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[00:00:06.880 --> 00:00:07.680] We're out, dude.
[00:00:07.680 --> 00:00:08.560] It's over.
[00:00:08.560 --> 00:00:12.800] Indie Hackers is officially independent again.
[00:00:12.800 --> 00:00:14.320] We're our own company.
[00:00:14.320 --> 00:00:15.360] We own it.
[00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:17.840] And we're no longer owned by Stripe.
[00:00:18.640 --> 00:00:20.240] Hearing it, hearing it out loud.
[00:00:20.240 --> 00:00:22.080] It just feels different.
[00:00:22.080 --> 00:00:23.760] But how do you feel?
[00:00:23.760 --> 00:00:25.280] Do you actually feel any different?
[00:00:25.280 --> 00:00:26.960] Yeah, I feel great.
[00:00:26.960 --> 00:00:30.720] I mean, obviously, this is not like a decision we just made yesterday.
[00:00:30.720 --> 00:00:34.080] This has been months in the making.
[00:00:34.080 --> 00:00:35.440] But now it's actually real.
[00:00:35.440 --> 00:00:39.120] Like, it means we no longer get our awesome paychecks anymore.
[00:00:39.120 --> 00:00:42.800] We no longer have an awesome, cushy monthly budget.
[00:00:42.800 --> 00:00:46.080] I think my last paycheck hit my account last Friday, and that's it.
[00:00:46.240 --> 00:00:54.480] We now have a business that does $0 in revenue that's burning probably $10,000 a month, not even including our salaries.
[00:00:54.800 --> 00:00:56.960] But on the flip side, we no longer have a boss.
[00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:03.120] We have a company, a Delaware C-Corp to be exact, and we can do whatever the hell we want with it.
[00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:07.600] We are officially ND hackers for the first time in six years.
[00:01:07.600 --> 00:01:08.560] So I'm excited.
[00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:12.320] The Indie Hackers founders have actually become indie hackers again.
[00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:12.880] Yeah.
[00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:14.480] Dude, it's funny.
[00:01:14.480 --> 00:01:19.680] You say like, you know, we no longer have the cushy paycheck coming in.
[00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:24.960] And I honestly, I don't know if, I don't know how you feel about this, but it's just my personality.
[00:01:24.960 --> 00:01:26.480] Dude, I love that.
[00:01:26.480 --> 00:01:30.480] I wrote a post on Indie Hackers like, I don't know, a couple of, like a month ago.
[00:01:30.480 --> 00:01:33.040] I think it was titled Hunt Before You Eat.
[00:01:33.360 --> 00:01:38.960] Like, I love the idea of having real intrinsic motivation to do things.
[00:01:38.960 --> 00:01:41.600] I don't want to be out on the street, but...
[00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:44.160] I don't know if I can say that I love not getting paid.
[00:01:44.160 --> 00:01:46.880] I actually quite like getting paid, but I like earning it.
[00:01:46.880 --> 00:01:52.320] I like knowing that it's coming from my own efforts, knowing that nobody can take it away from me.
[00:01:52.320 --> 00:01:56.000] And we're now in the position that every indie hacker is in, where we have to do that.
[00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:57.200] And we've been here before.
[00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:02.600] When I started Indie Hackers in 2016, we weren't owned by anybody and we were making ad revenue.
[00:02:02.840 --> 00:02:10.680] And I think we got up to like eight, nine thousand dollars a month in revenue in the first eight months before getting acquired and then promptly cut it down to zero.
[00:02:10.680 --> 00:02:14.600] So it's been a long time since I've actually been an entrepreneur.
[00:02:14.600 --> 00:02:16.760] And Sean Purdy came on here and kind of called us out.
[00:02:17.080 --> 00:02:19.000] He just shat on us two or three weeks ago.
[00:02:20.280 --> 00:02:31.400] But little did he know, we were already way ahead of him because we've been negotiating and doing paperwork and talking to lawyers and like making this Stripe divestment thing happen since November.
[00:02:32.040 --> 00:02:36.520] Ahead of him in information, not ahead of him in like dollars made.
[00:02:36.520 --> 00:02:38.440] We're very, very behind.
[00:02:38.920 --> 00:02:40.440] Are you worried about not having a paycheck?
[00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:42.920] Are you like, are there things in your life that are going to have to change?
[00:02:42.920 --> 00:02:45.720] You know, you're going to stop shopping at Whole Foods?
[00:02:45.720 --> 00:02:49.640] Lifestyle-wise, maybe I buy like slightly fewer books.
[00:02:49.640 --> 00:02:53.480] I mean, because I buy literally two books every week almost.
[00:02:53.480 --> 00:02:54.440] Is that your main lottery?
[00:02:54.680 --> 00:02:55.640] What's your main expenditure?
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:57.480] What's my like food?
[00:02:57.480 --> 00:02:57.960] What is it like?
[00:02:58.120 --> 00:02:58.600] Not even food.
[00:02:58.600 --> 00:02:59.480] I do Cook Unity.
[00:02:59.480 --> 00:03:02.600] I do like these subscription mealboxes where I don't have to even think about it.
[00:03:02.600 --> 00:03:05.160] Dude, I don't spend any money, honestly.
[00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:05.640] I just don't.
[00:03:05.960 --> 00:03:07.480] I go out to eat on weekends.
[00:03:07.480 --> 00:03:08.760] I treat myself.
[00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:10.200] You're a frugal spender.
[00:03:10.200 --> 00:03:11.400] I'm a big spender.
[00:03:11.400 --> 00:03:13.160] I live extravagantly.
[00:03:13.160 --> 00:03:17.960] I have a baller ass apartment, two bedrooms, even though I live by myself in the heart of Seattle.
[00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:21.080] I'm staring at the space needle outside my window.
[00:03:21.080 --> 00:03:23.480] I throw huge events for my friends.
[00:03:23.480 --> 00:03:25.000] I just had like a birthday party for myself.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:29.320] There was like a luxury Airbnb last weekend with cost thousands of dollars.
[00:03:31.160 --> 00:03:35.000] By the way, that juxtaposition was hilarious because I had like a quiet evening.
[00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:39.080] Natalie and like my friend like James brought his baby.
[00:03:39.080 --> 00:03:43.480] Like we couldn't even, we couldn't even speak in adult voices.
[00:03:43.480 --> 00:03:47.120] And you were like, just pumping the bass, like doing karaoke.
[00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:49.040] I can't even say half of what happened at my birthday party.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:50.640] I'll turn this into an R-rated show.
[00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:53.200] So we have very different lives.
[00:03:53.200 --> 00:03:56.080] But I'm not cutting down at all, man.
[00:03:56.080 --> 00:03:59.920] Like, I am drastically upping the amount that I'm going to work.
[00:03:59.920 --> 00:04:01.120] I'm going to work a lot harder.
[00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:04.960] I'm way more excited about life in general, I think.
[00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:07.760] I feel kind of like I have a purpose again.
[00:04:07.760 --> 00:04:09.760] Like, I have my drive.
[00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:11.280] You know, I got my mojo back.
[00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:13.440] It's not to say being at Stripe was bad.
[00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:16.400] You know, I enjoyed being at Stripe and Endie Hackers was just as fun to run then.
[00:04:16.400 --> 00:04:18.400] But now, I don't know, man.
[00:04:18.400 --> 00:04:19.360] I feel like a wolf, right?
[00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:19.840] I got to go out.
[00:04:19.840 --> 00:04:20.640] I got to eat.
[00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:22.720] I got to find a nice juicy deer.
[00:04:22.720 --> 00:04:24.880] And the hunt is exciting.
[00:04:24.880 --> 00:04:34.560] There was another funny way that we reacted to working at Stripe that was very different, which is like, this is a legitimate question.
[00:04:34.560 --> 00:04:36.080] Have you ever had a salaried job?
[00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:36.720] I don't think you have.
[00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:38.080] You've only done contract work, right?
[00:04:38.080 --> 00:04:39.760] That was my first ever full-time job.
[00:04:40.240 --> 00:04:41.680] So you've never had a full-time job.
[00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:42.880] Like, you were...
[00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:45.760] Like, obviously, you worked hard, especially at the beginning.
[00:04:45.920 --> 00:04:46.880] I've always made it myself.
[00:04:47.200 --> 00:04:47.920] Put it this way.
[00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:52.720] To me, it was pretty obvious that this was you being a complete fish out of water.
[00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:55.280] You're like a shark dropped over the Sahara desert.
[00:04:55.280 --> 00:05:01.280] Like, you got something, you got like power and some ferocity, but like, just not in this context.
[00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:05.360] Yeah, but you've never, like, you've had full-time jobs, but it never seemed like that's what you've liked to do.
[00:05:05.360 --> 00:05:06.640] You've always wanted to be on your own.
[00:05:06.640 --> 00:05:07.600] You've wanted to be a writer.
[00:05:07.600 --> 00:05:08.720] You've wanted to be independent.
[00:05:08.720 --> 00:05:14.880] Like, you were, like, I mean, you're not the kind of person I think of when I think of like a salaried employee.
[00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:22.160] The way that I approached salaried jobs was I had a destination in mind that was me no longer working there.
[00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:26.000] But in order for me to like work my, like, I had to like earn my way out, right?
[00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:29.720] So I started with sales, was making $38,000 a year with like commissions.
[00:05:29.520 --> 00:05:35.240] And I'm like, two years later, I worked my ass off and then got to graduate out of sales into like a software engineering job.
[00:05:35.320 --> 00:05:37.480] Then I like worked my ass off there.
[00:05:37.480 --> 00:05:42.520] So yes, I didn't want to be there, but that actually meant that I worked my ass off while I was there.
[00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:45.480] It's like Tarzan swinging from one vine to the next, right?
[00:05:45.480 --> 00:05:51.800] So let's talk about what we learned from this process, from the process of going through a divestment.
[00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:54.040] I've heard of a lot of people getting acquired.
[00:05:54.040 --> 00:06:00.600] I have not met that many people whose companies got acquired and then they got the company back and now own it.
[00:06:00.600 --> 00:06:02.360] So that whole divestment process is crazy.
[00:06:02.360 --> 00:06:03.720] I didn't even know that was possible.
[00:06:03.720 --> 00:06:08.680] And then also like the what we learned from like the six years of being an acquired company.
[00:06:08.680 --> 00:06:11.240] I think a lot of people consider getting bought.
[00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:13.560] You know, it's like a pie in the sky dream in the future.
[00:06:13.640 --> 00:06:18.120] Like what does it actually feel like to be bought by, in many ways, like our dream company?
[00:06:18.120 --> 00:06:22.840] Like can you imagine any company that would have been better to acquire indie hackers than Stripe?
[00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:27.480] I mean Stripe was literally the best choice.
[00:06:27.640 --> 00:06:29.240] And it was only eight months after we started.
[00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:33.640] So Indie Hackers came into existence, I think August 2016.
[00:06:33.640 --> 00:06:35.080] You joined a bit later.
[00:06:35.080 --> 00:06:39.480] And then right after that, Stripe was like, Patrick from Stripe was like, hey, can we buy indie hackers?
[00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:40.600] And we said, okay.
[00:06:40.600 --> 00:06:54.120] And less than a month passed from when he sent me that email to the point where we became official Stripe employees, which is literally, I think, exactly six years ago to the day that this episode will come out, April 5th, 2017.
[00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:55.640] Doesn't feel like six years, does it?
[00:06:56.280 --> 00:06:59.720] Let me give one thought on six years at Stripe.
[00:06:59.720 --> 00:07:03.000] It's that that first year was a grind.
[00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:06.760] Like that first year was like, I felt like a freshman at college.
[00:07:06.760 --> 00:07:08.040] I felt like a freshman at high school.
[00:07:08.040 --> 00:07:11.400] I don't know if you remember being there, but you're, you know, you're going from middle school to high school.
[00:07:11.400 --> 00:07:13.160] You're like, oh, I'm joining the big leagues, right?
[00:07:13.160 --> 00:07:14.360] Everyone is so big.
[00:07:15.040 --> 00:07:15.600] Everyone is like fresh.
[00:07:15.600 --> 00:07:22.800] I was like, any normal human being knows what I'm talking about.
[00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:29.120] And it's not necessarily that I like when we went into Stripe, I felt like, you know, everyone here is a lead and like they're smarter.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:30.400] Like, it didn't feel like high school.
[00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:32.320] It's slightly an imperfect analogy.
[00:07:32.320 --> 00:07:36.160] But what it did feel like was like, we got to be on.
[00:07:36.160 --> 00:07:38.400] Like, I better fucking prove myself, right?
[00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:39.440] Like, we got acquired.
[00:07:39.440 --> 00:07:42.240] You know, we weren't like making hundreds of millions in revenue.
[00:07:42.240 --> 00:07:44.480] We weren't like a normal financial acquisition.
[00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:48.000] There are a lot of reasons to be like, dude, you guys just had a fucking blog.
[00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:49.680] Like, why are you here?
[00:07:49.680 --> 00:07:50.480] That's my favorite question.
[00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:52.240] It's like, why did Stripe buy indie hackers?
[00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:53.360] Like, how much money were you guys making?
[00:07:53.360 --> 00:07:53.920] You guys are killing it.
[00:07:54.080 --> 00:07:57.200] Like, $8,000 a month.
[00:07:58.800 --> 00:08:00.160] It's just small stakes stuff.
[00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:06.240] You know, you got bought by a company that I think Stripe was worth $9 billion at the time we joined in 2017.
[00:08:06.240 --> 00:08:06.720] Yeah.
[00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:11.760] And it was interesting because when we got acquired by Stripe, indie hackers was like, was banging, man.
[00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:14.560] It was like on Hacker News almost every week.
[00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:16.960] Like, we were kind of like the it media company.
[00:08:16.960 --> 00:08:20.400] And when we went into Stripe, I kind of felt famous, honestly.
[00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:22.560] I don't know how you felt, but like talking to somebody else.
[00:08:22.640 --> 00:08:23.600] We got a bunch of.
[00:08:23.760 --> 00:08:34.560] I remember like the very first day getting like 12 Slack messages from people who were listening to the podcast who were so excited that we had joined Stripe and kind of known the acquisition was in the works for like a week or two.
[00:08:34.880 --> 00:08:44.080] So yeah, it's like a, it's kind of like joining a cult, you know, but instead of like coming in at like, you know, the ground floor and we came in like as like already appointed elected leaders in a way.
[00:08:44.080 --> 00:08:44.400] Yeah.
[00:08:44.640 --> 00:08:45.200] Yeah.
[00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:47.200] And that's just very different than being an indie hacker.
[00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:50.320] Like, every big company is, to some degree, a cult.
[00:08:50.320 --> 00:08:51.680] Everybody's got the shared mission.
[00:08:51.680 --> 00:08:53.920] Everybody has the same leader they look up to.
[00:08:53.920 --> 00:08:56.360] Everybody's sort of aligned even with their equity.
[00:08:56.600 --> 00:08:57.360] Versus us.
[00:08:57.360 --> 00:08:59.120] We were just like these, like, just lone wolves, right?
[00:08:59.120 --> 00:09:00.760] We had nothing besides just us.
[00:08:59.920 --> 00:09:03.880] And so, yeah, it did feel very, very validating.
[00:09:04.200 --> 00:09:09.960] I feel like the first year we were a lot more like connected to the internal workings of Stripe.
[00:09:09.960 --> 00:09:13.640] We did, well, we had like a two-month, almost like Stripe school.
[00:09:13.640 --> 00:09:16.200] Like, I like flew in from New York City to San Francisco.
[00:09:16.200 --> 00:09:19.160] We like went through the, we had like the class of whatever, you know, months.
[00:09:19.320 --> 00:09:20.600] Yeah, Stripe onboarding.
[00:09:20.600 --> 00:09:21.720] Yeah, Stripe onboarding.
[00:09:21.720 --> 00:09:23.160] It was like very intensive.
[00:09:23.160 --> 00:09:25.880] And then we kind of just like got cut loose.
[00:09:25.880 --> 00:09:31.640] And then the rest of the whatever five years that we worked there, for the most part, it's like we would just talk to Patrick Collison directly.
[00:09:32.120 --> 00:09:33.880] Here's what I learned from that process.
[00:09:34.520 --> 00:09:37.720] We were extremely independent at Stripe.
[00:09:37.720 --> 00:09:39.400] There were no ropes.
[00:09:39.400 --> 00:09:42.280] There were no chains holding us down.
[00:09:42.280 --> 00:09:48.840] We did not have to interface with the rest of Stripe to any degree that we didn't want to ourselves.
[00:09:48.840 --> 00:09:51.960] And this is like a nightmare story I hear from lots of other friends who've gone through acquisitions.
[00:09:51.960 --> 00:09:55.320] You know, like the second they join, they are not cut loose.
[00:09:55.320 --> 00:09:59.160] They are held down and restricted and they become just like another cog on the wheel.
[00:09:59.160 --> 00:10:00.440] That did not happen with us.
[00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:04.600] And that tells me that like it's quite possible for lots of companies to do acquisitions this way.
[00:10:04.600 --> 00:10:05.720] And that was fucking awesome.
[00:10:05.720 --> 00:10:07.720] We got to do exactly what we wanted.
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:09.080] We had to determine our own future.
[00:10:09.080 --> 00:10:19.320] We just had the added benefit of like this extra press and financial support and employee support from like all of these people at Stripe who are basically just like, hey, we're here if you need us.
[00:10:19.320 --> 00:10:21.960] And like it's, I could not have asked for a better deal.
[00:10:21.960 --> 00:10:25.880] Like there is no, like, how could it possibly have been structured better than that?
[00:10:25.880 --> 00:10:27.240] Like, I think they really hooked us up.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:28.840] Couldn't have been structured better.
[00:10:28.840 --> 00:10:31.080] We came in, we were like this hot startup.
[00:10:31.080 --> 00:10:32.520] We got autonomy.
[00:10:32.520 --> 00:10:45.920] And Patrick and like a few different Friday meetings would like hold us up, hold our team up as like the shining beacon on a hill of like getting things done, like shipping products without like kind of going through the internals.
[00:10:44.840 --> 00:10:50.560] He'd be like, Look, you know, they got a you know product from like idea to shipped in this period of time.
[00:10:50.800 --> 00:10:53.120] Like, why are we like, you know, I don't know why I decided to do this.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:58.240] He didn't ask me to do this, but I was like, Patrick, I'm just gonna send you an update of what we do every week at the end of the week.
[00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:01.440] I'm just gonna send you an update, just so you know, because like, I don't know, it's a little humble brag.
[00:11:01.680 --> 00:11:02.720] No, it wasn't even like that.
[00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:08.080] It just felt weird being like, hey, we got acquired, but like, is anyone gonna supervise us or does anyone even want to know what we do?
[00:11:08.080 --> 00:11:09.840] And they're like, you guys are on your own.
[00:11:10.160 --> 00:11:14.800] And so, I just would, at the end of every Friday, I'd send him like a list of all the stuff that you did, all the stuff that I did.
[00:11:14.800 --> 00:11:16.400] And it would be so much stuff.
[00:11:16.400 --> 00:11:20.400] It would be like literally like 50 bullet points and like five sections.
[00:11:20.400 --> 00:11:24.800] And then, like, I think one of the managers at Stripe messaged me like a month after.
[00:11:24.800 --> 00:11:26.960] He's like, Hey, man, good job with all the stuff you got accomplished.
[00:11:26.960 --> 00:11:27.840] Like, I really got to step it up.
[00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:29.040] And I'm like, What are you talking about?
[00:11:29.040 --> 00:11:30.400] Like, I just sent this to Patrick.
[00:11:30.400 --> 00:11:35.600] And it turns out he had been like forwarding that email to all the managers to be like, Hey, look what these two guys are doing.
[00:11:35.600 --> 00:11:37.440] What did your teams do this week?
[00:11:37.440 --> 00:11:43.200] And so, in a way, it was like we were like famous inside Stripe, but also we were like probably making a lot of other people's jobs way.
[00:11:43.280 --> 00:11:53.760] I'm surprised you never got a DM that was like, Hey, man, if you just like cut that list in half, like in your next Friday report, like trade this thousand dollars for like half of the list.
[00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:55.920] How about you stop sending those emails?
[00:11:55.920 --> 00:12:02.880] Um, but I think the other thing that happened in our first year was that it was like the most starry-eyed, ambitious year that we had.
[00:12:02.880 --> 00:12:04.800] It was like the world is our oyster.
[00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:08.000] The first like two weeks, I just met with a bunch of people, and we just talked about big ideas.
[00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.160] Like, what could indie hackers be at its biggest?
[00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:18.720] And I remember that the juxtaposition between like being indie, remember our conversations when we were like on our own, we're just like, How do we make an extra thousand dollars a month in ad revenue this month?
[00:12:18.800 --> 00:12:23.200] You know, and we would like do that, and it would be like the most exciting thing on earth.
[00:12:23.200 --> 00:12:30.000] Versus we joined Stripe, and everyone at Stripe is like, How do you change the world of entrepreneurship forever until the end of time?
[00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:33.240] I specifically remember Patty 11.
[00:12:33.240 --> 00:12:39.560] Patio 11, we were having like sidebar conversations with people at Stripe, like Patio 11.
[00:12:39.560 --> 00:12:43.160] And you were like, all right, like, you know, how should we like pitch?
[00:12:43.160 --> 00:14:04.960] what the kind of impact we want to have while working with a company and you said something that was like hardcore like small scale stuff you were like you know we just want to grow 10x we want to be like you know you named some company like we want to be like the bigger version of this media company and he's like wait wait wait he's like you want to like change like have internet scale impact like you need to frame it you need to like think way bigger you need to think way too small thinking way too small i think that that was really exciting on one hand because when you have this huge goal like it increases your self-belief suddenly you start thinking about ways that you can hit that goal and you realize that it's kind of possible whereas when you don't have big goals you don't even think about these stuff like you don't make big moves if you don't have big goals and so i remember just thinking like all the different things we could do that we i just never considered and we tried some stuff we're like okay why don't we like remember we like tried to do indie hackers as a publishing company and we were like okay like almost like a medium.com yeah we're like we can just take someone who's like semi-famous and we can like get their article on eddie hackers and blow them up uh that was our plan but like in the back of my mind i was like i don't i don't think we could why could we do that we're just some random website we can't blow someone up and then we tried it and i remember some people at stripe like recommended their friends who had pretty sizable twitter followings and they posted on any hackers and they did blow up like we got people like literally hundreds of thousands of page views from our newsletter and submitting to hacker News and being able to do that.
[00:14:05.040 --> 00:14:14.240] Dude, I mean, to this day, our top post ever is lynn tai your friend, posting when we were doing that uh and like we had her write her story, right?
[00:14:14.240 --> 00:14:17.760] And we like featured it like on the top of our little media site.
[00:14:17.760 --> 00:14:19.120] She's not the top post ever, by the way.
[00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:20.480] She's number 11.
[00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:21.360] So she's been eclipsed.
[00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:23.120] How has she fallen?
[00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:23.360] Yeah.
[00:14:23.360 --> 00:14:25.280] I changed the algorithm to make it so she fell.
[00:14:25.280 --> 00:14:26.400] So take that length.
[00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:28.720] Specifically and only so that she would fall.
[00:14:28.720 --> 00:14:30.000] There's no other logic to it.
[00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:34.080] Anyway, to go back to like learnings, I think the I don't know how you feel about these big audacious goals.
[00:14:34.080 --> 00:14:44.800] Like I don't know if you lived your life having these huge goals, but it's a double-edged sword, man, because on one hand, indie hackers grew tremendously, especially in those first two to three years at Stripe.
[00:14:44.800 --> 00:14:52.640] Like I think our newsletter had like, you know, 4,000 people on it when we joined Stripe, and now it's like well over 100,000, 150,000, I think.
[00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:56.800] I think our community forum wasn't even on the front page of the website.
[00:14:56.800 --> 00:14:57.760] It was tiny.
[00:14:57.760 --> 00:15:01.360] Half the accounts were still just like you and me trying to get other people to post.
[00:15:01.680 --> 00:15:03.040] You know, it was like a couple hundred people.
[00:15:03.040 --> 00:15:05.840] Like it's since grown to like hundreds of thousands.
[00:15:06.480 --> 00:15:08.480] Page views, same thing, like podcast.
[00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:11.840] Like we had released, I think like three episodes of the podcast.
[00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:15.280] It had, you know, barely a couple hundred downloads an episode.
[00:15:15.280 --> 00:15:17.680] Now it's like 20, 30,000 downloads an episode.
[00:15:17.680 --> 00:15:24.000] And just the first few years at Stripe, like we crushed it and became like literally dozens of times bigger as a company.
[00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:28.640] But on the flip side, like that paled in comparison to the goals that we set.
[00:15:28.640 --> 00:15:30.800] Like we weren't like, hey, how do we get 30 times bigger?
[00:15:30.800 --> 00:15:33.840] We were like, hey, how do we get like a million times bigger?
[00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:44.880] And I think after spending years working really hard and not necessarily making like really significant progress towards a huge goal like that, it's pretty demotivating.
[00:15:45.120 --> 00:15:48.320] It's very much kind of like, well, what's the point?
[00:15:48.320 --> 00:15:48.560] Right.
[00:15:48.560 --> 00:15:49.200] And it's easy.
[00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:52.720] I think there's a point at which I started to feel like, oh, I'm a failure.
[00:15:52.720 --> 00:15:53.920] You know, I failed.
[00:15:53.920 --> 00:15:55.120] We had a goal.
[00:15:55.120 --> 00:15:56.160] We wanted to hit it.
[00:15:56.160 --> 00:15:58.360] We were super optimistic about wanting to hit it.
[00:15:58.360 --> 00:15:59.760] And everyone was supporting us.
[00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:03.000] And when you have a company, you answer to your customers.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:04.440] Presumably, you have lots of customers.
[00:16:04.680 --> 00:16:11.160] But when you get acquired or you have investors, you kind of like, in a way, feel beholden to a very small number of people, right?
[00:16:11.160 --> 00:16:13.640] Like the person who bought your company, the people who invested.
[00:16:13.640 --> 00:16:17.400] And so now it just feels like you're letting down your dad or something, you know?
[00:16:17.400 --> 00:16:23.400] Like you feel like, oh, there's like a couple people that I really wanted to impress, and I'm not sure I did that.
[00:16:23.400 --> 00:16:27.480] And I think that's something that I'd never really felt because I'd never raised a bunch of money before or gotten acquired before.
[00:16:27.720 --> 00:16:29.400] I'd always been more accountable to my customers.
[00:16:29.400 --> 00:16:37.320] So I didn't like the idea of having these huge goals that lasted for years and years and years and not being able to necessarily hit them.
[00:16:37.320 --> 00:16:50.840] But then the other piece that sort of didn't feel good because it felt too good was the fact that even when we sort of were just having tepid growth, the paycheck still kept coming, right?
[00:16:50.840 --> 00:16:54.120] It just isn't very entrepreneurial.
[00:16:54.520 --> 00:17:07.320] And it has an interesting impact on your motivation when you get fed in ways that aren't connected to like you doing work that you find like impressive and that you're proud of.
[00:17:07.320 --> 00:17:12.200] And I think we found ourselves, so it was like a two-pronged attack against like my motivation, right?
[00:17:12.200 --> 00:17:19.080] Number one, we weren't making like huge strides toward like those really big milestones that we wanted to hit of growth and like impact.
[00:17:19.080 --> 00:17:24.200] But then also it's like, yeah, dude, we were just like too fat from not doing stuff.
[00:17:24.200 --> 00:17:24.600] Yeah.
[00:17:24.600 --> 00:17:28.680] I wonder if there's like some arrangement where they could have been like, you're kind of like a mini entrepreneur.
[00:17:28.680 --> 00:17:31.640] Like you can launch little like revenue generating products.
[00:17:31.640 --> 00:17:35.640] It's like you don't have like an internal Stripe corporate bonus structure.
[00:17:35.640 --> 00:17:41.880] Instead, you have like, you make it, like you like bring in extra revenue, and like that goes into your bank account, baby.
[00:17:41.880 --> 00:17:42.120] Yeah.
[00:17:42.120 --> 00:17:45.760] Like, I feel like that might have given me some sort of like a signal to the actual.
[00:17:45.920 --> 00:17:46.400] I think so.
[00:17:46.400 --> 00:17:46.960] I think so.
[00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:48.160] I think there's something to be said for that.
[00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:56.720] I mean, so right now, like part of the deal, we can't go into a ton of specifics, but like Stripe is a seed investor in indie hackers right now.
[00:17:56.720 --> 00:18:00.080] Theoretically, Stripe could have been a seed investor in Indie Hackers six years ago, right?
[00:18:00.080 --> 00:18:02.080] We didn't have to be acquired.
[00:18:02.080 --> 00:18:07.680] We didn't have to, because the day we got acquired, we just literally shut down all of our advertising, shut down all of our affiliate marketing.
[00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:10.400] We went from making $8K a month to $0 a month.
[00:18:10.400 --> 00:18:11.680] Revenue growth is not the point.
[00:18:11.680 --> 00:18:14.720] Stripe makes infinitely more money than any hackers is going to make.
[00:18:14.720 --> 00:18:25.600] Even if we work on this for like, you know, 20 years, we should focus more on the growth of other things, the growth of our traffic, the growth of our brand, the growth of the impact and influence we can have on other people starting businesses.
[00:18:25.600 --> 00:18:31.680] Like our core metric is like, okay, how many people have started a company because of indie hackers who otherwise wouldn't have started one?
[00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:32.000] Right.
[00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.440] Like that's a pretty badass metric, but that is not revenue, right?
[00:18:35.440 --> 00:18:37.440] It's hard to even measure what that leads to.
[00:18:37.840 --> 00:18:46.160] It's not revenue, and also like we had to like find the side window way to represent that through like, frankly, vanity metrics, like, right?
[00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:54.320] Because we had to try to like get at that underlying outcome through like, okay, how many downloads does the podcast have?
[00:18:54.320 --> 00:18:57.760] How many, you know, sort of how many page views do we have to the site?
[00:18:57.760 --> 00:19:00.480] How many subscribers do you have to the newsletter?
[00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:12.000] And like, this algorithm leads to multiply by the percentage of people who sign up for indie hackers and take our survey and say that they definitively would have not started their company if not for X episode or Y post on the forum or whatnot.
[00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:16.320] That versus like you did a thing and then someone paid you money into your bank account.
[00:19:16.320 --> 00:19:19.920] Like the relative motivational value is like a little bit different.
[00:19:20.080 --> 00:19:20.800] You need a connection.
[00:19:20.800 --> 00:19:26.240] If you want to get good feedback loops to improve at anything, you need a direct connection between the input and the outcomes.
[00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:29.200] You need to feel pain when you get stung by a bee.
[00:19:29.200 --> 00:19:32.360] You need to feel a cheering of a crowd when you score a goal.
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:33.880] And I mean, this is stereotypical.
[00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:40.760] This is stereotypically why entrepreneurs like to be entrepreneurs because they want to be rewarded commensurate with what they put in.
[00:19:40.760 --> 00:19:43.720] And if you go to a big company, that's hard to make happen.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.680] We kind of had it at Stripe.
[00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:48.200] Like, I think we had a good system set up, but it's just really hard to keep that going.
[00:19:49.160 --> 00:19:51.560] Fast forward five and a half years.
[00:19:51.560 --> 00:19:59.320] And the idea comes up: hey, you know, would you guys, what did you guys think about taking indie hackers ND again?
[00:19:59.320 --> 00:20:00.200] You remember when that came up?
[00:20:00.200 --> 00:20:06.280] That was like November 2022, like November last year.
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:07.880] And we had never really thought about that.
[00:20:07.880 --> 00:20:12.040] Like, I don't know if you know this, but like during the initial acquisition, I had no idea what I was doing.
[00:20:12.040 --> 00:20:20.120] And I was talking to Patrick and I was asking, like, hey, you know, like, if this whole thing goes south and we don't like working together, like, can I maybe buy indie hackers back from you?
[00:20:20.120 --> 00:20:21.320] And he just looked at me.
[00:20:21.320 --> 00:20:22.680] He was like, no.
[00:20:22.680 --> 00:20:23.800] Just one more answer like that.
[00:20:24.280 --> 00:20:25.080] That's not how these things work.
[00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:26.280] I was like, oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.
[00:20:26.280 --> 00:20:27.560] I'm just wondering.
[00:20:27.880 --> 00:20:33.000] But now here we had this opportunity, like, hey, like, we can make indie hackers ND again.
[00:20:33.720 --> 00:20:37.240] And I think, what, that was four months ago, five months ago?
[00:20:37.240 --> 00:20:41.800] Like, we had to decide, like, okay, do we want to do that versus continuing to say it's Stripe?
[00:20:41.800 --> 00:20:44.360] Like, that's a cool option we've never even considered before.
[00:20:44.600 --> 00:20:46.200] And then we decided we did.
[00:20:46.200 --> 00:20:47.880] But then we're like, okay, what does that look like?
[00:20:47.880 --> 00:21:00.120] And just having that conversation of like what we would want things to look like going forward if that happened and what Stripe would want things to look like going forward actually turned into like a pretty intense like negotiation, which was like cool, very cool.
[00:21:00.120 --> 00:21:00.480] I think.
[00:21:00.440 --> 00:21:03.560] I think it was like the more fun/slash stressful part of all this.
[00:21:03.560 --> 00:21:05.480] And then we got to a point where all of us were happy.
[00:21:05.480 --> 00:21:06.680] Everybody felt great.
[00:21:06.680 --> 00:21:10.840] And then the last, like, just, you know, little while has been nothing but admin work.
[00:21:10.840 --> 00:21:23.920] Talking to lawyers, having the lawyers talk to other lawyers, drawing up paperwork, and you know, setting up a new ND Hackers Inc., Delaware C Corp, and getting like all the basic payroll and bookkeeping and taxes set up for that kind of stuff.
[00:21:23.920 --> 00:21:28.320] So we are now officially out, but it's been a trek.
[00:21:28.320 --> 00:21:29.120] It's been a trek.
[00:21:29.360 --> 00:21:33.840] I usually find admin work like to be the most stressful type of work.
[00:21:33.840 --> 00:21:45.760] But I have to say, with the admin work on the heels of the negotiation, which of course went really well, but it was stressful enough that now I almost feel like I'm dealing with the walk in the park.
[00:21:45.760 --> 00:21:47.120] It was just high stakes, you know?
[00:21:47.120 --> 00:21:50.160] Like, how many big negotiations do you really do in your life?
[00:21:50.160 --> 00:21:53.440] You know, like buying a house, maybe selling your company.
[00:21:53.840 --> 00:21:59.680] I feel like unless that's your job, like very few people have, like, you know, hardly any, right?
[00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:08.080] Well, that was the, we can't go into too much detail about like the actual result of it, but the result of it is that like Stripe is a seed investor and indie hackers, which is cool, and everyone's happy.
[00:22:08.080 --> 00:22:14.480] But like the process to get to like terms where we both enjoyed it, I mean, like, I mean, like, what even is a divestment, right?
[00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:21.520] It is Stripe owns indie hackers outright, and now Stripe is an investor in indie hackers, and we primarily own indie hackers.
[00:22:21.520 --> 00:22:27.920] That is like a whole process that, you know, for at least a brief moment in time, like incentives aren't necessarily aligned.
[00:22:27.920 --> 00:22:30.240] You have to talk about it, and that's why it becomes a negotiation.
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:35.840] And we're negotiating with like someone at Stripe who like literally has bought and sold companies for a living.
[00:22:35.840 --> 00:22:38.080] Like he's done this hundreds of times.
[00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:40.080] We've done it one time, you know.
[00:22:40.080 --> 00:22:43.040] I don't even know what a divestment was until like November of last year.
[00:22:43.040 --> 00:22:44.880] I'm like, oh, you could, you could do that.
[00:22:44.880 --> 00:22:53.200] And so we just had to learn a lot in order to like, I think, do well and get to a point where everybody would be happy and where the deal even made sense for everybody because it's just easier to do.
[00:22:54.080 --> 00:23:04.520] Compared to the original negotiation of Stripe getting acquired and then this most recent divestment experience, what would you say was your biggest learning?
[00:23:04.920 --> 00:23:05.960] What was new here?
[00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:06.840] I've learned a bunch of things.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:07.080] I don't know.
[00:23:07.160 --> 00:23:08.760] There's probably like six things that I learned.
[00:23:09.400 --> 00:23:14.120] I think originally one of the things I learned, and I've talked about this before, is keep your chats informal.
[00:23:14.120 --> 00:23:19.640] So when Andy Hackers was joining Stripe, Patrick and I talked a lot on WhatsApp, which was awesome.
[00:23:19.640 --> 00:23:24.760] You know, if you talk over email, every email seems like it's the highest stakes thing you're ever going to send in your life.
[00:23:24.760 --> 00:23:29.480] You're like sweating over like the structure of like one sentence for like an hour.
[00:23:29.480 --> 00:23:32.600] If you talk in person, then that meeting kind of feels the same way.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:35.800] But then you're like riffing off the cuff and you're not prepared.
[00:23:35.800 --> 00:23:39.640] And you feel like you have to kind of like study, like you're going into like a job interview or something.
[00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:42.680] But if you talk over text or WhatsApp or something, it's like very lighthearted.
[00:23:42.680 --> 00:23:43.640] You're on your phone.
[00:23:43.640 --> 00:23:45.960] You can send emojis, which is nice.
[00:23:46.120 --> 00:23:53.240] You're trying to be friendly and you are engaging with somebody that you consider a friend, but like you're also trying to ask for what you want, which is very uncomfortable.
[00:23:53.800 --> 00:24:03.960] Dude, I don't know if I am misremembering, but I'm pretty sure I remember even when Patrick emailed you originally, he used like lowercase letters.
[00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:07.400] Like he took his formal medium and he made it even more informal.
[00:24:07.880 --> 00:24:08.680] I think that's smart.
[00:24:08.680 --> 00:24:19.400] I think the other thing is, you know, Patrick McKenzie, also known as Patio 11, one of our fellow Stripes, he wrote like the guide to salary negotiation, especially for tech workers.
[00:24:19.400 --> 00:24:21.320] Just Google Patio 11 salary negotiation.
[00:24:21.320 --> 00:24:26.040] And there's some really good points in there that are just like evergreen, always true basics.
[00:24:26.040 --> 00:24:27.800] Like number one, you gotta have the right mindset.
[00:24:27.800 --> 00:24:30.840] Like this is not necessarily a friendly conversation.
[00:24:30.840 --> 00:24:32.600] Like, you need to ask what you want.
[00:24:32.600 --> 00:24:38.120] If you're not uncomfortable, that means you've either done it a hundred times or you're not doing it enough.
[00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:53.200] And I think that a lot of people probably leave hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars on the table throughout the course of their life by not really pushing hard enough negotiations and feeling scared or uncomfortable to ask what they want because you're afraid you're going to offend the other person.
[00:24:53.520 --> 00:24:58.880] Whereas in reality, the other person, like, this is their job to literally negotiate and to decide what to pay.
[00:24:58.880 --> 00:25:00.960] And it's like usually not even their money that they're spending.
[00:25:00.960 --> 00:25:04.320] And so it turns out they're usually not really offended if you ask for what you want.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:06.320] So I think that was a really good point from that guide.
[00:25:06.560 --> 00:25:12.160] Another two points from that guide: research, research, research is super important.
[00:25:12.160 --> 00:25:14.480] You need to know what you want, right?
[00:25:14.480 --> 00:25:16.960] Like we had to sit down and figure out like, what do we really want?
[00:25:16.960 --> 00:25:18.320] What does the other party want?
[00:25:18.320 --> 00:25:21.760] You know, what have other deals like this look like?
[00:25:21.920 --> 00:25:26.560] If you don't do your research, it's really hard to figure out what even to propose that would make everybody happy.
[00:25:26.560 --> 00:25:30.000] And I think that was our goal and Stripe's goal: everybody being happy.
[00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.320] Like, nobody wanted anyone else to be unhappy.
[00:25:32.560 --> 00:25:35.280] A third point is like, you know, never say a number first.
[00:25:35.280 --> 00:25:37.280] Also, very uncomfortable.
[00:25:37.280 --> 00:25:40.480] And I think beyond that, I have my own sort of learnings from negotiation.
[00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:44.160] I think one of the most important things in negotiation is just framing.
[00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:45.760] Like, what analogy do you use, right?
[00:25:45.760 --> 00:25:49.520] If you're saying, like, hey, I want to get a job here, you should hire me.
[00:25:49.520 --> 00:25:56.240] And you say the going rate for senior engineers is X, so you should pay me X times, you know, plus 10% because I'm a slightly better senior engineer.
[00:25:56.240 --> 00:25:57.760] That's one type of framing, right?
[00:25:57.760 --> 00:26:08.400] Or if you say, hey, I'm going to frame this as I know exactly how to, you know, make your systems 10 times more efficient, and that's going to save you a million dollars a year, so you should pay me $500,000 a year.
[00:26:08.400 --> 00:26:10.080] That's a totally different framing.
[00:26:10.080 --> 00:26:14.240] And you're still a senior engineer, a slightly better senior engineer, but you frame things differently.
[00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:14.480] Right.
[00:26:15.360 --> 00:26:22.960] If you frame it as, like, hey, I'm an engineer, the comparison that people make is like, okay, what is the going salary for a senior engineer?
[00:26:22.960 --> 00:26:26.640] Maybe we're talking about like an extra $50,000 a year.
[00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:34.360] But if you frame it in terms of like the savings that you're going to create for their business, now they're thinking, depending on the size of their business, maybe on the order of like millions.
[00:26:29.520 --> 00:26:40.280] Or you could frame it, frame it for how much money you're going to make for them, or frame it for, like, you could frame things in lots of different creative ways.
[00:26:40.280 --> 00:26:42.040] And I think you can do this even if you're getting a job.
[00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:43.880] And then also like having leverage, right?
[00:26:43.880 --> 00:26:49.880] Like before you even get to the negotiation table, are you sort of like one of a million, right?
[00:26:49.880 --> 00:26:55.800] If things don't work out with you, are there like 900, 99, 999 other people they could just go to and get a better deal?
[00:26:55.800 --> 00:26:58.920] Because if that's the case, like you don't have a lot of leverage, right?
[00:26:58.920 --> 00:26:59.960] So you want to be unique.
[00:26:59.960 --> 00:27:01.160] You want to be kind of one of a kind.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:06.200] And then you want to understand what they want and what you want so you can ask for the right things and create the right frame.
[00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:07.640] And so you're there.
[00:27:07.640 --> 00:27:08.360] We both did this.
[00:27:08.360 --> 00:27:11.960] And it was very stressful, but also really heartwarming at the end.
[00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:19.400] And I think it's cool to just go through the stressful process that seems uncomfortable and then also realize that like everybody's on the same side and everybody loves each other.
[00:27:19.400 --> 00:27:21.640] And now we have like pretty good terms.
[00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:26.120] Like Stripe is a seed investor in NDHA and they're happy with that and we're happy with that.
[00:27:26.120 --> 00:27:27.640] So now we've got our company.
[00:27:27.640 --> 00:27:30.120] We're independent and we're done.
[00:27:30.120 --> 00:27:30.760] We're out of it.
[00:27:30.760 --> 00:27:31.800] Everybody's happy.
[00:27:31.800 --> 00:27:34.440] So the big question is, what now?
[00:27:34.440 --> 00:27:34.680] Right?
[00:27:34.680 --> 00:27:35.800] The world is our oyster.
[00:27:35.800 --> 00:27:37.240] We could do literally anything.
[00:27:37.240 --> 00:27:37.880] I mean, what do we got?
[00:27:37.880 --> 00:27:41.480] We got a Delaware C Corp, ND Hackers Inc., that makes $0 in revenue.
[00:27:41.800 --> 00:27:42.520] Zero dollars.
[00:27:42.520 --> 00:27:46.120] You make no money, but we've got a bunch of assets that could easily make money, right?
[00:27:46.120 --> 00:27:52.280] I was making eight grand a month off ads when our podcast was tiny, when our newsletter was tiny, when our website is tiny.
[00:27:52.280 --> 00:27:55.640] Everything today is like 30, 40, 50 times bigger than it was back then.
[00:27:55.640 --> 00:27:59.480] So I feel like the first step for us is to turn on the ad revenue.
[00:27:59.880 --> 00:28:02.840] Were you monetizing the newsletter at that point?
[00:28:02.840 --> 00:28:03.480] Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:03.480 --> 00:28:04.560] We had newsletter ads.
[00:28:04.520 --> 00:28:05.040] I had like a lot of people.
[00:28:05.080 --> 00:28:11.880] Do you know you remember now, like what the breakdown between sponsorships for the podcast and it was totally random.
[00:28:11.880 --> 00:28:13.560] Every single deal was individual, right?
[00:28:13.560 --> 00:28:14.600] It was all just sales, right?
[00:28:14.600 --> 00:28:17.520] Get on the phone, call people, open up your inbox, email people.
[00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:21.840] And what I found back then was like selling to people who had no money sucked.
[00:28:22.080 --> 00:28:23.760] The worst customer.
[00:28:23.760 --> 00:28:24.560] The worst customers.
[00:28:25.120 --> 00:28:25.920] Who would have thought?
[00:28:25.920 --> 00:28:31.280] The tiny companies who really wanted to advertise but didn't have much of a budget, and they would micromanage every single thing.
[00:28:31.280 --> 00:28:32.480] Like, the ads got to say exactly this.
[00:28:32.480 --> 00:28:33.280] No, change the ad to that.
[00:28:33.280 --> 00:28:33.920] No, change it to that.
[00:28:33.920 --> 00:28:34.800] Like, how many clicks did it get?
[00:28:34.800 --> 00:28:37.120] Well, how many, how many, how many opens did that email get?
[00:28:37.120 --> 00:28:41.200] Because they were super stressed because every dollar they spent, they needed to see a return on it.
[00:28:41.200 --> 00:28:45.920] Whereas the biggest companies, I think SparkPost advertised an Indie Hackers back in the day.
[00:28:45.920 --> 00:28:47.680] Probably the ads are still in the podcast.
[00:28:47.680 --> 00:28:48.800] They were super chill.
[00:28:49.120 --> 00:29:01.920] I remember talking to a woman there who was running something in marketing, and I was in Cape Town on vacation, and she was on vacation, and we were doing this deal, and she just wanted to talk about her kids and her vacation, and then she just cut me a check for like seven or eight thousand dollars.
[00:29:01.920 --> 00:29:04.640] I was like, yeah, we'll take some ads on the newsletter and on the podcast.
[00:29:04.640 --> 00:29:07.120] And then I did it, and there was like no red tape, and it took like five seconds.
[00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:08.720] You're like, how many?
[00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:10.400] She's like, I don't want to get into the details.
[00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:11.360] Just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:11.440 --> 00:29:12.000] This is easy.
[00:29:12.640 --> 00:29:13.760] How's your vacation to your way?
[00:29:14.560 --> 00:29:17.600] Yeah, because it wasn't her money, and she had a huge budget, and it just didn't.
[00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:22.080] And it goes that moment where I was like, oh, maybe enterprise sales is better than selling tiny companies.
[00:29:22.080 --> 00:29:26.160] Like, that was way easier, and I made 10 times more money than selling the smaller customers.
[00:29:26.160 --> 00:29:28.720] So I think this time around, we should do the same thing.
[00:29:28.720 --> 00:29:35.840] And we should obviously talk to some friends who've done this before and who have big newsletters and monetize them and figure out who we should talk to and what the best way to go about it is.
[00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:38.640] Because the downside of selling ads is it's not that fun.
[00:29:38.640 --> 00:29:40.720] Nobody listening to this podcast thinks, you know what?
[00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:43.120] The Indie Hackers podcast needs ads.
[00:29:43.120 --> 00:29:45.040] Like nobody wants ads.
[00:29:45.040 --> 00:29:47.520] And that's not like the business model I want to rely on forever.
[00:29:47.520 --> 00:29:52.320] So I think that should be like a stopgap while we do more interesting things.
[00:29:52.320 --> 00:29:54.000] I don't even think of it as a stopgap.
[00:29:54.000 --> 00:29:56.000] I think of it almost like as a tourniquet.
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:01.480] Like I see it as we are just bleeding money for the next whatever few months.
[00:30:01.480 --> 00:30:04.200] And let's just do the obvious thing.
[00:29:59.600 --> 00:30:06.520] Get some revenue coming into the newsletter.
[00:30:06.600 --> 00:30:08.120] Get some revenue coming into the podcast.
[00:30:08.120 --> 00:30:08.840] It's not sexy.
[00:30:08.840 --> 00:30:09.640] It's not fun.
[00:30:09.640 --> 00:30:14.520] I'm not going to enjoy doing it, but I will be happy to break even.
[00:30:14.520 --> 00:30:19.080] And then that's when, for me, the interesting stuff is going to start.
[00:30:19.080 --> 00:30:19.400] Yeah.
[00:30:19.400 --> 00:30:23.240] And I think we're at a place that a lot of indie hackers are at, which is like, okay, we have a new company.
[00:30:23.240 --> 00:30:24.280] Like, what do we do?
[00:30:24.280 --> 00:30:24.840] Right.
[00:30:24.840 --> 00:30:31.000] And this is the point where I think all of your decisions are worth a thousand times more than your later decisions.
[00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:36.520] Like, these are the heavy hitter decisions where once you start going in a certain direction, it's really hard to step back.
[00:30:36.520 --> 00:30:38.040] So you kind of want to get them right.
[00:30:38.040 --> 00:30:39.880] I wrote this post on indie hackers years ago.
[00:30:39.880 --> 00:30:42.920] It's called Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting.
[00:30:43.160 --> 00:30:44.840] I think there's like 50 questions in here.
[00:30:44.840 --> 00:30:46.680] And it's just a random list of example questions.
[00:30:46.760 --> 00:30:48.840] Not like these are supposed to be the definitive questions.
[00:30:48.840 --> 00:30:50.360] But there's some good stuff on here, right?
[00:30:50.360 --> 00:30:54.120] Like, what kinds of things have you enjoyed working on in the past?
[00:30:54.120 --> 00:30:55.480] Really simple question, right?
[00:30:55.480 --> 00:31:03.080] If you're going to start a business and you kind of have a lifetime of experience knowing what you like to work on, like, is your business within that wheelhouse or is it something totally different?
[00:31:03.080 --> 00:31:05.640] So for you, like, you know, I know that's like writing.
[00:31:05.640 --> 00:31:07.240] I know that's productivity.
[00:31:07.240 --> 00:31:10.280] I know that you tend to like working alone, right?
[00:31:10.280 --> 00:31:12.280] I know for me, I love coding.
[00:31:12.280 --> 00:31:13.400] I love creating products.
[00:31:13.400 --> 00:31:14.600] I love designing.
[00:31:14.600 --> 00:31:16.440] I love being proud of what I build.
[00:31:16.440 --> 00:31:22.520] I love working on really small things that I can ship and release and be done with it and then move on to the next thing.
[00:31:22.520 --> 00:31:27.480] And so, whatever we do with indie hackers, like ideally, I want it to involve a lot of that.
[00:31:27.480 --> 00:31:35.160] Yeah, look, and to that point, like, I'll match your post with a post that I made on indie hackers called Infinite Entrepreneurship.
[00:31:35.160 --> 00:32:04.960] And in a lot of ways, this is what I think of when I think about indie hackers, which is infinite entrepreneurship is when you set up the operations of your business and like the kinds of products you work on in a way where you're focused a lot more on enjoying the process instead of only trying to like worry about the proceeds, only trying to worry about like you know whether you're going to make a certain amount of revenue at the end of the year, only worrying about if you're going to build something that you can like exit for like life-changing amounts of money.
[00:32:04.960 --> 00:32:06.160] So, what's the process you want?
[00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:10.880] Like, what's like your everyday life that you find amazing?
[00:32:10.880 --> 00:32:12.640] Like, what do you want that to be?
[00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:17.600] I would say, number one, I look at it from like the unit of the day, like you just said.
[00:32:17.600 --> 00:32:20.560] And then I also like looking at it at the unit of the month.
[00:32:20.560 --> 00:32:28.320] Like, I would say that the main thing is I want to enjoy building stuff, which means I want to build a lot of things.
[00:32:28.320 --> 00:32:31.840] Like, I don't want to have our biggest product has been the form.
[00:32:31.840 --> 00:32:38.960] I don't want to have a product that I'm just doing this like slow compounding work on over many, many years, hoping.
[00:32:38.960 --> 00:32:40.080] You don't want a long slog.
[00:32:40.560 --> 00:32:41.520] I don't want a long slog.
[00:32:41.520 --> 00:32:43.360] I want faster small packages.
[00:32:43.680 --> 00:32:43.920] Right.
[00:32:43.920 --> 00:32:45.600] I want faster feedback loops.
[00:32:45.600 --> 00:32:47.280] So, probably small products.
[00:32:47.600 --> 00:32:49.600] Do you want them to generate revenue?
[00:32:49.600 --> 00:32:49.840] Yeah.
[00:32:49.840 --> 00:32:50.640] I want to code.
[00:32:50.880 --> 00:32:54.640] I also want to, you're a faster, better programmer than I am.
[00:32:54.640 --> 00:33:00.480] And so I want to do code work, but like, I think I'm going to have to slowly familiarize myself with the code base.
[00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:02.320] But yeah, I want to do that.
[00:33:02.320 --> 00:33:03.280] So that's a big one, too.
[00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:04.400] Just learning, right?
[00:33:04.400 --> 00:33:06.320] Like, for me, there's stuff I want to learn.
[00:33:06.320 --> 00:33:08.880] And I want to have an excuse to learn those things.
[00:33:08.880 --> 00:33:11.840] Like, we were talking a few weeks ago of me just doing like abstract learning.
[00:33:11.840 --> 00:33:17.120] But the second we get into product ideas, I'm like, okay, like AI is big.
[00:33:17.440 --> 00:33:23.120] There are very obvious ways we could use artificial intelligence to improve some of our solutions to problems we already solve.
[00:33:23.120 --> 00:33:24.080] But I got to learn a lot.
[00:33:24.080 --> 00:33:25.600] Like I got to learn a shitload to do that.
[00:33:25.600 --> 00:33:26.880] And I want to learn.
[00:33:26.200 --> 00:33:27.120] It's funny.
[00:33:26.360 --> 00:33:28.000] I want to have it.
[00:33:27.880 --> 00:33:29.800] It's funny because you want to learn.
[00:33:29.760 --> 00:33:35.560] And I think there are opportunities where we can learn, but it almost might be a requirement.
[00:33:36.840 --> 00:33:48.760] AI, machine learning, the pace of accelerated advancement in that field is almost going to force our hand in a lot of ways, which is a cool position to be in.
[00:33:48.760 --> 00:33:49.400] It's true.
[00:33:49.400 --> 00:34:11.720] It's like, I think the landscape for indie hackers, not the company, but as a people, as a community, as a profession or a career, is completely boosted by artificial intelligence because essentially, like the whole idea of the indie hacker movement is like we've reached the threshold where the average individual can basically create their own company without any help, right?
[00:34:11.720 --> 00:34:25.400] Like you're so empowered with like extremely efficient, high-level programming tools with amazing products and services out there that make it super easy to create a business, to accept payments online, to advertise, et cetera, that you're pretty much just limited by your own creativity.
[00:34:25.400 --> 00:34:29.960] And you don't need like a team of like 50 people just to put a website up like you did in the 90s.
[00:34:29.960 --> 00:34:36.440] And so AI, I think, is just like the latest technology in that trend where, okay, well, now as one person, you can do way more.
[00:34:36.440 --> 00:34:38.440] Like, did you suck at writing yesterday?
[00:34:38.440 --> 00:34:39.000] Guess what?
[00:34:39.000 --> 00:34:40.200] Like, today you're great at writing.
[00:34:40.200 --> 00:34:43.400] You're at least a passable writer because you have GPT-4, right?
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:45.000] Did you suck at brainstorming?
[00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:45.560] Like, guess what?
[00:34:45.560 --> 00:34:52.360] Today, like, you're a pretty decent brainstormer because you've got this almost AI co-founder that can be at your side and help you do everything.
[00:34:52.360 --> 00:34:57.960] And so, I think pretty much every indie hacker is going to have to consider reinventing themselves.
[00:34:57.960 --> 00:35:02.440] And if you're not, you know, in the next three or four years, you're going to be replaced by people who have.
[00:35:02.440 --> 00:35:09.080] We're in a place where I think what we should be doing is probably providing tools to help indie hackers do this, right?
[00:35:09.080 --> 00:35:10.760] To get better at being indie hackers.
[00:35:10.760 --> 00:35:13.240] And so I want to build lots of tools for that too.
[00:35:13.240 --> 00:35:20.080] If you think about all of the things that both you and I seem to want, I mean, we want to build products frequently.
[00:35:20.240 --> 00:35:23.840] So we don't want to have like, you know, big, hulking, slow feedback loop products.
[00:35:23.840 --> 00:35:25.680] We want to learn a lot.
[00:35:25.680 --> 00:35:32.640] Obviously, we want to serve like our natural customer base, which is going to be other indie hackers, other entrepreneurs.
[00:35:33.040 --> 00:35:34.560] So that's another constraint.
[00:35:34.560 --> 00:35:38.000] We need to probably build tools that help other people build.
[00:35:38.320 --> 00:35:43.440] In a lot of ways, I think that we have a good idea of some of the cool things we're going to build.
[00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:45.200] And we've actually started too, right?
[00:35:45.200 --> 00:35:45.840] Like.
[00:35:46.160 --> 00:35:48.160] Yeah, we've got a lot of ideas, right?
[00:35:48.160 --> 00:35:52.880] And the way we've been working is we've divided everything we do into what we call projects.
[00:35:52.960 --> 00:35:57.200] We've got a table on Notion with like a dozen projects that we're working on right now.
[00:35:57.200 --> 00:35:58.800] But mostly they're just internal stuff.
[00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:01.040] Divesting from Stripe, that's a project.
[00:36:01.040 --> 00:36:04.720] Reducing our costs, that's reducing our burden, that's a project.
[00:36:04.960 --> 00:36:08.640] Setting up a new company and setting up payroll and whatever, that's a project.
[00:36:08.880 --> 00:36:20.640] But as we go on, obviously we're going to sort of finish these internal projects and move more toward like user-facing, revenue generating, like actual products versus internal projects.
[00:36:20.640 --> 00:36:22.480] And why don't we just go through some of our ideas here?
[00:36:22.480 --> 00:36:32.000] We don't have a ton of stuff we've started working on now, but we've got like a list of like 15 or so random ideas that have popped into our heads.
[00:36:32.160 --> 00:36:34.160] Maybe like 13 of them are terrible.
[00:36:34.400 --> 00:36:36.000] Maybe one or two of them could be really good.
[00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:38.720] So let's just go through some of these ideas.
[00:36:38.960 --> 00:36:40.080] What's on here?
[00:36:40.080 --> 00:36:42.800] All right, an AI website companion.
[00:36:42.800 --> 00:36:48.400] So you know how you go to a website and they've got that little intercom chat bubble in the bottom right where you can chat with a customer?
[00:36:49.200 --> 00:36:52.080] And you know how like a lot of other websites will also have like onboarding?
[00:36:52.080 --> 00:36:56.800] So like when you sign up, it kind of walks you through a flow and is like, oh, click over here to do this.
[00:36:56.800 --> 00:36:58.000] Click over here to do that, right?
[00:36:58.080 --> 00:37:00.120] Just kind of teaches you how to use the website.
[00:36:59.760 --> 00:37:02.280] Well imagine if this was powered by artificial intelligence.
[00:37:02.520 --> 00:37:10.360] It could essentially ask you questions or learn about you and then give you a customized tour of the website, right?
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:19.320] Different people want to know about different features, want to use different features, and they don't just want to do it when they're onboarding, but they want to do it the entire time they're using your app, right?
[00:37:19.320 --> 00:37:22.920] And so this tool would know things like, when was the last time this user logged in?
[00:37:22.920 --> 00:37:25.400] And maybe even things like, how are they using their mouse, right?
[00:37:25.400 --> 00:37:29.320] Do they seem like a competent computer user or do they seem a little bit slow, right?
[00:37:29.640 --> 00:37:39.240] And just like essentially help anyone use your website in a much more efficient way that's better for them and more lucrative for you as a business owner, I think could be a dope ass product.
[00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:41.080] I don't know how much of it's in our wheelhouse, right?
[00:37:41.080 --> 00:37:44.760] Like how much is that a thing that like helps indie hackers?
[00:37:44.760 --> 00:37:51.400] But it could be because any indie hacker who has a website might want to have a product like that that helps their customers do a better job using their website.
[00:37:51.800 --> 00:37:53.560] Yeah, I mean, I think it could be big.
[00:37:53.560 --> 00:38:05.400] We had someone on the podcast just a few months ago who spoke about how much of a boost they had to their conversions by just actually being better about support, like customer support.
[00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:11.000] And I have to say, like, that's one of the few things that indie hackers tend to really hate.
[00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:14.440] Like, maybe marketing and like customer support, right?
[00:38:14.440 --> 00:38:19.800] Like, ideally, they like to just build a really cool product, have it be as automated as possible.
[00:38:19.800 --> 00:38:21.720] And that's what's going on here, right?
[00:38:21.720 --> 00:38:23.480] Kind of getting that off of your hands.
[00:38:23.480 --> 00:38:23.880] Right.
[00:38:23.880 --> 00:38:25.320] So another one.
[00:38:25.800 --> 00:38:28.280] I think you saw Sampar launched his new business.
[00:38:28.280 --> 00:38:29.320] It's called Hampton.
[00:38:29.320 --> 00:38:37.160] I think it's an exclusive club for high net worth, successful founders to come and join a mastermind of similar founders and pay.
[00:38:37.160 --> 00:38:39.560] Did he say how much money it costs to join Hampton?
[00:38:39.560 --> 00:38:41.960] I think it's probably thousands of dollars a year.
[00:38:42.440 --> 00:38:43.960] I think it's somewhere.
[00:38:44.040 --> 00:38:44.800] There's no price on the website.
[00:38:45.280 --> 00:38:45.840] Yeah, it's extremely.
[00:38:44.680 --> 00:38:48.960] Yeah, no, I think it's let's say 40,000, something like that a year.
[00:38:49.280 --> 00:38:51.440] Well, we have like the other end of the market, right?
[00:38:51.440 --> 00:39:00.960] We have dozens of meetups every month among people who are just getting started and they want to meet other people in person in their cities or maybe just online on Zoom calls and talk to them.
[00:39:00.960 --> 00:39:03.040] But we've never done anything formal like that.
[00:39:03.280 --> 00:39:09.680] And that is not something that I think is going to be replaced by AI anytime soon because it's talking to other people who are like you and sort of following each other's stories.
[00:39:09.680 --> 00:39:20.400] And so we could build something more formal to help match up indie hackers and mastermind groups and little cohorts and actually help them help each other much better than making a post on the forum and helping them.
[00:39:20.560 --> 00:39:22.800] So what do you think about the price point though?
[00:39:22.800 --> 00:39:29.280] I kind of immediately that is a callback to you trying to sell ads to broke companies.
[00:39:29.280 --> 00:39:29.600] Right.
[00:39:29.600 --> 00:39:39.280] So it's like, all right, well, in this situation, we're trying to like, you know, pair together broke indie hackers, some of whom aren't going to be broke, but I mean, a huge amount of indie hackers are aspiring.
[00:39:39.280 --> 00:39:43.120] But I like the idea of having it be high enough that it's something people aspire to, right?
[00:39:43.120 --> 00:39:50.480] I want the average indie hacker who comes in to have milestones and goals, and maybe they want to be big enough to the point where they could get into these mastermind groups.
[00:39:50.480 --> 00:40:17.160] So I don't know, maybe it's like once you've hit 10K MRR or 5K MRR or maybe 1K MRR, at some point, you know, you have qualified enough to be, you know, well on your way to being like a there's like subgroups on the forum that you can't access unless you have like an indie hackers product that has like stripe verified revenue of xyz right then you get invited to these like super secret swanky meetups.
[00:40:17.160 --> 00:40:18.040] Yeah.
[00:40:18.360 --> 00:40:22.440] How do you feel about all that, like the the sort of status bait stuff, right?
[00:40:22.440 --> 00:40:26.600] Like Sam called his thing hampton because it's like it sounds luxurious, right?
[00:40:26.600 --> 00:40:28.680] And it's like extremely exclusive.
[00:40:28.680 --> 00:40:30.520] And this is how every other club is on Earth, too.
[00:40:30.520 --> 00:40:31.960] That's like that's super successful.
[00:40:31.960 --> 00:40:33.640] Like Harvard, very exclusive.
[00:40:33.640 --> 00:40:34.360] It's hard to get in.
[00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:39.080] And that increases the value of Harvard because they get to select for the best people and everybody wants to go there.
[00:40:39.320 --> 00:40:40.280] Why Accommodator?
[00:40:40.280 --> 00:40:41.000] Same thing, right?
[00:40:41.000 --> 00:40:43.080] Like very exclusive, very hard to get in.
[00:40:43.080 --> 00:40:45.160] They associate with big name, successful people.
[00:40:45.160 --> 00:40:49.160] And so it raises your status to sort of be a part of it.
[00:40:49.160 --> 00:40:50.680] I feel like I've kind of come to terms with it.
[00:40:50.680 --> 00:41:00.840] I mean, the idea that you're getting at is that, you know, the superficial, the cover story is, hey, the value of coming here is that you're going to get these really functional benefits.
[00:41:00.840 --> 00:41:04.920] If you join this mastermind, you are going to make more money.
[00:41:04.920 --> 00:41:10.200] But let's be honest, a huge part of the value proposition is like you want status.
[00:41:10.200 --> 00:41:12.280] You want to be part of this super exclusive group.
[00:41:12.280 --> 00:41:16.120] And then you might feel like, well, that's kind of a bullshit value prop.
[00:41:16.120 --> 00:41:21.720] But if you actually know yourself, if you're self-aware, you realize like we like status.
[00:41:21.720 --> 00:41:23.560] We like being part of groups.
[00:41:23.560 --> 00:41:25.240] It's part of the human experience.
[00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:29.080] I don't really think it's bullshit as long as you have like eyes wide open about it.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:32.120] There's a good quote from Groucho Marx.
[00:41:32.200 --> 00:41:35.400] It says, I refuse to be part of any club that would have me as a member.
[00:41:35.400 --> 00:41:40.840] And I think that's kind of the vibe, you know, like, ah, shit, if it's good enough for me to get in, like, maybe it's not good enough.
[00:41:40.840 --> 00:41:41.240] I don't know.
[00:41:41.240 --> 00:41:44.840] I also feel that that's kind of at odds with our culture, right?
[00:41:44.840 --> 00:41:48.360] Entie Hackers has always been built on transparency.
[00:41:48.360 --> 00:41:52.920] It has always been built on kind of helping people get started.
[00:41:52.920 --> 00:42:02.040] And so that is a business idea that I don't think jives with, it's not the one that we would be the best at, that would be like the most congruent with the rest of our culture and what we do.
[00:42:02.040 --> 00:42:04.600] And so it's an interesting one, but I'm not sure about it.
[00:42:04.600 --> 00:42:23.200] At the same time, though, I'll say one word on it: is like a huge cohort of people that listen to us that are just getting started or super happy, but then a lot of people who are like further down have made a lot more revenue and they're dealing with problems of like you know bigger growth phases of companies, like they get kind of turned off by it.
[00:42:23.200 --> 00:42:25.520] And then, likewise, in reverse, right?
[00:42:25.520 --> 00:42:39.680] And so I kind of like the idea of like if we were to have something like this where there's almost like a growth-based cohort model, then I think it's not necessarily against like the ethos of indie hackers.
[00:42:39.680 --> 00:42:45.280] It's it's almost like a way of segmenting the information that we deliver to different people.
[00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:46.240] Right, right.
[00:42:46.560 --> 00:42:48.400] So some other ideas on this list.
[00:42:48.400 --> 00:42:50.160] Let's go some of the crazier ones.
[00:42:51.200 --> 00:42:53.120] A custom podcast player.
[00:42:53.120 --> 00:42:54.400] The idea is very simple.
[00:42:54.400 --> 00:43:02.480] There's a bunch of indie hackers and people in our space who have podcasts that help people with business and marketing and sales and hiring and all this stuff.
[00:43:02.480 --> 00:43:04.400] Copywriting, social media growth.
[00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:14.320] And if we could curate some of the best podcast episodes or best podcast shows, put them into one app where you can essentially live as an indie hacker, and we can do a lot of cool stuff.
[00:43:14.320 --> 00:43:15.440] We'll be a marketing channel.
[00:43:15.440 --> 00:43:20.160] Anybody in this space who had a podcast would want to be featured on this app.
[00:43:20.160 --> 00:43:21.440] It would be good for consumption.
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:28.080] If I'm going on a run or going to do chores and I'm an indie hacker and I know I want to listen to something productive, I don't have to do a ton of discovery, right?
[00:43:28.080 --> 00:43:33.520] I just open up the Indie Hackers Podcast app and I know there's going to be good episodes at the top of that.
[00:43:33.520 --> 00:43:35.520] And we could also tie it into our community.
[00:43:35.520 --> 00:43:37.200] Right now, podcasts are very stale.
[00:43:37.200 --> 00:43:44.640] It's very hard to get feedback on them because most podcast players don't support things like upvoting or comments or emailing the people who are behind it.
[00:43:44.640 --> 00:43:55.200] So we could bake that into the app too, off the back of all the other code we already have that powers our community, and essentially make it so that anybody with an indie hackers account can like socially participate in this podcast medium, which has been done before.
[00:43:55.600 --> 00:43:59.120] So, this reminds me of Crunchyroll.
[00:43:59.120 --> 00:44:03.160] And until I thought about that, I didn't really understand this idea too much.
[00:44:03.160 --> 00:44:18.440] But Crunchyroll, you love anime, and Crunchyroll, you probably can do a better job of explaining it than I can, but it's a like one-stop shop for people who love different animes to go and like see all of their shows kind of in one place.
[00:44:18.440 --> 00:44:21.000] And there's kind of a community around it.
[00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:22.280] It's a streaming service, right?
[00:44:22.280 --> 00:44:35.480] Like any streaming service, whether it's Netflix or Disney Plus or Hulu or Crunchyroll, like you create a bunch of shows, you put them all together, you charge a subscription fee, and then people go there and talk to each other and watch the same shows.
[00:44:35.480 --> 00:44:38.760] And I think that that is sorely missing in the world of podcasting.
[00:44:38.760 --> 00:44:40.680] I'm not sure it could work, right?
[00:44:40.680 --> 00:44:44.360] Because I think people, when they're podcasting, it's a very different medium than video.
[00:44:44.360 --> 00:44:46.600] They're not, you know, at the couch and comfortable.
[00:44:46.600 --> 00:44:53.000] They're usually standing up, they're on the go, they're doing chores, they're driving, they're going for a run.
[00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:58.200] Like, I did a poll once where I asked people, you know, what do you do when you listen to a podcast?
[00:44:58.200 --> 00:45:01.400] And, like, I think, like, 1% of people said, like, nothing.
[00:45:01.400 --> 00:45:04.040] I just sit there and listen to my podcast like a psycho.
[00:45:04.040 --> 00:45:05.480] Like, no one, no one does that.
[00:45:05.480 --> 00:45:09.400] And so I'm not sure if a streaming service would work, but it could.
[00:45:09.400 --> 00:45:21.720] Well, but, well, but let me just back this up slightly and say, like, when I think about like a podcast that just has a bunch of indie hackers type episodes in that feed, and I go, what problem is this solving?
[00:45:22.200 --> 00:45:34.360] I think a lot about like, oh, you know, sort of normally when I go, when I seek podcasts, I go to like, you know, Google podcast or Apple Podcasts, where it's just the entire list of all of the different options.
[00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:38.600] I thought, you know, like what I'm looking for is, you know, entrepreneurship content.
[00:45:38.600 --> 00:45:44.200] Then going to these like universal feeds creates all of this extra friction.
[00:45:44.200 --> 00:45:46.320] Like, there are so many more decisions that I need to make.
[00:45:46.320 --> 00:45:49.200] Whereas if I go to crunchyroll.com, it's curated, right?
[00:45:44.840 --> 00:45:50.640] Like, it's like, this is the stuff I want.
[00:45:50.960 --> 00:45:52.880] Like, narrow down the decision-making for me.
[00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:57.600] Like, help me get the, like, specifically, like, help me find out what's going on in the world of anime.
[00:45:57.600 --> 00:45:58.880] And so, that's in a sense.
[00:45:59.120 --> 00:46:01.120] So, the problem that it helps is discovery, right?
[00:46:01.120 --> 00:46:04.400] The discovery is, hey, if I go on iTunes, it's going to be shitty.
[00:46:04.720 --> 00:46:06.320] They have the business category.
[00:46:06.320 --> 00:46:07.840] How do I know this appeals to me?
[00:46:07.840 --> 00:46:17.440] Versus, like, hey, if I go on Indie Hackers' podcast app, I can discover new shows reliably well because it's curated and crafted by people who are like me, who know what I want specifically for me, right?
[00:46:17.440 --> 00:46:20.720] And we could do a bunch more stuff where we actually listen to shows, review the shows.
[00:46:20.720 --> 00:46:21.360] That's exactly right.
[00:46:22.080 --> 00:46:25.280] How many times on Twitter do you see, like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur?
[00:46:25.280 --> 00:46:29.840] Like, how many, yeah, how many like good podcasts are there like for entrepreneurs, right?
[00:46:29.840 --> 00:46:33.040] And, like, people will give like a list of like seven episodes, right?
[00:46:33.040 --> 00:46:34.400] But this doesn't seem like a small project.
[00:46:34.400 --> 00:46:38.000] Like, this isn't something that we build in a couple months and then set it and forget it.
[00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:42.320] Like, just growing that and maintaining it is a huge business that would take forever.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:43.600] And the numbers might not be there.
[00:46:43.600 --> 00:46:44.160] There might not be.
[00:46:44.480 --> 00:46:48.640] Yeah, like, the risk to reward ratio isn't really super thrilling on that one to me.
[00:46:48.640 --> 00:46:50.160] Like, just the time, man.
[00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:58.720] Like, again, like, time to try to grow it, to build it, to recruit people to share their podcasts on it, or, you know, you could do it really slow.
[00:46:58.720 --> 00:47:01.120] Like, you could be very unambitious at first.
[00:47:01.120 --> 00:47:05.440] Like, here is an app just for the Indie Hackers podcast.
[00:47:05.440 --> 00:47:10.240] And if you like the Indie Hackers podcast, you come in here, you see all our episodes, and you can comment on them, and that's it, right?
[00:47:10.240 --> 00:47:16.200] And then we add a seco

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": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
category.
[00:46:06.320 --> 00:46:07.840] How do I know this appeals to me?
[00:46:07.840 --> 00:46:17.440] Versus, like, hey, if I go on Indie Hackers' podcast app, I can discover new shows reliably well because it's curated and crafted by people who are like me, who know what I want specifically for me, right?
[00:46:17.440 --> 00:46:20.720] And we could do a bunch more stuff where we actually listen to shows, review the shows.
[00:46:20.720 --> 00:46:21.360] That's exactly right.
[00:46:22.080 --> 00:46:25.280] How many times on Twitter do you see, like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur?
[00:46:25.280 --> 00:46:29.840] Like, how many, yeah, how many like good podcasts are there like for entrepreneurs, right?
[00:46:29.840 --> 00:46:33.040] And, like, people will give like a list of like seven episodes, right?
[00:46:33.040 --> 00:46:34.400] But this doesn't seem like a small project.
[00:46:34.400 --> 00:46:38.000] Like, this isn't something that we build in a couple months and then set it and forget it.
[00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:42.320] Like, just growing that and maintaining it is a huge business that would take forever.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:43.600] And the numbers might not be there.
[00:46:43.600 --> 00:46:44.160] There might not be.
[00:46:44.480 --> 00:46:48.640] Yeah, like, the risk to reward ratio isn't really super thrilling on that one to me.
[00:46:48.640 --> 00:46:50.160] Like, just the time, man.
[00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:58.720] Like, again, like, time to try to grow it, to build it, to recruit people to share their podcasts on it, or, you know, you could do it really slow.
[00:46:58.720 --> 00:47:01.120] Like, you could be very unambitious at first.
[00:47:01.120 --> 00:47:05.440] Like, here is an app just for the Indie Hackers podcast.
[00:47:05.440 --> 00:47:10.240] And if you like the Indie Hackers podcast, you come in here, you see all our episodes, and you can comment on them, and that's it, right?
[00:47:10.240 --> 00:47:16.200] And then we add a second podcast, and a third, and a fourth, and just grow super slowly and gradually add features again.
[00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:21.600] Again, it's not like a month-long project, but it's like something that can be slow and like a little bit unassuming and get bigger.
[00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:27.840] And so, really, I think the biggest concern is, like, is there enough demand on the consumer side to actually want an app like this?
[00:47:27.840 --> 00:47:34.520] Number one, the demand might not be there, but then even if there is a demand, I'm not confident enough and ways to monetize it.
[00:47:29.840 --> 00:47:36.440] Most streaming services charge a subscription fee.
[00:47:36.680 --> 00:47:39.240] What are people going to pay like 10 or 15 bucks a month for something like this?
[00:47:39.240 --> 00:47:40.440] Like, maybe not, right?
[00:47:40.440 --> 00:47:40.760] Maybe.
[00:47:40.760 --> 00:47:42.120] Or maybe we charge them a premium.
[00:47:42.120 --> 00:47:47.640] Maybe it's like, okay, we're when you're the mom and pop shop, when you're the little guy, you can't afford to be cheap, right?
[00:47:47.640 --> 00:47:51.000] Being cheap is a luxury of having economies of scale and being a huge business.
[00:47:51.000 --> 00:47:53.320] We just have to maybe make a premium service.
[00:47:53.320 --> 00:47:58.120] You could also think about charging the people who are on the network if it has enough usage and enough advertising.
[00:47:58.120 --> 00:48:06.520] Like, if I was an indie hacker starting my own podcast for other indie hackers, I might pay a hundred bucks a month to get it in front of other people and have it recommended because it's basically advertising.
[00:48:06.520 --> 00:48:08.600] And so, you know, it's a marketplace.
[00:48:08.600 --> 00:48:10.440] You're bringing people together with content.
[00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:11.960] There's a possibility there.
[00:48:11.960 --> 00:48:14.040] But why don't you pick an idea from our list?
[00:48:14.280 --> 00:48:15.160] Pick a weird one.
[00:48:15.320 --> 00:48:15.800] How about this?
[00:48:15.800 --> 00:48:17.000] How about the social token?
[00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:19.720] Because we talked about this a couple of years ago.
[00:48:20.280 --> 00:48:24.200] This is another one where trying to figure out how to do it would require a lot of learning.
[00:48:24.200 --> 00:48:30.600] But essentially, I just really like the idea of social tokens, which are like, it's almost like a crypto version of Disney dollars, right?
[00:48:30.600 --> 00:48:37.080] You go to Disney and they give you Disney dollars, and you can use Disney dollars to buy things at a discount compared to normal dollars.
[00:48:37.080 --> 00:48:39.560] And it works because a lot of people don't spend their Disney dollars, right?
[00:48:39.560 --> 00:48:41.000] They keep them as commemorative tokens.
[00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:42.120] They take them home.
[00:48:42.120 --> 00:48:48.760] And so even if Disney sells $1,000 with the Disney dollars, maybe $200 of that just goes home with people and never gets spent on anything.
[00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:54.040] And the rest, you know, yeah, they can sell stuff at a discount because it's subsidized by how many Disney dollars don't get spent.
[00:48:54.040 --> 00:49:00.440] And so I like the idea of having a closed community and having our own sort of currency or token that's like, you know, the indie hackers coin.
[00:49:00.440 --> 00:49:06.840] And people could use that to do things like boost your posts to the top of indie hackers or buy ads or support each other's projects or products.
[00:49:06.840 --> 00:49:09.240] You know, maybe even invest in each other's products.
[00:49:09.480 --> 00:49:11.560] But it's all done through this crypto token.
[00:49:11.560 --> 00:49:19.600] And what's cool about a crypto token is, unlike a Disney dollar, like nobody's going to take it home and frame it and give it to their kids as a souvenir, but like you can kind of invest in it.
[00:49:14.920 --> 00:49:21.040] You can kind of speculate on it.
[00:49:21.120 --> 00:49:25.840] You can kind of hold it and watch the price increase as the value and the popularity of the community increases.
[00:49:25.840 --> 00:49:35.040] So you could buy a whole bunch of indie hackers dollars because you believe in indie hackers as a community and then sell them later on for more as other people believe in the price goes up.
[00:49:35.040 --> 00:49:40.560] Now, the challenge with this is that it's like very tricky from a legal perspective.
[00:49:40.560 --> 00:49:42.560] What you're doing is you're issuing a security.
[00:49:42.800 --> 00:49:46.240] If you issue a security, you need to file that with the SEC.
[00:49:46.240 --> 00:49:50.240] A lot of people have gotten in trouble for not doing this well, but it's actually possible to do.
[00:49:50.240 --> 00:49:52.960] I mean, you can file and register your security with the SEC.
[00:49:52.960 --> 00:49:56.400] And I think some people have done that for their tokens and it's perfectly legal and then it's fine.
[00:49:56.400 --> 00:50:00.240] And there's also a lot of exceptions to whether or not you might not need to file.
[00:50:00.240 --> 00:50:07.920] Like if you place certain limitations on what you're going to do, like you only allow a certain number of people to buy your security or whatever, you can apply for an exception.
[00:50:07.920 --> 00:50:09.360] So I think it's a fun idea.
[00:50:09.360 --> 00:50:10.560] I think it'd be cool.
[00:50:10.560 --> 00:50:14.160] I think it'd be really cool just to let indie hackers invest in each other's companies.
[00:50:14.160 --> 00:50:17.680] And that might be easier to do with crypto than with dollars.
[00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:20.160] And so that's one of the crazier ideas out there.
[00:50:20.160 --> 00:50:21.120] I don't know if we're going to do it.
[00:50:21.120 --> 00:50:22.240] You know, it's too hard.
[00:50:22.240 --> 00:50:23.600] There's a lot of reputational risk.
[00:50:23.600 --> 00:50:26.880] You don't want to release some crypto coin that tanks and everybody loses their money.
[00:50:26.880 --> 00:50:31.360] But I think that we have a real asset, which is an actual community that's not just some random Discord chat server.
[00:50:31.520 --> 00:50:33.200] See, dude, that's the thing.
[00:50:33.200 --> 00:50:34.000] That's the thing.
[00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:40.720] Because we have so many things on our site where we can actually have this currency be exchanged for real forms of value.
[00:50:40.720 --> 00:50:44.080] Say, you know, if you have a certain amount of token, then you get more points.
[00:50:44.080 --> 00:50:56.240] Or your posts get boosted more when you make them, or like, if you have a product page on the directory, that page like gets promoted more, or like, you know, gets a signal boost when you post a milestone to it.
[00:50:56.240 --> 00:50:58.560] You can invest in other people's products or whatever.
[00:50:58.560 --> 00:51:00.920] You can give it actual functionality that is useful.
[00:51:00.920 --> 00:51:05.080] It doesn't have to just be the speculative thing that people just if it was all greater full theory.
[00:50:59.840 --> 00:51:07.000] I would be like, let's nix this in the butt.
[00:51:07.480 --> 00:51:09.080] Yeah, yeah, feel great about it.
[00:51:09.080 --> 00:51:10.120] Reddit has an alternative.
[00:51:10.120 --> 00:51:18.120] Reddit has Reddit Gold, where essentially, like, instead of just upvoting somebody's comment, you can basically, I think, buy Reddit gold for them.
[00:51:18.120 --> 00:51:21.960] And when they have Reddit Gold, they can use it to get extra privileges.
[00:51:21.960 --> 00:51:23.480] I think they get some special subreddit.
[00:51:23.480 --> 00:51:23.960] It's just cool.
[00:51:23.960 --> 00:51:25.400] It's a cool way to show that you appreciate people.
[00:51:25.400 --> 00:51:26.840] So there's a functionality to it.
[00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:29.720] You know that by buying it, you're supporting Reddit.
[00:51:29.880 --> 00:51:31.720] So we could do something like that, right?
[00:51:31.800 --> 00:51:32.920] Has nothing to do with crypto.
[00:51:32.920 --> 00:51:35.160] It's nothing to do with issuing a security.
[00:51:35.160 --> 00:51:35.960] Nobody's investing.
[00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:39.080] So you sort of stay away from all that stuff, but people still can support the site.
[00:51:39.080 --> 00:51:46.520] But I do really like the idea of having an actual token that people can use to sort of de facto invest in ND hackers.
[00:51:46.520 --> 00:51:49.080] And so that's one of the crazier ideas on the list.
[00:51:49.080 --> 00:51:54.200] And I think if we did a lot of the other ideas, there would be more functionality that a token could be used for.
[00:51:54.360 --> 00:52:02.360] If we had mastermind groups, you could maybe use tokens to be able to speak first or to be able to start your own mastermind group or to get a discount on those types of things.
[00:52:02.360 --> 00:52:05.640] And so that might be something we do like last.
[00:52:05.960 --> 00:52:07.000] What else is up here?
[00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:09.720] So we've got substack competitor.
[00:52:10.040 --> 00:52:11.960] Yeah, we already have that.
[00:52:11.960 --> 00:52:12.600] We already kind of have that.
[00:52:12.680 --> 00:52:13.320] We already have that.
[00:52:13.320 --> 00:52:17.880] You can create a series on ND hackers, which essentially is a fancy word for a newsletter.
[00:52:17.880 --> 00:52:21.640] And you can write posts on indie hackers that go out to the people who subscribe to you.
[00:52:21.640 --> 00:52:24.760] And when they see your post, they'll have a little prompt to subscribe to your newsletter.
[00:52:24.760 --> 00:52:31.880] And so we already have a few dozen people who've had these series on indie hackers for how long?
[00:52:31.880 --> 00:52:32.760] Like two years?
[00:52:32.760 --> 00:52:35.720] It's kind of an idea that we kind of started, but we aborted.
[00:52:35.720 --> 00:52:37.640] But it's cool.
[00:52:37.640 --> 00:52:40.360] I mean, we could even convert people's followers into email subscribers.
[00:52:40.360 --> 00:52:42.920] We could just ping their followers and say, hey, do you want to be an email subscriber?
[00:52:42.920 --> 00:52:46.640] I have something like 200,000 followers on indie hackers, like more than I have on Twitter.
[00:52:46.640 --> 00:52:50.960] Like, that would be a pretty badass newsletter for me to have right out of the gate.
[00:52:50.960 --> 00:52:51.280] Okay.
[00:52:51.520 --> 00:52:53.840] Dozens of other people are in similar situations.
[00:52:53.840 --> 00:52:55.600] But then talk about the revenue side.
[00:52:55.600 --> 00:53:00.640] Like, how much Substack isn't like a revenue generating machine, is it?
[00:53:00.640 --> 00:53:01.280] Let me see.
[00:53:02.800 --> 00:53:07.840] It had a revenue of only $9 million in 2021, sky-high valuation.
[00:53:07.840 --> 00:53:23.200] One of the most often talked about issues that Substack has with trying to monetize is obviously they have a very small number of their writers who bring in a lion's share of their overall revenue.
[00:53:23.200 --> 00:53:33.680] And yet, when a writer on Substack starts to really, really grow their subscriber base and become like a hit, they start going, like, wait, why am I going to go elsewhere?
[00:53:33.680 --> 00:53:38.160] Yeah, why am I like giving all my money, like giving 12% or whatever it is to Substack?
[00:53:38.160 --> 00:53:46.400] So, in terms of like this being like a good business, but you know, then taking a step back, how much money would we really need it to make?
[00:53:46.400 --> 00:53:51.120] There's this theory that was proposed a while back that everything in business is either bundling or unbundling, right?
[00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:58.080] Bundling, you're either combining a bunch of different things together, like a Walmart or an Amazon and putting it all in one place for convenience, or unbundling.
[00:53:58.080 --> 00:54:02.800] You're taking something that was all stuck together and you're pulling it out and making it more specific and more niche, right?
[00:54:02.800 --> 00:54:06.880] And so, what we're talking about is like essentially unbundling Substack.
[00:54:06.880 --> 00:54:08.000] Hey, Substack's cool.
[00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:10.560] You can find any newsletter on any topic there.
[00:54:10.560 --> 00:54:15.920] But what if you want a newsletter specifically in this indie hackers entrepreneurship tech business niche, right?
[00:54:15.920 --> 00:54:22.240] We can curate a better selection of newsletters there and curate a better selection of readers for people who want to write that content.
[00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:30.000] So, in a way, it's like unbundling Substack in the same way that people have unbundled Reddit by creating entire businesses based on a single subreddit.
[00:54:30.280 --> 00:54:36.920] The question that you're asking is: is Substack a big and substantial enough business to be worth unbundling, right?
[00:54:36.920 --> 00:54:39.240] Like, you typically want to unbundle huge things.
[00:54:39.240 --> 00:54:42.680] So, if you take off a little piece of that, you could build something pretty big yourself.
[00:54:43.800 --> 00:54:47.000] Do we want a slice of a slice is what you're saying?
[00:54:47.240 --> 00:54:48.040] Exactly, exactly.
[00:54:48.040 --> 00:54:52.680] I don't know about you, but I have kind of a number in mind of how much money I want to make for my own projects.
[00:54:52.680 --> 00:54:55.880] My number is $3 million a year.
[00:54:55.880 --> 00:54:58.680] It's a sort of a pie-in-the-sky goal to aim towards.
[00:54:58.680 --> 00:55:00.120] I don't care that much about hitting it.
[00:55:00.120 --> 00:55:03.800] I'm not like worked up over hitting it because I don't want to feel bad if I'm not making progress.
[00:55:03.800 --> 00:55:10.360] But I do want to make incremental progress towards getting there over the next five or 10 or 20 years and however long it takes.
[00:55:10.360 --> 00:55:13.320] And it doesn't need to all come from one place.
[00:55:13.320 --> 00:55:14.920] You don't have any deadline?
[00:55:15.320 --> 00:55:16.760] That is the whole point for me.
[00:55:16.760 --> 00:55:18.440] The point is to make it long term.
[00:55:18.440 --> 00:55:23.960] When I first got into entrepreneurship, I had a very airy fairy goal of like, I want to be a success.
[00:55:23.960 --> 00:55:24.920] What the hell does that mean?
[00:55:24.920 --> 00:55:25.720] I didn't know what that meant.
[00:55:25.720 --> 00:55:29.560] It wasn't specific, but I knew that I would know it when I got it, right?
[00:55:29.560 --> 00:55:32.360] I want to sell a company or start an impactful company.
[00:55:32.600 --> 00:55:33.560] I want to make a lot of money.
[00:55:33.560 --> 00:55:36.840] I want people around me to be like, Cortland set out to do a thing and he did it, right?
[00:55:36.840 --> 00:55:38.920] And so there's this vague goal of being a success.
[00:55:38.920 --> 00:55:43.000] And it turns out, like, as you said earlier in your post about infinite entrepreneurship, right?
[00:55:43.000 --> 00:55:44.520] It's not really about the destination.
[00:55:44.520 --> 00:55:46.280] It's really about the journey.
[00:55:46.280 --> 00:55:50.600] But the farther away your destination is, the longer you have to go on your journey.
[00:55:50.600 --> 00:55:57.880] And so for me, the point isn't to like, I need to hit something next year and then leverage that to get to the next level because I don't have any grand ambition by that.
[00:55:57.880 --> 00:55:59.960] Like, I already kind of accomplished my main goal.
[00:55:59.960 --> 00:56:11.640] I just want to have a good excuse to do the things that I love on a day-to-day basis and then something to look forward to, some goal that I can incrementally inch my way towards because I like watching numbers go up.
[00:56:11.720 --> 00:56:13.160] It's as simple as that.
[00:56:13.160 --> 00:56:14.520] I think I like growth.
[00:56:14.520 --> 00:56:18.720] So, I mean, look, my goal is a dollar.
[00:56:14.680 --> 00:56:20.080] I want to make a dollar.
[00:56:14.840 --> 00:56:21.840] We make zero currently.
[00:56:22.400 --> 00:56:26.480] I want to get our ad engine churning and going.
[00:56:27.200 --> 00:56:29.600] But I don't want to do that by like two years from now.
[00:56:29.600 --> 00:56:32.400] I want to do that probably by the end of the month.
[00:56:32.400 --> 00:56:36.080] Like, I want us to see some revenue coming in.
[00:56:36.080 --> 00:56:39.600] And then when I get there, I'm going to push the goalpost back, right?
[00:56:39.600 --> 00:56:40.800] And I'm going to think about the next thing.
[00:56:40.800 --> 00:56:48.320] And then I'm going to think about one of our products that we're already working on, making real money, making subscription money, right?
[00:56:48.320 --> 00:56:52.880] And then I'm going to take stock where I'm at, and then I'm probably going to raise the bar from there.
[00:56:52.880 --> 00:56:53.360] Yeah.
[00:56:53.360 --> 00:56:56.560] So you want to go incremental not necessarily have a grand plan, right?
[00:56:56.560 --> 00:56:59.920] You want to sort of fall into the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
[00:56:59.920 --> 00:57:00.880] And I like that too.
[00:57:00.880 --> 00:57:03.360] I think as people, we carry around a lot of baggage, right?
[00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:09.360] If you think about like a caveman, like how much baggage did like, you know, an ancient nomadic human have, right?
[00:57:09.360 --> 00:57:11.680] You really only had like what you could carry with you.
[00:57:11.680 --> 00:57:13.920] You didn't have a mortgage.
[00:57:13.920 --> 00:57:15.280] You didn't have a car.
[00:57:15.280 --> 00:57:17.440] You didn't have a million possessions.
[00:57:17.440 --> 00:57:21.600] And so your mind was always kind of light and you kind of felt free and you kind of felt unencumbered.
[00:57:21.600 --> 00:57:23.600] Whereas today, like all of us have a million things.
[00:57:23.600 --> 00:57:24.560] We have a million worries.
[00:57:24.560 --> 00:57:25.680] We have a million concerns.
[00:57:25.680 --> 00:57:27.200] I've got a million things to do.
[00:57:27.200 --> 00:57:34.640] I've got a whole to-do list in my mind that I'm not even consciously aware of, but it's like shit that's on my plate and a calendar full of things that's just scheduled out into the future.
[00:57:34.640 --> 00:57:44.800] And I think that's like that kind of life, modern life, so to speak, just ends up having a background of just being ambiently stressful because we have so much baggage.
[00:57:44.800 --> 00:57:55.440] And so I like the idea of having a business and doing exactly what you say, where it's like, yeah, maybe we have this giant grab bag of ideas, but we don't have some master plan of step one, step two, step three, and the whole next 10 years mapped out, right?
[00:57:55.440 --> 00:57:57.680] We have, hey, this is what we're working on today.
[00:57:57.680 --> 00:58:02.760] And, you know, next month when we're done with this, we'll look in the grab bag and figure out the next thing to work on.
[00:58:02.760 --> 00:58:08.280] And we're never really encumbered because we're always just working on this one thing at this one time.
[00:58:08.280 --> 00:58:12.200] I think sounds really peaceful and really attractive.
[00:58:12.200 --> 00:58:17.160] I never want a week to show up and to think, oh, fuck.
[00:58:17.480 --> 00:58:20.760] This week, I have to do like XYZ.
[00:58:20.760 --> 00:58:25.880] Like we have to, you know, hit a certain revenue bar or we like, or, you know, it's a Tuesday.
[00:58:25.880 --> 00:58:28.920] Oh, shit, on Tuesday, I have to do this thing.
[00:58:28.920 --> 00:58:35.240] I like the idea of getting away from that and through one lens that almost looks like I don't want to work hard.
[00:58:35.240 --> 00:58:37.400] But I work really hard.
[00:58:37.400 --> 00:58:50.440] I just tend to work the hardest and be the most fulfilled when I feel like I'm the one pushing, you know, the work forward as opposed to being pulled by external requirements that are placed on me.
[00:58:50.440 --> 00:58:58.840] And I think the easiest way to fall into that is to sort of arbitrarily place a bunch of deadlines on your head that aren't connected to anything real.
[00:58:58.840 --> 00:59:02.600] So what can people expect from indie hackers going forward?
[00:59:02.600 --> 00:59:03.720] We're now indie.
[00:59:03.720 --> 00:59:05.080] We're outside of Stripe.
[00:59:05.080 --> 00:59:08.120] Obviously, we don't make any money, so we have to make money.
[00:59:08.440 --> 00:59:10.840] We also have incentive too because the sky's the limit.
[00:59:11.240 --> 00:59:12.760] How's that going to change indie hackers?
[00:59:13.400 --> 00:59:14.680] I guess what should people expect?
[00:59:14.680 --> 00:59:16.200] We're going to be building in public.
[00:59:16.200 --> 00:59:17.880] We're going to be transparent.
[00:59:17.880 --> 00:59:20.840] We're going to be like sharing what the hell we're doing and how much money we make.
[00:59:20.840 --> 00:59:23.240] We're going to be like experimenting in public.
[00:59:23.240 --> 00:59:26.200] We're going to be working on a lot of small projects.
[00:59:26.200 --> 00:59:27.720] We're going to be publishing our revenue numbers.
[00:59:27.720 --> 00:59:29.400] We're going to be sharing what we're up to.
[00:59:29.640 --> 00:59:31.080] Hopefully we'll talk about everything.
[00:59:31.080 --> 00:59:32.360] Anyway, dude, I'm excited.
[00:59:32.600 --> 00:59:34.200] I'm happy recording this episode with you.
[00:59:34.200 --> 00:59:43.160] Maybe we'll do more episodes with just you and me since now we have a lot of our own stuff to talk about that's like a little bit more transparent and ambitious instead of just doing all interviews too i like i like doing it this way.
[00:59:43.160 --> 00:59:55.600] Yeah, it's way more chill it's almost more like just the meetings that we have on a daily basis exactly exactly all right dude good talking and let's do it let's go let's do it i'm excited

Prompt 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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

[00:00:06.880 --> 00:00:07.680] We're out, dude.
[00:00:07.680 --> 00:00:08.560] It's over.
[00:00:08.560 --> 00:00:12.800] Indie Hackers is officially independent again.
[00:00:12.800 --> 00:00:14.320] We're our own company.
[00:00:14.320 --> 00:00:15.360] We own it.
[00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:17.840] And we're no longer owned by Stripe.
[00:00:18.640 --> 00:00:20.240] Hearing it, hearing it out loud.
[00:00:20.240 --> 00:00:22.080] It just feels different.
[00:00:22.080 --> 00:00:23.760] But how do you feel?
[00:00:23.760 --> 00:00:25.280] Do you actually feel any different?
[00:00:25.280 --> 00:00:26.960] Yeah, I feel great.
[00:00:26.960 --> 00:00:30.720] I mean, obviously, this is not like a decision we just made yesterday.
[00:00:30.720 --> 00:00:34.080] This has been months in the making.
[00:00:34.080 --> 00:00:35.440] But now it's actually real.
[00:00:35.440 --> 00:00:39.120] Like, it means we no longer get our awesome paychecks anymore.
[00:00:39.120 --> 00:00:42.800] We no longer have an awesome, cushy monthly budget.
[00:00:42.800 --> 00:00:46.080] I think my last paycheck hit my account last Friday, and that's it.
[00:00:46.240 --> 00:00:54.480] We now have a business that does $0 in revenue that's burning probably $10,000 a month, not even including our salaries.
[00:00:54.800 --> 00:00:56.960] But on the flip side, we no longer have a boss.
[00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:03.120] We have a company, a Delaware C-Corp to be exact, and we can do whatever the hell we want with it.
[00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:07.600] We are officially ND hackers for the first time in six years.
[00:01:07.600 --> 00:01:08.560] So I'm excited.
[00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:12.320] The Indie Hackers founders have actually become indie hackers again.
[00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:12.880] Yeah.
[00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:14.480] Dude, it's funny.
[00:01:14.480 --> 00:01:19.680] You say like, you know, we no longer have the cushy paycheck coming in.
[00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:24.960] And I honestly, I don't know if, I don't know how you feel about this, but it's just my personality.
[00:01:24.960 --> 00:01:26.480] Dude, I love that.
[00:01:26.480 --> 00:01:30.480] I wrote a post on Indie Hackers like, I don't know, a couple of, like a month ago.
[00:01:30.480 --> 00:01:33.040] I think it was titled Hunt Before You Eat.
[00:01:33.360 --> 00:01:38.960] Like, I love the idea of having real intrinsic motivation to do things.
[00:01:38.960 --> 00:01:41.600] I don't want to be out on the street, but...
[00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:44.160] I don't know if I can say that I love not getting paid.
[00:01:44.160 --> 00:01:46.880] I actually quite like getting paid, but I like earning it.
[00:01:46.880 --> 00:01:52.320] I like knowing that it's coming from my own efforts, knowing that nobody can take it away from me.
[00:01:52.320 --> 00:01:56.000] And we're now in the position that every indie hacker is in, where we have to do that.
[00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:57.200] And we've been here before.
[00:01:57.200 --> 00:02:02.600] When I started Indie Hackers in 2016, we weren't owned by anybody and we were making ad revenue.
[00:02:02.840 --> 00:02:10.680] And I think we got up to like eight, nine thousand dollars a month in revenue in the first eight months before getting acquired and then promptly cut it down to zero.
[00:02:10.680 --> 00:02:14.600] So it's been a long time since I've actually been an entrepreneur.
[00:02:14.600 --> 00:02:16.760] And Sean Purdy came on here and kind of called us out.
[00:02:17.080 --> 00:02:19.000] He just shat on us two or three weeks ago.
[00:02:20.280 --> 00:02:31.400] But little did he know, we were already way ahead of him because we've been negotiating and doing paperwork and talking to lawyers and like making this Stripe divestment thing happen since November.
[00:02:32.040 --> 00:02:36.520] Ahead of him in information, not ahead of him in like dollars made.
[00:02:36.520 --> 00:02:38.440] We're very, very behind.
[00:02:38.920 --> 00:02:40.440] Are you worried about not having a paycheck?
[00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:42.920] Are you like, are there things in your life that are going to have to change?
[00:02:42.920 --> 00:02:45.720] You know, you're going to stop shopping at Whole Foods?
[00:02:45.720 --> 00:02:49.640] Lifestyle-wise, maybe I buy like slightly fewer books.
[00:02:49.640 --> 00:02:53.480] I mean, because I buy literally two books every week almost.
[00:02:53.480 --> 00:02:54.440] Is that your main lottery?
[00:02:54.680 --> 00:02:55.640] What's your main expenditure?
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:57.480] What's my like food?
[00:02:57.480 --> 00:02:57.960] What is it like?
[00:02:58.120 --> 00:02:58.600] Not even food.
[00:02:58.600 --> 00:02:59.480] I do Cook Unity.
[00:02:59.480 --> 00:03:02.600] I do like these subscription mealboxes where I don't have to even think about it.
[00:03:02.600 --> 00:03:05.160] Dude, I don't spend any money, honestly.
[00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:05.640] I just don't.
[00:03:05.960 --> 00:03:07.480] I go out to eat on weekends.
[00:03:07.480 --> 00:03:08.760] I treat myself.
[00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:10.200] You're a frugal spender.
[00:03:10.200 --> 00:03:11.400] I'm a big spender.
[00:03:11.400 --> 00:03:13.160] I live extravagantly.
[00:03:13.160 --> 00:03:17.960] I have a baller ass apartment, two bedrooms, even though I live by myself in the heart of Seattle.
[00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:21.080] I'm staring at the space needle outside my window.
[00:03:21.080 --> 00:03:23.480] I throw huge events for my friends.
[00:03:23.480 --> 00:03:25.000] I just had like a birthday party for myself.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:29.320] There was like a luxury Airbnb last weekend with cost thousands of dollars.
[00:03:31.160 --> 00:03:35.000] By the way, that juxtaposition was hilarious because I had like a quiet evening.
[00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:39.080] Natalie and like my friend like James brought his baby.
[00:03:39.080 --> 00:03:43.480] Like we couldn't even, we couldn't even speak in adult voices.
[00:03:43.480 --> 00:03:47.120] And you were like, just pumping the bass, like doing karaoke.
[00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:49.040] I can't even say half of what happened at my birthday party.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:50.640] I'll turn this into an R-rated show.
[00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:53.200] So we have very different lives.
[00:03:53.200 --> 00:03:56.080] But I'm not cutting down at all, man.
[00:03:56.080 --> 00:03:59.920] Like, I am drastically upping the amount that I'm going to work.
[00:03:59.920 --> 00:04:01.120] I'm going to work a lot harder.
[00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:04.960] I'm way more excited about life in general, I think.
[00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:07.760] I feel kind of like I have a purpose again.
[00:04:07.760 --> 00:04:09.760] Like, I have my drive.
[00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:11.280] You know, I got my mojo back.
[00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:13.440] It's not to say being at Stripe was bad.
[00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:16.400] You know, I enjoyed being at Stripe and Endie Hackers was just as fun to run then.
[00:04:16.400 --> 00:04:18.400] But now, I don't know, man.
[00:04:18.400 --> 00:04:19.360] I feel like a wolf, right?
[00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:19.840] I got to go out.
[00:04:19.840 --> 00:04:20.640] I got to eat.
[00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:22.720] I got to find a nice juicy deer.
[00:04:22.720 --> 00:04:24.880] And the hunt is exciting.
[00:04:24.880 --> 00:04:34.560] There was another funny way that we reacted to working at Stripe that was very different, which is like, this is a legitimate question.
[00:04:34.560 --> 00:04:36.080] Have you ever had a salaried job?
[00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:36.720] I don't think you have.
[00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:38.080] You've only done contract work, right?
[00:04:38.080 --> 00:04:39.760] That was my first ever full-time job.
[00:04:40.240 --> 00:04:41.680] So you've never had a full-time job.
[00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:42.880] Like, you were...
[00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:45.760] Like, obviously, you worked hard, especially at the beginning.
[00:04:45.920 --> 00:04:46.880] I've always made it myself.
[00:04:47.200 --> 00:04:47.920] Put it this way.
[00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:52.720] To me, it was pretty obvious that this was you being a complete fish out of water.
[00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:55.280] You're like a shark dropped over the Sahara desert.
[00:04:55.280 --> 00:05:01.280] Like, you got something, you got like power and some ferocity, but like, just not in this context.
[00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:05.360] Yeah, but you've never, like, you've had full-time jobs, but it never seemed like that's what you've liked to do.
[00:05:05.360 --> 00:05:06.640] You've always wanted to be on your own.
[00:05:06.640 --> 00:05:07.600] You've wanted to be a writer.
[00:05:07.600 --> 00:05:08.720] You've wanted to be independent.
[00:05:08.720 --> 00:05:14.880] Like, you were, like, I mean, you're not the kind of person I think of when I think of like a salaried employee.
[00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:22.160] The way that I approached salaried jobs was I had a destination in mind that was me no longer working there.
[00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:26.000] But in order for me to like work my, like, I had to like earn my way out, right?
[00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:29.720] So I started with sales, was making $38,000 a year with like commissions.
[00:05:29.520 --> 00:05:35.240] And I'm like, two years later, I worked my ass off and then got to graduate out of sales into like a software engineering job.
[00:05:35.320 --> 00:05:37.480] Then I like worked my ass off there.
[00:05:37.480 --> 00:05:42.520] So yes, I didn't want to be there, but that actually meant that I worked my ass off while I was there.
[00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:45.480] It's like Tarzan swinging from one vine to the next, right?
[00:05:45.480 --> 00:05:51.800] So let's talk about what we learned from this process, from the process of going through a divestment.
[00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:54.040] I've heard of a lot of people getting acquired.
[00:05:54.040 --> 00:06:00.600] I have not met that many people whose companies got acquired and then they got the company back and now own it.
[00:06:00.600 --> 00:06:02.360] So that whole divestment process is crazy.
[00:06:02.360 --> 00:06:03.720] I didn't even know that was possible.
[00:06:03.720 --> 00:06:08.680] And then also like the what we learned from like the six years of being an acquired company.
[00:06:08.680 --> 00:06:11.240] I think a lot of people consider getting bought.
[00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:13.560] You know, it's like a pie in the sky dream in the future.
[00:06:13.640 --> 00:06:18.120] Like what does it actually feel like to be bought by, in many ways, like our dream company?
[00:06:18.120 --> 00:06:22.840] Like can you imagine any company that would have been better to acquire indie hackers than Stripe?
[00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:27.480] I mean Stripe was literally the best choice.
[00:06:27.640 --> 00:06:29.240] And it was only eight months after we started.
[00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:33.640] So Indie Hackers came into existence, I think August 2016.
[00:06:33.640 --> 00:06:35.080] You joined a bit later.
[00:06:35.080 --> 00:06:39.480] And then right after that, Stripe was like, Patrick from Stripe was like, hey, can we buy indie hackers?
[00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:40.600] And we said, okay.
[00:06:40.600 --> 00:06:54.120] And less than a month passed from when he sent me that email to the point where we became official Stripe employees, which is literally, I think, exactly six years ago to the day that this episode will come out, April 5th, 2017.
[00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:55.640] Doesn't feel like six years, does it?
[00:06:56.280 --> 00:06:59.720] Let me give one thought on six years at Stripe.
[00:06:59.720 --> 00:07:03.000] It's that that first year was a grind.
[00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:06.760] Like that first year was like, I felt like a freshman at college.
[00:07:06.760 --> 00:07:08.040] I felt like a freshman at high school.
[00:07:08.040 --> 00:07:11.400] I don't know if you remember being there, but you're, you know, you're going from middle school to high school.
[00:07:11.400 --> 00:07:13.160] You're like, oh, I'm joining the big leagues, right?
[00:07:13.160 --> 00:07:14.360] Everyone is so big.
[00:07:15.040 --> 00:07:15.600] Everyone is like fresh.
[00:07:15.600 --> 00:07:22.800] I was like, any normal human being knows what I'm talking about.
[00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:29.120] And it's not necessarily that I like when we went into Stripe, I felt like, you know, everyone here is a lead and like they're smarter.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:30.400] Like, it didn't feel like high school.
[00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:32.320] It's slightly an imperfect analogy.
[00:07:32.320 --> 00:07:36.160] But what it did feel like was like, we got to be on.
[00:07:36.160 --> 00:07:38.400] Like, I better fucking prove myself, right?
[00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:39.440] Like, we got acquired.
[00:07:39.440 --> 00:07:42.240] You know, we weren't like making hundreds of millions in revenue.
[00:07:42.240 --> 00:07:44.480] We weren't like a normal financial acquisition.
[00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:48.000] There are a lot of reasons to be like, dude, you guys just had a fucking blog.
[00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:49.680] Like, why are you here?
[00:07:49.680 --> 00:07:50.480] That's my favorite question.
[00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:52.240] It's like, why did Stripe buy indie hackers?
[00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:53.360] Like, how much money were you guys making?
[00:07:53.360 --> 00:07:53.920] You guys are killing it.
[00:07:54.080 --> 00:07:57.200] Like, $8,000 a month.
[00:07:58.800 --> 00:08:00.160] It's just small stakes stuff.
[00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:06.240] You know, you got bought by a company that I think Stripe was worth $9 billion at the time we joined in 2017.
[00:08:06.240 --> 00:08:06.720] Yeah.
[00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:11.760] And it was interesting because when we got acquired by Stripe, indie hackers was like, was banging, man.
[00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:14.560] It was like on Hacker News almost every week.
[00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:16.960] Like, we were kind of like the it media company.
[00:08:16.960 --> 00:08:20.400] And when we went into Stripe, I kind of felt famous, honestly.
[00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:22.560] I don't know how you felt, but like talking to somebody else.
[00:08:22.640 --> 00:08:23.600] We got a bunch of.
[00:08:23.760 --> 00:08:34.560] I remember like the very first day getting like 12 Slack messages from people who were listening to the podcast who were so excited that we had joined Stripe and kind of known the acquisition was in the works for like a week or two.
[00:08:34.880 --> 00:08:44.080] So yeah, it's like a, it's kind of like joining a cult, you know, but instead of like coming in at like, you know, the ground floor and we came in like as like already appointed elected leaders in a way.
[00:08:44.080 --> 00:08:44.400] Yeah.
[00:08:44.640 --> 00:08:45.200] Yeah.
[00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:47.200] And that's just very different than being an indie hacker.
[00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:50.320] Like, every big company is, to some degree, a cult.
[00:08:50.320 --> 00:08:51.680] Everybody's got the shared mission.
[00:08:51.680 --> 00:08:53.920] Everybody has the same leader they look up to.
[00:08:53.920 --> 00:08:56.360] Everybody's sort of aligned even with their equity.
[00:08:56.600 --> 00:08:57.360] Versus us.
[00:08:57.360 --> 00:08:59.120] We were just like these, like, just lone wolves, right?
[00:08:59.120 --> 00:09:00.760] We had nothing besides just us.
[00:08:59.920 --> 00:09:03.880] And so, yeah, it did feel very, very validating.
[00:09:04.200 --> 00:09:09.960] I feel like the first year we were a lot more like connected to the internal workings of Stripe.
[00:09:09.960 --> 00:09:13.640] We did, well, we had like a two-month, almost like Stripe school.
[00:09:13.640 --> 00:09:16.200] Like, I like flew in from New York City to San Francisco.
[00:09:16.200 --> 00:09:19.160] We like went through the, we had like the class of whatever, you know, months.
[00:09:19.320 --> 00:09:20.600] Yeah, Stripe onboarding.
[00:09:20.600 --> 00:09:21.720] Yeah, Stripe onboarding.
[00:09:21.720 --> 00:09:23.160] It was like very intensive.
[00:09:23.160 --> 00:09:25.880] And then we kind of just like got cut loose.
[00:09:25.880 --> 00:09:31.640] And then the rest of the whatever five years that we worked there, for the most part, it's like we would just talk to Patrick Collison directly.
[00:09:32.120 --> 00:09:33.880] Here's what I learned from that process.
[00:09:34.520 --> 00:09:37.720] We were extremely independent at Stripe.
[00:09:37.720 --> 00:09:39.400] There were no ropes.
[00:09:39.400 --> 00:09:42.280] There were no chains holding us down.
[00:09:42.280 --> 00:09:48.840] We did not have to interface with the rest of Stripe to any degree that we didn't want to ourselves.
[00:09:48.840 --> 00:09:51.960] And this is like a nightmare story I hear from lots of other friends who've gone through acquisitions.
[00:09:51.960 --> 00:09:55.320] You know, like the second they join, they are not cut loose.
[00:09:55.320 --> 00:09:59.160] They are held down and restricted and they become just like another cog on the wheel.
[00:09:59.160 --> 00:10:00.440] That did not happen with us.
[00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:04.600] And that tells me that like it's quite possible for lots of companies to do acquisitions this way.
[00:10:04.600 --> 00:10:05.720] And that was fucking awesome.
[00:10:05.720 --> 00:10:07.720] We got to do exactly what we wanted.
[00:10:07.720 --> 00:10:09.080] We had to determine our own future.
[00:10:09.080 --> 00:10:19.320] We just had the added benefit of like this extra press and financial support and employee support from like all of these people at Stripe who are basically just like, hey, we're here if you need us.
[00:10:19.320 --> 00:10:21.960] And like it's, I could not have asked for a better deal.
[00:10:21.960 --> 00:10:25.880] Like there is no, like, how could it possibly have been structured better than that?
[00:10:25.880 --> 00:10:27.240] Like, I think they really hooked us up.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:28.840] Couldn't have been structured better.
[00:10:28.840 --> 00:10:31.080] We came in, we were like this hot startup.
[00:10:31.080 --> 00:10:32.520] We got autonomy.
[00:10:32.520 --> 00:10:45.920] And Patrick and like a few different Friday meetings would like hold us up, hold our team up as like the shining beacon on a hill of like getting things done, like shipping products without like kind of going through the internals.
[00:10:44.840 --> 00:10:50.560] He'd be like, Look, you know, they got a you know product from like idea to shipped in this period of time.
[00:10:50.800 --> 00:10:53.120] Like, why are we like, you know, I don't know why I decided to do this.
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:58.240] He didn't ask me to do this, but I was like, Patrick, I'm just gonna send you an update of what we do every week at the end of the week.
[00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:01.440] I'm just gonna send you an update, just so you know, because like, I don't know, it's a little humble brag.
[00:11:01.680 --> 00:11:02.720] No, it wasn't even like that.
[00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:08.080] It just felt weird being like, hey, we got acquired, but like, is anyone gonna supervise us or does anyone even want to know what we do?
[00:11:08.080 --> 00:11:09.840] And they're like, you guys are on your own.
[00:11:10.160 --> 00:11:14.800] And so, I just would, at the end of every Friday, I'd send him like a list of all the stuff that you did, all the stuff that I did.
[00:11:14.800 --> 00:11:16.400] And it would be so much stuff.
[00:11:16.400 --> 00:11:20.400] It would be like literally like 50 bullet points and like five sections.
[00:11:20.400 --> 00:11:24.800] And then, like, I think one of the managers at Stripe messaged me like a month after.
[00:11:24.800 --> 00:11:26.960] He's like, Hey, man, good job with all the stuff you got accomplished.
[00:11:26.960 --> 00:11:27.840] Like, I really got to step it up.
[00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:29.040] And I'm like, What are you talking about?
[00:11:29.040 --> 00:11:30.400] Like, I just sent this to Patrick.
[00:11:30.400 --> 00:11:35.600] And it turns out he had been like forwarding that email to all the managers to be like, Hey, look what these two guys are doing.
[00:11:35.600 --> 00:11:37.440] What did your teams do this week?
[00:11:37.440 --> 00:11:43.200] And so, in a way, it was like we were like famous inside Stripe, but also we were like probably making a lot of other people's jobs way.
[00:11:43.280 --> 00:11:53.760] I'm surprised you never got a DM that was like, Hey, man, if you just like cut that list in half, like in your next Friday report, like trade this thousand dollars for like half of the list.
[00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:55.920] How about you stop sending those emails?
[00:11:55.920 --> 00:12:02.880] Um, but I think the other thing that happened in our first year was that it was like the most starry-eyed, ambitious year that we had.
[00:12:02.880 --> 00:12:04.800] It was like the world is our oyster.
[00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:08.000] The first like two weeks, I just met with a bunch of people, and we just talked about big ideas.
[00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.160] Like, what could indie hackers be at its biggest?
[00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:18.720] And I remember that the juxtaposition between like being indie, remember our conversations when we were like on our own, we're just like, How do we make an extra thousand dollars a month in ad revenue this month?
[00:12:18.800 --> 00:12:23.200] You know, and we would like do that, and it would be like the most exciting thing on earth.
[00:12:23.200 --> 00:12:30.000] Versus we joined Stripe, and everyone at Stripe is like, How do you change the world of entrepreneurship forever until the end of time?
[00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:33.240] I specifically remember Patty 11.
[00:12:33.240 --> 00:12:39.560] Patio 11, we were having like sidebar conversations with people at Stripe, like Patio 11.
[00:12:39.560 --> 00:12:43.160] And you were like, all right, like, you know, how should we like pitch?
[00:12:43.160 --> 00:14:04.960] what the kind of impact we want to have while working with a company and you said something that was like hardcore like small scale stuff you were like you know we just want to grow 10x we want to be like you know you named some company like we want to be like the bigger version of this media company and he's like wait wait wait he's like you want to like change like have internet scale impact like you need to frame it you need to like think way bigger you need to think way too small thinking way too small i think that that was really exciting on one hand because when you have this huge goal like it increases your self-belief suddenly you start thinking about ways that you can hit that goal and you realize that it's kind of possible whereas when you don't have big goals you don't even think about these stuff like you don't make big moves if you don't have big goals and so i remember just thinking like all the different things we could do that we i just never considered and we tried some stuff we're like okay why don't we like remember we like tried to do indie hackers as a publishing company and we were like okay like almost like a medium.com yeah we're like we can just take someone who's like semi-famous and we can like get their article on eddie hackers and blow them up uh that was our plan but like in the back of my mind i was like i don't i don't think we could why could we do that we're just some random website we can't blow someone up and then we tried it and i remember some people at stripe like recommended their friends who had pretty sizable twitter followings and they posted on any hackers and they did blow up like we got people like literally hundreds of thousands of page views from our newsletter and submitting to hacker News and being able to do that.
[00:14:05.040 --> 00:14:14.240] Dude, I mean, to this day, our top post ever is lynn tai your friend, posting when we were doing that uh and like we had her write her story, right?
[00:14:14.240 --> 00:14:17.760] And we like featured it like on the top of our little media site.
[00:14:17.760 --> 00:14:19.120] She's not the top post ever, by the way.
[00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:20.480] She's number 11.
[00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:21.360] So she's been eclipsed.
[00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:23.120] How has she fallen?
[00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:23.360] Yeah.
[00:14:23.360 --> 00:14:25.280] I changed the algorithm to make it so she fell.
[00:14:25.280 --> 00:14:26.400] So take that length.
[00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:28.720] Specifically and only so that she would fall.
[00:14:28.720 --> 00:14:30.000] There's no other logic to it.
[00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:34.080] Anyway, to go back to like learnings, I think the I don't know how you feel about these big audacious goals.
[00:14:34.080 --> 00:14:44.800] Like I don't know if you lived your life having these huge goals, but it's a double-edged sword, man, because on one hand, indie hackers grew tremendously, especially in those first two to three years at Stripe.
[00:14:44.800 --> 00:14:52.640] Like I think our newsletter had like, you know, 4,000 people on it when we joined Stripe, and now it's like well over 100,000, 150,000, I think.
[00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:56.800] I think our community forum wasn't even on the front page of the website.
[00:14:56.800 --> 00:14:57.760] It was tiny.
[00:14:57.760 --> 00:15:01.360] Half the accounts were still just like you and me trying to get other people to post.
[00:15:01.680 --> 00:15:03.040] You know, it was like a couple hundred people.
[00:15:03.040 --> 00:15:05.840] Like it's since grown to like hundreds of thousands.
[00:15:06.480 --> 00:15:08.480] Page views, same thing, like podcast.
[00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:11.840] Like we had released, I think like three episodes of the podcast.
[00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:15.280] It had, you know, barely a couple hundred downloads an episode.
[00:15:15.280 --> 00:15:17.680] Now it's like 20, 30,000 downloads an episode.
[00:15:17.680 --> 00:15:24.000] And just the first few years at Stripe, like we crushed it and became like literally dozens of times bigger as a company.
[00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:28.640] But on the flip side, like that paled in comparison to the goals that we set.
[00:15:28.640 --> 00:15:30.800] Like we weren't like, hey, how do we get 30 times bigger?
[00:15:30.800 --> 00:15:33.840] We were like, hey, how do we get like a million times bigger?
[00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:44.880] And I think after spending years working really hard and not necessarily making like really significant progress towards a huge goal like that, it's pretty demotivating.
[00:15:45.120 --> 00:15:48.320] It's very much kind of like, well, what's the point?
[00:15:48.320 --> 00:15:48.560] Right.
[00:15:48.560 --> 00:15:49.200] And it's easy.
[00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:52.720] I think there's a point at which I started to feel like, oh, I'm a failure.
[00:15:52.720 --> 00:15:53.920] You know, I failed.
[00:15:53.920 --> 00:15:55.120] We had a goal.
[00:15:55.120 --> 00:15:56.160] We wanted to hit it.
[00:15:56.160 --> 00:15:58.360] We were super optimistic about wanting to hit it.
[00:15:58.360 --> 00:15:59.760] And everyone was supporting us.
[00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:03.000] And when you have a company, you answer to your customers.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:04.440] Presumably, you have lots of customers.
[00:16:04.680 --> 00:16:11.160] But when you get acquired or you have investors, you kind of like, in a way, feel beholden to a very small number of people, right?
[00:16:11.160 --> 00:16:13.640] Like the person who bought your company, the people who invested.
[00:16:13.640 --> 00:16:17.400] And so now it just feels like you're letting down your dad or something, you know?
[00:16:17.400 --> 00:16:23.400] Like you feel like, oh, there's like a couple people that I really wanted to impress, and I'm not sure I did that.
[00:16:23.400 --> 00:16:27.480] And I think that's something that I'd never really felt because I'd never raised a bunch of money before or gotten acquired before.
[00:16:27.720 --> 00:16:29.400] I'd always been more accountable to my customers.
[00:16:29.400 --> 00:16:37.320] So I didn't like the idea of having these huge goals that lasted for years and years and years and not being able to necessarily hit them.
[00:16:37.320 --> 00:16:50.840] But then the other piece that sort of didn't feel good because it felt too good was the fact that even when we sort of were just having tepid growth, the paycheck still kept coming, right?
[00:16:50.840 --> 00:16:54.120] It just isn't very entrepreneurial.
[00:16:54.520 --> 00:17:07.320] And it has an interesting impact on your motivation when you get fed in ways that aren't connected to like you doing work that you find like impressive and that you're proud of.
[00:17:07.320 --> 00:17:12.200] And I think we found ourselves, so it was like a two-pronged attack against like my motivation, right?
[00:17:12.200 --> 00:17:19.080] Number one, we weren't making like huge strides toward like those really big milestones that we wanted to hit of growth and like impact.
[00:17:19.080 --> 00:17:24.200] But then also it's like, yeah, dude, we were just like too fat from not doing stuff.
[00:17:24.200 --> 00:17:24.600] Yeah.
[00:17:24.600 --> 00:17:28.680] I wonder if there's like some arrangement where they could have been like, you're kind of like a mini entrepreneur.
[00:17:28.680 --> 00:17:31.640] Like you can launch little like revenue generating products.
[00:17:31.640 --> 00:17:35.640] It's like you don't have like an internal Stripe corporate bonus structure.
[00:17:35.640 --> 00:17:41.880] Instead, you have like, you make it, like you like bring in extra revenue, and like that goes into your bank account, baby.
[00:17:41.880 --> 00:17:42.120] Yeah.
[00:17:42.120 --> 00:17:45.760] Like, I feel like that might have given me some sort of like a signal to the actual.
[00:17:45.920 --> 00:17:46.400] I think so.
[00:17:46.400 --> 00:17:46.960] I think so.
[00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:48.160] I think there's something to be said for that.
[00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:56.720] I mean, so right now, like part of the deal, we can't go into a ton of specifics, but like Stripe is a seed investor in indie hackers right now.
[00:17:56.720 --> 00:18:00.080] Theoretically, Stripe could have been a seed investor in Indie Hackers six years ago, right?
[00:18:00.080 --> 00:18:02.080] We didn't have to be acquired.
[00:18:02.080 --> 00:18:07.680] We didn't have to, because the day we got acquired, we just literally shut down all of our advertising, shut down all of our affiliate marketing.
[00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:10.400] We went from making $8K a month to $0 a month.
[00:18:10.400 --> 00:18:11.680] Revenue growth is not the point.
[00:18:11.680 --> 00:18:14.720] Stripe makes infinitely more money than any hackers is going to make.
[00:18:14.720 --> 00:18:25.600] Even if we work on this for like, you know, 20 years, we should focus more on the growth of other things, the growth of our traffic, the growth of our brand, the growth of the impact and influence we can have on other people starting businesses.
[00:18:25.600 --> 00:18:31.680] Like our core metric is like, okay, how many people have started a company because of indie hackers who otherwise wouldn't have started one?
[00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:32.000] Right.
[00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.440] Like that's a pretty badass metric, but that is not revenue, right?
[00:18:35.440 --> 00:18:37.440] It's hard to even measure what that leads to.
[00:18:37.840 --> 00:18:46.160] It's not revenue, and also like we had to like find the side window way to represent that through like, frankly, vanity metrics, like, right?
[00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:54.320] Because we had to try to like get at that underlying outcome through like, okay, how many downloads does the podcast have?
[00:18:54.320 --> 00:18:57.760] How many, you know, sort of how many page views do we have to the site?
[00:18:57.760 --> 00:19:00.480] How many subscribers do you have to the newsletter?
[00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:12.000] And like, this algorithm leads to multiply by the percentage of people who sign up for indie hackers and take our survey and say that they definitively would have not started their company if not for X episode or Y post on the forum or whatnot.
[00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:16.320] That versus like you did a thing and then someone paid you money into your bank account.
[00:19:16.320 --> 00:19:19.920] Like the relative motivational value is like a little bit different.
[00:19:20.080 --> 00:19:20.800] You need a connection.
[00:19:20.800 --> 00:19:26.240] If you want to get good feedback loops to improve at anything, you need a direct connection between the input and the outcomes.
[00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:29.200] You need to feel pain when you get stung by a bee.
[00:19:29.200 --> 00:19:32.360] You need to feel a cheering of a crowd when you score a goal.
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:33.880] And I mean, this is stereotypical.
[00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:40.760] This is stereotypically why entrepreneurs like to be entrepreneurs because they want to be rewarded commensurate with what they put in.
[00:19:40.760 --> 00:19:43.720] And if you go to a big company, that's hard to make happen.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.680] We kind of had it at Stripe.
[00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:48.200] Like, I think we had a good system set up, but it's just really hard to keep that going.
[00:19:49.160 --> 00:19:51.560] Fast forward five and a half years.
[00:19:51.560 --> 00:19:59.320] And the idea comes up: hey, you know, would you guys, what did you guys think about taking indie hackers ND again?
[00:19:59.320 --> 00:20:00.200] You remember when that came up?
[00:20:00.200 --> 00:20:06.280] That was like November 2022, like November last year.
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:07.880] And we had never really thought about that.
[00:20:07.880 --> 00:20:12.040] Like, I don't know if you know this, but like during the initial acquisition, I had no idea what I was doing.
[00:20:12.040 --> 00:20:20.120] And I was talking to Patrick and I was asking, like, hey, you know, like, if this whole thing goes south and we don't like working together, like, can I maybe buy indie hackers back from you?
[00:20:20.120 --> 00:20:21.320] And he just looked at me.
[00:20:21.320 --> 00:20:22.680] He was like, no.
[00:20:22.680 --> 00:20:23.800] Just one more answer like that.
[00:20:24.280 --> 00:20:25.080] That's not how these things work.
[00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:26.280] I was like, oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.
[00:20:26.280 --> 00:20:27.560] I'm just wondering.
[00:20:27.880 --> 00:20:33.000] But now here we had this opportunity, like, hey, like, we can make indie hackers ND again.
[00:20:33.720 --> 00:20:37.240] And I think, what, that was four months ago, five months ago?
[00:20:37.240 --> 00:20:41.800] Like, we had to decide, like, okay, do we want to do that versus continuing to say it's Stripe?
[00:20:41.800 --> 00:20:44.360] Like, that's a cool option we've never even considered before.
[00:20:44.600 --> 00:20:46.200] And then we decided we did.
[00:20:46.200 --> 00:20:47.880] But then we're like, okay, what does that look like?
[00:20:47.880 --> 00:21:00.120] And just having that conversation of like what we would want things to look like going forward if that happened and what Stripe would want things to look like going forward actually turned into like a pretty intense like negotiation, which was like cool, very cool.
[00:21:00.120 --> 00:21:00.480] I think.
[00:21:00.440 --> 00:21:03.560] I think it was like the more fun/slash stressful part of all this.
[00:21:03.560 --> 00:21:05.480] And then we got to a point where all of us were happy.
[00:21:05.480 --> 00:21:06.680] Everybody felt great.
[00:21:06.680 --> 00:21:10.840] And then the last, like, just, you know, little while has been nothing but admin work.
[00:21:10.840 --> 00:21:23.920] Talking to lawyers, having the lawyers talk to other lawyers, drawing up paperwork, and you know, setting up a new ND Hackers Inc., Delaware C Corp, and getting like all the basic payroll and bookkeeping and taxes set up for that kind of stuff.
[00:21:23.920 --> 00:21:28.320] So we are now officially out, but it's been a trek.
[00:21:28.320 --> 00:21:29.120] It's been a trek.
[00:21:29.360 --> 00:21:33.840] I usually find admin work like to be the most stressful type of work.
[00:21:33.840 --> 00:21:45.760] But I have to say, with the admin work on the heels of the negotiation, which of course went really well, but it was stressful enough that now I almost feel like I'm dealing with the walk in the park.
[00:21:45.760 --> 00:21:47.120] It was just high stakes, you know?
[00:21:47.120 --> 00:21:50.160] Like, how many big negotiations do you really do in your life?
[00:21:50.160 --> 00:21:53.440] You know, like buying a house, maybe selling your company.
[00:21:53.840 --> 00:21:59.680] I feel like unless that's your job, like very few people have, like, you know, hardly any, right?
[00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:08.080] Well, that was the, we can't go into too much detail about like the actual result of it, but the result of it is that like Stripe is a seed investor and indie hackers, which is cool, and everyone's happy.
[00:22:08.080 --> 00:22:14.480] But like the process to get to like terms where we both enjoyed it, I mean, like, I mean, like, what even is a divestment, right?
[00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:21.520] It is Stripe owns indie hackers outright, and now Stripe is an investor in indie hackers, and we primarily own indie hackers.
[00:22:21.520 --> 00:22:27.920] That is like a whole process that, you know, for at least a brief moment in time, like incentives aren't necessarily aligned.
[00:22:27.920 --> 00:22:30.240] You have to talk about it, and that's why it becomes a negotiation.
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:35.840] And we're negotiating with like someone at Stripe who like literally has bought and sold companies for a living.
[00:22:35.840 --> 00:22:38.080] Like he's done this hundreds of times.
[00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:40.080] We've done it one time, you know.
[00:22:40.080 --> 00:22:43.040] I don't even know what a divestment was until like November of last year.
[00:22:43.040 --> 00:22:44.880] I'm like, oh, you could, you could do that.
[00:22:44.880 --> 00:22:53.200] And so we just had to learn a lot in order to like, I think, do well and get to a point where everybody would be happy and where the deal even made sense for everybody because it's just easier to do.
[00:22:54.080 --> 00:23:04.520] Compared to the original negotiation of Stripe getting acquired and then this most recent divestment experience, what would you say was your biggest learning?
[00:23:04.920 --> 00:23:05.960] What was new here?
[00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:06.840] I've learned a bunch of things.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:07.080] I don't know.
[00:23:07.160 --> 00:23:08.760] There's probably like six things that I learned.
[00:23:09.400 --> 00:23:14.120] I think originally one of the things I learned, and I've talked about this before, is keep your chats informal.
[00:23:14.120 --> 00:23:19.640] So when Andy Hackers was joining Stripe, Patrick and I talked a lot on WhatsApp, which was awesome.
[00:23:19.640 --> 00:23:24.760] You know, if you talk over email, every email seems like it's the highest stakes thing you're ever going to send in your life.
[00:23:24.760 --> 00:23:29.480] You're like sweating over like the structure of like one sentence for like an hour.
[00:23:29.480 --> 00:23:32.600] If you talk in person, then that meeting kind of feels the same way.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:35.800] But then you're like riffing off the cuff and you're not prepared.
[00:23:35.800 --> 00:23:39.640] And you feel like you have to kind of like study, like you're going into like a job interview or something.
[00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:42.680] But if you talk over text or WhatsApp or something, it's like very lighthearted.
[00:23:42.680 --> 00:23:43.640] You're on your phone.
[00:23:43.640 --> 00:23:45.960] You can send emojis, which is nice.
[00:23:46.120 --> 00:23:53.240] You're trying to be friendly and you are engaging with somebody that you consider a friend, but like you're also trying to ask for what you want, which is very uncomfortable.
[00:23:53.800 --> 00:24:03.960] Dude, I don't know if I am misremembering, but I'm pretty sure I remember even when Patrick emailed you originally, he used like lowercase letters.
[00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:07.400] Like he took his formal medium and he made it even more informal.
[00:24:07.880 --> 00:24:08.680] I think that's smart.
[00:24:08.680 --> 00:24:19.400] I think the other thing is, you know, Patrick McKenzie, also known as Patio 11, one of our fellow Stripes, he wrote like the guide to salary negotiation, especially for tech workers.
[00:24:19.400 --> 00:24:21.320] Just Google Patio 11 salary negotiation.
[00:24:21.320 --> 00:24:26.040] And there's some really good points in there that are just like evergreen, always true basics.
[00:24:26.040 --> 00:24:27.800] Like number one, you gotta have the right mindset.
[00:24:27.800 --> 00:24:30.840] Like this is not necessarily a friendly conversation.
[00:24:30.840 --> 00:24:32.600] Like, you need to ask what you want.
[00:24:32.600 --> 00:24:38.120] If you're not uncomfortable, that means you've either done it a hundred times or you're not doing it enough.
[00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:53.200] And I think that a lot of people probably leave hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars on the table throughout the course of their life by not really pushing hard enough negotiations and feeling scared or uncomfortable to ask what they want because you're afraid you're going to offend the other person.
[00:24:53.520 --> 00:24:58.880] Whereas in reality, the other person, like, this is their job to literally negotiate and to decide what to pay.
[00:24:58.880 --> 00:25:00.960] And it's like usually not even their money that they're spending.
[00:25:00.960 --> 00:25:04.320] And so it turns out they're usually not really offended if you ask for what you want.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:06.320] So I think that was a really good point from that guide.
[00:25:06.560 --> 00:25:12.160] Another two points from that guide: research, research, research is super important.
[00:25:12.160 --> 00:25:14.480] You need to know what you want, right?
[00:25:14.480 --> 00:25:16.960] Like we had to sit down and figure out like, what do we really want?
[00:25:16.960 --> 00:25:18.320] What does the other party want?
[00:25:18.320 --> 00:25:21.760] You know, what have other deals like this look like?
[00:25:21.920 --> 00:25:26.560] If you don't do your research, it's really hard to figure out what even to propose that would make everybody happy.
[00:25:26.560 --> 00:25:30.000] And I think that was our goal and Stripe's goal: everybody being happy.
[00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.320] Like, nobody wanted anyone else to be unhappy.
[00:25:32.560 --> 00:25:35.280] A third point is like, you know, never say a number first.
[00:25:35.280 --> 00:25:37.280] Also, very uncomfortable.
[00:25:37.280 --> 00:25:40.480] And I think beyond that, I have my own sort of learnings from negotiation.
[00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:44.160] I think one of the most important things in negotiation is just framing.
[00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:45.760] Like, what analogy do you use, right?
[00:25:45.760 --> 00:25:49.520] If you're saying, like, hey, I want to get a job here, you should hire me.
[00:25:49.520 --> 00:25:56.240] And you say the going rate for senior engineers is X, so you should pay me X times, you know, plus 10% because I'm a slightly better senior engineer.
[00:25:56.240 --> 00:25:57.760] That's one type of framing, right?
[00:25:57.760 --> 00:26:08.400] Or if you say, hey, I'm going to frame this as I know exactly how to, you know, make your systems 10 times more efficient, and that's going to save you a million dollars a year, so you should pay me $500,000 a year.
[00:26:08.400 --> 00:26:10.080] That's a totally different framing.
[00:26:10.080 --> 00:26:14.240] And you're still a senior engineer, a slightly better senior engineer, but you frame things differently.
[00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:14.480] Right.
[00:26:15.360 --> 00:26:22.960] If you frame it as, like, hey, I'm an engineer, the comparison that people make is like, okay, what is the going salary for a senior engineer?
[00:26:22.960 --> 00:26:26.640] Maybe we're talking about like an extra $50,000 a year.
[00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:34.360] But if you frame it in terms of like the savings that you're going to create for their business, now they're thinking, depending on the size of their business, maybe on the order of like millions.
[00:26:29.520 --> 00:26:40.280] Or you could frame it, frame it for how much money you're going to make for them, or frame it for, like, you could frame things in lots of different creative ways.
[00:26:40.280 --> 00:26:42.040] And I think you can do this even if you're getting a job.
[00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:43.880] And then also like having leverage, right?
[00:26:43.880 --> 00:26:49.880] Like before you even get to the negotiation table, are you sort of like one of a million, right?
[00:26:49.880 --> 00:26:55.800] If things don't work out with you, are there like 900, 99, 999 other people they could just go to and get a better deal?
[00:26:55.800 --> 00:26:58.920] Because if that's the case, like you don't have a lot of leverage, right?
[00:26:58.920 --> 00:26:59.960] So you want to be unique.
[00:26:59.960 --> 00:27:01.160] You want to be kind of one of a kind.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:06.200] And then you want to understand what they want and what you want so you can ask for the right things and create the right frame.
[00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:07.640] And so you're there.
[00:27:07.640 --> 00:27:08.360] We both did this.
[00:27:08.360 --> 00:27:11.960] And it was very stressful, but also really heartwarming at the end.
[00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:19.400] And I think it's cool to just go through the stressful process that seems uncomfortable and then also realize that like everybody's on the same side and everybody loves each other.
[00:27:19.400 --> 00:27:21.640] And now we have like pretty good terms.
[00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:26.120] Like Stripe is a seed investor in NDHA and they're happy with that and we're happy with that.
[00:27:26.120 --> 00:27:27.640] So now we've got our company.
[00:27:27.640 --> 00:27:30.120] We're independent and we're done.
[00:27:30.120 --> 00:27:30.760] We're out of it.
[00:27:30.760 --> 00:27:31.800] Everybody's happy.
[00:27:31.800 --> 00:27:34.440] So the big question is, what now?
[00:27:34.440 --> 00:27:34.680] Right?
[00:27:34.680 --> 00:27:35.800] The world is our oyster.
[00:27:35.800 --> 00:27:37.240] We could do literally anything.
[00:27:37.240 --> 00:27:37.880] I mean, what do we got?
[00:27:37.880 --> 00:27:41.480] We got a Delaware C Corp, ND Hackers Inc., that makes $0 in revenue.
[00:27:41.800 --> 00:27:42.520] Zero dollars.
[00:27:42.520 --> 00:27:46.120] You make no money, but we've got a bunch of assets that could easily make money, right?
[00:27:46.120 --> 00:27:52.280] I was making eight grand a month off ads when our podcast was tiny, when our newsletter was tiny, when our website is tiny.
[00:27:52.280 --> 00:27:55.640] Everything today is like 30, 40, 50 times bigger than it was back then.
[00:27:55.640 --> 00:27:59.480] So I feel like the first step for us is to turn on the ad revenue.
[00:27:59.880 --> 00:28:02.840] Were you monetizing the newsletter at that point?
[00:28:02.840 --> 00:28:03.480] Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:03.480 --> 00:28:04.560] We had newsletter ads.
[00:28:04.520 --> 00:28:05.040] I had like a lot of people.
[00:28:05.080 --> 00:28:11.880] Do you know you remember now, like what the breakdown between sponsorships for the podcast and it was totally random.
[00:28:11.880 --> 00:28:13.560] Every single deal was individual, right?
[00:28:13.560 --> 00:28:14.600] It was all just sales, right?
[00:28:14.600 --> 00:28:17.520] Get on the phone, call people, open up your inbox, email people.
[00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:21.840] And what I found back then was like selling to people who had no money sucked.
[00:28:22.080 --> 00:28:23.760] The worst customer.
[00:28:23.760 --> 00:28:24.560] The worst customers.
[00:28:25.120 --> 00:28:25.920] Who would have thought?
[00:28:25.920 --> 00:28:31.280] The tiny companies who really wanted to advertise but didn't have much of a budget, and they would micromanage every single thing.
[00:28:31.280 --> 00:28:32.480] Like, the ads got to say exactly this.
[00:28:32.480 --> 00:28:33.280] No, change the ad to that.
[00:28:33.280 --> 00:28:33.920] No, change it to that.
[00:28:33.920 --> 00:28:34.800] Like, how many clicks did it get?
[00:28:34.800 --> 00:28:37.120] Well, how many, how many, how many opens did that email get?
[00:28:37.120 --> 00:28:41.200] Because they were super stressed because every dollar they spent, they needed to see a return on it.
[00:28:41.200 --> 00:28:45.920] Whereas the biggest companies, I think SparkPost advertised an Indie Hackers back in the day.
[00:28:45.920 --> 00:28:47.680] Probably the ads are still in the podcast.
[00:28:47.680 --> 00:28:48.800] They were super chill.
[00:28:49.120 --> 00:29:01.920] I remember talking to a woman there who was running something in marketing, and I was in Cape Town on vacation, and she was on vacation, and we were doing this deal, and she just wanted to talk about her kids and her vacation, and then she just cut me a check for like seven or eight thousand dollars.
[00:29:01.920 --> 00:29:04.640] I was like, yeah, we'll take some ads on the newsletter and on the podcast.
[00:29:04.640 --> 00:29:07.120] And then I did it, and there was like no red tape, and it took like five seconds.
[00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:08.720] You're like, how many?
[00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:10.400] She's like, I don't want to get into the details.
[00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:11.360] Just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:11.440 --> 00:29:12.000] This is easy.
[00:29:12.640 --> 00:29:13.760] How's your vacation to your way?
[00:29:14.560 --> 00:29:17.600] Yeah, because it wasn't her money, and she had a huge budget, and it just didn't.
[00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:22.080] And it goes that moment where I was like, oh, maybe enterprise sales is better than selling tiny companies.
[00:29:22.080 --> 00:29:26.160] Like, that was way easier, and I made 10 times more money than selling the smaller customers.
[00:29:26.160 --> 00:29:28.720] So I think this time around, we should do the same thing.
[00:29:28.720 --> 00:29:35.840] And we should obviously talk to some friends who've done this before and who have big newsletters and monetize them and figure out who we should talk to and what the best way to go about it is.
[00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:38.640] Because the downside of selling ads is it's not that fun.
[00:29:38.640 --> 00:29:40.720] Nobody listening to this podcast thinks, you know what?
[00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:43.120] The Indie Hackers podcast needs ads.
[00:29:43.120 --> 00:29:45.040] Like nobody wants ads.
[00:29:45.040 --> 00:29:47.520] And that's not like the business model I want to rely on forever.
[00:29:47.520 --> 00:29:52.320] So I think that should be like a stopgap while we do more interesting things.
[00:29:52.320 --> 00:29:54.000] I don't even think of it as a stopgap.
[00:29:54.000 --> 00:29:56.000] I think of it almost like as a tourniquet.
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:01.480] Like I see it as we are just bleeding money for the next whatever few months.
[00:30:01.480 --> 00:30:04.200] And let's just do the obvious thing.
[00:29:59.600 --> 00:30:06.520] Get some revenue coming into the newsletter.
[00:30:06.600 --> 00:30:08.120] Get some revenue coming into the podcast.
[00:30:08.120 --> 00:30:08.840] It's not sexy.
[00:30:08.840 --> 00:30:09.640] It's not fun.
[00:30:09.640 --> 00:30:14.520] I'm not going to enjoy doing it, but I will be happy to break even.
[00:30:14.520 --> 00:30:19.080] And then that's when, for me, the interesting stuff is going to start.
[00:30:19.080 --> 00:30:19.400] Yeah.
[00:30:19.400 --> 00:30:23.240] And I think we're at a place that a lot of indie hackers are at, which is like, okay, we have a new company.
[00:30:23.240 --> 00:30:24.280] Like, what do we do?
[00:30:24.280 --> 00:30:24.840] Right.
[00:30:24.840 --> 00:30:31.000] And this is the point where I think all of your decisions are worth a thousand times more than your later decisions.
[00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:36.520] Like, these are the heavy hitter decisions where once you start going in a certain direction, it's really hard to step back.
[00:30:36.520 --> 00:30:38.040] So you kind of want to get them right.
[00:30:38.040 --> 00:30:39.880] I wrote this post on indie hackers years ago.
[00:30:39.880 --> 00:30:42.920] It's called Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting.
[00:30:43.160 --> 00:30:44.840] I think there's like 50 questions in here.
[00:30:44.840 --> 00:30:46.680] And it's just a random list of example questions.
[00:30:46.760 --> 00:30:48.840] Not like these are supposed to be the definitive questions.
[00:30:48.840 --> 00:30:50.360] But there's some good stuff on here, right?
[00:30:50.360 --> 00:30:54.120] Like, what kinds of things have you enjoyed working on in the past?
[00:30:54.120 --> 00:30:55.480] Really simple question, right?
[00:30:55.480 --> 00:31:03.080] If you're going to start a business and you kind of have a lifetime of experience knowing what you like to work on, like, is your business within that wheelhouse or is it something totally different?
[00:31:03.080 --> 00:31:05.640] So for you, like, you know, I know that's like writing.
[00:31:05.640 --> 00:31:07.240] I know that's productivity.
[00:31:07.240 --> 00:31:10.280] I know that you tend to like working alone, right?
[00:31:10.280 --> 00:31:12.280] I know for me, I love coding.
[00:31:12.280 --> 00:31:13.400] I love creating products.
[00:31:13.400 --> 00:31:14.600] I love designing.
[00:31:14.600 --> 00:31:16.440] I love being proud of what I build.
[00:31:16.440 --> 00:31:22.520] I love working on really small things that I can ship and release and be done with it and then move on to the next thing.
[00:31:22.520 --> 00:31:27.480] And so, whatever we do with indie hackers, like ideally, I want it to involve a lot of that.
[00:31:27.480 --> 00:31:35.160] Yeah, look, and to that point, like, I'll match your post with a post that I made on indie hackers called Infinite Entrepreneurship.
[00:31:35.160 --> 00:32:04.960] And in a lot of ways, this is what I think of when I think about indie hackers, which is infinite entrepreneurship is when you set up the operations of your business and like the kinds of products you work on in a way where you're focused a lot more on enjoying the process instead of only trying to like worry about the proceeds, only trying to worry about like you know whether you're going to make a certain amount of revenue at the end of the year, only worrying about if you're going to build something that you can like exit for like life-changing amounts of money.
[00:32:04.960 --> 00:32:06.160] So, what's the process you want?
[00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:10.880] Like, what's like your everyday life that you find amazing?
[00:32:10.880 --> 00:32:12.640] Like, what do you want that to be?
[00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:17.600] I would say, number one, I look at it from like the unit of the day, like you just said.
[00:32:17.600 --> 00:32:20.560] And then I also like looking at it at the unit of the month.
[00:32:20.560 --> 00:32:28.320] Like, I would say that the main thing is I want to enjoy building stuff, which means I want to build a lot of things.
[00:32:28.320 --> 00:32:31.840] Like, I don't want to have our biggest product has been the form.
[00:32:31.840 --> 00:32:38.960] I don't want to have a product that I'm just doing this like slow compounding work on over many, many years, hoping.
[00:32:38.960 --> 00:32:40.080] You don't want a long slog.
[00:32:40.560 --> 00:32:41.520] I don't want a long slog.
[00:32:41.520 --> 00:32:43.360] I want faster small packages.
[00:32:43.680 --> 00:32:43.920] Right.
[00:32:43.920 --> 00:32:45.600] I want faster feedback loops.
[00:32:45.600 --> 00:32:47.280] So, probably small products.
[00:32:47.600 --> 00:32:49.600] Do you want them to generate revenue?
[00:32:49.600 --> 00:32:49.840] Yeah.
[00:32:49.840 --> 00:32:50.640] I want to code.
[00:32:50.880 --> 00:32:54.640] I also want to, you're a faster, better programmer than I am.
[00:32:54.640 --> 00:33:00.480] And so I want to do code work, but like, I think I'm going to have to slowly familiarize myself with the code base.
[00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:02.320] But yeah, I want to do that.
[00:33:02.320 --> 00:33:03.280] So that's a big one, too.
[00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:04.400] Just learning, right?
[00:33:04.400 --> 00:33:06.320] Like, for me, there's stuff I want to learn.
[00:33:06.320 --> 00:33:08.880] And I want to have an excuse to learn those things.
[00:33:08.880 --> 00:33:11.840] Like, we were talking a few weeks ago of me just doing like abstract learning.
[00:33:11.840 --> 00:33:17.120] But the second we get into product ideas, I'm like, okay, like AI is big.
[00:33:17.440 --> 00:33:23.120] There are very obvious ways we could use artificial intelligence to improve some of our solutions to problems we already solve.
[00:33:23.120 --> 00:33:24.080] But I got to learn a lot.
[00:33:24.080 --> 00:33:25.600] Like I got to learn a shitload to do that.
[00:33:25.600 --> 00:33:26.880] And I want to learn.
[00:33:26.200 --> 00:33:27.120] It's funny.
[00:33:26.360 --> 00:33:28.000] I want to have it.
[00:33:27.880 --> 00:33:29.800] It's funny because you want to learn.
[00:33:29.760 --> 00:33:35.560] And I think there are opportunities where we can learn, but it almost might be a requirement.
[00:33:36.840 --> 00:33:48.760] AI, machine learning, the pace of accelerated advancement in that field is almost going to force our hand in a lot of ways, which is a cool position to be in.
[00:33:48.760 --> 00:33:49.400] It's true.
[00:33:49.400 --> 00:34:11.720] It's like, I think the landscape for indie hackers, not the company, but as a people, as a community, as a profession or a career, is completely boosted by artificial intelligence because essentially, like the whole idea of the indie hacker movement is like we've reached the threshold where the average individual can basically create their own company without any help, right?
[00:34:11.720 --> 00:34:25.400] Like you're so empowered with like extremely efficient, high-level programming tools with amazing products and services out there that make it super easy to create a business, to accept payments online, to advertise, et cetera, that you're pretty much just limited by your own creativity.
[00:34:25.400 --> 00:34:29.960] And you don't need like a team of like 50 people just to put a website up like you did in the 90s.
[00:34:29.960 --> 00:34:36.440] And so AI, I think, is just like the latest technology in that trend where, okay, well, now as one person, you can do way more.
[00:34:36.440 --> 00:34:38.440] Like, did you suck at writing yesterday?
[00:34:38.440 --> 00:34:39.000] Guess what?
[00:34:39.000 --> 00:34:40.200] Like, today you're great at writing.
[00:34:40.200 --> 00:34:43.400] You're at least a passable writer because you have GPT-4, right?
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:45.000] Did you suck at brainstorming?
[00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:45.560] Like, guess what?
[00:34:45.560 --> 00:34:52.360] Today, like, you're a pretty decent brainstormer because you've got this almost AI co-founder that can be at your side and help you do everything.
[00:34:52.360 --> 00:34:57.960] And so, I think pretty much every indie hacker is going to have to consider reinventing themselves.
[00:34:57.960 --> 00:35:02.440] And if you're not, you know, in the next three or four years, you're going to be replaced by people who have.
[00:35:02.440 --> 00:35:09.080] We're in a place where I think what we should be doing is probably providing tools to help indie hackers do this, right?
[00:35:09.080 --> 00:35:10.760] To get better at being indie hackers.
[00:35:10.760 --> 00:35:13.240] And so I want to build lots of tools for that too.
[00:35:13.240 --> 00:35:20.080] If you think about all of the things that both you and I seem to want, I mean, we want to build products frequently.
[00:35:20.240 --> 00:35:23.840] So we don't want to have like, you know, big, hulking, slow feedback loop products.
[00:35:23.840 --> 00:35:25.680] We want to learn a lot.
[00:35:25.680 --> 00:35:32.640] Obviously, we want to serve like our natural customer base, which is going to be other indie hackers, other entrepreneurs.
[00:35:33.040 --> 00:35:34.560] So that's another constraint.
[00:35:34.560 --> 00:35:38.000] We need to probably build tools that help other people build.
[00:35:38.320 --> 00:35:43.440] In a lot of ways, I think that we have a good idea of some of the cool things we're going to build.
[00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:45.200] And we've actually started too, right?
[00:35:45.200 --> 00:35:45.840] Like.
[00:35:46.160 --> 00:35:48.160] Yeah, we've got a lot of ideas, right?
[00:35:48.160 --> 00:35:52.880] And the way we've been working is we've divided everything we do into what we call projects.
[00:35:52.960 --> 00:35:57.200] We've got a table on Notion with like a dozen projects that we're working on right now.
[00:35:57.200 --> 00:35:58.800] But mostly they're just internal stuff.
[00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:01.040] Divesting from Stripe, that's a project.
[00:36:01.040 --> 00:36:04.720] Reducing our costs, that's reducing our burden, that's a project.
[00:36:04.960 --> 00:36:08.640] Setting up a new company and setting up payroll and whatever, that's a project.
[00:36:08.880 --> 00:36:20.640] But as we go on, obviously we're going to sort of finish these internal projects and move more toward like user-facing, revenue generating, like actual products versus internal projects.
[00:36:20.640 --> 00:36:22.480] And why don't we just go through some of our ideas here?
[00:36:22.480 --> 00:36:32.000] We don't have a ton of stuff we've started working on now, but we've got like a list of like 15 or so random ideas that have popped into our heads.
[00:36:32.160 --> 00:36:34.160] Maybe like 13 of them are terrible.
[00:36:34.400 --> 00:36:36.000] Maybe one or two of them could be really good.
[00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:38.720] So let's just go through some of these ideas.
[00:36:38.960 --> 00:36:40.080] What's on here?
[00:36:40.080 --> 00:36:42.800] All right, an AI website companion.
[00:36:42.800 --> 00:36:48.400] So you know how you go to a website and they've got that little intercom chat bubble in the bottom right where you can chat with a customer?
[00:36:49.200 --> 00:36:52.080] And you know how like a lot of other websites will also have like onboarding?
[00:36:52.080 --> 00:36:56.800] So like when you sign up, it kind of walks you through a flow and is like, oh, click over here to do this.
[00:36:56.800 --> 00:36:58.000] Click over here to do that, right?
[00:36:58.080 --> 00:37:00.120] Just kind of teaches you how to use the website.
[00:36:59.760 --> 00:37:02.280] Well imagine if this was powered by artificial intelligence.
[00:37:02.520 --> 00:37:10.360] It could essentially ask you questions or learn about you and then give you a customized tour of the website, right?
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:19.320] Different people want to know about different features, want to use different features, and they don't just want to do it when they're onboarding, but they want to do it the entire time they're using your app, right?
[00:37:19.320 --> 00:37:22.920] And so this tool would know things like, when was the last time this user logged in?
[00:37:22.920 --> 00:37:25.400] And maybe even things like, how are they using their mouse, right?
[00:37:25.400 --> 00:37:29.320] Do they seem like a competent computer user or do they seem a little bit slow, right?
[00:37:29.640 --> 00:37:39.240] And just like essentially help anyone use your website in a much more efficient way that's better for them and more lucrative for you as a business owner, I think could be a dope ass product.
[00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:41.080] I don't know how much of it's in our wheelhouse, right?
[00:37:41.080 --> 00:37:44.760] Like how much is that a thing that like helps indie hackers?
[00:37:44.760 --> 00:37:51.400] But it could be because any indie hacker who has a website might want to have a product like that that helps their customers do a better job using their website.
[00:37:51.800 --> 00:37:53.560] Yeah, I mean, I think it could be big.
[00:37:53.560 --> 00:38:05.400] We had someone on the podcast just a few months ago who spoke about how much of a boost they had to their conversions by just actually being better about support, like customer support.
[00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:11.000] And I have to say, like, that's one of the few things that indie hackers tend to really hate.
[00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:14.440] Like, maybe marketing and like customer support, right?
[00:38:14.440 --> 00:38:19.800] Like, ideally, they like to just build a really cool product, have it be as automated as possible.
[00:38:19.800 --> 00:38:21.720] And that's what's going on here, right?
[00:38:21.720 --> 00:38:23.480] Kind of getting that off of your hands.
[00:38:23.480 --> 00:38:23.880] Right.
[00:38:23.880 --> 00:38:25.320] So another one.
[00:38:25.800 --> 00:38:28.280] I think you saw Sampar launched his new business.
[00:38:28.280 --> 00:38:29.320] It's called Hampton.
[00:38:29.320 --> 00:38:37.160] I think it's an exclusive club for high net worth, successful founders to come and join a mastermind of similar founders and pay.
[00:38:37.160 --> 00:38:39.560] Did he say how much money it costs to join Hampton?
[00:38:39.560 --> 00:38:41.960] I think it's probably thousands of dollars a year.
[00:38:42.440 --> 00:38:43.960] I think it's somewhere.
[00:38:44.040 --> 00:38:44.800] There's no price on the website.
[00:38:45.280 --> 00:38:45.840] Yeah, it's extremely.
[00:38:44.680 --> 00:38:48.960] Yeah, no, I think it's let's say 40,000, something like that a year.
[00:38:49.280 --> 00:38:51.440] Well, we have like the other end of the market, right?
[00:38:51.440 --> 00:39:00.960] We have dozens of meetups every month among people who are just getting started and they want to meet other people in person in their cities or maybe just online on Zoom calls and talk to them.
[00:39:00.960 --> 00:39:03.040] But we've never done anything formal like that.
[00:39:03.280 --> 00:39:09.680] And that is not something that I think is going to be replaced by AI anytime soon because it's talking to other people who are like you and sort of following each other's stories.
[00:39:09.680 --> 00:39:20.400] And so we could build something more formal to help match up indie hackers and mastermind groups and little cohorts and actually help them help each other much better than making a post on the forum and helping them.
[00:39:20.560 --> 00:39:22.800] So what do you think about the price point though?
[00:39:22.800 --> 00:39:29.280] I kind of immediately that is a callback to you trying to sell ads to broke companies.
[00:39:29.280 --> 00:39:29.600] Right.
[00:39:29.600 --> 00:39:39.280] So it's like, all right, well, in this situation, we're trying to like, you know, pair together broke indie hackers, some of whom aren't going to be broke, but I mean, a huge amount of indie hackers are aspiring.
[00:39:39.280 --> 00:39:43.120] But I like the idea of having it be high enough that it's something people aspire to, right?
[00:39:43.120 --> 00:39:50.480] I want the average indie hacker who comes in to have milestones and goals, and maybe they want to be big enough to the point where they could get into these mastermind groups.
[00:39:50.480 --> 00:40:17.160] So I don't know, maybe it's like once you've hit 10K MRR or 5K MRR or maybe 1K MRR, at some point, you know, you have qualified enough to be, you know, well on your way to being like a there's like subgroups on the forum that you can't access unless you have like an indie hackers product that has like stripe verified revenue of xyz right then you get invited to these like super secret swanky meetups.
[00:40:17.160 --> 00:40:18.040] Yeah.
[00:40:18.360 --> 00:40:22.440] How do you feel about all that, like the the sort of status bait stuff, right?
[00:40:22.440 --> 00:40:26.600] Like Sam called his thing hampton because it's like it sounds luxurious, right?
[00:40:26.600 --> 00:40:28.680] And it's like extremely exclusive.
[00:40:28.680 --> 00:40:30.520] And this is how every other club is on Earth, too.
[00:40:30.520 --> 00:40:31.960] That's like that's super successful.
[00:40:31.960 --> 00:40:33.640] Like Harvard, very exclusive.
[00:40:33.640 --> 00:40:34.360] It's hard to get in.
[00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:39.080] And that increases the value of Harvard because they get to select for the best people and everybody wants to go there.
[00:40:39.320 --> 00:40:40.280] Why Accommodator?
[00:40:40.280 --> 00:40:41.000] Same thing, right?
[00:40:41.000 --> 00:40:43.080] Like very exclusive, very hard to get in.
[00:40:43.080 --> 00:40:45.160] They associate with big name, successful people.
[00:40:45.160 --> 00:40:49.160] And so it raises your status to sort of be a part of it.
[00:40:49.160 --> 00:40:50.680] I feel like I've kind of come to terms with it.
[00:40:50.680 --> 00:41:00.840] I mean, the idea that you're getting at is that, you know, the superficial, the cover story is, hey, the value of coming here is that you're going to get these really functional benefits.
[00:41:00.840 --> 00:41:04.920] If you join this mastermind, you are going to make more money.
[00:41:04.920 --> 00:41:10.200] But let's be honest, a huge part of the value proposition is like you want status.
[00:41:10.200 --> 00:41:12.280] You want to be part of this super exclusive group.
[00:41:12.280 --> 00:41:16.120] And then you might feel like, well, that's kind of a bullshit value prop.
[00:41:16.120 --> 00:41:21.720] But if you actually know yourself, if you're self-aware, you realize like we like status.
[00:41:21.720 --> 00:41:23.560] We like being part of groups.
[00:41:23.560 --> 00:41:25.240] It's part of the human experience.
[00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:29.080] I don't really think it's bullshit as long as you have like eyes wide open about it.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:32.120] There's a good quote from Groucho Marx.
[00:41:32.200 --> 00:41:35.400] It says, I refuse to be part of any club that would have me as a member.
[00:41:35.400 --> 00:41:40.840] And I think that's kind of the vibe, you know, like, ah, shit, if it's good enough for me to get in, like, maybe it's not good enough.
[00:41:40.840 --> 00:41:41.240] I don't know.
[00:41:41.240 --> 00:41:44.840] I also feel that that's kind of at odds with our culture, right?
[00:41:44.840 --> 00:41:48.360] Entie Hackers has always been built on transparency.
[00:41:48.360 --> 00:41:52.920] It has always been built on kind of helping people get started.
[00:41:52.920 --> 00:42:02.040] And so that is a business idea that I don't think jives with, it's not the one that we would be the best at, that would be like the most congruent with the rest of our culture and what we do.
[00:42:02.040 --> 00:42:04.600] And so it's an interesting one, but I'm not sure about it.
[00:42:04.600 --> 00:42:23.200] At the same time, though, I'll say one word on it: is like a huge cohort of people that listen to us that are just getting started or super happy, but then a lot of people who are like further down have made a lot more revenue and they're dealing with problems of like you know bigger growth phases of companies, like they get kind of turned off by it.
[00:42:23.200 --> 00:42:25.520] And then, likewise, in reverse, right?
[00:42:25.520 --> 00:42:39.680] And so I kind of like the idea of like if we were to have something like this where there's almost like a growth-based cohort model, then I think it's not necessarily against like the ethos of indie hackers.
[00:42:39.680 --> 00:42:45.280] It's it's almost like a way of segmenting the information that we deliver to different people.
[00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:46.240] Right, right.
[00:42:46.560 --> 00:42:48.400] So some other ideas on this list.
[00:42:48.400 --> 00:42:50.160] Let's go some of the crazier ones.
[00:42:51.200 --> 00:42:53.120] A custom podcast player.
[00:42:53.120 --> 00:42:54.400] The idea is very simple.
[00:42:54.400 --> 00:43:02.480] There's a bunch of indie hackers and people in our space who have podcasts that help people with business and marketing and sales and hiring and all this stuff.
[00:43:02.480 --> 00:43:04.400] Copywriting, social media growth.
[00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:14.320] And if we could curate some of the best podcast episodes or best podcast shows, put them into one app where you can essentially live as an indie hacker, and we can do a lot of cool stuff.
[00:43:14.320 --> 00:43:15.440] We'll be a marketing channel.
[00:43:15.440 --> 00:43:20.160] Anybody in this space who had a podcast would want to be featured on this app.
[00:43:20.160 --> 00:43:21.440] It would be good for consumption.
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:28.080] If I'm going on a run or going to do chores and I'm an indie hacker and I know I want to listen to something productive, I don't have to do a ton of discovery, right?
[00:43:28.080 --> 00:43:33.520] I just open up the Indie Hackers Podcast app and I know there's going to be good episodes at the top of that.
[00:43:33.520 --> 00:43:35.520] And we could also tie it into our community.
[00:43:35.520 --> 00:43:37.200] Right now, podcasts are very stale.
[00:43:37.200 --> 00:43:44.640] It's very hard to get feedback on them because most podcast players don't support things like upvoting or comments or emailing the people who are behind it.
[00:43:44.640 --> 00:43:55.200] So we could bake that into the app too, off the back of all the other code we already have that powers our community, and essentially make it so that anybody with an indie hackers account can like socially participate in this podcast medium, which has been done before.
[00:43:55.600 --> 00:43:59.120] So, this reminds me of Crunchyroll.
[00:43:59.120 --> 00:44:03.160] And until I thought about that, I didn't really understand this idea too much.
[00:44:03.160 --> 00:44:18.440] But Crunchyroll, you love anime, and Crunchyroll, you probably can do a better job of explaining it than I can, but it's a like one-stop shop for people who love different animes to go and like see all of their shows kind of in one place.
[00:44:18.440 --> 00:44:21.000] And there's kind of a community around it.
[00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:22.280] It's a streaming service, right?
[00:44:22.280 --> 00:44:35.480] Like any streaming service, whether it's Netflix or Disney Plus or Hulu or Crunchyroll, like you create a bunch of shows, you put them all together, you charge a subscription fee, and then people go there and talk to each other and watch the same shows.
[00:44:35.480 --> 00:44:38.760] And I think that that is sorely missing in the world of podcasting.
[00:44:38.760 --> 00:44:40.680] I'm not sure it could work, right?
[00:44:40.680 --> 00:44:44.360] Because I think people, when they're podcasting, it's a very different medium than video.
[00:44:44.360 --> 00:44:46.600] They're not, you know, at the couch and comfortable.
[00:44:46.600 --> 00:44:53.000] They're usually standing up, they're on the go, they're doing chores, they're driving, they're going for a run.
[00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:58.200] Like, I did a poll once where I asked people, you know, what do you do when you listen to a podcast?
[00:44:58.200 --> 00:45:01.400] And, like, I think, like, 1% of people said, like, nothing.
[00:45:01.400 --> 00:45:04.040] I just sit there and listen to my podcast like a psycho.
[00:45:04.040 --> 00:45:05.480] Like, no one, no one does that.
[00:45:05.480 --> 00:45:09.400] And so I'm not sure if a streaming service would work, but it could.
[00:45:09.400 --> 00:45:21.720] Well, but, well, but let me just back this up slightly and say, like, when I think about like a podcast that just has a bunch of indie hackers type episodes in that feed, and I go, what problem is this solving?
[00:45:22.200 --> 00:45:34.360] I think a lot about like, oh, you know, sort of normally when I go, when I seek podcasts, I go to like, you know, Google podcast or Apple Podcasts, where it's just the entire list of all of the different options.
[00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:38.600] I thought, you know, like what I'm looking for is, you know, entrepreneurship content.
[00:45:38.600 --> 00:45:44.200] Then going to these like universal feeds creates all of this extra friction.
[00:45:44.200 --> 00:45:46.320] Like, there are so many more decisions that I need to make.
[00:45:46.320 --> 00:45:49.200] Whereas if I go to crunchyroll.com, it's curated, right?
[00:45:44.840 --> 00:45:50.640] Like, it's like, this is the stuff I want.
[00:45:50.960 --> 00:45:52.880] Like, narrow down the decision-making for me.
[00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:57.600] Like, help me get the, like, specifically, like, help me find out what's going on in the world of anime.
[00:45:57.600 --> 00:45:58.880] And so, that's in a sense.
[00:45:59.120 --> 00:46:01.120] So, the problem that it helps is discovery, right?
[00:46:01.120 --> 00:46:04.400] The discovery is, hey, if I go on iTunes, it's going to be shitty.
[00:46:04.720 --> 00:46:06.320] They have the business category.
[00:46:06.320 --> 00:46:07.840] How do I know this appeals to me?
[00:46:07.840 --> 00:46:17.440] Versus, like, hey, if I go on Indie Hackers' podcast app, I can discover new shows reliably well because it's curated and crafted by people who are like me, who know what I want specifically for me, right?
[00:46:17.440 --> 00:46:20.720] And we could do a bunch more stuff where we actually listen to shows, review the shows.
[00:46:20.720 --> 00:46:21.360] That's exactly right.
[00:46:22.080 --> 00:46:25.280] How many times on Twitter do you see, like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur?
[00:46:25.280 --> 00:46:29.840] Like, how many, yeah, how many like good podcasts are there like for entrepreneurs, right?
[00:46:29.840 --> 00:46:33.040] And, like, people will give like a list of like seven episodes, right?
[00:46:33.040 --> 00:46:34.400] But this doesn't seem like a small project.
[00:46:34.400 --> 00:46:38.000] Like, this isn't something that we build in a couple months and then set it and forget it.
[00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:42.320] Like, just growing that and maintaining it is a huge business that would take forever.
[00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:43.600] And the numbers might not be there.
[00:46:43.600 --> 00:46:44.160] There might not be.
[00:46:44.480 --> 00:46:48.640] Yeah, like, the risk to reward ratio isn't really super thrilling on that one to me.
[00:46:48.640 --> 00:46:50.160] Like, just the time, man.
[00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:58.720] Like, again, like, time to try to grow it, to build it, to recruit people to share their podcasts on it, or, you know, you could do it really slow.
[00:46:58.720 --> 00:47:01.120] Like, you could be very unambitious at first.
[00:47:01.120 --> 00:47:05.440] Like, here is an app just for the Indie Hackers podcast.
[00:47:05.440 --> 00:47:10.240] And if you like the Indie Hackers podcast, you come in here, you see all our episodes, and you can comment on them, and that's it, right?
[00:47:10.240 --> 00:47:16.200] And then we add a second podcast, and a third, and a fourth, and just grow super slowly and gradually add features again.
[00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:21.600] Again, it's not like a month-long project, but it's like something that can be slow and like a little bit unassuming and get bigger.
[00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:27.840] And so, really, I think the biggest concern is, like, is there enough demand on the consumer side to actually want an app like this?
[00:47:27.840 --> 00:47:34.520] Number one, the demand might not be there, but then even if there is a demand, I'm not confident enough and ways to monetize it.
[00:47:29.840 --> 00:47:36.440] Most streaming services charge a subscription fee.
[00:47:36.680 --> 00:47:39.240] What are people going to pay like 10 or 15 bucks a month for something like this?
[00:47:39.240 --> 00:47:40.440] Like, maybe not, right?
[00:47:40.440 --> 00:47:40.760] Maybe.
[00:47:40.760 --> 00:47:42.120] Or maybe we charge them a premium.
[00:47:42.120 --> 00:47:47.640] Maybe it's like, okay, we're when you're the mom and pop shop, when you're the little guy, you can't afford to be cheap, right?
[00:47:47.640 --> 00:47:51.000] Being cheap is a luxury of having economies of scale and being a huge business.
[00:47:51.000 --> 00:47:53.320] We just have to maybe make a premium service.
[00:47:53.320 --> 00:47:58.120] You could also think about charging the people who are on the network if it has enough usage and enough advertising.
[00:47:58.120 --> 00:48:06.520] Like, if I was an indie hacker starting my own podcast for other indie hackers, I might pay a hundred bucks a month to get it in front of other people and have it recommended because it's basically advertising.
[00:48:06.520 --> 00:48:08.600] And so, you know, it's a marketplace.
[00:48:08.600 --> 00:48:10.440] You're bringing people together with content.
[00:48:10.440 --> 00:48:11.960] There's a possibility there.
[00:48:11.960 --> 00:48:14.040] But why don't you pick an idea from our list?
[00:48:14.280 --> 00:48:15.160] Pick a weird one.
[00:48:15.320 --> 00:48:15.800] How about this?
[00:48:15.800 --> 00:48:17.000] How about the social token?
[00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:19.720] Because we talked about this a couple of years ago.
[00:48:20.280 --> 00:48:24.200] This is another one where trying to figure out how to do it would require a lot of learning.
[00:48:24.200 --> 00:48:30.600] But essentially, I just really like the idea of social tokens, which are like, it's almost like a crypto version of Disney dollars, right?
[00:48:30.600 --> 00:48:37.080] You go to Disney and they give you Disney dollars, and you can use Disney dollars to buy things at a discount compared to normal dollars.
[00:48:37.080 --> 00:48:39.560] And it works because a lot of people don't spend their Disney dollars, right?
[00:48:39.560 --> 00:48:41.000] They keep them as commemorative tokens.
[00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:42.120] They take them home.
[00:48:42.120 --> 00:48:48.760] And so even if Disney sells $1,000 with the Disney dollars, maybe $200 of that just goes home with people and never gets spent on anything.
[00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:54.040] And the rest, you know, yeah, they can sell stuff at a discount because it's subsidized by how many Disney dollars don't get spent.
[00:48:54.040 --> 00:49:00.440] And so I like the idea of having a closed community and having our own sort of currency or token that's like, you know, the indie hackers coin.
[00:49:00.440 --> 00:49:06.840] And people could use that to do things like boost your posts to the top of indie hackers or buy ads or support each other's projects or products.
[00:49:06.840 --> 00:49:09.240] You know, maybe even invest in each other's products.
[00:49:09.480 --> 00:49:11.560] But it's all done through this crypto token.
[00:49:11.560 --> 00:49:19.600] And what's cool about a crypto token is, unlike a Disney dollar, like nobody's going to take it home and frame it and give it to their kids as a souvenir, but like you can kind of invest in it.
[00:49:14.920 --> 00:49:21.040] You can kind of speculate on it.
[00:49:21.120 --> 00:49:25.840] You can kind of hold it and watch the price increase as the value and the popularity of the community increases.
[00:49:25.840 --> 00:49:35.040] So you could buy a whole bunch of indie hackers dollars because you believe in indie hackers as a community and then sell them later on for more as other people believe in the price goes up.
[00:49:35.040 --> 00:49:40.560] Now, the challenge with this is that it's like very tricky from a legal perspective.
[00:49:40.560 --> 00:49:42.560] What you're doing is you're issuing a security.
[00:49:42.800 --> 00:49:46.240] If you issue a security, you need to file that with the SEC.
[00:49:46.240 --> 00:49:50.240] A lot of people have gotten in trouble for not doing this well, but it's actually possible to do.
[00:49:50.240 --> 00:49:52.960] I mean, you can file and register your security with the SEC.
[00:49:52.960 --> 00:49:56.400] And I think some people have done that for their tokens and it's perfectly legal and then it's fine.
[00:49:56.400 --> 00:50:00.240] And there's also a lot of exceptions to whether or not you might not need to file.
[00:50:00.240 --> 00:50:07.920] Like if you place certain limitations on what you're going to do, like you only allow a certain number of people to buy your security or whatever, you can apply for an exception.
[00:50:07.920 --> 00:50:09.360] So I think it's a fun idea.
[00:50:09.360 --> 00:50:10.560] I think it'd be cool.
[00:50:10.560 --> 00:50:14.160] I think it'd be really cool just to let indie hackers invest in each other's companies.
[00:50:14.160 --> 00:50:17.680] And that might be easier to do with crypto than with dollars.
[00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:20.160] And so that's one of the crazier ideas out there.
[00:50:20.160 --> 00:50:21.120] I don't know if we're going to do it.
[00:50:21.120 --> 00:50:22.240] You know, it's too hard.
[00:50:22.240 --> 00:50:23.600] There's a lot of reputational risk.
[00:50:23.600 --> 00:50:26.880] You don't want to release some crypto coin that tanks and everybody loses their money.
[00:50:26.880 --> 00:50:31.360] But I think that we have a real asset, which is an actual community that's not just some random Discord chat server.
[00:50:31.520 --> 00:50:33.200] See, dude, that's the thing.
[00:50:33.200 --> 00:50:34.000] That's the thing.
[00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:40.720] Because we have so many things on our site where we can actually have this currency be exchanged for real forms of value.
[00:50:40.720 --> 00:50:44.080] Say, you know, if you have a certain amount of token, then you get more points.
[00:50:44.080 --> 00:50:56.240] Or your posts get boosted more when you make them, or like, if you have a product page on the directory, that page like gets promoted more, or like, you know, gets a signal boost when you post a milestone to it.
[00:50:56.240 --> 00:50:58.560] You can invest in other people's products or whatever.
[00:50:58.560 --> 00:51:00.920] You can give it actual functionality that is useful.
[00:51:00.920 --> 00:51:05.080] It doesn't have to just be the speculative thing that people just if it was all greater full theory.
[00:50:59.840 --> 00:51:07.000] I would be like, let's nix this in the butt.
[00:51:07.480 --> 00:51:09.080] Yeah, yeah, feel great about it.
[00:51:09.080 --> 00:51:10.120] Reddit has an alternative.
[00:51:10.120 --> 00:51:18.120] Reddit has Reddit Gold, where essentially, like, instead of just upvoting somebody's comment, you can basically, I think, buy Reddit gold for them.
[00:51:18.120 --> 00:51:21.960] And when they have Reddit Gold, they can use it to get extra privileges.
[00:51:21.960 --> 00:51:23.480] I think they get some special subreddit.
[00:51:23.480 --> 00:51:23.960] It's just cool.
[00:51:23.960 --> 00:51:25.400] It's a cool way to show that you appreciate people.
[00:51:25.400 --> 00:51:26.840] So there's a functionality to it.
[00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:29.720] You know that by buying it, you're supporting Reddit.
[00:51:29.880 --> 00:51:31.720] So we could do something like that, right?
[00:51:31.800 --> 00:51:32.920] Has nothing to do with crypto.
[00:51:32.920 --> 00:51:35.160] It's nothing to do with issuing a security.
[00:51:35.160 --> 00:51:35.960] Nobody's investing.
[00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:39.080] So you sort of stay away from all that stuff, but people still can support the site.
[00:51:39.080 --> 00:51:46.520] But I do really like the idea of having an actual token that people can use to sort of de facto invest in ND hackers.
[00:51:46.520 --> 00:51:49.080] And so that's one of the crazier ideas on the list.
[00:51:49.080 --> 00:51:54.200] And I think if we did a lot of the other ideas, there would be more functionality that a token could be used for.
[00:51:54.360 --> 00:52:02.360] If we had mastermind groups, you could maybe use tokens to be able to speak first or to be able to start your own mastermind group or to get a discount on those types of things.
[00:52:02.360 --> 00:52:05.640] And so that might be something we do like last.
[00:52:05.960 --> 00:52:07.000] What else is up here?
[00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:09.720] So we've got substack competitor.
[00:52:10.040 --> 00:52:11.960] Yeah, we already have that.
[00:52:11.960 --> 00:52:12.600] We already kind of have that.
[00:52:12.680 --> 00:52:13.320] We already have that.
[00:52:13.320 --> 00:52:17.880] You can create a series on ND hackers, which essentially is a fancy word for a newsletter.
[00:52:17.880 --> 00:52:21.640] And you can write posts on indie hackers that go out to the people who subscribe to you.
[00:52:21.640 --> 00:52:24.760] And when they see your post, they'll have a little prompt to subscribe to your newsletter.
[00:52:24.760 --> 00:52:31.880] And so we already have a few dozen people who've had these series on indie hackers for how long?
[00:52:31.880 --> 00:52:32.760] Like two years?
[00:52:32.760 --> 00:52:35.720] It's kind of an idea that we kind of started, but we aborted.
[00:52:35.720 --> 00:52:37.640] But it's cool.
[00:52:37.640 --> 00:52:40.360] I mean, we could even convert people's followers into email subscribers.
[00:52:40.360 --> 00:52:42.920] We could just ping their followers and say, hey, do you want to be an email subscriber?
[00:52:42.920 --> 00:52:46.640] I have something like 200,000 followers on indie hackers, like more than I have on Twitter.
[00:52:46.640 --> 00:52:50.960] Like, that would be a pretty badass newsletter for me to have right out of the gate.
[00:52:50.960 --> 00:52:51.280] Okay.
[00:52:51.520 --> 00:52:53.840] Dozens of other people are in similar situations.
[00:52:53.840 --> 00:52:55.600] But then talk about the revenue side.
[00:52:55.600 --> 00:53:00.640] Like, how much Substack isn't like a revenue generating machine, is it?
[00:53:00.640 --> 00:53:01.280] Let me see.
[00:53:02.800 --> 00:53:07.840] It had a revenue of only $9 million in 2021, sky-high valuation.
[00:53:07.840 --> 00:53:23.200] One of the most often talked about issues that Substack has with trying to monetize is obviously they have a very small number of their writers who bring in a lion's share of their overall revenue.
[00:53:23.200 --> 00:53:33.680] And yet, when a writer on Substack starts to really, really grow their subscriber base and become like a hit, they start going, like, wait, why am I going to go elsewhere?
[00:53:33.680 --> 00:53:38.160] Yeah, why am I like giving all my money, like giving 12% or whatever it is to Substack?
[00:53:38.160 --> 00:53:46.400] So, in terms of like this being like a good business, but you know, then taking a step back, how much money would we really need it to make?
[00:53:46.400 --> 00:53:51.120] There's this theory that was proposed a while back that everything in business is either bundling or unbundling, right?
[00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:58.080] Bundling, you're either combining a bunch of different things together, like a Walmart or an Amazon and putting it all in one place for convenience, or unbundling.
[00:53:58.080 --> 00:54:02.800] You're taking something that was all stuck together and you're pulling it out and making it more specific and more niche, right?
[00:54:02.800 --> 00:54:06.880] And so, what we're talking about is like essentially unbundling Substack.
[00:54:06.880 --> 00:54:08.000] Hey, Substack's cool.
[00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:10.560] You can find any newsletter on any topic there.
[00:54:10.560 --> 00:54:15.920] But what if you want a newsletter specifically in this indie hackers entrepreneurship tech business niche, right?
[00:54:15.920 --> 00:54:22.240] We can curate a better selection of newsletters there and curate a better selection of readers for people who want to write that content.
[00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:30.000] So, in a way, it's like unbundling Substack in the same way that people have unbundled Reddit by creating entire businesses based on a single subreddit.
[00:54:30.280 --> 00:54:36.920] The question that you're asking is: is Substack a big and substantial enough business to be worth unbundling, right?
[00:54:36.920 --> 00:54:39.240] Like, you typically want to unbundle huge things.
[00:54:39.240 --> 00:54:42.680] So, if you take off a little piece of that, you could build something pretty big yourself.
[00:54:43.800 --> 00:54:47.000] Do we want a slice of a slice is what you're saying?
[00:54:47.240 --> 00:54:48.040] Exactly, exactly.
[00:54:48.040 --> 00:54:52.680] I don't know about you, but I have kind of a number in mind of how much money I want to make for my own projects.
[00:54:52.680 --> 00:54:55.880] My number is $3 million a year.
[00:54:55.880 --> 00:54:58.680] It's a sort of a pie-in-the-sky goal to aim towards.
[00:54:58.680 --> 00:55:00.120] I don't care that much about hitting it.
[00:55:00.120 --> 00:55:03.800] I'm not like worked up over hitting it because I don't want to feel bad if I'm not making progress.
[00:55:03.800 --> 00:55:10.360] But I do want to make incremental progress towards getting there over the next five or 10 or 20 years and however long it takes.
[00:55:10.360 --> 00:55:13.320] And it doesn't need to all come from one place.
[00:55:13.320 --> 00:55:14.920] You don't have any deadline?
[00:55:15.320 --> 00:55:16.760] That is the whole point for me.
[00:55:16.760 --> 00:55:18.440] The point is to make it long term.
[00:55:18.440 --> 00:55:23.960] When I first got into entrepreneurship, I had a very airy fairy goal of like, I want to be a success.
[00:55:23.960 --> 00:55:24.920] What the hell does that mean?
[00:55:24.920 --> 00:55:25.720] I didn't know what that meant.
[00:55:25.720 --> 00:55:29.560] It wasn't specific, but I knew that I would know it when I got it, right?
[00:55:29.560 --> 00:55:32.360] I want to sell a company or start an impactful company.
[00:55:32.600 --> 00:55:33.560] I want to make a lot of money.
[00:55:33.560 --> 00:55:36.840] I want people around me to be like, Cortland set out to do a thing and he did it, right?
[00:55:36.840 --> 00:55:38.920] And so there's this vague goal of being a success.
[00:55:38.920 --> 00:55:43.000] And it turns out, like, as you said earlier in your post about infinite entrepreneurship, right?
[00:55:43.000 --> 00:55:44.520] It's not really about the destination.
[00:55:44.520 --> 00:55:46.280] It's really about the journey.
[00:55:46.280 --> 00:55:50.600] But the farther away your destination is, the longer you have to go on your journey.
[00:55:50.600 --> 00:55:57.880] And so for me, the point isn't to like, I need to hit something next year and then leverage that to get to the next level because I don't have any grand ambition by that.
[00:55:57.880 --> 00:55:59.960] Like, I already kind of accomplished my main goal.
[00:55:59.960 --> 00:56:11.640] I just want to have a good excuse to do the things that I love on a day-to-day basis and then something to look forward to, some goal that I can incrementally inch my way towards because I like watching numbers go up.
[00:56:11.720 --> 00:56:13.160] It's as simple as that.
[00:56:13.160 --> 00:56:14.520] I think I like growth.
[00:56:14.520 --> 00:56:18.720] So, I mean, look, my goal is a dollar.
[00:56:14.680 --> 00:56:20.080] I want to make a dollar.
[00:56:14.840 --> 00:56:21.840] We make zero currently.
[00:56:22.400 --> 00:56:26.480] I want to get our ad engine churning and going.
[00:56:27.200 --> 00:56:29.600] But I don't want to do that by like two years from now.
[00:56:29.600 --> 00:56:32.400] I want to do that probably by the end of the month.
[00:56:32.400 --> 00:56:36.080] Like, I want us to see some revenue coming in.
[00:56:36.080 --> 00:56:39.600] And then when I get there, I'm going to push the goalpost back, right?
[00:56:39.600 --> 00:56:40.800] And I'm going to think about the next thing.
[00:56:40.800 --> 00:56:48.320] And then I'm going to think about one of our products that we're already working on, making real money, making subscription money, right?
[00:56:48.320 --> 00:56:52.880] And then I'm going to take stock where I'm at, and then I'm probably going to raise the bar from there.
[00:56:52.880 --> 00:56:53.360] Yeah.
[00:56:53.360 --> 00:56:56.560] So you want to go incremental not necessarily have a grand plan, right?
[00:56:56.560 --> 00:56:59.920] You want to sort of fall into the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
[00:56:59.920 --> 00:57:00.880] And I like that too.
[00:57:00.880 --> 00:57:03.360] I think as people, we carry around a lot of baggage, right?
[00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:09.360] If you think about like a caveman, like how much baggage did like, you know, an ancient nomadic human have, right?
[00:57:09.360 --> 00:57:11.680] You really only had like what you could carry with you.
[00:57:11.680 --> 00:57:13.920] You didn't have a mortgage.
[00:57:13.920 --> 00:57:15.280] You didn't have a car.
[00:57:15.280 --> 00:57:17.440] You didn't have a million possessions.
[00:57:17.440 --> 00:57:21.600] And so your mind was always kind of light and you kind of felt free and you kind of felt unencumbered.
[00:57:21.600 --> 00:57:23.600] Whereas today, like all of us have a million things.
[00:57:23.600 --> 00:57:24.560] We have a million worries.
[00:57:24.560 --> 00:57:25.680] We have a million concerns.
[00:57:25.680 --> 00:57:27.200] I've got a million things to do.
[00:57:27.200 --> 00:57:34.640] I've got a whole to-do list in my mind that I'm not even consciously aware of, but it's like shit that's on my plate and a calendar full of things that's just scheduled out into the future.
[00:57:34.640 --> 00:57:44.800] And I think that's like that kind of life, modern life, so to speak, just ends up having a background of just being ambiently stressful because we have so much baggage.
[00:57:44.800 --> 00:57:55.440] And so I like the idea of having a business and doing exactly what you say, where it's like, yeah, maybe we have this giant grab bag of ideas, but we don't have some master plan of step one, step two, step three, and the whole next 10 years mapped out, right?
[00:57:55.440 --> 00:57:57.680] We have, hey, this is what we're working on today.
[00:57:57.680 --> 00:58:02.760] And, you know, next month when we're done with this, we'll look in the grab bag and figure out the next thing to work on.
[00:58:02.760 --> 00:58:08.280] And we're never really encumbered because we're always just working on this one thing at this one time.
[00:58:08.280 --> 00:58:12.200] I think sounds really peaceful and really attractive.
[00:58:12.200 --> 00:58:17.160] I never want a week to show up and to think, oh, fuck.
[00:58:17.480 --> 00:58:20.760] This week, I have to do like XYZ.
[00:58:20.760 --> 00:58:25.880] Like we have to, you know, hit a certain revenue bar or we like, or, you know, it's a Tuesday.
[00:58:25.880 --> 00:58:28.920] Oh, shit, on Tuesday, I have to do this thing.
[00:58:28.920 --> 00:58:35.240] I like the idea of getting away from that and through one lens that almost looks like I don't want to work hard.
[00:58:35.240 --> 00:58:37.400] But I work really hard.
[00:58:37.400 --> 00:58:50.440] I just tend to work the hardest and be the most fulfilled when I feel like I'm the one pushing, you know, the work forward as opposed to being pulled by external requirements that are placed on me.
[00:58:50.440 --> 00:58:58.840] And I think the easiest way to fall into that is to sort of arbitrarily place a bunch of deadlines on your head that aren't connected to anything real.
[00:58:58.840 --> 00:59:02.600] So what can people expect from indie hackers going forward?
[00:59:02.600 --> 00:59:03.720] We're now indie.
[00:59:03.720 --> 00:59:05.080] We're outside of Stripe.
[00:59:05.080 --> 00:59:08.120] Obviously, we don't make any money, so we have to make money.
[00:59:08.440 --> 00:59:10.840] We also have incentive too because the sky's the limit.
[00:59:11.240 --> 00:59:12.760] How's that going to change indie hackers?
[00:59:13.400 --> 00:59:14.680] I guess what should people expect?
[00:59:14.680 --> 00:59:16.200] We're going to be building in public.
[00:59:16.200 --> 00:59:17.880] We're going to be transparent.
[00:59:17.880 --> 00:59:20.840] We're going to be like sharing what the hell we're doing and how much money we make.
[00:59:20.840 --> 00:59:23.240] We're going to be like experimenting in public.
[00:59:23.240 --> 00:59:26.200] We're going to be working on a lot of small projects.
[00:59:26.200 --> 00:59:27.720] We're going to be publishing our revenue numbers.
[00:59:27.720 --> 00:59:29.400] We're going to be sharing what we're up to.
[00:59:29.640 --> 00:59:31.080] Hopefully we'll talk about everything.
[00:59:31.080 --> 00:59:32.360] Anyway, dude, I'm excited.
[00:59:32.600 --> 00:59:34.200] I'm happy recording this episode with you.
[00:59:34.200 --> 00:59:43.160] Maybe we'll do more episodes with just you and me since now we have a lot of our own stuff to talk about that's like a little bit more transparent and ambitious instead of just doing all interviews too i like i like doing it this way.
[00:59:43.160 --> 00:59:55.600] Yeah, it's way more chill it's almost more like just the meetings that we have on a daily basis exactly exactly all right dude good talking and let's do it let's go let's do it i'm excited