like these, these little efficiencies.
[00:43:14.960 --> 00:43:15.920] I just don't give a shit.
[00:43:15.920 --> 00:43:19.440] I'll just like just get the get the fuel in my body.
[00:43:19.440 --> 00:43:20.240] Couldn't do it.
[00:43:20.240 --> 00:43:21.200] Food is my vice.
[00:43:21.200 --> 00:43:24.640] If I could have like a shitty superpower, it would be to be able to eat an infinite amount of food.
[00:43:24.640 --> 00:43:25.840] I eat like 12 meals a day.
[00:43:25.840 --> 00:43:26.880] They'd all be delicious.
[00:43:26.880 --> 00:43:28.640] None of them would be Soylent.
[00:43:28.640 --> 00:43:29.760] Plus, coffee is awesome.
[00:43:30.160 --> 00:43:31.440] Yeah, coffee's delicious too.
[00:43:31.440 --> 00:43:32.160] I love coffee.
[00:43:32.160 --> 00:43:32.960] Yeah, can't do it.
[00:43:32.960 --> 00:43:34.000] Yahya, what are you?
[00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:34.960] What are you working for?
[00:43:34.960 --> 00:43:36.720] I mean, you said you wanted freedom.
[00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:38.400] You said you wanted flexibility.
[00:43:38.560 --> 00:43:40.240] Stock alarm is at 20k MRR.
[00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:42.320] I think it's just you and one co-founder.
[00:43:42.320 --> 00:43:43.520] How far do you want to push it?
[00:43:43.520 --> 00:43:48.240] And what do you want to do, you know, with the business that you're creating and the money that you're generating?
[00:43:48.240 --> 00:43:54.320] I feel like it would be nice to have either one or multiple lifestyle agencies.
[00:43:54.320 --> 00:43:55.600] I think that is the dream, right?
[00:43:55.600 --> 00:43:56.960] You don't really answer to anyone.
[00:43:56.960 --> 00:43:58.400] You kind of work on your own thing.
[00:43:58.400 --> 00:44:04.840] People recognize you for helping them out in some aspect of their life with something you built.
[00:44:05.080 --> 00:44:09.800] I think all that is great for you and your psyche and whatnot.
[00:44:09.800 --> 00:44:20.440] But at the end of the day, having income to do the things you want to do, and if the thing you want to do is also making you that income is the best thing ever, right?
[00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:31.880] I think working at a big tech job, there's always like, oh, I have to do this one thing, really don't want to do, or you know, I might get laid off as I think Microsoft just, or someone just laid off 10K employees, right?
[00:44:31.880 --> 00:44:32.440] I think it's Microsoft.
[00:44:33.160 --> 00:44:35.960] All of the tech companies just laid off 10K employees.
[00:44:35.960 --> 00:44:39.320] Yeah, I'm not even like, I can pay attention, but it doesn't, I'm not stressed.
[00:44:39.400 --> 00:44:42.760] I literally have a friend at Amazon who got laid off the day before yesterday.
[00:44:43.080 --> 00:44:43.560] Oh, geez.
[00:44:43.560 --> 00:44:43.960] Sorry, David.
[00:44:44.200 --> 00:44:45.080] Dodged a bullet.
[00:44:45.080 --> 00:44:45.960] Could have been you.
[00:44:45.960 --> 00:44:46.680] Yeah, I don't know.
[00:44:46.680 --> 00:44:50.520] I think something about that is really nice, and I think it's a great way to live life, right?
[00:44:51.240 --> 00:44:56.360] Especially because you're building things that are helping other people and making money while doing it.
[00:44:56.360 --> 00:45:04.040] And the flexibility makes it so that, you know, you can reshape your life however you want, like planning to move from Seattle in a few months, right?
[00:45:04.520 --> 00:45:05.480] So, yeah.
[00:45:06.440 --> 00:45:16.520] What do you think, you know, in the past three years of you working on this, joining as a sort of a late co-founder, growing it to 10K in a year, now up to past 20k in revenue?
[00:45:16.520 --> 00:45:23.400] What do you think is something that you've learned on this journey that a fledgling indie hacker might benefit from hearing?
[00:45:23.400 --> 00:45:26.280] There's a lot more money to go around than you initially think, right?
[00:45:26.280 --> 00:45:30.200] Like people are willing to spend money on things that make their lives better.
[00:45:30.200 --> 00:45:41.640] I think that's that's something that I didn't realize back then because for some reason I had this idea that to make any money with a company to build this big thing or big grand thing or sell some type of physical product or something.
[00:45:41.640 --> 00:45:46.800] But, you know, with SaaS, like, hey, you know, you might have noticed my email is hey.com, right?
[00:45:46.800 --> 00:45:48.880] Like I pay for email.
[00:45:48.880 --> 00:45:51.040] It's ridiculous, but it's so nice.
[00:45:44.920 --> 00:45:52.000] Like it makes life so much easier.
[00:45:52.240 --> 00:45:53.840] Email is free and you pay for it.
[00:45:53.840 --> 00:46:01.520] Yeah, it's ridiculous, but I think that's something that really helped reshape my view of how to build companies and whatnot.
[00:46:01.520 --> 00:46:02.240] Awesome.
[00:46:02.240 --> 00:46:08.560] Well, listen, Yahia, as a 35-year-old Channing, I really love hearing your story.
[00:46:08.560 --> 00:46:12.000] As your age, Channing, I would have been a little bit more resentful.
[00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:14.640] And it's been an awesome conversation.
[00:46:15.200 --> 00:46:21.680] Where can people who are listening go to find more about you and like StockAlarm and other stuff that you're getting into?
[00:46:21.680 --> 00:46:23.840] I'm finally trying to get into Twitter, right?
[00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:29.680] Like for some reason, I've resisted it for so long, but I think my Twitter is my name is Yahya, pretty much.
[00:46:29.680 --> 00:46:30.720] Like that's my age.
[00:46:30.720 --> 00:46:36.720] Didn't I see that StockAlarm, like the StockAlarm Twitter account, it's like all automated?
[00:46:36.720 --> 00:46:37.440] Pretty much.
[00:46:37.440 --> 00:46:39.760] I'm trying to post on it as well.
[00:46:39.760 --> 00:46:42.960] But just obviously post stock market updates and whatnot.
[00:46:42.960 --> 00:46:49.120] But mostly signing up for Stock Alarm, joining our newsletter or checking out.
[00:46:49.600 --> 00:46:53.360] I do actually post company updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera.
[00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:55.120] Working on some cool stuff.
[00:46:55.120 --> 00:46:57.200] We're actually launching a business version soon.
[00:46:57.200 --> 00:47:01.680] So that should be like for wealth management firms that have been using us.
[00:47:01.840 --> 00:47:02.800] That's a whole thing.
[00:47:02.800 --> 00:47:04.240] But yeah.
[00:47:04.560 --> 00:47:04.880] All right.
[00:47:04.880 --> 00:47:06.400] Thanks again for coming on, Yahia.
[00:47:07.200 --> 00:47:08.400] Thanks, guys.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:08.960] All right, we should probably introduce you.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:12.160] You are Yahia Bakur, the founder of StockAlarm.
[00:00:12.160 --> 00:00:13.600] Am I pronouncing that right?
[00:00:13.600 --> 00:00:14.480] Yes, the boat.
[00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:17.600] You are, you're super young.
[00:00:17.600 --> 00:00:21.840] I think what's inspirational about you is the fact that you're only 23 years old.
[00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:24.160] You've been working on StockAlarm for three years now.
[00:00:24.160 --> 00:00:29.360] So you started this when you were 20 or 19 in college, and you just recently quit your job.
[00:00:29.360 --> 00:00:30.880] You're a software engineer at Amazon.
[00:00:30.880 --> 00:00:39.440] You're making $250,000 a year, and you've taken the leap to work full-time on StockAlarm, which is making $20,000 a month, so you're killing it there too.
[00:00:39.440 --> 00:00:45.040] I think that's pretty rare to hear an indie hacker succeeding so wildly at your age, and it's pretty inspirational to see.
[00:00:45.040 --> 00:00:46.640] So welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:47.040] Thank you.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:47.760] Thank you.
[00:00:48.080 --> 00:00:50.800] You know what I was doing at 20 years old?
[00:00:50.800 --> 00:00:54.080] I was going to bars with a fake ID.
[00:00:54.080 --> 00:00:57.840] I was trying to seem like I actually knew how to order.
[00:00:57.840 --> 00:01:05.520] So like I'd go there and there would be like some cute girl and like I would stand and like the bartender wouldn't see me because I was too short and I was like too timid.
[00:01:05.840 --> 00:01:13.920] And yet you're like 20 years old, like running a business, making grands, like making business decisions.
[00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:16.960] I'm happy I didn't have friends like you who made me feel like shit.
[00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:18.560] I tried to have balance, actually.
[00:01:18.560 --> 00:01:20.640] I think my idea was taken somewhere in Jersey.
[00:01:20.640 --> 00:01:23.120] So not too far off, but yeah.
[00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:25.440] So let's talk about your product, StockAlarm.
[00:01:25.840 --> 00:01:28.800] I'll try to describe it, Yahya, and you tell me if I'm getting this right.
[00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:30.880] So let's say that I'm trading stocks.
[00:01:30.880 --> 00:01:35.120] Obviously, that can be really time consuming to do, especially if I'm like a day trader or something.
[00:01:35.120 --> 00:01:39.920] I might be watching 10 or 20 different stocks and I want to buy and sell them at different prices.
[00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:45.760] And so I'm just watching and clicking refresh on the page over and over and over again all day so I know when to buy and sell.
[00:01:46.080 --> 00:01:47.600] Enter StockAlarm.
[00:01:47.600 --> 00:01:48.960] You know, that process is a huge waste of time.
[00:01:48.960 --> 00:01:53.120] But if I download your app or I sign up for your website, then suddenly I can set alerts.
[00:01:53.120 --> 00:01:56.560] I can tell StockAlarm, hey, notify me when this stock hits this price.
[00:01:56.880 --> 00:01:58.400] And then I can buy or sell it.
[00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:00.680] And I'm no longer having to do all this manual checking myself.
[00:02:00.680 --> 00:02:06.120] I'm just getting automatic notifications via email or a phone call or a text message.
[00:02:06.120 --> 00:02:11.080] And now I can just go buy stocks and not have to do this whole sort of time-consuming process.
[00:02:11.080 --> 00:02:15.880] And so that, I think, is the main benefit, as I understand it, of your app, StockAlarm.
[00:02:15.880 --> 00:02:16.920] Yep, that's pretty much it.
[00:02:16.920 --> 00:02:26.440] The whole point of it was to avoid that feeling of, you know, you're watching Tesla or whatever volatile Wall Street Bud stock was going on is popular at the time.
[00:02:26.440 --> 00:02:31.320] You're watching it for a while, you stop watching it, and your last thought before that was maybe I should buy some, right?
[00:02:31.320 --> 00:02:35.480] And then later on, you're like, oh, it spiked by, you know, 10%.
[00:02:35.480 --> 00:02:38.200] But if you had bought a call option, you would have made a ton of money.
[00:02:38.200 --> 00:02:39.560] Yeah, I get that exact feeling.
[00:02:39.560 --> 00:02:44.920] Like, maybe I should have bought some whenever I see the price spike, but not when I see it fall.
[00:02:45.240 --> 00:02:52.840] And so I have a sort of retroactive history in my mind of like, I totally would have, I totally knew this was going to happen and I would have bought if I, you know, I just thought about it.
[00:02:52.840 --> 00:02:54.520] And fun story, actually.
[00:02:54.520 --> 00:02:56.680] I was not the original founder on this.
[00:02:56.680 --> 00:02:58.440] I actually joined the party pretty late.
[00:02:59.320 --> 00:03:01.320] Okay, when did you join?
[00:03:01.640 --> 00:03:10.280] So I joined Stock Alarm when there was, I think it was under $100 MRR and it's like three, 400 monthly active users.
[00:03:10.680 --> 00:03:15.000] The story of how I joined is pretty fun, as well as the co-founders and where they are now.
[00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:18.040] I think Corlin, you might have talked to one of them a few weeks ago, Rude.
[00:03:18.280 --> 00:03:21.000] He was working on a content moderation platform.
[00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:23.640] The other one, Morgan, he recently got a full-time job.
[00:03:23.640 --> 00:03:27.320] He had a period of one year where he was going full-time on StockAlarm.
[00:03:27.320 --> 00:03:28.200] The year expired.
[00:03:28.200 --> 00:03:31.320] We didn't hit the MR that he would have wanted to stay on.
[00:03:31.320 --> 00:03:32.920] So he just went back.
[00:03:32.920 --> 00:03:33.400] Okay.
[00:03:33.400 --> 00:03:35.560] So yeah, give me the give me the rundown.
[00:03:35.560 --> 00:03:37.880] You started StockAlarm, I think, in 2019.
[00:03:37.880 --> 00:03:39.000] Was that when you joined?
[00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.120] Or is that when the first two co-founders started it?
[00:03:42.440 --> 00:03:45.000] So I joined, I think it was a few months after.
[00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:53.200] Essentially, what had happened is, you know, I was senior year of college, applying to jobs, you know, you're trying to just get in Fang, et cetera.
[00:03:54.240 --> 00:03:59.760] And I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Morgan, which had been going kind of viral, a couple thousand likes.
[00:03:59.760 --> 00:04:04.080] He had written, Hey, I started this stock market alerting app.
[00:04:04.080 --> 00:04:05.440] Check it out.
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:08.080] Been working on it for a while, et cetera.
[00:04:08.080 --> 00:04:12.400] So I opened it, and my first thought was, this would be great if it worked, right?
[00:04:12.400 --> 00:04:15.040] Like it would just, it was broken in a lot of ways.
[00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:23.360] So like, hey, I would actually pay the five bucks a month for this if only it had these features, because at the time I had my own kind of setup, right?
[00:04:23.680 --> 00:04:29.280] I thought I was doing well with options, wasn't actually, but it was fun, right?
[00:04:29.920 --> 00:04:32.960] So went ahead, sent him a list of suggestions.
[00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:35.920] I'm like, hey, I have a spreadsheet where I keep prices updated.
[00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:37.840] I'm actually trying to build something like StockAlarm.
[00:04:38.160 --> 00:04:40.320] Please add these features, right?
[00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:41.760] One thing led to another.
[00:04:41.760 --> 00:04:42.560] We hopped on a call.
[00:04:42.560 --> 00:04:44.080] They're like, hey, do you want to join?
[00:04:44.080 --> 00:04:44.960] It's pretty early on.
[00:04:45.120 --> 00:04:46.240] You can grow this thing.
[00:04:47.520 --> 00:04:49.280] We can become co-founders.
[00:04:49.280 --> 00:04:52.000] So essentially, that's what happened and grew it for a period of one year.
[00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:55.680] I think by the end of the year, we were chilling at 10K MRR.
[00:04:55.680 --> 00:04:56.320] I love that.
[00:04:56.320 --> 00:05:08.240] It's like, in a way, your story is like the way that I ended up as one of the founding members of this product is I noticed what was wrong with it and I kind of like politely shat on it in certain ways.
[00:05:08.240 --> 00:05:10.080] Like, here's what would make your app good.
[00:05:10.080 --> 00:05:18.560] It kind of reminds me of when tech companies like for like hackers to hack in and like show security vulnerabilities.
[00:05:18.560 --> 00:05:24.320] And then they end up bringing on those hackers to run the security team and like kind of show them how to do it in a better way.
[00:05:24.320 --> 00:05:39.560] I've never hired anybody who's complained about my apps, but I've become good friends with people who have, like Julian, who's been on the podcast a few times, messaged me in the early days of indie hackers to be like, hey, your site's cool and all, but like, here's like 15 things that you could be doing better that are wrong with it.
[00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:44.760] And I think when you're an early stage founder, like that kind of feedback is extremely appreciated.
[00:05:44.760 --> 00:05:49.400] Like usually you're just kind of like in a bubble where nobody's talking to you and nobody cares.
[00:05:49.400 --> 00:05:56.840] So if somebody's like taking the time to go through and pointed out all the things that could be better, you're probably thinking like maybe I should talk to this person or hire them.
[00:05:56.840 --> 00:05:57.480] Yep.
[00:05:57.480 --> 00:05:59.480] And I think at the time they had full-time jobs.
[00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:00.920] They were like Facebook.
[00:06:00.920 --> 00:06:06.200] I was in senior of college, which yes, technically I have things to do, but not really, right?
[00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:08.920] So yeah, I had a bunch of spare time to work on this.
[00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:13.320] Got a lot of beer pong to play, homework to do, not much else.
[00:06:13.640 --> 00:06:23.080] I mean, for you to give them suggestions on how they could make this better, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like you just said you thought about how you would do the app the same way.
[00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:25.960] So I would assume that you were stock trading already.
[00:06:25.960 --> 00:06:28.440] You had like, what was your background with trading?
[00:06:28.440 --> 00:06:31.240] Like, how long, how did you even get into stocks?
[00:06:31.960 --> 00:06:34.120] I really like to read books in college.
[00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:38.360] So I read a bunch of, you know, trading books as well as stuff on derivatives.
[00:06:38.360 --> 00:06:41.000] One of my favorite books actually is The Random Walk Down Wall Street.
[00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:50.360] Like it's they're really simple books to read, but you know, it introduces you to all the lingo, all of the concepts, and also it was perfect for our target market, right?
[00:06:50.360 --> 00:06:59.400] Which is mostly retail traders as well as professional traders that just want the really easy UI to use to complement whatever they're doing on a day-to-day basis.
[00:06:59.720 --> 00:07:06.920] I'm going to have to say, like in this in this situation, I actually don't know hardly anything about stock trading, even to this day, right?
[00:07:06.920 --> 00:07:13.000] Like, you were nerding out at age 20, and I'm 35, and like, I've got like Robin Hood.
[00:07:13.000 --> 00:08:51.960] I think I've got some Bitcoin locked up in one of these apps like i bought them because i was quote supposed to i never looked into it i don't open those apps so i'm gonna kind of like use you in this interview at least if nothing else like i need to figure out like books and stuff to read but i'm gonna keep mining you for information so i'm taking notes yeah what are your recommendations you said random walk uh down wall street what else have you like read to like learn more about trading and what'd be your advice to somebody who's like you know sort of a noob like you were at some point i mean i wouldn't say that i'm necessarily you know i i think the standard advice of index funds and don't trade applies to the best majority of people right there was that one study of like it wasn't a study it was this famous article about how a monkey picked out random stocks and it performed better than you know a bunch of uh mutual fund managers and whatnot so i think trying to actively trade is not usually the move but you know if what most people tend to do um especially you know tech people that i was working with is they would have fun money right so they'd be like hey this is money i would spend going to vegas instead i'm just going to spend it at home trading options right so they say okay i have this much money i'm going to spend on trading and then usually that's also part of who our users are right because they're like hey if i'm spent trading with a couple thousand dollars i don't mind spending five bucks a month on this app to actually keep me on top of everything so i don't right so i can go to class or go to work or etc i like that point of view basically this is fun money but on the flip side of that like you have to understand like your personality type like are you an addictive gambler right yeah is this fun money going to suddenly turn into like your rent money and suddenly turn into like your mortgage payment?
[00:08:51.960 --> 00:08:57.640] Like, I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that control, but um if you do, I think that's a really good way to look at it.
[00:08:57.640 --> 00:09:03.880] And there's people that trade, you know, on like a monthly basis or they rebounce their portfolios every six months, right?
[00:09:03.880 --> 00:09:08.200] But they have so much money in there that you know, it's still useful for them.
[00:09:08.200 --> 00:09:11.000] I'm not supposed to talk about like our target users, right?
[00:09:11.400 --> 00:09:12.760] What we've learned from them.
[00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:21.800] A lot of them, they only do a couple of trades a year, but the volume is so large or the amount of money they put in is so large that they're like, okay, I need to be on top of this thing, right?
[00:09:22.360 --> 00:09:29.560] And then in terms of what you should actually do, everybody has their own opinions, I think, but whoever's making money is probably the right one, right?
[00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:30.200] Yeah.
[00:09:30.200 --> 00:09:41.320] I know a lot of friends who are like YOLO crypto traders, and they're just putting money into every single coin, putting half their net worth into that, making and losing millions of dollars and living that kind of lifestyle.
[00:09:41.320 --> 00:09:45.800] But I think that you're sort of right about the probably the right move is not to be an active trader.
[00:09:46.040 --> 00:09:50.200] I remember when I was in college, I graduated in 2009.
[00:09:50.200 --> 00:09:54.920] And so 2008 was sort of like the financial crisis due to like the housing bubble bursting.
[00:09:54.920 --> 00:09:56.760] And right after that, I started trading stocks.
[00:09:56.760 --> 00:09:59.640] And I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing.
[00:09:59.640 --> 00:10:07.240] So I was just doing a lot of day trading, you know, just like buying and selling stocks like three or four times a day for months on end because it was fun to do.
[00:10:07.240 --> 00:10:14.360] And if I had just like held any of those stocks that I had bought and just not sold them and literally just done nothing, like the easiest, I could have just forgotten about them.
[00:10:14.360 --> 00:10:16.280] It would have been the easiest, dumbest thing to do.
[00:10:16.280 --> 00:10:21.400] And yet it would have been the smartest and would have made way more money than all the buying and selling that I did.
[00:10:21.400 --> 00:10:24.600] Which is kind of funny because then I probably wouldn't have needed stock alarm.
[00:10:24.600 --> 00:10:26.120] I wouldn't have needed to know any alerts.
[00:10:26.120 --> 00:10:29.800] I just would have completely forgot about it, set it and forget it and profited.
[00:10:29.800 --> 00:10:34.840] There's also like that whole like, the whole hodling thing for the crypto community.
[00:10:34.840 --> 00:10:37.320] Yeah, that uh that's so bad.
[00:10:37.320 --> 00:10:38.360] That's a matter of what.
[00:10:38.360 --> 00:10:38.920] Yeah.
[00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:39.720] Kind of is.
[00:10:39.720 --> 00:10:44.600] I don't see that as much with stock traders, but I think it's for some reason very popular in crypto.
[00:10:44.640 --> 00:10:56.640] So, I mean, you knew you knew a bit about stock trading, you knew enough to criticize and like poke holes and like an actual new startup for it, but that startup was like new.
[00:10:56.640 --> 00:11:01.120] You said they only had only been around for a couple of months and you were looking for a job.
[00:11:01.120 --> 00:11:06.960] So, I'm kind of curious, like, why was that like an option that seemed like why go work for a broke startup?
[00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:11.200] So, here's the fun thing: I wasn't even trying to get into the startup space.
[00:11:11.200 --> 00:11:18.480] Like, for some reason, in my head, to build a startup, you needed to raise money and have this grand idea, right?
[00:11:18.480 --> 00:11:21.120] Like, building this thing that'll immediately help billions.
[00:11:21.120 --> 00:11:32.320] I didn't understand this concept of like indie hacking, where it's like, okay, you see a niche market where, you know, there's only the potential for to make a couple million or which is a lot of money, right?
[00:11:32.320 --> 00:11:40.560] But the point is, I didn't think that you could build a small product that kind of worked in that market and it could fund your lifestyle, right?
[00:11:40.560 --> 00:11:42.800] Which is what a lot of indie hackers do.
[00:11:42.800 --> 00:11:45.440] So, in my head, I was like, okay, I'll give this guy suggestions.
[00:11:45.440 --> 00:11:49.200] I could use this app and then I'll keep looking for a full-time job, right?
[00:11:49.520 --> 00:11:54.320] So, my priority was getting into a big company, getting to Amazon.
[00:11:54.320 --> 00:11:59.040] And, you know, I was working on Stock Alarm at the site, and I'm like, wow, I really like doing this thing.
[00:11:59.280 --> 00:12:00.400] It's fun to work on.
[00:12:00.400 --> 00:12:01.680] You get recognition, right?
[00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:02.560] People reach out.
[00:12:02.560 --> 00:12:09.360] They're like, hey, surprisingly, people feel very strongly about their money and things related to their money.
[00:12:09.360 --> 00:12:15.200] So if, you know, Stock Alarm works the way it's supposed to, people get an alert, they leave really positive reviews.
[00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:20.080] So if you check the App Store, we have like 6,000 reviews with 4.8 stars.
[00:12:20.080 --> 00:12:23.120] And, you know, some people are very angry, some people are very happy.
[00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:25.600] But I think the nice part is people feel strongly about it.
[00:12:25.600 --> 00:12:27.040] So, I think that was cool.
[00:12:27.040 --> 00:12:36.360] And somewhere along the line, I was like, hey, what I'm doing at Amazon is fun, but it's getting old very quickly.
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:41.880] Meanwhile, every time I work on StockAlarm, I'm up till like midnight and time just flies, right?
[00:12:41.880 --> 00:12:45.480] And, you know, I do Amazon during the day, Stock Alarm at night.
[00:12:45.480 --> 00:12:48.760] And my main goal at the time was, okay, get promoted to Amazon.
[00:12:49.080 --> 00:12:53.640] I did that in 10 months, and I was like, okay, I feel nothing, right?
[00:12:53.640 --> 00:13:00.120] Like, I could gun for another promotion or could gun for more money, which I tried, did the whole diamond save thing.
[00:13:00.120 --> 00:13:03.320] But I was like, okay, what do I actually want to do with my life?
[00:13:03.320 --> 00:13:08.040] So StockAlarm seemed like a very good option because, you know, here it was.
[00:13:08.040 --> 00:13:18.760] I had this sort of gem that could fund an indie hacking lifestyle and I could try to grow it and expand it beyond alerting and what it currently does.
[00:13:18.760 --> 00:13:28.280] Let's go to the beginning, though, because I'm curious about this transition that you made from early employee, basically, or maybe late co-founder to founder.
[00:13:28.280 --> 00:13:30.360] Like, that's one of the most baller movies you could possibly make.
[00:13:30.360 --> 00:13:32.200] Like, hey, you guys made this app.
[00:13:32.200 --> 00:13:35.240] I'm just, you know, part of the peanut gallery on LinkedIn telling you what you need to do.
[00:13:35.240 --> 00:13:40.840] To like, today, you're like, I'm the founder of StockAlarm, quit my job running this.
[00:13:40.840 --> 00:13:42.360] How does that happen?
[00:13:42.680 --> 00:13:50.200] So, initially, it happened by initially Ruben Morgan did not really believe this thing would grow past the QK MRR, right?
[00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:55.880] They're like, hey, if you, you know, manage to grow to this point, we'll give you all this equity.
[00:13:55.880 --> 00:13:58.920] And later on, they told me they're like, we never actually thought it would happen, right?
[00:13:58.920 --> 00:14:00.760] So, which is funny.
[00:14:02.200 --> 00:14:05.800] Yeah, I met, I actually only met them a year and a half after working.
[00:14:05.800 --> 00:14:07.400] We hope we all took a trip to Tahoe.
[00:14:07.400 --> 00:14:09.160] We're like, hey, company off-site, right?
[00:14:09.160 --> 00:14:11.240] So it was a full thing.
[00:14:11.240 --> 00:14:22.880] But yeah, the way that happened was I joined on initially, started trying all these growth tactics, started actually building up a product and whatnot, grid, grid, grid.
[00:14:22.880 --> 00:14:35.440] And then once I got all the equity I wanted, I'm like, hey, guys, I'd love to keep going on this, but I'll need more until eventually I got to like co-founder status and everybody was cool with it and amount of equity that's respectable and whatnot.
[00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:36.720] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:14:36.720 --> 00:14:39.840] I mean, in that sense, it's worth it to them because they own equity in the company.
[00:14:39.840 --> 00:14:45.360] And if you are making the company more valuable, then like the value of their equity is going up.
[00:14:45.360 --> 00:14:58.640] And I'd rather own like 40% of a company that's like making 20 grand a month and you know, somebody's working on it full time and own 100% of a company where I'm not even believing in the product really that much and don't have time to work on it and I don't have anyone else.
[00:14:58.640 --> 00:15:05.120] So I think that's like a smart move on their part too, to recognize that you had the ambition and the skills to like sort of take it to the next level.
[00:15:05.120 --> 00:15:07.680] But I also get like maybe why they didn't feel that way in the beginning.
[00:15:07.680 --> 00:15:10.080] Like you said you joined and they had like 100 MRR.
[00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:13.120] It's not exactly a huge company.
[00:15:13.120 --> 00:15:19.440] And I think that very first like phase where you're not, no one's really using the app and it's not that big and it's not making that much money.
[00:15:19.440 --> 00:15:21.520] It's like, it's easy to be like, this is never going to work.
[00:15:21.520 --> 00:15:22.720] Like how could this ever get big?
[00:15:22.800 --> 00:15:24.240] How do you get out of that first phase?
[00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:31.920] How do you like take something that's making 100 MRR and like find your first real paying customers and your first sort of growth wins and build the right features?
[00:15:31.920 --> 00:15:36.480] I think what worked for us super well at the beginning was trying to make super fans out of people.
[00:15:36.480 --> 00:15:40.320] So they'd reach out, they'd be like, hey, can you please build me this feature?
[00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:40.560] Right.
[00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:48.720] Normally when someone reaches out to support asking for something, for some reason they don't expect it to happen, especially for like bigger products.
[00:15:48.720 --> 00:15:51.360] But for us, we're like, okay, you get a request on Monday.
[00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:52.880] It'll be built in by Wednesday, right?
[00:15:52.880 --> 00:15:59.520] Especially if it's a new alert type, like, hey, can you create a trigger type based on RSI or something?
[00:15:59.520 --> 00:16:07.960] So we would get to work, build it by Wednesday, emails in back, and suddenly, you know, they post positive views, they'd refer a bunch of people.
[00:16:07.960 --> 00:16:13.000] So initially, it just grew by word of mouth from customers that we gave specific attention to.
[00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:14.920] And we did that for months on end.
[00:16:14.920 --> 00:16:20.280] Because like paying customers tended to be friends with other paying customers.
[00:16:20.280 --> 00:16:21.880] That makes a ton of sense.
[00:16:21.880 --> 00:16:23.080] Like you're sort of a unique case.
[00:16:23.080 --> 00:16:28.200] You're a software engineer and you have experience and growth and marketing.
[00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:31.080] Most software engineers are like only software engineers.
[00:16:31.080 --> 00:16:33.960] They have no desire to do any of the growth stuff.
[00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:34.760] Like they don't want to market.
[00:16:34.760 --> 00:16:39.080] They don't want to message anyone or send a cold email or even really submit their app to product hunt.
[00:16:39.080 --> 00:16:40.520] They just want to code stuff.
[00:16:40.520 --> 00:16:50.120] And so I think the fact that you were looking at it with the sort of growth hat on makes a lot of sense for why you're able to break out of these early stage doldrums that it's hard for a lot of early founders to break out of.
[00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:51.080] Yeah.
[00:16:51.080 --> 00:16:55.560] And then all the usual stuff like posting product hunt, beta list, subreddits, right?
[00:16:55.560 --> 00:16:58.840] I think we went viral on the React.js subreddit, right?
[00:16:58.840 --> 00:17:04.840] Which is not necessarily our target market because all the trading ones ban any spam or self-promotion.
[00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:07.400] But we did that for a while.
[00:17:07.800 --> 00:17:11.400] Another thing we did, if you look at our Twitter, like there's a bot there.
[00:17:11.560 --> 00:17:15.960] I wrote like 10 lines of code three years ago and it tweets still today.
[00:17:15.960 --> 00:17:23.640] It tweets out the latest news for stocks on our platform as well as top upcoming earnings, dividends, et cetera.
[00:17:23.640 --> 00:17:31.080] So it kind of reuses our infrastructure that we've already built up for the product to help with growth.
[00:17:31.080 --> 00:17:43.480] I'm interested in that early phase where clearly the other co-founders weren't that confident that this thing was going to be like a long-term success early on.
[00:17:43.480 --> 00:17:48.160] What was the point where some of these tactics that we're using to grow are working out?
[00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:51.600] Like, when did it legitimately become validated?
[00:17:52.800 --> 00:17:57.440] When we hit a few thousand MRR, we're like, hey, this actually has potential to grow, right?
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:17:59.120] Because we've gotten to this point.
[00:17:59.120 --> 00:18:00.720] Why couldn't it hit 10k MRR?
[00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:02.400] Why can't it hit 20?
[00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:07.120] So I think around that point, we were all still putting in time at the beginning, right?
[00:18:07.120 --> 00:18:13.680] We were all still building and trying to figure out what to build by asking people who were paying, hey, why are you paying?
[00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:14.240] What do you want?
[00:18:14.400 --> 00:18:16.000] What else do you want us to build?
[00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:16.880] And whatnot.
[00:18:17.440 --> 00:18:20.640] But it only really got validated once more people were paying for it.
[00:18:20.640 --> 00:18:29.280] And we saw that it could actually grow because with this type of thing, especially for retail traders, they tend to cycle in and out of trading during the year.
[00:18:29.280 --> 00:18:31.840] And when they're in, they're spending a bunch of money.
[00:18:31.840 --> 00:18:35.840] And when they're out, they cancel their subscription and then say, hey, we're coming back later.
[00:18:35.840 --> 00:18:36.320] Right.
[00:18:36.640 --> 00:18:47.360] So we needed to make sure that our churn rate would stay low enough that the business could actually grow and the MR would not be just flylining or declining over time.
[00:18:47.680 --> 00:18:52.240] I think there's like two types of people, or maybe two types of approaches to starting a company.
[00:18:52.240 --> 00:18:53.680] And you're definitely doing the second.
[00:18:53.680 --> 00:18:57.120] So the first approach is like what I call the master plan approach.
[00:18:57.120 --> 00:19:02.640] You sit down from day one, you get your blueprints, like an evil, you know, mad scientist, and you're like, this is what we're going to do.
[00:19:02.640 --> 00:19:04.240] And you have it all charted out.
[00:19:04.240 --> 00:19:05.680] You know, where are you going to be in 10 years?
[00:19:05.680 --> 00:19:06.720] Where are you going to be in five years?
[00:19:06.720 --> 00:19:07.680] Where are you going to be in one year?
[00:19:07.680 --> 00:19:10.320] And you draw it all the way back to today and you have a master plan.
[00:19:10.320 --> 00:19:12.960] And then you have the opposite, which is more of like a bottom-up approach.
[00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:14.320] You're like, what are we going to do today?
[00:19:14.560 --> 00:19:17.600] Today I'm going to send these guys a message about how their app is buggy.
[00:19:17.560 --> 00:19:18.560] You know, okay, now I'm here.
[00:19:18.720 --> 00:19:20.920] Today we're going to do some influencer marketing because that seems good, right?
[00:19:20.920 --> 00:19:21.440] Oh, now we're here.
[00:19:21.440 --> 00:19:22.080] We're making some money.
[00:19:22.080 --> 00:19:23.480] Like, maybe we should try to make more money.
[00:19:23.360 --> 00:19:23.560] Right.
[00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:29.440] And you just follow the path and you see where you are now and you see where you could get to in the next step.
[00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:40.920] And I think that second path, like, that's not what I like to do because I like to be super meticulous in planning, but I think it's honestly the better way to go because it's more motivational and you end up seeing more realistic opportunities.
[00:19:40.920 --> 00:19:51.240] Like a lot of your story at this point is you figuring out what to do next based on like where you are right now, which means you're always going to have kind of a clear vision of where you can go.
[00:19:51.240 --> 00:19:52.920] And like maybe you'll hit a dead end, right?
[00:19:52.920 --> 00:20:01.720] Maybe you get to some point and you follow the wrong path and you have to backtrack a little bit, but it seems like that never really happened with you and you've just been figuring it out one step at a time.
[00:20:01.720 --> 00:20:02.040] Yeah.
[00:20:02.040 --> 00:20:06.120] I mean, in general, we try to have a long-term plan of where this thing is going.
[00:20:06.120 --> 00:20:18.040] Like, hey, we want to, you know, build these additional features that all tie into an overarching theme that people are willing to pay either more for or stick around longer for.
[00:20:18.360 --> 00:20:27.320] But yeah, they, you know, week by week, month by month, we tend to be like, okay, this is the most important thing to work on right now, and this will help us in the long term.
[00:20:27.560 --> 00:20:28.040] But yeah.
[00:20:28.040 --> 00:20:32.680] Okay, so like you have a sort of a master plan, you're saying like there is, there's a rhyme and reason there.
[00:20:32.680 --> 00:20:38.840] There's an idea of where we're going there, but the day-to-day, what to do, priorities can change pretty fast, right?
[00:20:38.840 --> 00:20:43.400] Like what do you think is like the part of your master plan that has worked out the best?
[00:20:43.400 --> 00:20:49.080] The prediction that you've made or the strategy that you guys have had that actually you've been able to make into reality?
[00:20:49.080 --> 00:20:57.080] I think one thing that's worked really well for us is keeping the app really simple and making decisions on how to limit the app, right?
[00:20:57.080 --> 00:21:06.040] So, hey, we're going to have the most common RSI as an option for alerts, but we're not going to have like a million options in a million different time periods and whatnot.
[00:21:06.040 --> 00:21:08.600] Make it really intuitive, user-friendly.
[00:21:08.600 --> 00:21:13.080] And, you know, one of the reviews that really made me happy, right, was this guy reaching out.
[00:21:13.080 --> 00:21:14.520] He's like, hey, I'm 70.
[00:21:14.520 --> 00:21:15.840] I love using your app.
[00:21:15.840 --> 00:21:16.880] It's really simple, right?
[00:21:16.880 --> 00:21:18.480] Because you open it, there's a big button.
[00:21:14.760 --> 00:21:21.760] It's like, hey, Tesla, here's the stock graph.
[00:21:22.080 --> 00:21:24.720] Here's a big button that says add alert, right?
[00:21:24.720 --> 00:21:27.200] You click on it, it says can't really mess it up.
[00:21:27.200 --> 00:21:40.400] And that's something we iterated on a lot, and something we try to keep up on a daily basis is, hey, cut the crap, even if we wrote some, even if we built a feature that, you know, turns out it isn't working, we just remove it, right?
[00:21:40.400 --> 00:21:42.320] So try not to get attached to stuff.
[00:21:42.320 --> 00:21:51.040] I think one of the things that's kind of impressive about your idea is that I saw you posting about it on Indie Hackers, and then one of the responses was, doesn't this already exist?
[00:21:51.040 --> 00:21:55.280] You know, aren't there already stock alerting apps and options?
[00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:56.480] And I had the same thought, right?
[00:21:56.480 --> 00:22:00.080] Like, yeah, it's probably like, there probably already are alternatives to this, right?
[00:22:00.080 --> 00:22:02.080] I use Robinhood for the limited trading I do.
[00:22:02.080 --> 00:22:05.120] I've never set an alarm, but like, there probably is an alarm there.
[00:22:05.280 --> 00:22:08.960] Or if we use like some other, you know, app or something, they probably have alarms.
[00:22:08.960 --> 00:22:12.880] But like, what you're basically proving is that like the market's big.
[00:22:12.880 --> 00:22:17.680] Just because someone has done something doesn't mean they've done it well or doesn't mean they've done it in the way that you're going to do it.
[00:22:17.680 --> 00:22:29.920] And if you have these sort of guiding principles, like we're going to make it super duper simple, like that's going to appeal to enough people that you can build a business out of it, despite the fact that other people have stock alerts or stock alarms.
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:34.960] I remember that comment actually, because I actually took like a good 20 minutes to write that response.
[00:22:34.960 --> 00:22:36.800] I was like looking at alternatives.
[00:22:36.800 --> 00:22:43.600] But I remember one of the examples I used was, hey, Google Analytics is a thing, but it sucks to use, right?
[00:22:43.600 --> 00:22:46.320] Like it's just plain too many options.
[00:22:46.320 --> 00:22:50.480] It's, you know, the thing you want to find is very hard to find.
[00:22:51.040 --> 00:22:53.120] So now there's plausible, right?
[00:22:53.120 --> 00:23:03.880] I mean, Notion's a pretty good example, but I think there's a lot of small startups that can just take one aspect of a bigger product and do it really well, which is what most people want out of that bigger product, anyways.
[00:22:59.600 --> 00:23:04.440] Yeah.
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:15.080] I think that's kind of like one of the biggest misconceptions about startups and businesses in general, especially for people who are doing it for the first time, is that you have to solve an unsolved problem, right?
[00:23:15.080 --> 00:23:19.560] If someone has already solved, if people are already eating at restaurants, like you can't make another restaurant.
[00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:23.720] If people are already staying in hotels and Airbnbs, it's a solved problem.
[00:23:23.880 --> 00:23:26.200] You can't solve a problem that people have already solved.
[00:23:26.200 --> 00:23:28.200] But it's actually not true at all.
[00:23:28.360 --> 00:23:35.160] The vast majority of the biggest startups in the world, even the newest startups, are just solving a problem that has already been solved.
[00:23:35.160 --> 00:23:36.680] They're just doing it in a new way.
[00:23:36.680 --> 00:23:39.800] The creativity comes not in the problem that you pick.
[00:23:39.800 --> 00:23:42.120] The creativity comes in your solution to that problem.
[00:23:42.120 --> 00:23:48.200] Like with the Aiya's app, the creativity comes in making it super niche, super specific, and then super simple.
[00:23:48.200 --> 00:23:54.280] And that allows you to solve a problem that's already being solved, but in a different way, and to reach a new group of customers.
[00:23:54.280 --> 00:23:56.840] Because I think growth is the hardest thing for indie hackers.
[00:23:57.080 --> 00:24:02.360] The number one thing is building your app or having an idea, but that actually turns out to be not that hard.
[00:24:02.360 --> 00:24:05.000] People figure out how to hack it together, even if they don't know how to code.
[00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:06.680] But then once it's built, people are like, oh, shit.
[00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:08.360] No one knows about it.
[00:24:08.360 --> 00:24:09.000] No one's using it.
[00:24:09.000 --> 00:24:10.040] No one's, they have no customers.
[00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:11.240] We have no revenue.
[00:24:11.480 --> 00:24:13.160] But it's been pretty smooth sailing for you guys.
[00:24:13.400 --> 00:24:19.640] Getting to, I think you said you got to 10K after a year and revenue, that's pretty quick for an indie hacker.
[00:24:19.640 --> 00:24:28.680] And so I kind of want to walk through some of the things that have worked for you from a growth perspective and just break them down so others can learn a bit about what you've learned, if that's okay.
[00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:29.160] Yeah.
[00:24:29.400 --> 00:24:35.160] So you mentioned doing marketing on forums and websites like Reddit and stuff.
[00:24:35.160 --> 00:24:35.800] How does that work?
[00:24:35.800 --> 00:24:38.440] What's your playbook for marketing on internet forums?
[00:24:38.920 --> 00:24:43.480] There's a few posts actually on Indie hackers about this that say it pretty well.
[00:24:43.480 --> 00:24:50.160] It's finding where your customers currently hang out and then going and hang out in that area as well.
[00:24:50.160 --> 00:24:53.040] And then not necessarily shilling your app and spamming it, right?
[00:24:53.040 --> 00:24:58.960] But suggesting it every once in a while and being like, hey, I built this, full disclosure, use it, right?
[00:24:59.120 --> 00:25:04.320] One thing that worked for us, actually, Quora really hates spam, right?
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:10.080] But if you're just totally upfront and honest about the fact that you worked on this, it works pretty well.
[00:25:10.080 --> 00:25:14.640] So if you look up like what stock, what's the best stock alerting app on Quora, right?
[00:25:14.640 --> 00:25:18.160] There's like, if I remember correctly, there was like 60 questions or something.
[00:25:18.480 --> 00:25:20.240] I check it every month or so.
[00:25:20.240 --> 00:25:21.360] I just post an answer.
[00:25:21.360 --> 00:25:23.280] I'm like, hey, try this.
[00:25:23.280 --> 00:25:24.320] Disclosure.
[00:25:24.320 --> 00:25:25.440] I built this.
[00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:33.360] And then I think at one point, I was getting like 10K views on my answers per month, right?
[00:25:33.360 --> 00:25:35.200] And then it leaks straight to our app.
[00:25:35.360 --> 00:25:42.720] It does a deep link where it's like, depending on your device, Android or iPhone or you're on a computer, right?
[00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:46.560] It just goes to the correct client, whether it's web, iOS, or Android.
[00:25:46.560 --> 00:25:48.960] So that worked pretty well, actually.
[00:25:49.280 --> 00:25:51.440] Just answering questions on Quora straight up.
[00:25:51.440 --> 00:25:51.840] Reddit.
[00:25:51.920 --> 00:25:52.800] I just Googled it.
[00:25:53.120 --> 00:25:56.400] Like I said, what's the best stock alerting app, Quora?
[00:25:56.400 --> 00:25:58.560] And the very first link on Google links to that question.
[00:25:58.560 --> 00:26:00.160] Is there any app that provides stock alerts?
[00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:01.840] And then I see answer number one.
[00:26:01.840 --> 00:26:04.800] You hear Bakor, StockAlarm sounds like it fits.
[00:26:04.800 --> 00:26:06.320] And you just sort of talk about Stock Alarm.
[00:26:06.320 --> 00:26:07.760] And then at the very end, you're like, disclosure.
[00:26:07.760 --> 00:26:10.800] I work on Stock Alarm and truly think it's one of the best out there.
[00:26:10.800 --> 00:26:12.480] And you're probably getting a lot of clicks from that.
[00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:13.840] So it makes sense.
[00:26:13.840 --> 00:26:19.760] Yeah, you can see the number of views at the bottom, and I hope that's one of the ones that have quite a bit of views.
[00:26:19.760 --> 00:26:20.080] Yeah.
[00:26:19.960 --> 00:26:21.920] Yeah, yeah, so that worked pretty well for us.
[00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:24.000] SEO was huge, right?
[00:26:24.000 --> 00:26:26.960] So, static marketing website, stockalarm.io.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:29.440] That was literally just HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
[00:26:29.440 --> 00:26:31.560] I put it together in like a day, right?
[00:26:31.560 --> 00:26:42.040] Just a lot of templates, swapped out all of the text and the images, threw in all of the meta tags, picked a few high picking keywords, was pretty difficult.
[00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:45.880] Like, one thing we did was pick a high-intent keyword, which was stock alerts, right?
[00:26:45.880 --> 00:26:50.440] It has pretty low volume, but people who click on that tend to actually download the app.
[00:26:50.440 --> 00:26:56.920] So, if you look up stock alerts on Google, we're number one ahead of like articles from Schwab and Fidelity and whatnot.
[00:26:56.920 --> 00:26:58.200] Yeah, how do you get to be number one?
[00:26:58.200 --> 00:27:00.040] Because, like you said, it's not high volume.
[00:27:00.040 --> 00:27:05.320] There's not a ton of people searching for this, but like there's a lot of other companies who are writing about stock alerts.
[00:27:05.320 --> 00:27:20.760] Yeah, I think backlinking worked pretty well for us in the sense that you know, we posted links on this from a bunch of other websites and reached out for people to actually like, hey, you know, we'll write you an article, but we'll drop a link to back to here.
[00:27:21.080 --> 00:27:22.760] And at some point, it kind of took off organically.
[00:27:22.760 --> 00:27:28.840] Like, the balance wrote a few articles about tools to help with the stock trading, and they linked to us.
[00:27:28.840 --> 00:27:32.600] So, we started getting links organically from people, which is great.
[00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:35.880] Another thing is, you know, just writing content.
[00:27:35.880 --> 00:27:47.320] We have a ton of blog posts all around RSI alerts or why you should set stock alerts for something, or you know, how income statements work or whatnot.
[00:27:47.320 --> 00:27:53.560] So, they're all kind of around the stock market and the stocks financials and technicals and whatnot.
[00:27:53.880 --> 00:28:01.240] Another thing is our web app has, you know, I think we support right now around 40,000 or 60,000 assets.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:04.680] I need to check, but it just automatically fills them in.
[00:28:04.680 --> 00:28:07.320] So, you know, we have new web pages for those all the time.
[00:28:07.320 --> 00:28:14.040] So, when you look up Tesla stock alerts on Google, the first one's from our web app, app.stockalarm.io, right?
[00:28:14.040 --> 00:28:16.400] So that also helps out a lot.
[00:28:14.200 --> 00:28:23.840] SEO was probably the biggest thing, like just focusing on that, because it took a few months for us to see any results from there.
[00:28:23.840 --> 00:28:25.200] So that was nice.
[00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:30.720] Yeah, that's one of the things I think discourages a lot of indie hackers from doing SEO, especially if they're in the ideation phase.
[00:28:30.720 --> 00:28:33.840] Like if you're just starting an app and you're like, I don't know if this is going to work.
[00:28:33.920 --> 00:28:38.320] If this doesn't work, I want to abandon it and move on to something new, you know, next month.
[00:28:38.320 --> 00:28:56.240] Then SEO doesn't enter most people's minds because it takes months to like write these blog posts and create these pages and then get other people to link to them and then have them start rising up the ranks in Google and like prove that they're going to do anything and generate any amount of traffic or that that traffic's going to convert to like paying users.
[00:28:56.240 --> 00:29:00.160] And I think a lot of people just don't have the patience or the time for that strategy.
[00:29:00.160 --> 00:29:02.160] But it seems like you were just committed early on.
[00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:03.840] And so you're like, why not?
[00:29:04.160 --> 00:29:06.960] It just felt like something like get it out of the way early.
[00:29:07.280 --> 00:29:08.800] It's going to help eventually.
[00:29:08.800 --> 00:29:09.760] It can't hurt, right?
[00:29:09.760 --> 00:29:13.840] Like, and how much time does it take to really bang out these articles?
[00:29:14.160 --> 00:29:21.280] Ironically, the person who runs the stock, the stock alarm app thinks about investing in SEO.
[00:29:21.280 --> 00:29:21.680] Yeah.
[00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:23.120] Who would have guessed?
[00:29:23.120 --> 00:29:25.440] Well, it seemed like a win.
[00:29:25.680 --> 00:29:29.440] And I think we ported up over our, I mean, I know we did this.
[00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:33.360] Like last week, I ported over our web app to Next.js for more SEO games, right?
[00:29:33.360 --> 00:29:38.240] Just because we built the Create React app first, and that was not doing too hot on Google.
[00:29:38.560 --> 00:29:49.280] One thing I want to slightly dig into, just because I'm completely unfamiliar with it, and I know a lot of other people probably are too, is like, I know plenty about just like generic SEO for a website.
[00:29:49.280 --> 00:29:51.760] We've done a little bit for indie hackers, not nearly enough.
[00:29:51.760 --> 00:29:53.200] We need to invest more.
[00:29:53.200 --> 00:29:59.360] But I read that a lot of your search volume is coming to your iOS app.
[00:29:59.360 --> 00:30:01.160] So what's the difference?
[00:29:59.600 --> 00:30:10.280] Like, what learnings have you come across that like help you to rise in your search rank on app stores as opposed to just like your websites, your landing pages?
[00:30:10.280 --> 00:30:10.840] That is right.
[00:30:10.840 --> 00:30:12.360] Most of us come from our iOS app.
[00:30:12.360 --> 00:30:17.080] But you know how you can track where your refers come on iOS for people who download the app?
[00:30:17.080 --> 00:30:22.840] So I remember very, very clearly when I started, there was just one page for stocknime.io.
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:25.560] It was, maybe if we use Wayback Time Machine, you can see it.
[00:30:25.560 --> 00:30:29.640] But at the time, only 5% of our traffic was coming from web.
[00:30:29.640 --> 00:30:32.360] Like web refers on the app store was 5%.
[00:30:32.360 --> 00:30:36.280] And then after doing all of the SEO stuff and waiting six months, it was 20%.
[00:30:36.600 --> 00:30:41.480] So now a lot of our traffic was coming from web straight into iOS.
[00:30:41.480 --> 00:30:51.160] And then also this was pretty useful because people coming from web, you know, a lot of them only, you know, might have had Androids or were on their laptops, right?
[00:30:51.160 --> 00:30:55.560] So when we built our Android app and our web app, they started going there as well.
[00:30:55.560 --> 00:30:59.960] Before that, we had, I think we built our web app before the Android app.
[00:30:59.960 --> 00:31:03.080] And on the web app, we had a button that said download for Android.
[00:31:03.080 --> 00:31:05.560] And when you clicked it, it said, oh, sorry, we don't have Android.
[00:31:05.560 --> 00:31:06.280] Put in your email.
[00:31:06.360 --> 00:31:07.640] We'll email you when it's out, right?
[00:31:07.640 --> 00:31:10.440] So we had like a wait list thing going on.
[00:31:11.720 --> 00:31:13.240] That was a pretty good move, actually.
[00:31:13.240 --> 00:31:14.440] What about your newsletter?
[00:31:14.440 --> 00:31:19.880] You mentioned on the Andy Hackers website that you guys have a newsletter that you try to put all of your existing users on.
[00:31:19.880 --> 00:31:21.560] Does that help you grow in any way?
[00:31:21.560 --> 00:31:23.720] Or is this help you re-engage existing users?
[00:31:23.720 --> 00:31:26.760] Like, what's sort of the focus of having a newsletter?
[00:31:26.760 --> 00:31:28.920] And how big is it, if you don't mind sharing?
[00:31:29.400 --> 00:31:33.720] I think right now it goes out to 170K people, right?
[00:31:33.720 --> 00:31:34.040] Wow.
[00:31:34.040 --> 00:31:36.280] And we send it out every month and a half or so.
[00:31:36.280 --> 00:31:38.840] I mean, there is a very, yeah, it's pretty good.
[00:31:39.240 --> 00:31:42.680] We don't do any like affiliations with other startups.
[00:31:42.680 --> 00:31:46.640] So it's literally just, like, we don't promote anything on it other than us, right?
[00:31:46.640 --> 00:31:50.240] So we just say, right, hey, here's what we've worked on the past month and a half.
[00:31:44.840 --> 00:31:51.280] Here's all the new features.
[00:31:51.520 --> 00:31:52.560] Here's where you find them.
[00:31:52.560 --> 00:31:52.800] Right.
[00:31:52.800 --> 00:31:55.840] We try to limit it to like four or five sections.
[00:31:55.840 --> 00:32:01.200] And then the very last section is just a heart-to-heart, hey, we're a small team.
[00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:04.080] Forward this newsletter to anybody who might find it useful.
[00:32:04.080 --> 00:32:04.400] Right.
[00:32:04.400 --> 00:32:06.000] So we do get some downloads there.
[00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:07.760] We do get some people subscribing.
[00:32:07.760 --> 00:32:14.560] But mostly because people tend to have trading sprints and then they stop trading for a while and then come back into it.
[00:32:14.560 --> 00:32:15.120] Right.
[00:32:15.760 --> 00:32:17.600] Especially when they're doing it actively.
[00:32:17.600 --> 00:32:24.400] You know, someone who might have churned out, we send them that newsletter and like, hey, you know, it's kind of like a reminder, hey, we're still around.
[00:32:24.400 --> 00:32:24.960] Right.
[00:32:24.960 --> 00:32:28.000] We also have push notifications that go out.
[00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:33.360] I wrote some code there to send it out every once in a while based off the user's last activity and whatnot.
[00:32:33.360 --> 00:32:35.360] It's a good way to get people to come back in.
[00:32:35.360 --> 00:32:41.040] But for our newsletter specifically, it's, you know, just tell people, here's what we've been working on.
[00:32:41.040 --> 00:32:42.400] If you have any ideas, reach out.
[00:32:42.400 --> 00:32:44.640] Otherwise, forward this newsletter.
[00:32:44.640 --> 00:32:55.520] I know people who have been doing literally nothing other than writing a newsletter every day for three years and they don't have 170,000 people on their newsletter.
[00:32:55.520 --> 00:32:59.040] How do you grow a newsletter that big when that's not even your main focus?
[00:32:59.040 --> 00:33:01.840] Are these just like everybody who signs up from your app is on your newsletter?
[00:33:01.920 --> 00:33:04.640] Is like the request to forward it really working that well or something?
[00:33:04.800 --> 00:33:13.440] I mean, right now, I think we ask people on our iOS app to like, when they sign up, you know, they can click on, hey, I want to receive this newsletter.
[00:33:13.920 --> 00:33:16.320] Click by default or not and double check that.
[00:33:16.320 --> 00:33:18.560] We've changed quite a bit since then.
[00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:21.920] But essentially, we don't, we don't send it out very often, right?
[00:33:21.920 --> 00:33:23.920] So, not many people unsubscribe from it.
[00:33:24.240 --> 00:33:26.160] We're very picky about what goes on there, right?
[00:33:26.160 --> 00:33:33.080] And then, every once in a while, we send a survey to people at like a limited portion of that, to ask them, hey, what do you guys think we should build?
[00:33:33.160 --> 00:33:33.720] Whatnot?
[00:33:33.720 --> 00:33:38.680] So, eventually, all of this culminated in you getting to where you were when you quit your job.
[00:33:38.680 --> 00:33:43.480] Last September, you made a post on Indie Hackers, and you're basically like, Hey, you know what?
[00:33:43.480 --> 00:33:44.760] Done making excuses.
[00:33:44.760 --> 00:33:46.360] I'm going to take the leap.
[00:33:46.520 --> 00:33:47.480] I'm only 23.
[00:33:47.480 --> 00:33:49.640] I'm never going to have a better time in my life to just do this.
[00:33:49.640 --> 00:33:50.840] I have no responsibilities.
[00:33:50.840 --> 00:33:52.040] You know, you don't have a mortgage.
[00:33:52.040 --> 00:33:52.760] You're not married.
[00:33:52.760 --> 00:33:53.720] You don't have kids.
[00:33:53.720 --> 00:34:02.040] And you gave up a very well-paying job at Amazon, making $250,000 a year to go full-time on this app.
[00:34:02.040 --> 00:34:02.680] What was that like?
[00:34:02.680 --> 00:34:03.960] Because that's not an easy decision to make.
[00:34:03.960 --> 00:34:09.400] Even though you're absolute making $20,000 a month, that's still like I imagine most people in your life are like, what the hell are you doing?
[00:34:09.400 --> 00:34:11.720] Like, why would you quit?
[00:34:11.720 --> 00:34:13.800] I got a bunch of mixed reactions, actually.
[00:34:14.040 --> 00:34:15.800] That was the part that confused me the most, right?
[00:34:15.800 --> 00:34:20.200] Because it was, if I was signed to somebody who was also in the space, right?
[00:34:20.200 --> 00:34:24.440] Or somebody who had started coming there, like, what are you waiting for?
[00:34:24.440 --> 00:34:26.840] Like, I would have quit ages ago, right?
[00:34:26.840 --> 00:34:31.320] So that was one reaction I was getting, which was, which made me feel like, okay, I should quit.
[00:34:31.320 --> 00:34:33.160] Parents were like, are you insane?
[00:34:33.160 --> 00:34:33.560] Right.
[00:34:33.560 --> 00:34:35.560] So that was expected.
[00:34:35.800 --> 00:34:37.000] Friends were mixed.
[00:34:37.000 --> 00:34:39.480] Like, some of them knew, but were like, you know what you're doing.
[00:34:39.480 --> 00:34:42.360] Others were like, dude, you're making a ton of money.
[00:34:42.360 --> 00:34:43.320] Why are you doing this?
[00:34:43.320 --> 00:34:43.640] Right.
[00:34:43.960 --> 00:34:47.720] I think at the end of the day, I was just like, what will I not regret doing?
[00:34:47.720 --> 00:34:51.160] And I know I won't regret taking a leap of eight on this.
[00:34:51.160 --> 00:34:54.440] And plus, worst case, you can always get a job later, right?
[00:34:54.680 --> 00:34:56.280] The tech companies aren't going anywhere.
[00:34:56.440 --> 00:34:56.920] Exactly.
[00:34:57.080 --> 00:35:03.800] When I think about it, I mean, I'm just going to go back again to when I was a total loser at your age, or even slightly before then.
[00:35:04.280 --> 00:35:08.520] Like, I was that kid in college where I would like meet with my advisor.
[00:35:08.520 --> 00:35:12.520] I remember meeting with my advisor in my third year.
[00:35:12.520 --> 00:35:16.160] And she was like, hey, listen, Channing, like, you got to make a decision.
[00:35:14.440 --> 00:35:18.720] Like, you got to choose a major or a minor.
[00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:20.960] I'd been there for three years and I still hadn't chosen.
[00:35:21.280 --> 00:35:27.760] And for me, the entire thing was any career path that I began to go down or that I began to contemplate.
[00:35:27.760 --> 00:35:29.360] I'm like, this is forever.
[00:35:29.360 --> 00:35:36.480] It's like, what career handcuffs do I want to like cuff myself to and then just have to do that all the time?
[00:35:36.800 --> 00:35:50.960] And in a sense, the thing that is most attractive to me about being an indie hacker, doing other things that I want to do, like I want to write a novel, like I want to have all of these jobs where I get to like, A, I get to be in control of my destiny.
[00:35:50.960 --> 00:35:54.480] I get to like, you know, experiment with a bunch of other things, et cetera.
[00:35:54.480 --> 00:36:00.160] It's super intangible, but that seems like a big thing that also kind of inspires you.
[00:36:00.160 --> 00:36:01.280] Yeah, no, for sure.
[00:36:01.280 --> 00:36:09.040] For me, yes, there's always, okay, if I start my own thing and it pays off, the payout is much bigger, but flexibility is really important to me.
[00:36:09.040 --> 00:36:14.320] And even though Amazon was actually pretty flexible, like I could travel around the U.S., they were cool with remote work there.
[00:36:14.320 --> 00:36:17.040] I had the idea, I'm like, what if I want to go outside the U.S.
[00:36:17.040 --> 00:36:20.320] and just go to Europe for a bit or something and work while I'm there?
[00:36:20.320 --> 00:36:21.680] Like, I can't do that at Amazon.
[00:36:21.760 --> 00:36:29.200] For some reason, the idea of flexibility through, you know, starting your own thing just seemed super attractive.
[00:36:29.200 --> 00:36:38.000] Do you think you would have had trouble quitting if you had waited until you were 25, 27, 30 years old to take the leap?
[00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:38.560] I don't know.
[00:36:38.560 --> 00:36:45.600] I think it would have been harder to leave if I had done any, you know, I was working on another promotion at the time to get to like a senior engineer.
[00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:47.520] I knew that was a lot more money.
[00:36:47.760 --> 00:36:54.000] And I was like, maybe it would have been harder to leave that more money, but I was most certainly going to do this at some point.
[00:36:54.000 --> 00:36:57.840] And, you know, if for some reason I end up back at a job, I'm going to do it again.
[00:36:57.840 --> 00:36:59.440] So I know that for sure already, right?
[00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:01.720] Like, this is, I got a taste of it.
[00:37:01.720 --> 00:37:03.080] It's a ton of fun.
[00:37:03.160 --> 00:37:06.920] Definitely messes up your working schedule because you have full flexibility.
[00:37:06.920 --> 00:37:07.080] Right.
[00:37:07.080 --> 00:37:08.600] So that part's been interesting.
[00:37:08.600 --> 00:37:10.360] What's your working schedule looking like now?
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:12.360] Like, are you a night owl?
[00:37:12.360 --> 00:37:13.400] Oh, it's janky.
[00:37:13.400 --> 00:37:14.040] It is.
[00:37:15.480 --> 00:37:19.000] So I try to wake up early, which worked for like a week.
[00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:25.880] And realistically, like full transparency, I wake up at like 9:30, 10:30 to 11.
[00:37:25.880 --> 00:37:27.240] I get to a WeWork, right?
[00:37:27.240 --> 00:37:28.600] Because I'm like, I need to work.
[00:37:28.920 --> 00:37:31.480] Courtland's like, dude, that is so structured.
[00:37:31.480 --> 00:37:33.240] Courtland's like, that's so early.
[00:37:33.240 --> 00:37:35.720] Like 9:30, you're already awake.
[00:37:36.040 --> 00:37:39.800] I'm a night owl and a morning board, so I try to do both and it doesn't work.
[00:37:39.800 --> 00:37:41.720] But I mean, that's some structure going to a we work.
[00:37:41.720 --> 00:37:42.920] Like you sound like disciplined.
[00:37:43.400 --> 00:37:47.320] You've got some place that is a workplace for you and it's not the same as your home.
[00:37:47.320 --> 00:37:54.040] So I get it like three times a week and then other times I just go to a coffee shop, but normally it's like 11 to 5 or 6.
[00:37:54.040 --> 00:37:59.400] And then for some reason, this has been development in the past month, like midnight to 3 a.m.
[00:37:59.560 --> 00:38:01.320] has been wildly productive.
[00:38:01.320 --> 00:38:05.000] You know, something about it's just so quiet out.
[00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:08.600] You're like in that weird, tired zone where you're not anxious about what you're doing.
[00:38:08.600 --> 00:38:11.160] So you're like, I'm going to write really calm.
[00:38:11.400 --> 00:38:21.160] I love the idea of like either being mega early, up early, working early, doing stuff early, or way late because everyone else is asleep.
[00:38:21.160 --> 00:38:23.000] It's funny, Cortland is the opposite of me.
[00:38:23.000 --> 00:38:24.760] I'm sort of like the morning lark.
[00:38:24.760 --> 00:38:26.200] He's always been a night owl.
[00:38:26.680 --> 00:38:31.080] I'll point out there was some point where he crossed over and he was telling me I was right all the time.
[00:38:31.080 --> 00:38:32.680] I don't know where he's at now.
[00:38:32.680 --> 00:38:40.440] But like, yeah, there's just, there's like a magic to like, you're not getting notifications on your phone, right?
[00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:44.640] Like, you know, if you open up like social media, there's like less activity.
[00:38:44.640 --> 00:38:47.840] Like, you're just sort of there in the dark doing work.
[00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:48.640] It works either way.
[00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:59.520] Like, if you are the typical software engineer who wants to stay up late and you're working past midnight, it's like you get that exact same experience as if you wake up super early in the morning where like nothing is going on and you can just be Zen.
[00:38:59.520 --> 00:39:00.960] And in the middle of the day, it's harder.
[00:39:00.960 --> 00:39:02.640] So I can identify with that.
[00:39:02.640 --> 00:39:05.840] I was going to say, there's just a lot less services that cater to you at night.
[00:39:06.400 --> 00:39:08.880] I would love to go to a coffee shop at 1 a.m.
[00:39:09.200 --> 00:39:10.640] Like, I think that's awesome.
[00:39:10.960 --> 00:39:12.000] They just won't let you in.
[00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:14.800] Yeah, they just, everything in Seattle closes at like 8 or like 30.
[00:39:14.880 --> 00:39:15.680] It's ridiculous.
[00:39:15.840 --> 00:39:18.160] Yeah, you want groceries, it's 8:30, like you're shit out of luck.
[00:39:18.160 --> 00:39:19.840] Like, eat tomorrow.
[00:39:19.840 --> 00:39:24.800] The concept of quitting early in your 20s and doing this at a young age, I think is really fascinating too.
[00:39:24.800 --> 00:39:28.720] I think it's kind of a startup cliche that startups are a young person's game.
[00:39:28.720 --> 00:39:30.640] You know, you just like, you need less money.
[00:39:30.640 --> 00:39:37.040] And I think about myself, like, if I were to quit indie hackers today, like, I wouldn't be nearly as scrappy as I was in my early 20s.
[00:39:37.040 --> 00:39:38.800] I live a bougie ass lifestyle.
[00:39:38.800 --> 00:39:41.120] Like, I need to make a certain amount of salary.
[00:39:41.120 --> 00:39:45.520] You know, like, I just like, I would need either a ton of savings or I would need like a lot of funding.
[00:39:45.520 --> 00:39:52.560] Otherwise, I would just like refuse to reverse, you know, and go back to like eating ramen noodles and living, you know, like paycheck to paycheck.
[00:39:52.640 --> 00:39:55.280] Like, it's just hard to do that when you're older.
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:39:58.400] And so I wonder, like, Channing, I don't know if you agree.
[00:39:58.400 --> 00:39:59.680] Like, if you feel the same way, right?
[00:39:59.680 --> 00:40:01.760] Like, you've got probably a decent amount of savings.
[00:40:01.760 --> 00:40:04.720] Do you feel like at 35, you're like, nah, I got to keep my.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:07.520] I mean, you've got like this nice bookcase behind you, this nice apartment.
[00:40:07.520 --> 00:40:09.440] Like, could you give me a-I'll have a really bad example.
[00:40:09.440 --> 00:40:12.000] I mean, uh, generally, no.
[00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:13.120] I'm a weirdo.
[00:40:13.120 --> 00:40:15.280] I mean, look, Courtland, you and I talk all the time.
[00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:25.040] You know that, like, I just happened to be in this phase of life, I don't know, going back to maybe three or four years, where there was just a fire that got sparked in me.
[00:40:25.040 --> 00:40:37.000] And the elasticity, like the willingness to, like, you know, sort of live way more like a way more ascetic lifestyle that I had when I was in my early 20s and mid-20s now I kind of got that back.
[00:40:37.320 --> 00:40:47.480] But without that weird exception for me, yeah, and also I'll say there are certain things that I don't want to give up like I definitely live in like a nice apartment.
[00:40:47.480 --> 00:40:48.520] I wouldn't want to give that up.
[00:40:48.520 --> 00:40:52.680] I buy like I spend a weird amount of money on books.
[00:40:52.680 --> 00:40:55.160] Like a good buddy of mine was like why do you have so many books?
[00:40:55.160 --> 00:40:56.440] Like it's just the thing I want.
[00:40:56.440 --> 00:40:57.240] What would you give up?
[00:40:57.240 --> 00:40:58.360] Would you sell all your books?
[00:40:58.360 --> 00:41:00.360] Would you sell your expensive VR setup?
[00:41:00.360 --> 00:41:04.680] Like would you move into a shittier apartment and a worse I would not sell books.
[00:41:04.680 --> 00:41:05.960] I would not sell books.
[00:41:05.960 --> 00:41:07.240] Get a Kindle.
[00:41:07.560 --> 00:41:08.360] Get a Kindle.
[00:41:08.360 --> 00:41:09.000] It's way cheaper.
[00:41:09.080 --> 00:41:09.880] Dude, I'm so weird.
[00:41:09.880 --> 00:41:19.160] What I do, I'll admit this, but when I buy books, like I almost want it to be so easily accessible to me so I don't have an excuse to not read them.
[00:41:19.160 --> 00:41:24.360] That if I buy a book, I buy the physical book, I buy the e-book, and I buy the audio book.
[00:41:24.360 --> 00:41:25.800] Like it's just, I just do that.
[00:41:25.800 --> 00:41:29.400] So there definitely are like these weird bougie tendencies that I have.
[00:41:29.400 --> 00:41:31.400] I don't think I would give up books, Cortland.
[00:41:33.320 --> 00:41:34.280] I'm kind of spoiled.
[00:41:34.280 --> 00:41:38.600] Like I have to have a gym in my apartment like in New York City.
[00:41:38.600 --> 00:41:44.600] If it's winter, like in the winters, I just turn into kind of like a sissy and I don't like walk the 30s.
[00:41:44.680 --> 00:41:46.440] Dude, you're just saying that you wouldn't give up anything.
[00:41:46.440 --> 00:41:48.200] You're just listing things that you wouldn't give up.
[00:41:49.560 --> 00:41:52.440] But I also, it's like I don't have a car or care.
[00:41:53.400 --> 00:41:57.640] It's like the things that I just named are the things that I really care about.
[00:41:57.640 --> 00:41:59.640] Like I drink Soylent.
[00:41:59.640 --> 00:42:00.840] I don't care about food.
[00:42:00.840 --> 00:42:02.520] I don't spend crap on food.
[00:42:02.520 --> 00:42:03.960] I don't party, really.
[00:42:03.960 --> 00:42:05.800] I don't go out, right?
[00:42:05.800 --> 00:42:06.760] Like, I just hang out.
[00:42:06.800 --> 00:42:09.720] I'm, I'm a, like, I'm a, uh, like, I work.
[00:42:09.720 --> 00:42:12.680] So I like have the things that fuel the work.
[00:42:12.680 --> 00:42:14.200] How do you feel on Soylent?
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:16.720] I feel like that, that stuff just sketches me out.
[00:42:16.800 --> 00:42:18.320] It should, it should sketch you out.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:20.400] The way that I don't know, I'm not going to defend it.
[00:42:20.560 --> 00:42:24.080] Um, I don't really like eating as much as other people.
[00:42:24.080 --> 00:42:27.840] Like, that's that's really like the baseline situation.
[00:42:27.840 --> 00:42:33.520] What I do is I'll drink like a soylent a day, um, and then I'll have like two other meals, like real meals.
[00:42:33.680 --> 00:42:42.800] For me, it's like I'm such an optimizer that if there's something that I don't really care about, like, I don't really care about, like, I don't like making food.
[00:42:42.800 --> 00:42:43.520] I hate it.
[00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:46.000] I won't wait on it, like, I won't learn how to do it.
[00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:48.480] My girlfriend's an awesome cook, so that's dope.
[00:42:48.480 --> 00:42:57.040] But, like, if I, if I'm hungry right now and I also want to be like coding or writing or doing some work, like, I pop a, I just go grab a soylent.
[00:42:57.040 --> 00:43:05.600] And then the even sort of weirder thing is I also like, I like, I need caffeine, but I don't like having to make coffee all the time.
[00:43:05.600 --> 00:43:08.480] So, I'll just like, whatever, I'll just take a caffeine pill.
[00:43:08.480 --> 00:43:11.680] Like, these tiny little weird efficiencies.
[00:43:11.680 --> 00:43:12.880] Caffeine pills and the soy.
[00:43:13.040 --> 00:43:14.960] Yeah, like these, these little efficiencies.
[00:43:14.960 --> 00:43:15.920] I just don't give a shit.
[00:43:15.920 --> 00:43:19.440] I'll just like just get the get the fuel in my body.
[00:43:19.440 --> 00:43:20.240] Couldn't do it.
[00:43:20.240 --> 00:43:21.200] Food is my vice.
[00:43:21.200 --> 00:43:24.640] If I could have like a shitty superpower, it would be to be able to eat an infinite amount of food.
[00:43:24.640 --> 00:43:25.840] I eat like 12 meals a day.
[00:43:25.840 --> 00:43:26.880] They'd all be delicious.
[00:43:26.880 --> 00:43:28.640] None of them would be Soylent.
[00:43:28.640 --> 00:43:29.760] Plus, coffee is awesome.
[00:43:30.160 --> 00:43:31.440] Yeah, coffee's delicious too.
[00:43:31.440 --> 00:43:32.160] I love coffee.
[00:43:32.160 --> 00:43:32.960] Yeah, can't do it.
[00:43:32.960 --> 00:43:34.000] Yahya, what are you?
[00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:34.960] What are you working for?
[00:43:34.960 --> 00:43:36.720] I mean, you said you wanted freedom.
[00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:38.400] You said you wanted flexibility.
[00:43:38.560 --> 00:43:40.240] Stock alarm is at 20k MRR.
[00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:42.320] I think it's just you and one co-founder.
[00:43:42.320 --> 00:43:43.520] How far do you want to push it?
[00:43:43.520 --> 00:43:48.240] And what do you want to do, you know, with the business that you're creating and the money that you're generating?
[00:43:48.240 --> 00:43:54.320] I feel like it would be nice to have either one or multiple lifestyle agencies.
[00:43:54.320 --> 00:43:55.600] I think that is the dream, right?
[00:43:55.600 --> 00:43:56.960] You don't really answer to anyone.
[00:43:56.960 --> 00:43:58.400] You kind of work on your own thing.
[00:43:58.400 --> 00:44:04.840] People recognize you for helping them out in some aspect of their life with something you built.
[00:44:05.080 --> 00:44:09.800] I think all that is great for you and your psyche and whatnot.
[00:44:09.800 --> 00:44:20.440] But at the end of the day, having income to do the things you want to do, and if the thing you want to do is also making you that income is the best thing ever, right?
[00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:31.880] I think working at a big tech job, there's always like, oh, I have to do this one thing, really don't want to do, or you know, I might get laid off as I think Microsoft just, or someone just laid off 10K employees, right?
[00:44:31.880 --> 00:44:32.440] I think it's Microsoft.
[00:44:33.160 --> 00:44:35.960] All of the tech companies just laid off 10K employees.
[00:44:35.960 --> 00:44:39.320] Yeah, I'm not even like, I can pay attention, but it doesn't, I'm not stressed.
[00:44:39.400 --> 00:44:42.760] I literally have a friend at Amazon who got laid off the day before yesterday.
[00:44:43.080 --> 00:44:43.560] Oh, geez.
[00:44:43.560 --> 00:44:43.960] Sorry, David.
[00:44:44.200 --> 00:44:45.080] Dodged a bullet.
[00:44:45.080 --> 00:44:45.960] Could have been you.
[00:44:45.960 --> 00:44:46.680] Yeah, I don't know.
[00:44:46.680 --> 00:44:50.520] I think something about that is really nice, and I think it's a great way to live life, right?
[00:44:51.240 --> 00:44:56.360] Especially because you're building things that are helping other people and making money while doing it.
[00:44:56.360 --> 00:45:04.040] And the flexibility makes it so that, you know, you can reshape your life however you want, like planning to move from Seattle in a few months, right?
[00:45:04.520 --> 00:45:05.480] So, yeah.
[00:45:06.440 --> 00:45:16.520] What do you think, you know, in the past three years of you working on this, joining as a sort of a late co-founder, growing it to 10K in a year, now up to past 20k in revenue?
[00:45:16.520 --> 00:45:23.400] What do you think is something that you've learned on this journey that a fledgling indie hacker might benefit from hearing?
[00:45:23.400 --> 00:45:26.280] There's a lot more money to go around than you initially think, right?
[00:45:26.280 --> 00:45:30.200] Like people are willing to spend money on things that make their lives better.
[00:45:30.200 --> 00:45:41.640] I think that's that's something that I didn't realize back then because for some reason I had this idea that to make any money with a company to build this big thing or big grand thing or sell some type of physical product or something.
[00:45:41.640 --> 00:45:46.800] But, you know, with SaaS, like, hey, you know, you might have noticed my email is hey.com, right?
[00:45:46.800 --> 00:45:48.880] Like I pay for email.
[00:45:48.880 --> 00:45:51.040] It's ridiculous, but it's so nice.
[00:45:44.920 --> 00:45:52.000] Like it makes life so much easier.
[00:45:52.240 --> 00:45:53.840] Email is free and you pay for it.
[00:45:53.840 --> 00:46:01.520] Yeah, it's ridiculous, but I think that's something that really helped reshape my view of how to build companies and whatnot.
[00:46:01.520 --> 00:46:02.240] Awesome.
[00:46:02.240 --> 00:46:08.560] Well, listen, Yahia, as a 35-year-old Channing, I really love hearing your story.
[00:46:08.560 --> 00:46:12.000] As your age, Channing, I would have been a little bit more resentful.
[00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:14.640] And it's been an awesome conversation.
[00:46:15.200 --> 00:46:21.680] Where can people who are listening go to find more about you and like StockAlarm and other stuff that you're getting into?
[00:46:21.680 --> 00:46:23.840] I'm finally trying to get into Twitter, right?
[00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:29.680] Like for some reason, I've resisted it for so long, but I think my Twitter is my name is Yahya, pretty much.
[00:46:29.680 --> 00:46:30.720] Like that's my age.
[00:46:30.720 --> 00:46:36.720] Didn't I see that StockAlarm, like the StockAlarm Twitter account, it's like all automated?
[00:46:36.720 --> 00:46:37.440] Pretty much.
[00:46:37.440 --> 00:46:39.760] I'm trying to post on it as well.
[00:46:39.760 --> 00:46:42.960] But just obviously post stock market updates and whatnot.
[00:46:42.960 --> 00:46:49.120] But mostly signing up for Stock Alarm, joining our newsletter or checking out.
[00:46:49.600 --> 00:46:53.360] I do actually post company updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera.
[00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:55.120] Working on some cool stuff.
[00:46:55.120 --> 00:46:57.200] We're actually launching a business version soon.
[00:46:57.200 --> 00:47:01.680] So that should be like for wealth management firms that have been using us.
[00:47:01.840 --> 00:47:02.800] That's a whole thing.
[00:47:02.800 --> 00:47:04.240] But yeah.
[00:47:04.560 --> 00:47:04.880] All right.
[00:47:04.880 --> 00:47:06.400] Thanks again for coming on, Yahia.
[00:47:07.200 --> 00:47:08.400] Thanks, guys.