Debug Information

Processing Details

• VTT File: 62b81e4e.vtt
• Processing Time: September 11, 2025 at 01:06 PM
• Total Chunks: 2
• Transcript Length: 91,546 characters
• Caption Count: 879 captions

Prompts Used

Prompt 1: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 1 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:
[00:00:06.720 --> 00:00:08.080] We might as well jump into it.
[00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:09.280] We're here with Lane Wagner.
[00:00:09.280 --> 00:00:09.920] What's up, Lane?
[00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:11.200] Hey, how's it going?
[00:00:11.200 --> 00:00:12.000] Doing great.
[00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:13.120] Yeah, same here.
[00:00:13.120 --> 00:00:21.840] You are the founder of Boot.dev, where basically anybody can go to learn back-end development what you call the addictive way.
[00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:29.200] So you've got over 34,000 students who've basically signed up to start learning modern back-end development skills like Python and Go.
[00:00:29.200 --> 00:00:31.920] And it takes, what, six months, you said?
[00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:39.600] Just working on this part-time to get to the point where people have completed your coursework and they are now at what level of back-end developer?
[00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:41.200] Entry level.
[00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:44.800] Six months is the aggressive estimate, right?
[00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:46.400] That's the market take.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:47.520] Yeah, exactly.
[00:00:47.520 --> 00:00:47.920] It's the market.
[00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:50.240] Only for the real addicts.
[00:00:50.960 --> 00:00:55.520] Yeah, the ones that are spending 20 hours a week, you know, really grinding at it.
[00:00:55.520 --> 00:00:58.560] And that's kind of one of the ways that I think we differentiate in this space.
[00:00:58.560 --> 00:01:03.280] Like, so many people are marketing, like, you know, 12 weeks, six weeks, like crazy.
[00:01:03.280 --> 00:01:06.720] You know, we'll get you through this program really quickly.
[00:01:06.720 --> 00:01:08.000] I think it takes a little longer.
[00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:13.520] I have a blog post that is like linked, you know, with the asterisk on the six months.
[00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:14.960] We're looking at six months.
[00:01:14.960 --> 00:01:16.240] We're looking at 12 months.
[00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:17.840] It's going to take longer.
[00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:19.680] You have to work hard.
[00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:22.720] I saw that you had a post on indie hackers.
[00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:29.280] I think it was in July of 2020 where correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:31.040] Was it Q Vault Classroom?
[00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:35.280] You were like, hey, how I'm launching your product in an overcrowded industry.
[00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:37.040] And it was called Q Vault Classroom.
[00:01:37.040 --> 00:01:41.520] I wasn't even sure if this is the same product, but based on your description, it sounds like it.
[00:01:41.520 --> 00:01:43.760] You renamed it the boot.dev.
[00:01:44.080 --> 00:01:46.880] You dredged up the horrors that were the old product.
[00:01:46.880 --> 00:01:47.520] Yeah.
[00:01:48.160 --> 00:01:53.440] And it struggled for a long time, as I'm sure many indie hackers have this story, right?
[00:01:54.400 --> 00:01:58.880] Yeah, launched it as Q Vault Classroom, and the reason for naming it Q Vault is awful.
[00:01:58.880 --> 00:02:01.160] It's just because I owned the domain name.
[00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:03.160] I didn't want to buy another one.
[00:01:59.920 --> 00:02:04.760] So it was Q Vault Classroom.
[00:02:04.840 --> 00:02:08.520] That was July 2020, right in the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:02:08.520 --> 00:02:16.360] And now the new, better named boot.dev is what I saw is that it's up to 26,000 in revenue a month.
[00:02:16.360 --> 00:02:18.200] Is that still accurate?
[00:02:18.520 --> 00:02:21.080] Yeah, we did 26,000 last month.
[00:02:21.080 --> 00:02:26.520] And we've kind of been on this insane growth curve for the last about eight months.
[00:02:27.080 --> 00:02:28.760] Actually, you could even look back farther than that.
[00:02:28.760 --> 00:02:33.720] When we really started to grow, was the very beginning of, oh my gosh, it's 2023 already.
[00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:36.600] Yeah, 2022 was when things started to get good.
[00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:39.400] 2020, 2021 were uber rough.
[00:02:39.400 --> 00:02:43.400] We can talk about all those struggles, but it started to grow in 2020.
[00:02:43.400 --> 00:02:45.160] And the rebranding was part of that.
[00:02:45.160 --> 00:02:50.760] We rebranded in March of 2022 and really niched down.
[00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:58.360] And right when we like niched down and stopped trying to just be generic online coding classroom was when everything started to grow.
[00:02:58.360 --> 00:02:59.320] Who is we?
[00:02:59.320 --> 00:03:02.120] When you say we, who all is running boot.dev?
[00:03:02.440 --> 00:03:05.320] Yeah, so Qvault Classroom started out as a side project.
[00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:10.040] I was an engineering manager managing a Go team of developers at a fairly large company.
[00:03:10.040 --> 00:03:18.760] So side project until roughly the middle of 2021 when I brought on a partner from the UK.
[00:03:19.720 --> 00:03:22.200] We struggled for six months together.
[00:03:22.200 --> 00:03:27.800] I then bought him out, went back to owning it myself, hired an employee.
[00:03:27.800 --> 00:03:32.360] With the employee, we grew for the first half of 2022.
[00:03:32.360 --> 00:03:35.400] And then I brought on some investment.
[00:03:35.400 --> 00:03:39.800] So small angel funding, a third of a million dollars.
[00:03:40.120 --> 00:03:44.680] And then we've really grown since then because that was also when I was able to go full-time.
[00:03:44.680 --> 00:03:48.080] Okay, so it's basically you and one employee then.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:50.320] And a small amount of angel investing.
[00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:55.040] We just talked to Wes Cow recently on the podcast, a couple weeks ago.
[00:03:55.040 --> 00:03:57.360] She runs Maven.com.
[00:03:57.360 --> 00:03:59.680] In some respects, Maven is like the same as you.
[00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:00.960] It's like online education.
[00:04:00.960 --> 00:04:05.360] But in other respects, it couldn't be more different, right?
[00:04:05.360 --> 00:04:08.960] Like you raise a very small angel round and you mostly bootstrapped before that.
[00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:13.120] Wes raised like $25 million from investors.
[00:04:13.120 --> 00:04:20.720] You have like this very cool, we'll talk about it, like gamified user interface where anyone can just pop in and start learning to code immediately.
[00:04:20.720 --> 00:04:22.960] On Maven, it's like cohort-based courses.
[00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:27.040] You know, you pick an instructor, there's a time and a place you've got to be there.
[00:04:27.040 --> 00:04:28.000] Yours is cheap.
[00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.440] It's like $40 a month, $19 a month if you have the yearly plan.
[00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:35.280] Maven is like $1,000 a course, sometimes even more.
[00:04:35.600 --> 00:04:41.920] I think what Maven is doing represents like the other half of kind of the good side of like where I see education going.
[00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:47.600] The idea of cohort-based learning is super valuable to like a big subset of people.
[00:04:47.840 --> 00:04:57.920] It's like you could argue the reason people spend like insane amounts of money on college isn't because the material is that much better or even because you get like one-on-one learning with your professor.
[00:04:57.920 --> 00:04:59.920] A lot of times it's an auditorium, right?
[00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:04.880] It's more the like social pressure of I have to like meet deadlines.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:06.720] I have friends that are depending on me.
[00:05:06.880 --> 00:05:08.480] So I think there's a ton of value there.
[00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:12.480] The big downside dude, like the idea of cohort-based learning is expense, right?
[00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:17.360] So I feel like there's kind of two ways that education will go, hopefully, over the next two years.
[00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:28.840] And like, on one side, it's like this amazing, like self-paced experience where we do everything we can to like artificially give you like a dopamine hits to keep you going and getting through.
[00:05:28.840 --> 00:05:30.440] Because that's like the big struggle, right?
[00:05:30.440 --> 00:05:39.160] With anyone who's learning, generally speaking, 30 bucks a month or like price down for PPP isn't what's stopping you from breaking into an industry.
[00:05:39.160 --> 00:05:41.480] It's like giving up four weeks in.
[00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:46.200] And then on the other hand, like, I think that cohort-based learning is going to work for a lot of people.
[00:05:46.200 --> 00:05:50.360] It's almost like the boot camp model, but I guess stretched out over a longer period of time, maybe.
[00:05:50.680 --> 00:05:56.840] So, if these are the good halves of where education is going, what's the bad side of where education is going?
[00:05:56.840 --> 00:06:04.440] Well, the whole reason I started this thing was I got a CS degree and I'm really not happy with that experience.
[00:06:04.920 --> 00:06:05.720] Same here, man.
[00:06:05.720 --> 00:06:09.560] I feel like I learned very little that was actually of practical use for me.
[00:06:09.560 --> 00:06:10.600] And it was very expensive.
[00:06:11.000 --> 00:06:13.080] I liked a lot of my professors.
[00:06:13.400 --> 00:06:17.720] Like, not really any issues there, but it's insanely expensive.
[00:06:17.720 --> 00:06:20.120] And I say that as someone who basically paid zero for college.
[00:06:20.120 --> 00:06:28.680] Like, I got scholarships all the way through, but still working, you know, on the side, trying to, like, pay for living expenses, that sort of thing.
[00:06:28.920 --> 00:06:30.120] It took four years.
[00:06:30.120 --> 00:06:33.560] I had to take an acting class at one point, like, to get an elective credit.
[00:06:33.560 --> 00:06:35.720] Just like totally insane stuff.
[00:06:36.040 --> 00:06:38.600] You mean you got to take an acting class?
[00:06:38.600 --> 00:06:41.800] I had the privilege of taking an acting class.
[00:06:41.800 --> 00:06:44.200] I was Stanley in a streetcar named Desire.
[00:06:44.200 --> 00:06:44.840] Oh, man.
[00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:48.760] So, like, there's this societal thing where, like, I love studying philosophy on my own.
[00:06:48.760 --> 00:06:50.120] I like listen to podcasts and stuff.
[00:06:50.120 --> 00:06:52.360] But, like, when I'm trying to get a job, right?
[00:06:52.360 --> 00:06:58.760] When I'm working as a bank teller and I really want to level up my career, like, now is not the time to pitch me an acting class.
[00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:06.360] One of my favorite quotes from this guy, Naval, on Twitter, Naval Ravikant, he posted this right when the pandemic was in full bore.
[00:07:06.360 --> 00:07:08.680] He says, Schools aren't about learning.
[00:07:08.680 --> 00:07:10.360] Offices aren't about working.
[00:07:10.360 --> 00:07:12.040] Churches aren't about praying.
[00:07:12.040 --> 00:07:13.960] Restaurants aren't about eating.
[00:07:13.960 --> 00:07:14.760] Obvious now?
[00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:20.240] And that cuts right to the core of this idea that's at the core of cohort-based learning.
[00:07:20.240 --> 00:07:23.040] And what Cortland often says is bad learning.
[00:07:23.520 --> 00:07:29.200] Right, where Cortland's often like, yeah, college was a scam, but I found all my best friends there.
[00:07:29.200 --> 00:07:30.800] Like, I still love these guys.
[00:07:30.800 --> 00:07:33.600] Like, you know, but for MIT, I wouldn't know them.
[00:07:33.600 --> 00:07:43.600] And it's like hard to bake that in if you have, you know, basically a cohort class or an online course where you're just distilling it down to the pure functional part.
[00:07:43.600 --> 00:07:45.360] But still, I have a question, though.
[00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:46.240] Why so cheap?
[00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:52.640] Like, your boot.dev is $39 a month or $19 a month if you take the yearly package.
[00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:57.760] And you have a blog post where you talk about aligning your incentives and you talk about pricing.
[00:07:57.760 --> 00:08:08.240] And you said that one of your two goals, besides aligning your incentives, is that you want the overall cost to the student to be extremely low, like as low as possible, like less than 1% the price of college.
[00:08:08.240 --> 00:08:09.680] But what you've built is awesome.
[00:08:09.680 --> 00:08:10.560] It's amazing, right?
[00:08:10.560 --> 00:08:15.840] I went through the early tutorials and it's like a very useful product that took a ton of effort and time.
[00:08:15.840 --> 00:08:18.160] Why not charge more money?
[00:08:18.480 --> 00:08:22.880] So to quickly answer your question, I think our price will go up a little bit.
[00:08:23.200 --> 00:08:24.320] There's definitely a cap.
[00:08:24.320 --> 00:08:29.680] Like I don't think we'll ever realistically be having like our lifetime value for a student over $1,000.
[00:08:29.840 --> 00:08:37.760] So the value that boot dev provides today versus a year ago is like way higher because we have so many new courses and like features and all these things.
[00:08:37.920 --> 00:08:39.600] So it'll creep up.
[00:08:39.600 --> 00:08:44.240] But yeah, this problem of incentives is like very prescient in education.
[00:08:44.240 --> 00:08:49.760] And I think people very rightfully are quick to like sniff out scams in education.
[00:08:49.760 --> 00:08:54.720] Like if you publish a course and it's not very good and you charge a lot of money, like people will get upset, right?
[00:08:54.720 --> 00:08:56.000] Rightfully so.
[00:08:56.000 --> 00:08:59.120] But it's amazing how much college has gotten away with.
[00:08:59.120 --> 00:09:08.920] Like I don't know why college gets this special pass of like we're going to charge you $100,000, give you some degree that doesn't directly help you with your job.
[00:09:09.160 --> 00:09:11.720] And for some reason, like we don't care.
[00:09:12.520 --> 00:09:14.920] So it's really important to me to get these incentives aligned.
[00:09:14.920 --> 00:09:23.400] And I think the basic model of charging a low amount and providing a ton of value is the lowest risk thing until something better comes along.
[00:09:23.400 --> 00:09:28.760] Obviously, like in the blog post that you're talking about, Cortland, I talk about ISAs and this kind of stuff.
[00:09:28.760 --> 00:09:30.920] And I think that that stuff can work.
[00:09:30.920 --> 00:09:37.640] But now we've seen the last four years that, and there was a pretty big blow up with companies doing ISAs.
[00:09:37.640 --> 00:09:41.960] And so it turned out not to be the silver bullet that we thought it would be.
[00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:44.360] For listeners, ISAs are an income share agreement.
[00:09:44.360 --> 00:09:47.560] So these are basically companies that'll say, oh, come, we'll teach you to code for free.
[00:09:47.560 --> 00:09:51.240] And then you give us a percentage of your salary, your first year on the job.
[00:09:51.240 --> 00:09:53.160] Yeah, and so like there's kind of two things.
[00:09:53.160 --> 00:09:55.400] My understanding of the problem is like twofold.
[00:09:55.400 --> 00:10:00.440] One is that you just have to get a job making like a not super great income.
[00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:14.280] So like you could land a job after one of these boot camps making 50 or 60K, but now you're on the hook for 50 or 60 thousand dollars to backpay your education, even though the job you happen to land isn't that great.
[00:10:14.840 --> 00:10:18.120] And I think the marginal cost of most of this stuff can just be near zero.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:21.720] You know, I add a new student on boot dev, I pay zero dollars.
[00:10:21.720 --> 00:10:24.360] The biggest cost I have is acquisition, right?
[00:10:24.360 --> 00:10:25.640] Getting the word out.
[00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:35.080] So by having something awesome, by coming on podcasts or doing a course on Free Code Camp on their YouTube channel, like I can bring those costs way, way down.
[00:10:35.400 --> 00:10:37.960] But that is the challenge, is getting in front of people.
[00:10:37.960 --> 00:10:47.040] I'm kind of curious what it took you to get in front of people in the beginning because to learn how to code, I built a code game called Flexbox Defense.
[00:10:47.040 --> 00:10:50.800] It teaches you CSS styles and things like that.
[00:10:50.800 --> 00:10:54.240] And I feel like it was a huge missed opportunity for me.
[00:10:54.240 --> 00:10:58.720] You can correct me if I'm wrong, because at the time, I wasn't all that entrepreneurial.
[00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:02.560] I just wanted to get like a cushy gig doing consulting work.
[00:11:02.560 --> 00:11:04.800] So I'm like, oh, well, this will be remarkable, right?
[00:11:04.800 --> 00:11:05.440] It's a game.
[00:11:05.440 --> 00:11:06.720] It'll teach people.
[00:11:06.720 --> 00:11:08.960] And that thing blew up on day one.
[00:11:08.960 --> 00:11:12.080] Like, I still, I think I had like a donation for PayPal.
[00:11:12.080 --> 00:11:18.240] I probably get, you know, $20 a week five or six years later, seven years later.
[00:11:18.240 --> 00:11:19.280] And it just spread.
[00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:20.960] So what was it like for you?
[00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:31.440] I mean, first off, was the, you know, V1 of your product even this sort of gamified learning experience, or how did that, like the early growth pings work for you?
[00:11:32.400 --> 00:11:35.360] Yeah, so I had a bunch of problems in the beginning.
[00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:39.680] One problem was the idea for the platform was like way too broad.
[00:11:39.680 --> 00:11:41.040] It was like, we're going to teach you to code.
[00:11:41.040 --> 00:11:48.800] And the genesis for the idea was like, okay, we have all these boot camps that are like rushing people through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in three months.
[00:11:48.800 --> 00:11:57.920] I want to teach you like the stuff you learn in a CS degree that's actually applicable to a job because there are parts of a CS degree that are super important, other parts not so much.
[00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:01.200] But I want to teach you that stuff that boot camps seem to be skipping over.
[00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:03.040] And I interviewed a lot of boot camp grads.
[00:12:03.040 --> 00:12:07.120] There were a couple kind of prominent boot camps here where I live in Utah.
[00:12:07.120 --> 00:12:10.960] And it's like, well, this stuff is obviously missing, and you just need a little bit longer to teach it.
[00:12:10.960 --> 00:12:13.040] So that was the idea.
[00:12:13.040 --> 00:12:24.640] But that idea is so generic and broad that I just struggled to find any traction because I'm like releasing a Go course and then like an object-authoriented programming course and just all this stuff.
[00:12:24.640 --> 00:12:26.080] And where were you trying to advertise?
[00:12:26.080 --> 00:12:31.480] Like when you say you were struggling, like you put it on product hunt or something, or you tweet about it and then it's crickets.
[00:12:31.480 --> 00:12:34.040] Yeah, we had like a crickets product hunt thing.
[00:12:34.680 --> 00:12:36.360] Where was I trying to advertise?
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:37.400] That was the other problem.
[00:12:37.480 --> 00:12:42.280] Was like I've learned so much in the last two and a half years, even though I was putting in the effort.
[00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:50.040] You know, when you're bad at like UI design and marketing, you have to put in 10 times the effort that someone experienced has to put in to get the same result.
[00:12:50.040 --> 00:12:50.760] Because you don't know.
[00:12:50.840 --> 00:12:52.840] You're in the wrong places saying the wrong things.
[00:12:52.840 --> 00:12:55.080] Yeah, so I had like 300 followers on Twitter.
[00:12:55.080 --> 00:12:56.120] I'm like tweeting about it.
[00:12:56.120 --> 00:12:57.240] Nobody cares.
[00:12:58.440 --> 00:13:02.200] Blogging was how we initially started to get traction.
[00:13:02.200 --> 00:13:05.160] So I was an okay writer.
[00:13:05.320 --> 00:13:07.000] I'm a much better writer now.
[00:13:07.240 --> 00:13:14.920] But I was a decent writer and I've got some traction on Medium and some of these other blogging platforms, which in hindsight was definitely not the best way to do it.
[00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:18.520] I probably should have gone the video route with YouTube.
[00:13:18.840 --> 00:13:19.880] But it did work.
[00:13:19.880 --> 00:13:21.320] I did get some traction.
[00:13:21.320 --> 00:13:28.200] We started ranking for some SEO terms, and that's kind of like what creeped us up to that first like $1,000 MRR.
[00:13:28.200 --> 00:13:28.600] Right.
[00:13:28.920 --> 00:13:43.720] Honestly, that's even a pain with me and Cortland with Indie Hackers is like, you know, if you're closely like, you know, sort of running out of money on your runway and you're getting started, SEO is a long-term play, even if you do it well, right?
[00:13:43.720 --> 00:13:48.360] So you basically didn't start to see anything until the SEO started to take off.
[00:13:48.520 --> 00:13:53.160] Launched the platform, I guess, in March of 2020, like right as the pandemic broke.
[00:13:53.160 --> 00:13:56.280] And it was like a nothing burger for like a good three or four months.
[00:13:56.280 --> 00:14:00.280] I mean, I'm like doing the classic thing, just kind of like head down, working on it, nights and weekends, right?
[00:14:00.280 --> 00:14:04.480] I had a full-time job, so I'm not like, there's no concept of runway at this point, right?
[00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:07.080] Um, but like I'm working on it.
[00:14:07.320 --> 00:14:08.360] I put out the first course.
[00:14:08.360 --> 00:14:11.640] There was, there was it was like a whole platform that I built with just one course on it.
[00:14:11.680 --> 00:14:13.680] Um, again, probably a mistake.
[00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:16.640] Uh, could have could have done that a different way.
[00:14:13.480 --> 00:14:20.800] It was like the middle of 2021 when we made like our first thousand dollars in a single month.
[00:14:21.120 --> 00:14:23.760] Um, so just like really long, slow burn.
[00:14:23.760 --> 00:14:30.000] I love blogging, so like it wasn't hard to just do that once a week, but it was not the growth play.
[00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:35.120] And we can talk about how we grew a lot faster after that by doing more than just blogging.
[00:14:35.120 --> 00:14:36.480] How do you get good at writing?
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:40.320] Because this is something I see a lot of people improve at over the course of their career online.
[00:14:40.320 --> 00:14:45.760] They start off as like kind of crappy writers, and then they kind of find their own in terms of like, oh, what actually resonates with readers?
[00:14:45.760 --> 00:14:47.840] What makes something good versus something bad?
[00:14:47.840 --> 00:14:51.600] What's your philosophy after having written lots of blog posts for years?
[00:14:51.920 --> 00:14:57.280] I've looked at my early blog posts and the blog posts of like inexperienced writers, people who've just started.
[00:14:57.280 --> 00:15:06.400] And I feel like there's this fake writer in everyone where like you have this fake voice that you expect to be like the writer voice, and you need to write in that voice.
[00:15:06.400 --> 00:15:07.040] Yeah.
[00:15:07.040 --> 00:15:09.120] And that was one of the biggest things to like overcome.
[00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:16.000] Be like, no, actually, it's much better if you just write in your own voice and have unique hot takes.
[00:15:17.200 --> 00:15:19.440] Slightly controversial stuff is the best.
[00:15:19.840 --> 00:15:30.720] Anytime I wrote an article that had a hot take that I knew like about 50% of the people who read the article would disagree with, I knew that was a banger and it's going like to the top of Hacker News.
[00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:43.280] So that's the other thing is like you actually want to rip out the nuance from your thoughts and like put it towards the bottom of your article and put all your controversial stuff right at the top to get people's attention.
[00:15:43.280 --> 00:15:45.840] That's honestly one of the best pieces of advice I think I could give.
[00:15:45.840 --> 00:15:47.200] I think that's amazing advice.
[00:15:47.200 --> 00:15:49.920] Literally, Channing and I were just looking at your blog, and I was saying this.
[00:15:49.920 --> 00:15:51.280] I was like, look at Lane's blog.
[00:15:51.280 --> 00:15:58.920] Like, every single post he has is like an interesting discussion topic that you could kind of like argue with because, and now I know exactly why.
[00:15:58.920 --> 00:16:00.520] Like, you've intentionally done it that way.
[00:16:00.520 --> 00:16:01.640] And it's like, that's good.
[00:16:01.640 --> 00:16:02.680] It generates discussion.
[00:16:02.680 --> 00:16:03.560] It generates engagement.
[00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:06.440] Like, people want to read stuff that's not very milquetoast.
[00:16:06.760 --> 00:16:11.880] And then to your point, like, on the opposite, like, the worst thing ever is when someone's writing, they're equivocating about every point.
[00:16:11.880 --> 00:16:18.120] You know, they show you both sides of the issue, and they never say anything that's like extreme, and it just gets boring.
[00:16:18.120 --> 00:16:22.840] Yeah, so I actually fell into this trap pretty hard because weird side notes.
[00:16:23.160 --> 00:16:26.040] I grew up LDS, Mormon here in Utah.
[00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:27.560] I've since left the church.
[00:16:27.560 --> 00:16:33.960] I'm like pretty atheist at this point, but I've watched a lot of like religious discussion.
[00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:42.760] And what's really valued in like academic, like, you know, kind of philosophical debate is tons of nuance, tons of equivocating.
[00:16:42.760 --> 00:16:46.840] You're always couching everything you say in like, but it depends.
[00:16:46.840 --> 00:16:51.240] And that's actually a terrible strategy for writing online.
[00:16:51.240 --> 00:16:54.760] It's a terrible strategy for doing anything that's supposed to be interesting.
[00:16:54.760 --> 00:16:55.080] Yeah.
[00:16:55.080 --> 00:16:58.200] Nobody wants to hear like the both like lukewarm sides of an issue.
[00:16:58.200 --> 00:17:02.920] People want to hear an actual strong opinion that they can like, you know, hold on to and like say something about.
[00:17:02.920 --> 00:17:08.360] Yeah, which has like bad ramifications for society, but like it is a good way to get people to listen to you online.
[00:17:08.360 --> 00:17:09.000] You mean, what do you mean?
[00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:10.120] Like Twitter?
[00:17:10.840 --> 00:17:26.120] One of the things that I think is really beautiful and honestly reassuring about communicating in that way is if you have a product and it's just you or your small team, you can say the prose to the poetry, like the really simplified, interesting thing.
[00:17:26.120 --> 00:17:33.640] And then once you get people in the door and they come to your website or they see your product, then you can give them like an extra layer, right?
[00:17:33.640 --> 00:17:35.240] You're kind of going down the pyramid.
[00:17:35.240 --> 00:17:36.360] You start with just the top.
[00:17:36.360 --> 00:17:37.640] They go, that's interesting.
[00:17:37.640 --> 00:17:43.960] And then you give them a little bit more of the pyramid, and you only show them what is needed to get them to the next step.
[00:17:43.960 --> 00:17:47.600] And so by the time it really matters, people know what you're about.
[00:17:44.600 --> 00:17:48.240] Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:57.200] People give you the benefit of the doubt once they've, you know, in the context of a blog, read down the page or in the context of your product, like signed up and done a few things.
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:18:00.480] So you can like, yeah, you can save the nuance for later.
[00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:03.840] Okay, so you're a better writer, but SEO is still slow.
[00:18:03.840 --> 00:18:05.760] What actually started moving the needle?
[00:18:05.760 --> 00:18:12.720] You said you started blowing up, started really, you know, jumping to another level of growth, like in early 2022, I think you said.
[00:18:12.960 --> 00:18:14.240] What worked?
[00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:18.400] How did you switch from Q Vault to boot.dev?
[00:18:18.720 --> 00:18:20.880] How did you make that transformation?
[00:18:20.880 --> 00:18:24.080] Well, I always knew it needed, like, we needed to change our name.
[00:18:24.080 --> 00:18:26.640] I was like, this name doesn't make any sense.
[00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:29.280] It has nothing to do with education.
[00:18:29.600 --> 00:18:31.680] It's like, I always knew it was going to change at some point.
[00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:32.960] I was just too lazy to change it.
[00:18:32.960 --> 00:18:37.680] So I guess I was taking it more seriously and wanted to rebrand at that point.
[00:18:37.680 --> 00:18:47.200] But I don't think the rebranding was a part of the greater idea, which helped our growth, which was niching down the product, being way more obvious about what we're about.
[00:18:47.440 --> 00:18:55.920] So I actually ended up deleting some courses, which sounds insane to a content creator because you spend all this time building these courses and this educational material.
[00:18:56.240 --> 00:19:03.840] So the pitch of Q Vault back in 2021 was come learn computer science online.
[00:19:04.320 --> 00:19:11.760] And ranking for those search terms is the worst because you're ranking against the colleges that started the internet.
[00:19:11.760 --> 00:19:15.040] Like their domains are like the most powerful domains.
[00:19:15.360 --> 00:19:17.840] And you can't rate for those terms.
[00:19:18.320 --> 00:19:21.040] But you can rank for terms like backend developer.
[00:19:21.040 --> 00:19:27.280] So it just so happened that everyone coming to my website, even though it was about computer science, like pretty much had the goal of becoming a back-end developer.
[00:19:28.480 --> 00:19:30.600] Those are like quite tightly aligned, right?
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:35.880] There's a ton of resources on the internet for learning front-end development on your own.
[00:19:36.520 --> 00:19:42.120] But backend's kind of unique in that there's just not many platforms dedicated to back-end development.
[00:19:42.120 --> 00:19:51.640] You can find something that talks about Java or something that talks about C, but like a career path for back-end developers doesn't really exist.
[00:19:51.640 --> 00:19:55.080] And I think there's several reasons why that is, but that niching down helped.
[00:19:55.080 --> 00:20:00.680] And so when we did that, I went and deleted anything on the product that distracted from that.
[00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:01.960] So we had a graphics course.
[00:20:01.960 --> 00:20:04.360] I'm kind of like throw it away.
[00:20:04.360 --> 00:20:04.760] It was.
[00:20:04.920 --> 00:20:05.640] It was awful.
[00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:12.120] But we immediately started growing because people were now landing on the site and they're like, oh, this is where I can learn back-end development.
[00:20:12.600 --> 00:20:13.560] I was searching around.
[00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:17.160] There's nowhere else that does that, but all your messaging talks about it.
[00:20:17.160 --> 00:20:19.160] So that was the product side of it for sure.
[00:20:19.160 --> 00:20:26.520] So it's kind of a rare product-led growth change where usually when people tinker around with their product, it doesn't really change their ability to grow.
[00:20:26.520 --> 00:20:27.880] But you kept your marketing the same.
[00:20:27.880 --> 00:20:28.600] You're still blogging.
[00:20:28.600 --> 00:20:30.440] You're still working on SEO.
[00:20:30.440 --> 00:20:33.000] But you just pared down your product to change what you're working on.
[00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:38.360] And it made your messaging much more specific, much more valuable, and quite frankly, easier to rank for.
[00:20:38.360 --> 00:20:40.360] And that's what kickstarted your growth.
[00:20:40.360 --> 00:20:47.080] So when we were making $1,000 a month at the beginning of 2022, we had about the same amount of organic traffic.
[00:20:47.080 --> 00:20:49.320] Actually, we might have even had more than we have right now.
[00:20:49.320 --> 00:20:57.160] Because when I rebranded the site, we lost a bunch of rankings, even though I did everything perfectly, but Google's the worst, like from a technical perspective.
[00:20:57.320 --> 00:21:02.040] All the redirects are there, but we lost half of our organic traffic.
[00:21:02.040 --> 00:21:04.680] So we had this like funnel of people coming in.
[00:21:04.680 --> 00:21:08.280] At the time, it was almost 100,000 people hitting our blog every month.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:13.560] It was just, we had awful, like truly awful conversion rates.
[00:21:14.120 --> 00:21:20.960] So getting that up and changing what we were writing about, like everything we're writing about now is back-end and Go and Python.
[00:21:22.480 --> 00:21:25.520] Tightening that up has been a game changer.
[00:21:25.520 --> 00:21:28.800] So I'm going to go back in the vault and embarrass you again.
[00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:36.960] Or actually, this time I'm not going to embarrass you because you mentioned it was right at the beginning of 2022 where you started to see some more growth.
[00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:38.640] You started to kind of niche down.
[00:21:38.640 --> 00:21:49.200] And sure enough, here's a post from what is it, July 2022, where you said, got 10 super users and it's unlocking growth even faster than I expected.
[00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:58.960] And so that seems like it aligns perfectly with this idea of instead of being mediocre to a lot of people, you're like stellar to a small number of people.
[00:21:58.960 --> 00:22:01.280] But like, tell me what happened here.
[00:22:01.600 --> 00:22:06.160] Yeah, so I'm not going to fanboy too hard, but I have listened to like every indie hacker podcast.
[00:22:06.480 --> 00:22:10.480] I've also listened to a lot of the Y Combinator stuff.
[00:22:10.480 --> 00:22:20.560] And one of these ideas that I think is really, really important is it's much better to be great to a small number of people than like lukewarm to a lot of people.
[00:22:20.560 --> 00:22:23.520] And so that was what I was like really taking into heart at that point.
[00:22:23.520 --> 00:22:28.640] And so yeah, I just went and like one by one started interviewing people who were actually using the site.
[00:22:28.640 --> 00:22:29.920] Why are you here?
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:30.800] Why are you here?
[00:22:30.800 --> 00:22:32.400] Why do you care about these courses?
[00:22:32.560 --> 00:22:35.360] Why aren't you over on some competitor site?
[00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:39.360] And like the story started to get pretty consistent.
[00:22:39.360 --> 00:22:41.680] Like I'm here to learn back-end development.
[00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:42.880] This is my background.
[00:22:42.960 --> 00:22:48.400] Turns out a lot of them had a common background in like IT ops, but like hadn't really written a lot of codes.
[00:22:49.040 --> 00:22:54.000] Learning what they were about and then building just for them started to grow.
[00:22:54.000 --> 00:23:00.760] And this industry, like the Learn2X industry, is like so powerfully fueled by word of mouth.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:06.680] So you start getting some super users who really like you, you can start growing kind of organically in that way.
[00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:11.640] What do you think the Y Combinator podcast is doing that we should be doing?
[00:23:11.640 --> 00:23:16.520] Speaking of fights and disagreements, what's good about their podcast?
[00:23:16.520 --> 00:23:18.040] Because I never listened to it.
[00:23:18.040 --> 00:23:25.560] They did a series of lectures at Stanford and published it as a podcast on Spotify.
[00:23:25.560 --> 00:23:33.800] It's like 20 episodes from like, I don't know, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, like all the they all like took a lecture.
[00:23:33.800 --> 00:23:35.480] We should be lecturing at Stanford.
[00:23:35.640 --> 00:23:37.480] And those were great.
[00:23:37.480 --> 00:23:38.760] Those 20 episodes.
[00:23:39.320 --> 00:23:41.400] That's all I've listened to from them.
[00:23:41.400 --> 00:23:43.240] What do you think we should be doing on this podcast?
[00:23:43.240 --> 00:23:45.160] If you've listened to every episode, what do you like?
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:46.440] What do you not like?
[00:23:46.440 --> 00:23:53.960] The best episodes that have had the most impact on boot dev are like, I mean, I could just start naming them.
[00:23:54.280 --> 00:23:58.840] I guess I don't know exactly what the pattern are, but it was like Near Ayal, the hooked stuff was awesome.
[00:23:58.840 --> 00:24:00.280] The mom test.
[00:24:00.600 --> 00:24:05.880] The people who have come on and like really drilled into these very specific ideas.
[00:24:05.880 --> 00:24:11.160] The authors, people who've written books, because they're subject matter experts and they're like, you know, here's what you need to know.
[00:24:11.160 --> 00:24:12.200] Here's valuable information.
[00:24:12.200 --> 00:24:13.080] Boom, bam.
[00:24:13.080 --> 00:24:15.080] And you walk away having learned something.
[00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:24.440] Now, I will say the stories are great too because it's like you hear the advice from the people with the books and then you like hear the stories of how people implemented it.
[00:24:24.440 --> 00:24:34.360] So I don't know if one works without the other, but like the authors explaining in depth, like, okay, here's how you're going to do a customer interview was immensely helpful.
[00:24:34.360 --> 00:24:37.240] It's fascinating to hear that because they ask other people the same question.
[00:24:37.240 --> 00:24:44.960] And it feels like the people who have not yet built anything like the stories and the people like you who are like, okay, I'm at $26,000 a month.
[00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:47.680] Like, you want the real hard facts of how you're going to build an actual business.
[00:24:48.000 --> 00:24:49.440] You're beyond the stories a little bit.
[00:24:49.440 --> 00:24:51.920] Like, you're already inspired and motivated.
[00:24:51.920 --> 00:24:52.960] You just want to build something.
[00:24:52.960 --> 00:24:55.440] How do I solve very specific problems?
[00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:59.600] Yeah, I guess like if your struggle, and I mean, you guys know this better than me.
[00:24:59.600 --> 00:25:02.800] If your struggle is motivation, then yeah, I'm sure the stories are more helpful.
[00:25:02.800 --> 00:25:05.120] But like, I didn't really struggle with motivation.
[00:25:05.120 --> 00:25:08.880] I just like struggled with sucking at building a business.
[00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:10.480] Yeah.
[00:25:10.960 --> 00:25:12.240] That simplifies things.
[00:25:12.240 --> 00:25:14.240] That's where I always was, too, in my 20s.
[00:25:14.240 --> 00:25:15.280] And even now, right?
[00:25:15.280 --> 00:25:17.760] Like, it's not hard to like sit down and work.
[00:25:17.760 --> 00:25:23.600] It's hard to succeed because there's like a hundred million other people out there working on like a bunch of, even in your niche, right?
[00:25:23.600 --> 00:25:26.240] Like you are teaching people how to code online.
[00:25:26.240 --> 00:25:26.880] There are tons.
[00:25:26.960 --> 00:25:31.120] I mean, there's been like five people on this podcast who've been teaching people how to code online.
[00:25:31.120 --> 00:25:34.800] It's like hard to cut through the noise and figure out how you're going to win.
[00:25:34.800 --> 00:25:35.920] So I agree with you.
[00:25:35.920 --> 00:25:40.800] I think even if you've got the motivation, it's not easy to build something.
[00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:42.960] You need to get Seth Godin on.
[00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:45.440] The Purple Cow, I think, was one of the best books.
[00:25:45.600 --> 00:25:46.480] I'm a huge fan.
[00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:48.640] I would love to have him on.
[00:25:48.960 --> 00:25:49.440] Yeah.
[00:25:49.920 --> 00:25:54.480] So like this new, I am not like a good UI UX person.
[00:25:54.480 --> 00:25:55.760] I'm a back-end developer.
[00:25:55.760 --> 00:25:56.560] Surprise.
[00:25:57.280 --> 00:26:02.000] But like the early versions of the site were truly awful in terms of how they looked and felt.
[00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:03.840] It's gotten a lot better now.
[00:26:03.840 --> 00:26:11.360] And I think a good cheat code there was reading The Purple Cow and realizing like, okay, this industry is crowded.
[00:26:11.360 --> 00:26:15.600] There's a ton of people teaching people how to code online.
[00:26:15.600 --> 00:26:17.920] We need to be remarkable and different.
[00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:19.680] And there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:26:19.680 --> 00:26:24.320] Like, we need to stop trying to make our site look like the big players.
[00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:26.240] Yeah, that's exactly it.
[00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:26.960] I think standing out.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:28.960] I mean, we do this for indie hackers in a way.
[00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:30.200] For us, it's like really simple.
[00:26:30.200 --> 00:26:31.640] Somebody was complaining yesterday on Twitter.
[00:26:31.640 --> 00:26:34.920] They're like, at CS Allen, when are you going to make the website white so I can read it?
[00:26:29.840 --> 00:26:36.520] And I'm like, probably never.
[00:26:36.760 --> 00:26:39.320] Just going to be this weird, hard to read, dark blue website.
[00:26:39.320 --> 00:26:40.120] Because you know what?
[00:26:40.120 --> 00:26:44.520] Every time somebody comes to indie hackers a second time, they remember that they've been here before.
[00:26:44.520 --> 00:26:49.000] And I think just standing yourself out apart from the crowd is worth its weight in gold.
[00:26:49.000 --> 00:26:52.600] Yeah, we recently changed our font probably four months ago.
[00:26:52.920 --> 00:26:57.880] It is the like the open source version, I don't know, of the font from Dota 2.
[00:26:57.880 --> 00:26:58.200] Yeah.
[00:26:58.200 --> 00:26:58.680] So it's like this.
[00:26:58.920 --> 00:26:59.880] Very video gamey.
[00:26:59.880 --> 00:27:00.280] Yeah.
[00:27:00.280 --> 00:27:00.680] Yeah.
[00:27:00.680 --> 00:27:02.440] And like, I initially had a bunch of complaints.
[00:27:02.440 --> 00:27:04.200] Like, oh, it's like a little harder to read.
[00:27:04.200 --> 00:27:07.880] And so like, I actually did take that into account because you do a lot of reading on the site.
[00:27:07.880 --> 00:27:09.880] So we like made some tweaks so it was a little easier to read.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:11.320] But at the end of the day, we kept it.
[00:27:11.320 --> 00:27:15.000] And people land on it and they're like, this is a weird, like, this is a weird feel.
[00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:15.400] Yeah.
[00:27:15.640 --> 00:27:17.080] But they remember it, right?
[00:27:17.320 --> 00:27:20.440] And that helps so much more than you'd think.
[00:27:20.440 --> 00:27:23.880] And it also just puts you into like game mindset.
[00:27:23.880 --> 00:27:27.480] So Cortland and I played a lot of World of Warcraft growing up.
[00:27:27.480 --> 00:27:30.760] And I'm obsessed with gamifying my life.
[00:27:30.760 --> 00:27:32.760] I'm obsessed with gaming products.
[00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:42.520] But I'm also kind of curious because, I mean, even your pitch, it might have been on your, it might have been on the site, might be on Twitter, is like, hey, make learning addictive.
[00:27:42.520 --> 00:27:49.240] And you also just mentioned Nier Ayal, where he wrote this book called Hooked, which is all about basically getting people hooked on games.
[00:27:49.240 --> 00:27:52.680] And then he wrote a book after that that's called Indistractible, which is like, how do I unwind?
[00:27:52.680 --> 00:27:55.720] How do I teach people how to like not get hooked on stuff?
[00:27:55.720 --> 00:28:05.720] So how do you think about striking the balance there where you're hooking people, but trying to make sure that it's like in a way that aligns with their values?
[00:28:06.040 --> 00:28:07.080] Yeah, great question.
[00:28:07.080 --> 00:28:12.600] I mean, the best cheat code is the fact that we're teaching you useful things.
[00:28:12.600 --> 00:28:18.720] So, like, getting addicted to like learning useful things is already inherently a good thing rather than scrolling on Facebook.
[00:28:18.720 --> 00:28:21.920] So, like, just out of the gate, we're in a pretty good spot.
[00:28:21.920 --> 00:28:31.840] Now, there is one pitfall that we definitely ran into, which is like you can incentivize the wrong things in your product because we do have a lot of users who love the game system.
[00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:34.560] Like, they love the achievements and the quests.
[00:28:34.560 --> 00:28:41.600] And if you incentivize the wrong things, then you get people beating your game, but not learning as effectively as they can.
[00:28:41.600 --> 00:28:46.480] So, we've had to retweak a bunch of times how we award achievements.
[00:28:46.640 --> 00:28:47.520] Let me give you an example.
[00:28:47.520 --> 00:28:56.720] So, in the early version of boot dev, you had one button after you wrote your code in the browser, and it was the run button.
[00:28:56.720 --> 00:29:01.200] And when you run your code, you could see afterwards if you got it correct or not.
[00:29:01.680 --> 00:29:06.480] And we had an achievement that would incentivize you to never get it wrong.
[00:29:06.480 --> 00:29:09.680] So, you get it right the first time, and then you go on the next one, you get it right the next time.
[00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:11.360] You have the streak building up.
[00:29:11.360 --> 00:29:19.520] That is terrible practice for like real-life coding because, in real life, you're sitting there with a debugger, like you're getting it wrong over and over and over again.
[00:29:20.160 --> 00:29:22.640] There's no value in getting it right the first time.
[00:29:22.640 --> 00:29:24.000] So, we had to tweak that.
[00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:27.440] So, now there's two buttons: you basically have a debug and like a submit.
[00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:29.920] And so, you can sit there and test with the debug as much as you want.
[00:29:29.920 --> 00:29:32.560] And then, once you think you have it right, you can submit.
[00:29:32.560 --> 00:29:35.120] And, like, that changed a ton.
[00:29:35.120 --> 00:29:39.360] Now, like, people are cheating way less, like, all that kind of stuff.
[00:29:40.160 --> 00:29:43.600] I mean, the way you've got it set up, like, the gamification is it's actually like a quest.
[00:29:43.600 --> 00:29:46.400] And the quest is basically like to become a developer.
[00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:51.760] And so, you got these little missions you go on, which are like, you know, in any other coding course, it'd be called like courses.
[00:29:51.760 --> 00:29:56.000] But at the end of it, like, are people graduating and getting hired?
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:01.160] Yeah, so I know pretty much everyone who's gone through the course, like all the way.
[00:30:01.160 --> 00:30:01.800] It's huge.
[00:29:59.760 --> 00:30:06.600] There's like 20 courses on the platform, and they're all kind of lined up in a linear fashion.
[00:30:06.760 --> 00:30:10.440] So it takes people, you know, six to twelve months to actually get through it all.
[00:30:10.680 --> 00:30:12.200] So there's a lot of content.
[00:30:12.360 --> 00:30:15.080] So I pretty much know everyone who's been through all of it.
[00:30:15.080 --> 00:30:19.080] And at this point, I'm pretty sure all of them are employed.
[00:30:19.320 --> 00:30:25.000] A couple of them were employed before, switching into like a new tech stack, but some of them weren't.
[00:30:25.320 --> 00:30:30.920] In fact, I think the top two on our leaderboard came to the platform learning to code, never been employed.
[00:30:31.240 --> 00:30:33.160] Now they have jobs as developers.
[00:30:33.480 --> 00:30:35.240] So success has been awesome.
[00:30:35.480 --> 00:30:41.000] But it is like, like I said, our approach is take your time and go deeper on this stuff.
[00:30:41.320 --> 00:30:47.240] We don't want to produce people who have a very shallow understanding of JavaScript who are then out struggling in the market.
[00:30:47.240 --> 00:30:48.440] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:30:48.440 --> 00:30:54.040] I've been thinking a lot about AI and its role on and basically coding.
[00:30:54.040 --> 00:30:56.440] I was using ChatGPT the other day to help me code.
[00:30:56.440 --> 00:30:58.120] Have you used it yet?
[00:30:58.440 --> 00:30:59.480] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:59.720 --> 00:31:02.360] We actually, so we have a new mascot for the site.
[00:31:02.360 --> 00:31:03.320] His name is Boots.
[00:31:03.320 --> 00:31:07.960] He's a cute little wizard bear who helps you learn to code.
[00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:11.160] He's like your mentor as you go through these assignments.
[00:31:11.160 --> 00:31:17.400] And basically the way he works is you can highlight any code snippet in the courses and click explain.
[00:31:17.400 --> 00:31:24.360] And then Boots uses the GPT-4AI or API to explain what that code is doing.
[00:31:24.840 --> 00:31:28.440] So I'm a huge fan of that assisted learning.
[00:31:28.680 --> 00:31:33.640] I've been using it every once in a while to convert data from one format to another.
[00:31:34.280 --> 00:31:40.920] I've actually found GitHub Copilot to be more helpful when it comes to efficiency just because it's baked into my editor.
[00:31:40.920 --> 00:31:44.120] It'll just auto-complete your code for you while you're writing code, which is amazing.
[00:31:44.120 --> 00:31:46.960] And it's like right 99% of the time in my case.
[00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:47.680] It's amazing.
[00:31:47.680 --> 00:31:52.000] Actually, I was struggling to come up with a good This is gonna be a little tangential.
[00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:55.760] I was struggling to come up with a good challenge yesterday for our Go course.
[00:31:55.760 --> 00:32:02.320] And we have this unique problem where Go is a highly meant to be run on multiple CPU cores.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:06.080] And when we run it in the browser, we're running in WebAssembly, which is single-threaded.
[00:32:06.080 --> 00:32:12.640] So I like I needed a challenge that would get you to understand the idea of concurrency, even though you're working in a single-threaded environment.
[00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:19.520] And ChatGPT came up with like the formula for the challenge that I'd been struggling to come up with for quite a while.
[00:32:19.920 --> 00:32:20.160] Good.
[00:32:20.320 --> 00:32:20.960] So good.
[00:32:20.960 --> 00:32:22.480] Yeah, so we'll be using it a lot.
[00:32:23.200 --> 00:32:26.080] Do you think this is going to change the way that people code in the long run?
[00:32:26.080 --> 00:32:27.840] Like, obviously, it's early days, right?
[00:32:27.840 --> 00:32:35.280] Like, chat, like, GPT-4 or ChatGPT has only been out for, like, I mean, it feels like it's been an eternity, but it's like a month, you know?
[00:32:35.280 --> 00:32:37.120] Like, it's like not that long.
[00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:48.560] Once people start building actual tooling on it, like, you've built, you know, you've got your wizard bear in there, and it's kind of helpful, but like, you can also imagine like something that's helping you write the code and kind of talking about what you should do next, et cetera.
[00:32:48.560 --> 00:32:51.360] And these aren't like improvements to the underlying technology.
[00:32:51.360 --> 00:32:53.280] You know, the underlying technology is already out.
[00:32:53.280 --> 00:33:00.480] These are just improvements to the user interface that allow you to sort of corral the AI to help people write a lot more effective code.
[00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:07.760] And you have people like Amjad Masad from Replit and other people who are predicting that every developer is going to be, you know, quote-unquote 10X developer.
[00:33:07.760 --> 00:33:13.840] And every 10X developer is going to be 100x developer, which sounds fanciful, but it's like, at this point, I believe almost anything.
[00:33:13.840 --> 00:33:14.480] What do you think?
[00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:18.720] Do you think this is actually the future that, like, it's going to revolutionize how people code?
[00:33:18.720 --> 00:33:23.440] Or is it just going to be a little bit of a co-pilot, a little bit of a helper on the side?
[00:33:23.760 --> 00:33:30.000] So, I think, like, an order of magnitude improvement for developers is probably an exaggeration.
[00:33:30.520 --> 00:33:39.240] Um, in my experience, like co-pilot and chat GPT maybe make me like two times, like at most, two times more productive, depending on the situation.
[00:33:39.240 --> 00:33:43.480] Like, there have been situations where I like got me unstuck, and so you could argue that's like amazing, right?
[00:33:43.560 --> 00:33:44.520] Saved me a ton of time.
[00:33:44.520 --> 00:33:48.600] But then, like, in the normal case, it's it's not quite as helpful.
[00:33:48.600 --> 00:34:06.440] Um, but yeah, I think it's it's pretty accurate to say, um, for people learning, like people who are like very junior, chat GPT and like AI code generation is going to be super helpful for kind of getting you unstuck, especially in the sense that like it can write the code and then explain what it does, right?
[00:34:06.440 --> 00:34:08.600] Because that's what you really need when you're learning.
[00:34:08.600 --> 00:34:17.000] We already had, like, this is the thing: we already had the ability to like, oh, I need a binary tree, let me go copy-paste that from online.
[00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:18.680] Like, we already had that problem.
[00:34:18.680 --> 00:34:23.400] The fact that ChatGPT can code a binary tree is like not super interesting.
[00:34:23.400 --> 00:34:31.160] The fact that it can explain to you what every line does without you having to interact with another human, like, that's pretty interesting to me.
[00:34:31.560 --> 00:34:36.600] So, I think it's fair to say that it'll make the more productive people even more productive.
[00:34:36.600 --> 00:34:39.480] And I think it'll also help at the bottom end of the curve.
[00:34:39.640 --> 00:34:45.800] I think the takeaway is that because people are getting more productive, like, you just need to get better.
[00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:52.200] Because as you get better, you can use these tools to kind of magnify your impact in whatever you're doing.
[00:34:52.440 --> 00:34:57.960] There's something that I really like when I think about the disruptive potential of ChatGPT.
[00:34:57.960 --> 00:34:59.880] Because a lot of people are really worried.
[00:35:00.600 --> 00:35:04.600] But probably the best take that I've heard is from this guy, Cal Newport.
[00:35:04.600 --> 00:35:07.080] You may have read his book or heard of it, Deep Work.
[00:35:07.080 --> 00:35:18.160] His whole brand is: we all are doing way too much running around hair on fire, like shallow work, and we should be spending more time doing things that are more difficult.
[00:35:18.160 --> 00:35:19.120] And he did a deep dive.
[00:35:19.120 --> 00:35:28.480] He's a computer scientist on ChatGPT, and he's like, hey, look, this is going to be disruptive, but it's going to be disrupting a lot of the work that none of us really want to do.
[00:35:28.480 --> 00:35:32.640] Just like you said, hey, you can already go look up code snippets on Google.
[00:35:32.640 --> 00:35:36.240] This thing just kind of makes it happen in a couple of clicks, right?
[00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:42.720] There are a lot of admin type, you know, sort of communication overhead type jobs that this thing is going to make go away.
[00:35:42.720 --> 00:35:50.880] When we think about ChatGPT and its ability to do writing work, it's like, you know, it does good listicles that are kind of superficial.
[00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:51.920] It gives you ideas.
[00:35:51.920 --> 00:35:59.760] But if you're a really, really good, insightful, you know, writer saying the kind of surprising shit that we talked about, right?
[00:36:00.080 --> 00:36:03.680] ChatGPT, at least at the moment, isn't making that go away.
[00:36:03.680 --> 00:36:11.760] So I like the idea of having this thing that makes the shallow work go away and gives me more space for deep work.
[00:36:12.080 --> 00:36:19.120] Yeah, I think, like, generally speaking, job displacement is a good thing as long as it doesn't happen too fast.
[00:36:19.520 --> 00:36:19.760] Right?
[00:36:20.320 --> 00:36:21.760] Like, you want this advancement.
[00:36:21.760 --> 00:36:23.760] Like, you want people not doing data entry.
[00:36:23.760 --> 00:36:25.920] Like, data entry is awful.
[00:36:25.920 --> 00:36:27.680] It is soul-sucking work.
[00:36:28.240 --> 00:36:33.440] But you also don't want to, like, tomorrow put, you know, 4 million people out of the job.
[00:36:33.440 --> 00:36:33.840] Right.
[00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:38.000] So, as long as it happens at a reasonable pace, I think it's fantastic.
[00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:47.120] Well, it's interesting because I think we also, like, especially as software engineers, have been living in an environment where we, it's kind of a matter of course that we have to update our skills.
[00:36:47.120 --> 00:36:47.360] Right?
[00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:52.880] Like, for example, if you're a front-end developer, it's like every two years, you gotta forget everything you know.
[00:36:52.880 --> 00:36:55.280] There's another framework out that's completely different.
[00:36:55.280 --> 00:36:57.920] And I think most careers in the history of the world have not been that way.
[00:36:57.920 --> 00:37:05.720] You know, if you're making horseshoes in like 1835, like you're making them the same way in like 1865, it wasn't a big difference.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:07.800] And so if you're out of a job, you're screwed.
[00:37:07.800 --> 00:37:10.360] Like you just haven't really had to learn anything.
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:15.720] Whereas now it's like, okay, like you see a lot of programmers who are like, okay, how do I learn like all this AI stuff, right?
[00:37:15.720 --> 00:37:17.160] And it's not that bad.
[00:37:17.160 --> 00:37:30.040] And so I think as you get a workforce that's more adept at changing, it's kind of like better than it was in the past to have really rapid disruption and put more people out of work because those people can adapt much more quickly.
[00:37:30.040 --> 00:37:31.560] Or so I hope.
[00:37:31.880 --> 00:37:38.280] Yeah, the idea that like we teach you from the time that you're five until the time that you're 22.
[00:37:38.280 --> 00:37:44.120] And then after that, you just stop work is, I think, terribly outdated.
[00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:55.480] It makes way more sense to me to have, especially with how fast things are moving, to just expect that all of your working years, you'll be to some degree learning new stuff.
[00:37:55.480 --> 00:37:59.480] And we need to get comfortable with that idea and figure out the right ways to do it.
[00:37:59.480 --> 00:37:59.960] Yeah.
[00:37:59.960 --> 00:38:01.560] And it's kind of hard as a founder.
[00:38:01.560 --> 00:38:06.360] I think when you're starting companies, it's like you've got this pull in one direction.
[00:38:06.360 --> 00:38:09.000] It's like, hey, I want to make money and have this actually work.
[00:38:09.160 --> 00:38:11.080] I want to just keep failing for years.
[00:38:11.080 --> 00:38:16.680] But on the other side, you have all these tempting things that can like, maybe you move a little bit slower, but they're better.
[00:38:16.680 --> 00:38:21.560] Like, for example, like I failed at like four or five companies in my 20s, but I learned something new every time.
[00:38:21.560 --> 00:38:23.320] And not just like fluffy stuff, but like hard skills.
[00:38:23.320 --> 00:38:30.680] Like I became like a much better writer, a much better visual designer, a much better backhand and front-end programmer and sysadmin, like all these skills.
[00:38:30.680 --> 00:38:37.320] So that like by the time I was 30, I was like this badass who accumulated all these skills, even though I hadn't had any like real wins and business.
[00:38:37.320 --> 00:38:51.600] And I think it's worthwhile for founders to essentially slow down a little bit, worry a little bit less about like succeeding with the current thing, and like accumulate skills because that's something that's guaranteed that you can always take with you no matter whether or not your business succeeds.
[00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:54.240] Yeah, I was actually just thinking about this yesterday.
[00:38:54.640 --> 00:39:00.000] The whole idea of like an MVP is like super subjective.
[00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.800] Like my first MVP, Q Vault Classroom, was truly terrible.
[00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:10.640] Like it was not good, but like not because I needed to put in an extra month of effort.
[00:39:10.640 --> 00:39:12.960] That probably wasn't the right call either.
[00:39:13.280 --> 00:39:16.480] I just was really bad at UI UX design.
[00:39:16.480 --> 00:39:19.520] And like it took me a while to figure it out.
[00:39:20.240 --> 00:39:21.520] So yeah, I'm with you.
[00:39:21.520 --> 00:39:26.880] It's like you have to figure out the right amount of effort to put in, but just expect that it's going to get better if you keep doing it.
[00:39:26.880 --> 00:39:31.280] Like the next product or the next iteration of the product is going to get better.
[00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:38.480] So figuring out that right amount of effort to put in up front is actually super challenging because it's hard to like figure out what minimum is.
[00:39:38.480 --> 00:39:46.240] Like minimum for me right now is a much higher bar than it was back then, even though I don't know, the amount of time is like pretty much the same that I'm putting in.
[00:39:47.920 --> 00:40:01.120] That's such a fascinating topic to me because I think that it takes that falling on your face and like the error correcting forward to get good at literally any of the skills that go into being an entrepreneur, right?
[00:40:01.120 --> 00:40:04.400] To be just a back-end developer or a front-end developer.
[00:40:04.720 --> 00:40:06.960] A front-end developer took me many years, right?
[00:40:07.360 --> 00:40:08.080] I was in sales.
[00:40:08.080 --> 00:40:12.480] It took me a while to get good at sales, but you have to do all of these things all at once.
[00:40:12.480 --> 00:40:24.000] And yet, a lot of the narrative with making a company work, I think of like a lot of the Mark Zuckerberg being a college genius and having this thing that works right out of the gate.
[00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:31.800] Like, you often don't hear about Cortland, what he just mentioned, his four big failed projects that like taught him here.
[00:40:31.960 --> 00:40:41.080] He just sort of shows up like the tip of the iceberg with you know, indie hackers doing really well, and you don't see the 10 years of compounded growth and learning.
[00:40:41.080 --> 00:40:44.520] I think it's really hard and scary to like branch off and learn something new.
[00:40:44.520 --> 00:40:47.400] Like, let's say you're a founder right now, you don't know how to code, right?
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:40:55.160] Like, on one hand, you're like, okay, well, I can just use all these no-code tools and AI, and I could just be, you know, be a writer, and I can make money next month, right?
[00:40:55.160 --> 00:40:59.000] But, like, at what point do you decide, like, hey, maybe I just should learn how to code?
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:01.880] And I know that if I do that, I will not be making money next month.
[00:41:01.880 --> 00:41:05.880] Like, my company will not be off the ground because, like, I'm investing in my skills.
[00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:07.960] Striking the right balance there, I think, is hard.
[00:41:07.960 --> 00:41:11.640] But I don't know, as I've gotten older, I've leaned more on, like, err on the side of learn.
[00:41:11.640 --> 00:41:15.720] Like, it's not as big of a rush as you think it is to get to the point where your company's successful.
[00:41:15.720 --> 00:41:17.320] Like, that time is going to pass anyway.
[00:41:17.320 --> 00:41:20.600] But if you become more of a badass over time, it's just worth it.
[00:41:21.240 --> 00:41:24.360] I'm a big Age of Empire StarCraft 2 fan.
[00:41:24.360 --> 00:41:26.040] And, like, there's a lot of stuff.
[00:41:26.120 --> 00:41:28.040] So, I'm going to throw it down.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:33.240] I think erring on the side of investing is you're building more worker units.
[00:41:33.240 --> 00:41:34.120] You're investing in the economy.
[00:41:34.440 --> 00:41:35.000] Your economy.
[00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:36.040] It's your macro.
[00:41:36.040 --> 00:41:37.080] Yeah, it's your macro.
[00:41:37.080 --> 00:41:37.800] Exactly.
[00:41:37.800 --> 00:41:41.480] Taking the shortcut and deploying next month, that can work.
[00:41:41.480 --> 00:41:43.400] But it's the rush build.
[00:41:43.720 --> 00:41:47.400] And if it doesn't work, then you're not any farther forward.
[00:41:47.400 --> 00:41:48.200] Yeah, you lose it.
[00:41:48.280 --> 00:41:49.640] You got to play another game.
[00:41:49.640 --> 00:41:57.560] There's a niche of 10 now super fans of this show, like just hardcore StarCraft fans who are like geeking out.
[00:41:57.560 --> 00:41:59.720] Like they're driving, listening to this podcast.
[00:41:59.720 --> 00:42:01.560] They pulled over to the side of the road.
[00:42:01.560 --> 00:42:05.800] And then the other 90% of our audience is like me.
[00:42:05.760 --> 00:42:07.160] Like, they can go take a hike.
[00:42:07.160 --> 00:42:08.840] I'm here for the 10%.
[00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:12.680] There was another lifetime where I was, StarCraft was all I did.
[00:42:12.680 --> 00:42:14.520] I was a grandmaster StarCraft 2 player.
[00:42:14.520 --> 00:42:16.960] All I did was play StarCraft non-stop.
[00:42:16.960 --> 00:42:18.720] A game is amazing.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:20.000] So, Lane, I'm glad you're a fan.
[00:42:20.640 --> 00:42:22.560] We haven't made a better game since StarCraft 2.
[00:42:22.560 --> 00:42:31.280] Why isn't it the case that learning how to code online and gamified versions of learning haven't reached the levels of fun that a game like StarCraft has?
[00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:34.400] When you're making a gamified coding thing, it's fun.
[00:42:34.560 --> 00:42:35.200] I signed into it.
[00:42:35.200 --> 00:42:36.000] I did the demo.
[00:42:36.240 --> 00:42:39.120] For your homepage, the sort of sign-up button is not even sign up.
[00:42:39.120 --> 00:42:42.000] It's like, do this three-minute demo, immediately jump in.
[00:42:42.240 --> 00:42:42.640] It's fun.
[00:42:43.040 --> 00:42:43.840] It's not bad.
[00:42:43.840 --> 00:42:51.840] But nothing I've ever seen is at the point where I'm like, this is actually the same level as a real game.
[00:42:53.440 --> 00:42:54.960] That's a really good question.
[00:42:55.840 --> 00:43:04.720] I think it's because when you're designing a game, you have one goal in mind, and that is just to make it as addictive as possible and as fun as possible.
[00:43:04.720 --> 00:43:15.280] When you're designing something like Boot Dev, you're, okay, how can I make this as fun, as addicting as possible while the North Star is getting you through all of this content?
[00:43:15.600 --> 00:43:21.440] And some of that content is like, well, here's the thing: coding actually is inherently fun and has a game loop built into it.
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:21.520] Yeah.
[00:43:21.920 --> 00:43:24.800] Like, you write some code, you get some feedback.
[00:43:24.800 --> 00:43:26.480] I can throw some confetti in your face.
[00:43:26.480 --> 00:43:27.520] Like, maybe that helps.
[00:43:27.520 --> 00:43:39.600] But, like, the actual game loop of write code, get feedback, solve a puzzle is there, like it is in Diablo, where you're like, you know, running around, monsters exploding, and like, that's the core game loop.
[00:43:41.040 --> 00:43:43.120] It just takes so much more effort.
[00:43:43.120 --> 00:43:48.240] Like, it's funny, like, on the topic of StarCraft, that is a hard game.
[00:43:48.240 --> 00:43:50.960] And I have friends that won't play it because it's hard.
[00:43:50.960 --> 00:43:53.840] And so they go to other games that are like lower effort.
[00:43:53.840 --> 00:43:56.400] I think coding is like an even harder game.
[00:43:56.400 --> 00:43:58.960] Like, it is a game, but the effort bar is much higher.
[00:43:58.960 --> 00:44:03.320] So it's like just taxing to do it for long, long periods of time.
[00:44:03.480 --> 00:44:07.320] Well, it's also kind of a catch-22 for you, right?
[00:44:07.320 --> 00:44:18.760] Where you, if you somehow, theoretically, if you were able to make your product as fun as StarCraft, then in a lot of ways, it would defeat the purpose.
[00:44:18.760 --> 00:44:25.880] Like you said, you don't necessarily want people to be kind of stuck and playing the learning game over and over again.
[00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:27.400] You want them to get to the end.
[00:44:27.400 --> 00:44:35.640] Like the entire philosophy book's written about how do you distinguish like, you know, what a game is from other types of pursuits.
[00:44:35.640 --> 00:44:42.760] And one of the big distinctions is like, look, if you, in a way, we have a game of hiking, of like trying to climb a mountain.
[00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:50.040] And you know it's a game because if you were given the option of getting helicopter to the top of the mountain, you'd be like, why would I do that?
[00:44:50.040 --> 00:44:50.280] Right?
[00:44:52.120 --> 00:44:53.800] Yeah, it's like, isn't the point to get to the top?
[00:44:53.800 --> 00:44:56.520] It's like, the point is to climb to the top.
[00:44:56.520 --> 00:44:58.040] Like, that's what StarCraft is, right?
[00:44:58.360 --> 00:45:00.760] You want to get there, but you want to have the process.
[00:45:00.760 --> 00:45:10.360] You want to see the, you know, you want to feel your heart pounding and all that stuff, but you have to somehow make the game fun, but also like have people want to graduate and go do something else.
[00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:12.040] That's a great comparison.
[00:45:12.040 --> 00:45:17.640] Whereas if you could snap your fingers and know how to be a great backend engineer tomorrow, like, let's just do that.
[00:45:17.640 --> 00:45:17.880] Yeah.
[00:45:18.840 --> 00:45:20.840] What's this boot dev bullshit?
[00:45:21.800 --> 00:45:24.200] Well, should we, maybe we should be doing this for any hackers, right?
[00:45:24.200 --> 00:45:27.400] Maybe having a podcast and a community forum is the wrong approach, right?
[00:45:27.480 --> 00:45:35.960] Maybe we should have a game that turns you into a good founder, almost like the Semes or something, where you're sort of controlling this virtual company, but you're making all these decisions that.
[00:45:36.120 --> 00:45:37.320] You know that exists, right?
[00:45:37.320 --> 00:45:44.760] Like, there is, I don't, I think, number one, there's a VR game that's like, I think it's like, you know, start whatever business, right?
[00:45:45.280 --> 00:45:46.960] But it's like, it's such bullshit.
[00:45:46.960 --> 00:45:52.000] It's like, it basically is all of the process of it, all the stress.
[00:45:52.000 --> 00:45:59.920] But if being a founder is so intrinsically not that fun, that like it's just, you know, you're sitting in a cube and like you're watching these numbers go up and down.
[00:46:01.360 --> 00:46:04.640] Pretty sure it's not like flying off the shelves.
[00:46:04.640 --> 00:46:07.280] Well, I think part of being a founder is that there's no prescribed path.
[00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:08.720] There are no railroad tracks, right?
[00:46:08.720 --> 00:46:10.960] Like if you're playing StarCraft, like there is a tech tree.
[00:46:10.960 --> 00:46:14.080] You do this, you do that, you do this, and you unlock this building, you unlock this unit.
[00:46:14.080 --> 00:46:22.720] Whereas being a founder, like there might be paths that get carved out, but like due to the competitive nature of markets, they get a little bit like saturated by the competition.
[00:46:22.720 --> 00:46:32.960] And so essentially, if you really want to be a step ahead and actually be able to market your product or come up with new ideas, you have to abandon the existing path to some degree.
[00:46:32.960 --> 00:46:38.160] You can't just make the same thing and market it the same way as everybody else and actually build a successful company.
[00:46:38.160 --> 00:46:43.600] With boot dev, like, maybe you got to change your font to like a video game font and like niche down in some way.
[00:46:43.760 --> 00:46:47.520] Like Andy Hack is like, maybe we needed a blue website and we had to have revenue numbers.
[00:46:47.520 --> 00:47:01.200] And so it's like kind of hard to think of like how you would have a game that even enables this because a huge part of it is trying to explore and figure out like what isn't part of the default user interface, the default path that I can do to make my company successful.
[00:47:02.160 --> 00:47:09.040] The interesting thing is like being an entrepreneur like learning to code is kind of inherently a game in the sense that there is a feedback loop.
[00:47:09.040 --> 00:47:10.480] Like I log into Stripe.
[00:47:10.480 --> 00:47:17.040] There is like no greater dopamine hit than like having a good day on Stripe where the revenue hits, and you see that.
[00:47:17.040 --> 00:47:22.240] In fact, I had to uninstall the Stripe mobile app for my phone because I was checking too often at one point.
[00:47:22.320 --> 00:47:24.400] Like when we started to grow, it was bad.
[00:47:24.400 --> 00:47:26.880] I was like compulsively checking.
[00:47:27.520 --> 00:47:29.720] It's like the dopamine hits are there.
[00:47:29.720 --> 00:47:36.520] And like, I guess the social aspect, there's like a, there's something amazing about like, you know, your company's doing well.
[00:47:36.520 --> 00:47:38.440] You're sharing with the community and all that stuff.
[00:47:38.600 --> 00:47:41.080] That stuff I think you guys are doing a great job with.
[00:47:41.080 --> 00:47:46.760] And like, but like, those are like really the only things, at least in my experience, that are like part of the game loop.
[00:47:46.760 --> 00:47:48.440] Like, I'm growing this thing.
[00:47:48.440 --> 00:47:50.680] Like, people are seeing me growing it.
[00:47:50.680 --> 00:47:52.360] That's that's encouraging.
[00:47:52.360 --> 00:47:53.800] Number go up, money go up.
[00:47:53.800 --> 00:47:54.520] That's it.
[00:47:54.520 --> 00:47:54.840] Yeah.
[00:47:54.840 --> 00:48:02.600] The final, the final part of the game loop that's actually harder to recognize is something that we talked about before, which is self-growth.
[00:48:02.600 --> 00:48:06.680] Like, I'm convinced that our brains are made for games.
[00:48:06.680 --> 00:48:09.160] Like, there's a reason why we like games.
[00:48:09.160 --> 00:48:24.200] And it's that the brain has evolved to like take in these signals from the environment, like, oh, hey, I had this goal and it was hard and I overcame the challenge and I did it because it just so highly correlates with you becoming smarter, right?
[00:48:24.200 --> 00:48:30.760] With you become like, you know, sort of being, I don't know, more articulate or better able to write something if that's what your challenge is.
[00:48:30.760 --> 00:48:38.600] And in those rare moments where you recognize, I mean, hey, with me with coding, like, hey, I really struggled to get a web page up really fast.
[00:48:38.600 --> 00:48:42.680] And then I struggled in these ways and I had these, you know, vanity metrics come my way.
[00:48:42.680 --> 00:48:45.800] And at the end of that, it was actually really easy for me to whip things up.
[00:48:45.800 --> 00:48:53.320] Or I used to fucking have an email phobia where I really didn't like opening emails like back in college because it was just, you know, such a slam.
[00:48:53.320 --> 00:48:55.160] It was a point where I got over that.
[00:48:55.160 --> 00:48:57.720] And then just opening an email was fun for me.
[00:48:57.720 --> 00:49:06.040] I think that there's nothing like entrepreneurship for having like a million of those types of experiences every single year.
[00:49:06.040 --> 00:49:08.040] Yeah, I don't know what you do there.
[00:49:08.040 --> 00:49:13.960] It's like I have struggled so much to put gamification stuff into boot dev.
[00:49:14.040 --> 00:49:20.080] Like the problem of gamifying entrepreneurship in like an online platform, I think is like two or three X.
[00:49:20.640 --> 00:49:29.280] Like it is a much greater challenge, just like thinking as a user of indie hackers, like, do I care about it?
[00:49:29.280 --> 00:49:29.680] I don't know.
[00:49:29.680 --> 00:49:31.600] I don't know if it even should be done.
[00:49:31.600 --> 00:49:33.360] I mean, but like, I mean, just basic stuff, right?
[00:49:33.360 --> 00:49:36.240] Like the sort of feedback loop of like, okay, Stripe, you get like a little ding.
[00:49:36.240 --> 00:49:37.280] You see, you've made money.
[00:49:37.280 --> 00:49:39.120] That's an addictive reward.
[00:49:39.360 --> 00:49:40.640] But there's also social rewards.
[00:49:40.640 --> 00:49:41.840] Like, people want status.
[00:49:41.840 --> 00:49:43.200] They want to compare themselves to others.
[00:49:43.200 --> 00:49:46.160] Like, one of the biggest things in any game is a leaderboard.
[00:49:46.160 --> 00:49:51.680] Like, I play a ton of Beat Saber on my VR headset, and it's like partly exercise, it's partly fun.
[00:49:51.680 --> 00:49:55.120] But what drives me is I beat a song that I've never beaten before.
[00:49:55.200 --> 00:49:58.640] Then I look at the leaderboard and it's like, you remember, you know, 13,000.
[00:49:58.640 --> 00:50:02.720] You know, 12,999 people have beat this song harder than you beat it.
[00:50:02.720 --> 00:50:04.080] What are you going to do about that?
[00:50:04.080 --> 00:50:07.520] And it's just fun to come back and get sucked into, like, okay, I'll play it again.
[00:50:07.520 --> 00:50:11.440] I'll do the exact same thing again just to see my name go up that chart.
[00:50:11.440 --> 00:50:12.880] And we could do that with indie hackers.
[00:50:12.880 --> 00:50:13.760] Like, we have a ton of products.
[00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:14.880] We have a ton of revenue.
[00:50:14.880 --> 00:50:17.360] We could show who's growing faster, who's doing what.
[00:50:17.360 --> 00:50:23.680] And that's just one more motivational factor, especially in the early days when the dollar amounts aren't that high.
[00:50:24.320 --> 00:50:27.040] Just comparing yourself to others is motivational.
[00:50:27.040 --> 00:50:28.160] Or it could be demotivational.
[00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:28.880] That's the challenge.
[00:50:28.880 --> 00:50:31.280] That's why it might not be a thing we want to do.
[00:50:31.280 --> 00:50:33.280] Right when you said it, I was like, that's the thing.
[00:50:33.280 --> 00:50:39.440] Because we have a leaderboard on boot dev, and it's arguably our most effective gamification thing.
[00:50:39.680 --> 00:50:43.600] And I would definitely check the indie hackers leaderboard after a good month.
[00:50:44.480 --> 00:50:45

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:
.840] Like, people want status.
[00:49:41.840 --> 00:49:43.200] They want to compare themselves to others.
[00:49:43.200 --> 00:49:46.160] Like, one of the biggest things in any game is a leaderboard.
[00:49:46.160 --> 00:49:51.680] Like, I play a ton of Beat Saber on my VR headset, and it's like partly exercise, it's partly fun.
[00:49:51.680 --> 00:49:55.120] But what drives me is I beat a song that I've never beaten before.
[00:49:55.200 --> 00:49:58.640] Then I look at the leaderboard and it's like, you remember, you know, 13,000.
[00:49:58.640 --> 00:50:02.720] You know, 12,999 people have beat this song harder than you beat it.
[00:50:02.720 --> 00:50:04.080] What are you going to do about that?
[00:50:04.080 --> 00:50:07.520] And it's just fun to come back and get sucked into, like, okay, I'll play it again.
[00:50:07.520 --> 00:50:11.440] I'll do the exact same thing again just to see my name go up that chart.
[00:50:11.440 --> 00:50:12.880] And we could do that with indie hackers.
[00:50:12.880 --> 00:50:13.760] Like, we have a ton of products.
[00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:14.880] We have a ton of revenue.
[00:50:14.880 --> 00:50:17.360] We could show who's growing faster, who's doing what.
[00:50:17.360 --> 00:50:23.680] And that's just one more motivational factor, especially in the early days when the dollar amounts aren't that high.
[00:50:24.320 --> 00:50:27.040] Just comparing yourself to others is motivational.
[00:50:27.040 --> 00:50:28.160] Or it could be demotivational.
[00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:28.880] That's the challenge.
[00:50:28.880 --> 00:50:31.280] That's why it might not be a thing we want to do.
[00:50:31.280 --> 00:50:33.280] Right when you said it, I was like, that's the thing.
[00:50:33.280 --> 00:50:39.440] Because we have a leaderboard on boot dev, and it's arguably our most effective gamification thing.
[00:50:39.680 --> 00:50:43.600] And I would definitely check the indie hackers leaderboard after a good month.
[00:50:44.480 --> 00:50:45.520] Am I at the top?
[00:50:46.320 --> 00:50:46.880] Where am I?
[00:50:46.880 --> 00:50:48.480] Yeah, what's going on?
[00:50:48.680 --> 00:51:00.440] We have this, we have this really fun dichotomy where any comparison like signals that we have on the site, because we've had not necessarily leaderboards, but we have featured sections.
[00:51:00.440 --> 00:51:04.440] You know, we used to have people that had like the most popular milestone posts.
[00:51:04.760 --> 00:51:05.400] Everything is a feed.
[00:50:59.920 --> 00:51:06.040] It's all a ranking.
[00:51:06.360 --> 00:51:08.920] Everything is a feed, and there are two types of people.
[00:51:08.920 --> 00:51:13.560] There are people who see these competitive dashboards and they go, I'm going to be number one.
[00:51:13.880 --> 00:51:17.960] And then you have the people who are like, fuck all those, you know, sort of posers.
[00:51:17.960 --> 00:51:19.320] It's all fake anyway.
[00:51:19.320 --> 00:51:20.520] It's all vanity.
[00:51:20.520 --> 00:51:21.880] Like, this isn't, you know, healthy at all.
[00:51:22.040 --> 00:51:23.320] This is not what we should be doing.
[00:51:23.320 --> 00:51:24.680] Yeah, but they suck.
[00:51:25.000 --> 00:51:25.560] Yeah.
[00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:28.760] This is like the people who don't like StarCraft.
[00:51:28.920 --> 00:51:31.240] That is not a winner's coping strategy, but.
[00:51:31.560 --> 00:51:34.120] Well, I think if you're making a product, you got to have opinions, right?
[00:51:34.120 --> 00:51:36.040] Like, there's room in the world for multiple indie hackers.
[00:51:36.040 --> 00:51:38.760] If we decided we want to do all this gamification stuff, like, we could do it.
[00:51:38.760 --> 00:51:41.560] Somebody could build the other super nice, non-competitive indie hackers.
[00:51:41.560 --> 00:51:42.840] Like, same with boot.dev, right?
[00:51:42.840 --> 00:51:45.400] Like, you've taken a stand, you want to have a leaderboard.
[00:51:45.640 --> 00:51:49.240] This is what's great and allows for multiple people in any industry to win.
[00:51:49.240 --> 00:51:59.160] This is part of why you can't enter a crowded marketplace where people are already doing stuff and still make a business that's doing $26,000 a month in revenue because you can have your own opinions.
[00:51:59.160 --> 00:52:11.080] And in fact, not having opinions and not taking a stand is probably as detrimental for building a product as it is for writing because you have this lukewarm, boring thing that nobody knows why they should read it or use it compared to what's already out there.
[00:52:11.400 --> 00:52:16.280] Where we've positioned ourselves today at Boot Dev, I've found that we have very few competitors.
[00:52:16.600 --> 00:52:18.600] A lot of our users use other sites.
[00:52:18.600 --> 00:52:23.160] Like, they'll learn back in on boot dev, they're interested in HTML, they'll go learn it somewhere else.
[00:52:23.160 --> 00:52:26.040] There's like a hundred sites where you can go learn HTML and CSS.
[00:52:26.040 --> 00:52:33.080] Like, the last thing I'm worried about is another person starting another site where you can learn HTML and CSS by watching videos.
[00:52:34.280 --> 00:52:40.840] And yeah, the more you can lean into that, like you enter a crowded marketplace and you think of it as this huge thing.
[00:52:40.840 --> 00:52:49.280] But once you start to figure out what you're about, like you take the intersection of like, you know, gamification and back end and the programming language go.
[00:52:49.280 --> 00:52:56.240] Like all of a sudden, your market starts to get really small and you can do really well in that in that small market.
[00:52:56.240 --> 00:52:58.000] So what's what's next for you?
[00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:00.800] I mean, you're profitable now, which is a really cool place to be.
[00:53:00.800 --> 00:53:02.880] Like everything beyond this is kind of just great.
[00:53:02.880 --> 00:53:06.000] You can try to grow and get more and more employees.
[00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:10.560] It's kind of like you're playing a game with your life and you get to design what you want your life to be, right?
[00:53:10.560 --> 00:53:12.720] Do you want to be the wizard or do you want to be the warrior?
[00:53:12.880 --> 00:53:25.440] Do you want to be a bootstrapped, scrappy anti hacker who just like has fun tinkering on the coolest things you want to you want to build or do you go hard, build a huge team somewhere in between, something on a different axis?
[00:53:25.440 --> 00:53:28.160] Like what do you what do you want to do in the future?
[00:53:28.480 --> 00:53:36.480] So we raised a third of a million dollars and we we just had a profitable Q1.
[00:53:36.720 --> 00:53:42.400] Our biggest expenses are my salary and my employees salary like by far as tech companies go.
[00:53:43.040 --> 00:53:48.800] But I'm taking half the salary that I was taking as actually less than half as an engineering manager.
[00:53:49.120 --> 00:53:55.520] So the goal is to stay profitable whilst growing my salary back up to a reasonable level.
[00:53:57.040 --> 00:53:58.880] That's like this year's goal.
[00:53:59.440 --> 00:54:04.480] After that, like my investors, I actually knew them from a previous company.
[00:54:04.720 --> 00:54:06.480] So I had a really easy and fast raise.
[00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:09.600] It took like a week to get it closed and done, which was awesome.
[00:54:09.680 --> 00:54:11.600] They were the only investors I talked to.
[00:54:11.600 --> 00:54:15.040] But I was upfront with them, like, I probably don't want to raise again.
[00:54:15.040 --> 00:54:18.560] Like, I want to do this the like, slow growth, profitable way.
[00:54:18.800 --> 00:54:21.040] I think it'll be a much healthier EdTech business.
[00:54:21.040 --> 00:54:30.600] There's there's been a lot of EdTech companies in the last 10 years that have, like, blown up and then, like, died um because they grew on the back of, like, I don't know, Facebook ads that weren't profitable or something like that.
[00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:34.360] So, no, the plan is to, like, keep growing profitably.
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:37.080] Maybe even 37 signal style.
[00:54:37.240 --> 00:54:40.760] I agree with maybe 20 of the 37 signals, something like that.
[00:54:42.280 --> 00:54:43.560] That's the plan.
[00:54:43.560 --> 00:54:45.080] What do you what inspires you?
[00:54:45.080 --> 00:54:52.040] I mean, obviously getting to the point of paying yourself what you are making at your normal job is tremendously inspirational.
[00:54:52.040 --> 00:54:54.920] I think there's almost like this like sort of ladder of what inspires indie actors.
[00:54:54.920 --> 00:54:57.960] Like, getting to quit your own your job is usually the first one.
[00:54:57.960 --> 00:55:00.360] Getting to the point of profitability is the second one.
[00:55:00.360 --> 00:55:03.640] Getting to the point where you can, you know, actually, like, make a living wage.
[00:55:03.640 --> 00:55:05.480] That's, like, great is the third one.
[00:55:05.480 --> 00:55:07.400] What is after that for you?
[00:55:07.720 --> 00:55:10.280] Yeah, so, um, I have expenses.
[00:55:10.280 --> 00:55:12.280] Uh, I'm married with two children.
[00:55:12.280 --> 00:55:14.520] My youngest was just born two months ago.
[00:55:14.520 --> 00:55:14.840] Nice.
[00:55:15.640 --> 00:55:16.120] Congratulations.
[00:55:16.360 --> 00:55:16.920] Thank you.
[00:55:16.920 --> 00:55:21.320] Yeah, the plan is like, okay, I want to get back to making a good amount of money.
[00:55:21.320 --> 00:55:24.600] And like, I actually kind of just have tunnel vision to that point.
[00:55:24.600 --> 00:55:35.480] But I guess like the dream after that is like, how can I just work less so that when my kids are, you know, five, ten years old, I just have a ton of time to do stuff with them.
[00:55:35.480 --> 00:55:37.240] That's kind of the thing.
[00:55:37.240 --> 00:55:39.560] I almost have the opposite of that.
[00:55:39.560 --> 00:55:47.640] I like having a full plate, but there's something about the nature of that full plate that I want to get better at, which is...
[00:55:47.640 --> 00:55:54.760] It would be very odd if as somebody with no kids chanting your dream was to have enough time to spend all your time with somebody.
[00:55:54.760 --> 00:55:55.560] So here's the thing.
[00:55:55.560 --> 00:55:57.480] We're actually the same, I think.
[00:55:59.160 --> 00:56:02.120] I hate boredom more than anything in the world.
[00:56:02.680 --> 00:56:07.720] Like summer days as a child when like all my friends were out of town were the worst days of my entire existence.
[00:56:08.360 --> 00:56:14.720] So like when I didn't have kids a few years ago, I filled like all my time with side projects.
[00:56:14.440 --> 00:56:17.120] Like that's what this like whole thing, that's how this whole thing started.
[00:56:14.520 --> 00:56:19.680] Like I can't not be working on stuff.
[00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:27.680] But man, kids, like, they really ch like the definition of a full plate is so fundamentally different with two kids.
[00:56:27.680 --> 00:56:29.200] Yeah, I'm talking about having a full plate.
[00:56:29.200 --> 00:56:31.440] You're like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
[00:56:32.080 --> 00:56:44.320] So like a full plate for like in 10 years, if I'm like, don't have to work, like just waking up with a few kids is already like so much of a full plate that it's fine.
[00:56:44.320 --> 00:56:47.120] Well, listen, Lane, appreciate you coming on.
[00:56:47.120 --> 00:56:50.240] Hope your life with kids doesn't get too full.
[00:56:50.400 --> 00:56:52.560] You still have time to keep working on boot.dev.
[00:56:52.560 --> 00:57:01.440] What would you say is one takeaway, something that you've learned from your journey that Andy Aggers might not have heard from somebody else that you think people would benefit from hearing it?
[00:57:01.840 --> 00:57:03.760] What's your philosophy?
[00:57:04.080 --> 00:57:06.560] Yeah, we've covered a lot of the important stuff.
[00:57:06.560 --> 00:57:16.640] I guess the one thing I have in my notes that we didn't really talk about that I think is super critical is the idea that all of the worst ideas that are going to like stop you from growing.
[00:57:16.640 --> 00:57:22.960] So all the stuff I was working on in those first, like that first year and a half, they sound like good ideas.
[00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:24.880] And almost objectively they are.
[00:57:24.880 --> 00:57:30.640] So like for example, the idea that oh, maybe we should do a hackathon.
[00:57:30.640 --> 00:57:34.720] There's like no world in which doing a hackathon like hurts the business, right?
[00:57:35.200 --> 00:57:38.400] It'll either help a little or help a lot.
[00:57:38.800 --> 00:57:41.920] But it can be a giant waste of time.
[00:57:41.920 --> 00:57:47.920] And you could be doing something so much more like focused on what you're trying to do.
[00:57:47.920 --> 00:57:52.960] So, like, avoiding the shiny ideas as they come up has been so helpful.
[00:57:52.960 --> 00:58:04.920] Just trying to be as focused as you can on your niche, on your customer, and avoiding all the shiny stuff, I think is one of the best things that's helped in the last 12 months with boot dev.
[00:58:05.160 --> 00:58:07.640] Niche down, focus, avoid the shiny stuff.
[00:58:07.640 --> 00:58:09.400] Wayne Wagner, thanks for coming on.
[00:58:09.400 --> 00:58:10.840] Thanks for having me, guys.

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

[00:00:06.720 --> 00:00:08.080] We might as well jump into it.
[00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:09.280] We're here with Lane Wagner.
[00:00:09.280 --> 00:00:09.920] What's up, Lane?
[00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:11.200] Hey, how's it going?
[00:00:11.200 --> 00:00:12.000] Doing great.
[00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:13.120] Yeah, same here.
[00:00:13.120 --> 00:00:21.840] You are the founder of Boot.dev, where basically anybody can go to learn back-end development what you call the addictive way.
[00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:29.200] So you've got over 34,000 students who've basically signed up to start learning modern back-end development skills like Python and Go.
[00:00:29.200 --> 00:00:31.920] And it takes, what, six months, you said?
[00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:39.600] Just working on this part-time to get to the point where people have completed your coursework and they are now at what level of back-end developer?
[00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:41.200] Entry level.
[00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:44.800] Six months is the aggressive estimate, right?
[00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:46.400] That's the market take.
[00:00:47.040 --> 00:00:47.520] Yeah, exactly.
[00:00:47.520 --> 00:00:47.920] It's the market.
[00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:50.240] Only for the real addicts.
[00:00:50.960 --> 00:00:55.520] Yeah, the ones that are spending 20 hours a week, you know, really grinding at it.
[00:00:55.520 --> 00:00:58.560] And that's kind of one of the ways that I think we differentiate in this space.
[00:00:58.560 --> 00:01:03.280] Like, so many people are marketing, like, you know, 12 weeks, six weeks, like crazy.
[00:01:03.280 --> 00:01:06.720] You know, we'll get you through this program really quickly.
[00:01:06.720 --> 00:01:08.000] I think it takes a little longer.
[00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:13.520] I have a blog post that is like linked, you know, with the asterisk on the six months.
[00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:14.960] We're looking at six months.
[00:01:14.960 --> 00:01:16.240] We're looking at 12 months.
[00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:17.840] It's going to take longer.
[00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:19.680] You have to work hard.
[00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:22.720] I saw that you had a post on indie hackers.
[00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:29.280] I think it was in July of 2020 where correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:31.040] Was it Q Vault Classroom?
[00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:35.280] You were like, hey, how I'm launching your product in an overcrowded industry.
[00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:37.040] And it was called Q Vault Classroom.
[00:01:37.040 --> 00:01:41.520] I wasn't even sure if this is the same product, but based on your description, it sounds like it.
[00:01:41.520 --> 00:01:43.760] You renamed it the boot.dev.
[00:01:44.080 --> 00:01:46.880] You dredged up the horrors that were the old product.
[00:01:46.880 --> 00:01:47.520] Yeah.
[00:01:48.160 --> 00:01:53.440] And it struggled for a long time, as I'm sure many indie hackers have this story, right?
[00:01:54.400 --> 00:01:58.880] Yeah, launched it as Q Vault Classroom, and the reason for naming it Q Vault is awful.
[00:01:58.880 --> 00:02:01.160] It's just because I owned the domain name.
[00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:03.160] I didn't want to buy another one.
[00:01:59.920 --> 00:02:04.760] So it was Q Vault Classroom.
[00:02:04.840 --> 00:02:08.520] That was July 2020, right in the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:02:08.520 --> 00:02:16.360] And now the new, better named boot.dev is what I saw is that it's up to 26,000 in revenue a month.
[00:02:16.360 --> 00:02:18.200] Is that still accurate?
[00:02:18.520 --> 00:02:21.080] Yeah, we did 26,000 last month.
[00:02:21.080 --> 00:02:26.520] And we've kind of been on this insane growth curve for the last about eight months.
[00:02:27.080 --> 00:02:28.760] Actually, you could even look back farther than that.
[00:02:28.760 --> 00:02:33.720] When we really started to grow, was the very beginning of, oh my gosh, it's 2023 already.
[00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:36.600] Yeah, 2022 was when things started to get good.
[00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:39.400] 2020, 2021 were uber rough.
[00:02:39.400 --> 00:02:43.400] We can talk about all those struggles, but it started to grow in 2020.
[00:02:43.400 --> 00:02:45.160] And the rebranding was part of that.
[00:02:45.160 --> 00:02:50.760] We rebranded in March of 2022 and really niched down.
[00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:58.360] And right when we like niched down and stopped trying to just be generic online coding classroom was when everything started to grow.
[00:02:58.360 --> 00:02:59.320] Who is we?
[00:02:59.320 --> 00:03:02.120] When you say we, who all is running boot.dev?
[00:03:02.440 --> 00:03:05.320] Yeah, so Qvault Classroom started out as a side project.
[00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:10.040] I was an engineering manager managing a Go team of developers at a fairly large company.
[00:03:10.040 --> 00:03:18.760] So side project until roughly the middle of 2021 when I brought on a partner from the UK.
[00:03:19.720 --> 00:03:22.200] We struggled for six months together.
[00:03:22.200 --> 00:03:27.800] I then bought him out, went back to owning it myself, hired an employee.
[00:03:27.800 --> 00:03:32.360] With the employee, we grew for the first half of 2022.
[00:03:32.360 --> 00:03:35.400] And then I brought on some investment.
[00:03:35.400 --> 00:03:39.800] So small angel funding, a third of a million dollars.
[00:03:40.120 --> 00:03:44.680] And then we've really grown since then because that was also when I was able to go full-time.
[00:03:44.680 --> 00:03:48.080] Okay, so it's basically you and one employee then.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:50.320] And a small amount of angel investing.
[00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:55.040] We just talked to Wes Cow recently on the podcast, a couple weeks ago.
[00:03:55.040 --> 00:03:57.360] She runs Maven.com.
[00:03:57.360 --> 00:03:59.680] In some respects, Maven is like the same as you.
[00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:00.960] It's like online education.
[00:04:00.960 --> 00:04:05.360] But in other respects, it couldn't be more different, right?
[00:04:05.360 --> 00:04:08.960] Like you raise a very small angel round and you mostly bootstrapped before that.
[00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:13.120] Wes raised like $25 million from investors.
[00:04:13.120 --> 00:04:20.720] You have like this very cool, we'll talk about it, like gamified user interface where anyone can just pop in and start learning to code immediately.
[00:04:20.720 --> 00:04:22.960] On Maven, it's like cohort-based courses.
[00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:27.040] You know, you pick an instructor, there's a time and a place you've got to be there.
[00:04:27.040 --> 00:04:28.000] Yours is cheap.
[00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.440] It's like $40 a month, $19 a month if you have the yearly plan.
[00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:35.280] Maven is like $1,000 a course, sometimes even more.
[00:04:35.600 --> 00:04:41.920] I think what Maven is doing represents like the other half of kind of the good side of like where I see education going.
[00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:47.600] The idea of cohort-based learning is super valuable to like a big subset of people.
[00:04:47.840 --> 00:04:57.920] It's like you could argue the reason people spend like insane amounts of money on college isn't because the material is that much better or even because you get like one-on-one learning with your professor.
[00:04:57.920 --> 00:04:59.920] A lot of times it's an auditorium, right?
[00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:04.880] It's more the like social pressure of I have to like meet deadlines.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:06.720] I have friends that are depending on me.
[00:05:06.880 --> 00:05:08.480] So I think there's a ton of value there.
[00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:12.480] The big downside dude, like the idea of cohort-based learning is expense, right?
[00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:17.360] So I feel like there's kind of two ways that education will go, hopefully, over the next two years.
[00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:28.840] And like, on one side, it's like this amazing, like self-paced experience where we do everything we can to like artificially give you like a dopamine hits to keep you going and getting through.
[00:05:28.840 --> 00:05:30.440] Because that's like the big struggle, right?
[00:05:30.440 --> 00:05:39.160] With anyone who's learning, generally speaking, 30 bucks a month or like price down for PPP isn't what's stopping you from breaking into an industry.
[00:05:39.160 --> 00:05:41.480] It's like giving up four weeks in.
[00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:46.200] And then on the other hand, like, I think that cohort-based learning is going to work for a lot of people.
[00:05:46.200 --> 00:05:50.360] It's almost like the boot camp model, but I guess stretched out over a longer period of time, maybe.
[00:05:50.680 --> 00:05:56.840] So, if these are the good halves of where education is going, what's the bad side of where education is going?
[00:05:56.840 --> 00:06:04.440] Well, the whole reason I started this thing was I got a CS degree and I'm really not happy with that experience.
[00:06:04.920 --> 00:06:05.720] Same here, man.
[00:06:05.720 --> 00:06:09.560] I feel like I learned very little that was actually of practical use for me.
[00:06:09.560 --> 00:06:10.600] And it was very expensive.
[00:06:11.000 --> 00:06:13.080] I liked a lot of my professors.
[00:06:13.400 --> 00:06:17.720] Like, not really any issues there, but it's insanely expensive.
[00:06:17.720 --> 00:06:20.120] And I say that as someone who basically paid zero for college.
[00:06:20.120 --> 00:06:28.680] Like, I got scholarships all the way through, but still working, you know, on the side, trying to, like, pay for living expenses, that sort of thing.
[00:06:28.920 --> 00:06:30.120] It took four years.
[00:06:30.120 --> 00:06:33.560] I had to take an acting class at one point, like, to get an elective credit.
[00:06:33.560 --> 00:06:35.720] Just like totally insane stuff.
[00:06:36.040 --> 00:06:38.600] You mean you got to take an acting class?
[00:06:38.600 --> 00:06:41.800] I had the privilege of taking an acting class.
[00:06:41.800 --> 00:06:44.200] I was Stanley in a streetcar named Desire.
[00:06:44.200 --> 00:06:44.840] Oh, man.
[00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:48.760] So, like, there's this societal thing where, like, I love studying philosophy on my own.
[00:06:48.760 --> 00:06:50.120] I like listen to podcasts and stuff.
[00:06:50.120 --> 00:06:52.360] But, like, when I'm trying to get a job, right?
[00:06:52.360 --> 00:06:58.760] When I'm working as a bank teller and I really want to level up my career, like, now is not the time to pitch me an acting class.
[00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:06.360] One of my favorite quotes from this guy, Naval, on Twitter, Naval Ravikant, he posted this right when the pandemic was in full bore.
[00:07:06.360 --> 00:07:08.680] He says, Schools aren't about learning.
[00:07:08.680 --> 00:07:10.360] Offices aren't about working.
[00:07:10.360 --> 00:07:12.040] Churches aren't about praying.
[00:07:12.040 --> 00:07:13.960] Restaurants aren't about eating.
[00:07:13.960 --> 00:07:14.760] Obvious now?
[00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:20.240] And that cuts right to the core of this idea that's at the core of cohort-based learning.
[00:07:20.240 --> 00:07:23.040] And what Cortland often says is bad learning.
[00:07:23.520 --> 00:07:29.200] Right, where Cortland's often like, yeah, college was a scam, but I found all my best friends there.
[00:07:29.200 --> 00:07:30.800] Like, I still love these guys.
[00:07:30.800 --> 00:07:33.600] Like, you know, but for MIT, I wouldn't know them.
[00:07:33.600 --> 00:07:43.600] And it's like hard to bake that in if you have, you know, basically a cohort class or an online course where you're just distilling it down to the pure functional part.
[00:07:43.600 --> 00:07:45.360] But still, I have a question, though.
[00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:46.240] Why so cheap?
[00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:52.640] Like, your boot.dev is $39 a month or $19 a month if you take the yearly package.
[00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:57.760] And you have a blog post where you talk about aligning your incentives and you talk about pricing.
[00:07:57.760 --> 00:08:08.240] And you said that one of your two goals, besides aligning your incentives, is that you want the overall cost to the student to be extremely low, like as low as possible, like less than 1% the price of college.
[00:08:08.240 --> 00:08:09.680] But what you've built is awesome.
[00:08:09.680 --> 00:08:10.560] It's amazing, right?
[00:08:10.560 --> 00:08:15.840] I went through the early tutorials and it's like a very useful product that took a ton of effort and time.
[00:08:15.840 --> 00:08:18.160] Why not charge more money?
[00:08:18.480 --> 00:08:22.880] So to quickly answer your question, I think our price will go up a little bit.
[00:08:23.200 --> 00:08:24.320] There's definitely a cap.
[00:08:24.320 --> 00:08:29.680] Like I don't think we'll ever realistically be having like our lifetime value for a student over $1,000.
[00:08:29.840 --> 00:08:37.760] So the value that boot dev provides today versus a year ago is like way higher because we have so many new courses and like features and all these things.
[00:08:37.920 --> 00:08:39.600] So it'll creep up.
[00:08:39.600 --> 00:08:44.240] But yeah, this problem of incentives is like very prescient in education.
[00:08:44.240 --> 00:08:49.760] And I think people very rightfully are quick to like sniff out scams in education.
[00:08:49.760 --> 00:08:54.720] Like if you publish a course and it's not very good and you charge a lot of money, like people will get upset, right?
[00:08:54.720 --> 00:08:56.000] Rightfully so.
[00:08:56.000 --> 00:08:59.120] But it's amazing how much college has gotten away with.
[00:08:59.120 --> 00:09:08.920] Like I don't know why college gets this special pass of like we're going to charge you $100,000, give you some degree that doesn't directly help you with your job.
[00:09:09.160 --> 00:09:11.720] And for some reason, like we don't care.
[00:09:12.520 --> 00:09:14.920] So it's really important to me to get these incentives aligned.
[00:09:14.920 --> 00:09:23.400] And I think the basic model of charging a low amount and providing a ton of value is the lowest risk thing until something better comes along.
[00:09:23.400 --> 00:09:28.760] Obviously, like in the blog post that you're talking about, Cortland, I talk about ISAs and this kind of stuff.
[00:09:28.760 --> 00:09:30.920] And I think that that stuff can work.
[00:09:30.920 --> 00:09:37.640] But now we've seen the last four years that, and there was a pretty big blow up with companies doing ISAs.
[00:09:37.640 --> 00:09:41.960] And so it turned out not to be the silver bullet that we thought it would be.
[00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:44.360] For listeners, ISAs are an income share agreement.
[00:09:44.360 --> 00:09:47.560] So these are basically companies that'll say, oh, come, we'll teach you to code for free.
[00:09:47.560 --> 00:09:51.240] And then you give us a percentage of your salary, your first year on the job.
[00:09:51.240 --> 00:09:53.160] Yeah, and so like there's kind of two things.
[00:09:53.160 --> 00:09:55.400] My understanding of the problem is like twofold.
[00:09:55.400 --> 00:10:00.440] One is that you just have to get a job making like a not super great income.
[00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:14.280] So like you could land a job after one of these boot camps making 50 or 60K, but now you're on the hook for 50 or 60 thousand dollars to backpay your education, even though the job you happen to land isn't that great.
[00:10:14.840 --> 00:10:18.120] And I think the marginal cost of most of this stuff can just be near zero.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:21.720] You know, I add a new student on boot dev, I pay zero dollars.
[00:10:21.720 --> 00:10:24.360] The biggest cost I have is acquisition, right?
[00:10:24.360 --> 00:10:25.640] Getting the word out.
[00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:35.080] So by having something awesome, by coming on podcasts or doing a course on Free Code Camp on their YouTube channel, like I can bring those costs way, way down.
[00:10:35.400 --> 00:10:37.960] But that is the challenge, is getting in front of people.
[00:10:37.960 --> 00:10:47.040] I'm kind of curious what it took you to get in front of people in the beginning because to learn how to code, I built a code game called Flexbox Defense.
[00:10:47.040 --> 00:10:50.800] It teaches you CSS styles and things like that.
[00:10:50.800 --> 00:10:54.240] And I feel like it was a huge missed opportunity for me.
[00:10:54.240 --> 00:10:58.720] You can correct me if I'm wrong, because at the time, I wasn't all that entrepreneurial.
[00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:02.560] I just wanted to get like a cushy gig doing consulting work.
[00:11:02.560 --> 00:11:04.800] So I'm like, oh, well, this will be remarkable, right?
[00:11:04.800 --> 00:11:05.440] It's a game.
[00:11:05.440 --> 00:11:06.720] It'll teach people.
[00:11:06.720 --> 00:11:08.960] And that thing blew up on day one.
[00:11:08.960 --> 00:11:12.080] Like, I still, I think I had like a donation for PayPal.
[00:11:12.080 --> 00:11:18.240] I probably get, you know, $20 a week five or six years later, seven years later.
[00:11:18.240 --> 00:11:19.280] And it just spread.
[00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:20.960] So what was it like for you?
[00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:31.440] I mean, first off, was the, you know, V1 of your product even this sort of gamified learning experience, or how did that, like the early growth pings work for you?
[00:11:32.400 --> 00:11:35.360] Yeah, so I had a bunch of problems in the beginning.
[00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:39.680] One problem was the idea for the platform was like way too broad.
[00:11:39.680 --> 00:11:41.040] It was like, we're going to teach you to code.
[00:11:41.040 --> 00:11:48.800] And the genesis for the idea was like, okay, we have all these boot camps that are like rushing people through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in three months.
[00:11:48.800 --> 00:11:57.920] I want to teach you like the stuff you learn in a CS degree that's actually applicable to a job because there are parts of a CS degree that are super important, other parts not so much.
[00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:01.200] But I want to teach you that stuff that boot camps seem to be skipping over.
[00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:03.040] And I interviewed a lot of boot camp grads.
[00:12:03.040 --> 00:12:07.120] There were a couple kind of prominent boot camps here where I live in Utah.
[00:12:07.120 --> 00:12:10.960] And it's like, well, this stuff is obviously missing, and you just need a little bit longer to teach it.
[00:12:10.960 --> 00:12:13.040] So that was the idea.
[00:12:13.040 --> 00:12:24.640] But that idea is so generic and broad that I just struggled to find any traction because I'm like releasing a Go course and then like an object-authoriented programming course and just all this stuff.
[00:12:24.640 --> 00:12:26.080] And where were you trying to advertise?
[00:12:26.080 --> 00:12:31.480] Like when you say you were struggling, like you put it on product hunt or something, or you tweet about it and then it's crickets.
[00:12:31.480 --> 00:12:34.040] Yeah, we had like a crickets product hunt thing.
[00:12:34.680 --> 00:12:36.360] Where was I trying to advertise?
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:37.400] That was the other problem.
[00:12:37.480 --> 00:12:42.280] Was like I've learned so much in the last two and a half years, even though I was putting in the effort.
[00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:50.040] You know, when you're bad at like UI design and marketing, you have to put in 10 times the effort that someone experienced has to put in to get the same result.
[00:12:50.040 --> 00:12:50.760] Because you don't know.
[00:12:50.840 --> 00:12:52.840] You're in the wrong places saying the wrong things.
[00:12:52.840 --> 00:12:55.080] Yeah, so I had like 300 followers on Twitter.
[00:12:55.080 --> 00:12:56.120] I'm like tweeting about it.
[00:12:56.120 --> 00:12:57.240] Nobody cares.
[00:12:58.440 --> 00:13:02.200] Blogging was how we initially started to get traction.
[00:13:02.200 --> 00:13:05.160] So I was an okay writer.
[00:13:05.320 --> 00:13:07.000] I'm a much better writer now.
[00:13:07.240 --> 00:13:14.920] But I was a decent writer and I've got some traction on Medium and some of these other blogging platforms, which in hindsight was definitely not the best way to do it.
[00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:18.520] I probably should have gone the video route with YouTube.
[00:13:18.840 --> 00:13:19.880] But it did work.
[00:13:19.880 --> 00:13:21.320] I did get some traction.
[00:13:21.320 --> 00:13:28.200] We started ranking for some SEO terms, and that's kind of like what creeped us up to that first like $1,000 MRR.
[00:13:28.200 --> 00:13:28.600] Right.
[00:13:28.920 --> 00:13:43.720] Honestly, that's even a pain with me and Cortland with Indie Hackers is like, you know, if you're closely like, you know, sort of running out of money on your runway and you're getting started, SEO is a long-term play, even if you do it well, right?
[00:13:43.720 --> 00:13:48.360] So you basically didn't start to see anything until the SEO started to take off.
[00:13:48.520 --> 00:13:53.160] Launched the platform, I guess, in March of 2020, like right as the pandemic broke.
[00:13:53.160 --> 00:13:56.280] And it was like a nothing burger for like a good three or four months.
[00:13:56.280 --> 00:14:00.280] I mean, I'm like doing the classic thing, just kind of like head down, working on it, nights and weekends, right?
[00:14:00.280 --> 00:14:04.480] I had a full-time job, so I'm not like, there's no concept of runway at this point, right?
[00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:07.080] Um, but like I'm working on it.
[00:14:07.320 --> 00:14:08.360] I put out the first course.
[00:14:08.360 --> 00:14:11.640] There was, there was it was like a whole platform that I built with just one course on it.
[00:14:11.680 --> 00:14:13.680] Um, again, probably a mistake.
[00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:16.640] Uh, could have could have done that a different way.
[00:14:13.480 --> 00:14:20.800] It was like the middle of 2021 when we made like our first thousand dollars in a single month.
[00:14:21.120 --> 00:14:23.760] Um, so just like really long, slow burn.
[00:14:23.760 --> 00:14:30.000] I love blogging, so like it wasn't hard to just do that once a week, but it was not the growth play.
[00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:35.120] And we can talk about how we grew a lot faster after that by doing more than just blogging.
[00:14:35.120 --> 00:14:36.480] How do you get good at writing?
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:40.320] Because this is something I see a lot of people improve at over the course of their career online.
[00:14:40.320 --> 00:14:45.760] They start off as like kind of crappy writers, and then they kind of find their own in terms of like, oh, what actually resonates with readers?
[00:14:45.760 --> 00:14:47.840] What makes something good versus something bad?
[00:14:47.840 --> 00:14:51.600] What's your philosophy after having written lots of blog posts for years?
[00:14:51.920 --> 00:14:57.280] I've looked at my early blog posts and the blog posts of like inexperienced writers, people who've just started.
[00:14:57.280 --> 00:15:06.400] And I feel like there's this fake writer in everyone where like you have this fake voice that you expect to be like the writer voice, and you need to write in that voice.
[00:15:06.400 --> 00:15:07.040] Yeah.
[00:15:07.040 --> 00:15:09.120] And that was one of the biggest things to like overcome.
[00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:16.000] Be like, no, actually, it's much better if you just write in your own voice and have unique hot takes.
[00:15:17.200 --> 00:15:19.440] Slightly controversial stuff is the best.
[00:15:19.840 --> 00:15:30.720] Anytime I wrote an article that had a hot take that I knew like about 50% of the people who read the article would disagree with, I knew that was a banger and it's going like to the top of Hacker News.
[00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:43.280] So that's the other thing is like you actually want to rip out the nuance from your thoughts and like put it towards the bottom of your article and put all your controversial stuff right at the top to get people's attention.
[00:15:43.280 --> 00:15:45.840] That's honestly one of the best pieces of advice I think I could give.
[00:15:45.840 --> 00:15:47.200] I think that's amazing advice.
[00:15:47.200 --> 00:15:49.920] Literally, Channing and I were just looking at your blog, and I was saying this.
[00:15:49.920 --> 00:15:51.280] I was like, look at Lane's blog.
[00:15:51.280 --> 00:15:58.920] Like, every single post he has is like an interesting discussion topic that you could kind of like argue with because, and now I know exactly why.
[00:15:58.920 --> 00:16:00.520] Like, you've intentionally done it that way.
[00:16:00.520 --> 00:16:01.640] And it's like, that's good.
[00:16:01.640 --> 00:16:02.680] It generates discussion.
[00:16:02.680 --> 00:16:03.560] It generates engagement.
[00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:06.440] Like, people want to read stuff that's not very milquetoast.
[00:16:06.760 --> 00:16:11.880] And then to your point, like, on the opposite, like, the worst thing ever is when someone's writing, they're equivocating about every point.
[00:16:11.880 --> 00:16:18.120] You know, they show you both sides of the issue, and they never say anything that's like extreme, and it just gets boring.
[00:16:18.120 --> 00:16:22.840] Yeah, so I actually fell into this trap pretty hard because weird side notes.
[00:16:23.160 --> 00:16:26.040] I grew up LDS, Mormon here in Utah.
[00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:27.560] I've since left the church.
[00:16:27.560 --> 00:16:33.960] I'm like pretty atheist at this point, but I've watched a lot of like religious discussion.
[00:16:33.960 --> 00:16:42.760] And what's really valued in like academic, like, you know, kind of philosophical debate is tons of nuance, tons of equivocating.
[00:16:42.760 --> 00:16:46.840] You're always couching everything you say in like, but it depends.
[00:16:46.840 --> 00:16:51.240] And that's actually a terrible strategy for writing online.
[00:16:51.240 --> 00:16:54.760] It's a terrible strategy for doing anything that's supposed to be interesting.
[00:16:54.760 --> 00:16:55.080] Yeah.
[00:16:55.080 --> 00:16:58.200] Nobody wants to hear like the both like lukewarm sides of an issue.
[00:16:58.200 --> 00:17:02.920] People want to hear an actual strong opinion that they can like, you know, hold on to and like say something about.
[00:17:02.920 --> 00:17:08.360] Yeah, which has like bad ramifications for society, but like it is a good way to get people to listen to you online.
[00:17:08.360 --> 00:17:09.000] You mean, what do you mean?
[00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:10.120] Like Twitter?
[00:17:10.840 --> 00:17:26.120] One of the things that I think is really beautiful and honestly reassuring about communicating in that way is if you have a product and it's just you or your small team, you can say the prose to the poetry, like the really simplified, interesting thing.
[00:17:26.120 --> 00:17:33.640] And then once you get people in the door and they come to your website or they see your product, then you can give them like an extra layer, right?
[00:17:33.640 --> 00:17:35.240] You're kind of going down the pyramid.
[00:17:35.240 --> 00:17:36.360] You start with just the top.
[00:17:36.360 --> 00:17:37.640] They go, that's interesting.
[00:17:37.640 --> 00:17:43.960] And then you give them a little bit more of the pyramid, and you only show them what is needed to get them to the next step.
[00:17:43.960 --> 00:17:47.600] And so by the time it really matters, people know what you're about.
[00:17:44.600 --> 00:17:48.240] Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:57.200] People give you the benefit of the doubt once they've, you know, in the context of a blog, read down the page or in the context of your product, like signed up and done a few things.
[00:17:57.440 --> 00:18:00.480] So you can like, yeah, you can save the nuance for later.
[00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:03.840] Okay, so you're a better writer, but SEO is still slow.
[00:18:03.840 --> 00:18:05.760] What actually started moving the needle?
[00:18:05.760 --> 00:18:12.720] You said you started blowing up, started really, you know, jumping to another level of growth, like in early 2022, I think you said.
[00:18:12.960 --> 00:18:14.240] What worked?
[00:18:14.800 --> 00:18:18.400] How did you switch from Q Vault to boot.dev?
[00:18:18.720 --> 00:18:20.880] How did you make that transformation?
[00:18:20.880 --> 00:18:24.080] Well, I always knew it needed, like, we needed to change our name.
[00:18:24.080 --> 00:18:26.640] I was like, this name doesn't make any sense.
[00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:29.280] It has nothing to do with education.
[00:18:29.600 --> 00:18:31.680] It's like, I always knew it was going to change at some point.
[00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:32.960] I was just too lazy to change it.
[00:18:32.960 --> 00:18:37.680] So I guess I was taking it more seriously and wanted to rebrand at that point.
[00:18:37.680 --> 00:18:47.200] But I don't think the rebranding was a part of the greater idea, which helped our growth, which was niching down the product, being way more obvious about what we're about.
[00:18:47.440 --> 00:18:55.920] So I actually ended up deleting some courses, which sounds insane to a content creator because you spend all this time building these courses and this educational material.
[00:18:56.240 --> 00:19:03.840] So the pitch of Q Vault back in 2021 was come learn computer science online.
[00:19:04.320 --> 00:19:11.760] And ranking for those search terms is the worst because you're ranking against the colleges that started the internet.
[00:19:11.760 --> 00:19:15.040] Like their domains are like the most powerful domains.
[00:19:15.360 --> 00:19:17.840] And you can't rate for those terms.
[00:19:18.320 --> 00:19:21.040] But you can rank for terms like backend developer.
[00:19:21.040 --> 00:19:27.280] So it just so happened that everyone coming to my website, even though it was about computer science, like pretty much had the goal of becoming a back-end developer.
[00:19:28.480 --> 00:19:30.600] Those are like quite tightly aligned, right?
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:35.880] There's a ton of resources on the internet for learning front-end development on your own.
[00:19:36.520 --> 00:19:42.120] But backend's kind of unique in that there's just not many platforms dedicated to back-end development.
[00:19:42.120 --> 00:19:51.640] You can find something that talks about Java or something that talks about C, but like a career path for back-end developers doesn't really exist.
[00:19:51.640 --> 00:19:55.080] And I think there's several reasons why that is, but that niching down helped.
[00:19:55.080 --> 00:20:00.680] And so when we did that, I went and deleted anything on the product that distracted from that.
[00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:01.960] So we had a graphics course.
[00:20:01.960 --> 00:20:04.360] I'm kind of like throw it away.
[00:20:04.360 --> 00:20:04.760] It was.
[00:20:04.920 --> 00:20:05.640] It was awful.
[00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:12.120] But we immediately started growing because people were now landing on the site and they're like, oh, this is where I can learn back-end development.
[00:20:12.600 --> 00:20:13.560] I was searching around.
[00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:17.160] There's nowhere else that does that, but all your messaging talks about it.
[00:20:17.160 --> 00:20:19.160] So that was the product side of it for sure.
[00:20:19.160 --> 00:20:26.520] So it's kind of a rare product-led growth change where usually when people tinker around with their product, it doesn't really change their ability to grow.
[00:20:26.520 --> 00:20:27.880] But you kept your marketing the same.
[00:20:27.880 --> 00:20:28.600] You're still blogging.
[00:20:28.600 --> 00:20:30.440] You're still working on SEO.
[00:20:30.440 --> 00:20:33.000] But you just pared down your product to change what you're working on.
[00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:38.360] And it made your messaging much more specific, much more valuable, and quite frankly, easier to rank for.
[00:20:38.360 --> 00:20:40.360] And that's what kickstarted your growth.
[00:20:40.360 --> 00:20:47.080] So when we were making $1,000 a month at the beginning of 2022, we had about the same amount of organic traffic.
[00:20:47.080 --> 00:20:49.320] Actually, we might have even had more than we have right now.
[00:20:49.320 --> 00:20:57.160] Because when I rebranded the site, we lost a bunch of rankings, even though I did everything perfectly, but Google's the worst, like from a technical perspective.
[00:20:57.320 --> 00:21:02.040] All the redirects are there, but we lost half of our organic traffic.
[00:21:02.040 --> 00:21:04.680] So we had this like funnel of people coming in.
[00:21:04.680 --> 00:21:08.280] At the time, it was almost 100,000 people hitting our blog every month.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:13.560] It was just, we had awful, like truly awful conversion rates.
[00:21:14.120 --> 00:21:20.960] So getting that up and changing what we were writing about, like everything we're writing about now is back-end and Go and Python.
[00:21:22.480 --> 00:21:25.520] Tightening that up has been a game changer.
[00:21:25.520 --> 00:21:28.800] So I'm going to go back in the vault and embarrass you again.
[00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:36.960] Or actually, this time I'm not going to embarrass you because you mentioned it was right at the beginning of 2022 where you started to see some more growth.
[00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:38.640] You started to kind of niche down.
[00:21:38.640 --> 00:21:49.200] And sure enough, here's a post from what is it, July 2022, where you said, got 10 super users and it's unlocking growth even faster than I expected.
[00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:58.960] And so that seems like it aligns perfectly with this idea of instead of being mediocre to a lot of people, you're like stellar to a small number of people.
[00:21:58.960 --> 00:22:01.280] But like, tell me what happened here.
[00:22:01.600 --> 00:22:06.160] Yeah, so I'm not going to fanboy too hard, but I have listened to like every indie hacker podcast.
[00:22:06.480 --> 00:22:10.480] I've also listened to a lot of the Y Combinator stuff.
[00:22:10.480 --> 00:22:20.560] And one of these ideas that I think is really, really important is it's much better to be great to a small number of people than like lukewarm to a lot of people.
[00:22:20.560 --> 00:22:23.520] And so that was what I was like really taking into heart at that point.
[00:22:23.520 --> 00:22:28.640] And so yeah, I just went and like one by one started interviewing people who were actually using the site.
[00:22:28.640 --> 00:22:29.920] Why are you here?
[00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:30.800] Why are you here?
[00:22:30.800 --> 00:22:32.400] Why do you care about these courses?
[00:22:32.560 --> 00:22:35.360] Why aren't you over on some competitor site?
[00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:39.360] And like the story started to get pretty consistent.
[00:22:39.360 --> 00:22:41.680] Like I'm here to learn back-end development.
[00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:42.880] This is my background.
[00:22:42.960 --> 00:22:48.400] Turns out a lot of them had a common background in like IT ops, but like hadn't really written a lot of codes.
[00:22:49.040 --> 00:22:54.000] Learning what they were about and then building just for them started to grow.
[00:22:54.000 --> 00:23:00.760] And this industry, like the Learn2X industry, is like so powerfully fueled by word of mouth.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:06.680] So you start getting some super users who really like you, you can start growing kind of organically in that way.
[00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:11.640] What do you think the Y Combinator podcast is doing that we should be doing?
[00:23:11.640 --> 00:23:16.520] Speaking of fights and disagreements, what's good about their podcast?
[00:23:16.520 --> 00:23:18.040] Because I never listened to it.
[00:23:18.040 --> 00:23:25.560] They did a series of lectures at Stanford and published it as a podcast on Spotify.
[00:23:25.560 --> 00:23:33.800] It's like 20 episodes from like, I don't know, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, like all the they all like took a lecture.
[00:23:33.800 --> 00:23:35.480] We should be lecturing at Stanford.
[00:23:35.640 --> 00:23:37.480] And those were great.
[00:23:37.480 --> 00:23:38.760] Those 20 episodes.
[00:23:39.320 --> 00:23:41.400] That's all I've listened to from them.
[00:23:41.400 --> 00:23:43.240] What do you think we should be doing on this podcast?
[00:23:43.240 --> 00:23:45.160] If you've listened to every episode, what do you like?
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:46.440] What do you not like?
[00:23:46.440 --> 00:23:53.960] The best episodes that have had the most impact on boot dev are like, I mean, I could just start naming them.
[00:23:54.280 --> 00:23:58.840] I guess I don't know exactly what the pattern are, but it was like Near Ayal, the hooked stuff was awesome.
[00:23:58.840 --> 00:24:00.280] The mom test.
[00:24:00.600 --> 00:24:05.880] The people who have come on and like really drilled into these very specific ideas.
[00:24:05.880 --> 00:24:11.160] The authors, people who've written books, because they're subject matter experts and they're like, you know, here's what you need to know.
[00:24:11.160 --> 00:24:12.200] Here's valuable information.
[00:24:12.200 --> 00:24:13.080] Boom, bam.
[00:24:13.080 --> 00:24:15.080] And you walk away having learned something.
[00:24:15.400 --> 00:24:24.440] Now, I will say the stories are great too because it's like you hear the advice from the people with the books and then you like hear the stories of how people implemented it.
[00:24:24.440 --> 00:24:34.360] So I don't know if one works without the other, but like the authors explaining in depth, like, okay, here's how you're going to do a customer interview was immensely helpful.
[00:24:34.360 --> 00:24:37.240] It's fascinating to hear that because they ask other people the same question.
[00:24:37.240 --> 00:24:44.960] And it feels like the people who have not yet built anything like the stories and the people like you who are like, okay, I'm at $26,000 a month.
[00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:47.680] Like, you want the real hard facts of how you're going to build an actual business.
[00:24:48.000 --> 00:24:49.440] You're beyond the stories a little bit.
[00:24:49.440 --> 00:24:51.920] Like, you're already inspired and motivated.
[00:24:51.920 --> 00:24:52.960] You just want to build something.
[00:24:52.960 --> 00:24:55.440] How do I solve very specific problems?
[00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:59.600] Yeah, I guess like if your struggle, and I mean, you guys know this better than me.
[00:24:59.600 --> 00:25:02.800] If your struggle is motivation, then yeah, I'm sure the stories are more helpful.
[00:25:02.800 --> 00:25:05.120] But like, I didn't really struggle with motivation.
[00:25:05.120 --> 00:25:08.880] I just like struggled with sucking at building a business.
[00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:10.480] Yeah.
[00:25:10.960 --> 00:25:12.240] That simplifies things.
[00:25:12.240 --> 00:25:14.240] That's where I always was, too, in my 20s.
[00:25:14.240 --> 00:25:15.280] And even now, right?
[00:25:15.280 --> 00:25:17.760] Like, it's not hard to like sit down and work.
[00:25:17.760 --> 00:25:23.600] It's hard to succeed because there's like a hundred million other people out there working on like a bunch of, even in your niche, right?
[00:25:23.600 --> 00:25:26.240] Like you are teaching people how to code online.
[00:25:26.240 --> 00:25:26.880] There are tons.
[00:25:26.960 --> 00:25:31.120] I mean, there's been like five people on this podcast who've been teaching people how to code online.
[00:25:31.120 --> 00:25:34.800] It's like hard to cut through the noise and figure out how you're going to win.
[00:25:34.800 --> 00:25:35.920] So I agree with you.
[00:25:35.920 --> 00:25:40.800] I think even if you've got the motivation, it's not easy to build something.
[00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:42.960] You need to get Seth Godin on.
[00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:45.440] The Purple Cow, I think, was one of the best books.
[00:25:45.600 --> 00:25:46.480] I'm a huge fan.
[00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:48.640] I would love to have him on.
[00:25:48.960 --> 00:25:49.440] Yeah.
[00:25:49.920 --> 00:25:54.480] So like this new, I am not like a good UI UX person.
[00:25:54.480 --> 00:25:55.760] I'm a back-end developer.
[00:25:55.760 --> 00:25:56.560] Surprise.
[00:25:57.280 --> 00:26:02.000] But like the early versions of the site were truly awful in terms of how they looked and felt.
[00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:03.840] It's gotten a lot better now.
[00:26:03.840 --> 00:26:11.360] And I think a good cheat code there was reading The Purple Cow and realizing like, okay, this industry is crowded.
[00:26:11.360 --> 00:26:15.600] There's a ton of people teaching people how to code online.
[00:26:15.600 --> 00:26:17.920] We need to be remarkable and different.
[00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:19.680] And there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:26:19.680 --> 00:26:24.320] Like, we need to stop trying to make our site look like the big players.
[00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:26.240] Yeah, that's exactly it.
[00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:26.960] I think standing out.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:28.960] I mean, we do this for indie hackers in a way.
[00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:30.200] For us, it's like really simple.
[00:26:30.200 --> 00:26:31.640] Somebody was complaining yesterday on Twitter.
[00:26:31.640 --> 00:26:34.920] They're like, at CS Allen, when are you going to make the website white so I can read it?
[00:26:29.840 --> 00:26:36.520] And I'm like, probably never.
[00:26:36.760 --> 00:26:39.320] Just going to be this weird, hard to read, dark blue website.
[00:26:39.320 --> 00:26:40.120] Because you know what?
[00:26:40.120 --> 00:26:44.520] Every time somebody comes to indie hackers a second time, they remember that they've been here before.
[00:26:44.520 --> 00:26:49.000] And I think just standing yourself out apart from the crowd is worth its weight in gold.
[00:26:49.000 --> 00:26:52.600] Yeah, we recently changed our font probably four months ago.
[00:26:52.920 --> 00:26:57.880] It is the like the open source version, I don't know, of the font from Dota 2.
[00:26:57.880 --> 00:26:58.200] Yeah.
[00:26:58.200 --> 00:26:58.680] So it's like this.
[00:26:58.920 --> 00:26:59.880] Very video gamey.
[00:26:59.880 --> 00:27:00.280] Yeah.
[00:27:00.280 --> 00:27:00.680] Yeah.
[00:27:00.680 --> 00:27:02.440] And like, I initially had a bunch of complaints.
[00:27:02.440 --> 00:27:04.200] Like, oh, it's like a little harder to read.
[00:27:04.200 --> 00:27:07.880] And so like, I actually did take that into account because you do a lot of reading on the site.
[00:27:07.880 --> 00:27:09.880] So we like made some tweaks so it was a little easier to read.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:11.320] But at the end of the day, we kept it.
[00:27:11.320 --> 00:27:15.000] And people land on it and they're like, this is a weird, like, this is a weird feel.
[00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:15.400] Yeah.
[00:27:15.640 --> 00:27:17.080] But they remember it, right?
[00:27:17.320 --> 00:27:20.440] And that helps so much more than you'd think.
[00:27:20.440 --> 00:27:23.880] And it also just puts you into like game mindset.
[00:27:23.880 --> 00:27:27.480] So Cortland and I played a lot of World of Warcraft growing up.
[00:27:27.480 --> 00:27:30.760] And I'm obsessed with gamifying my life.
[00:27:30.760 --> 00:27:32.760] I'm obsessed with gaming products.
[00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:42.520] But I'm also kind of curious because, I mean, even your pitch, it might have been on your, it might have been on the site, might be on Twitter, is like, hey, make learning addictive.
[00:27:42.520 --> 00:27:49.240] And you also just mentioned Nier Ayal, where he wrote this book called Hooked, which is all about basically getting people hooked on games.
[00:27:49.240 --> 00:27:52.680] And then he wrote a book after that that's called Indistractible, which is like, how do I unwind?
[00:27:52.680 --> 00:27:55.720] How do I teach people how to like not get hooked on stuff?
[00:27:55.720 --> 00:28:05.720] So how do you think about striking the balance there where you're hooking people, but trying to make sure that it's like in a way that aligns with their values?
[00:28:06.040 --> 00:28:07.080] Yeah, great question.
[00:28:07.080 --> 00:28:12.600] I mean, the best cheat code is the fact that we're teaching you useful things.
[00:28:12.600 --> 00:28:18.720] So, like, getting addicted to like learning useful things is already inherently a good thing rather than scrolling on Facebook.
[00:28:18.720 --> 00:28:21.920] So, like, just out of the gate, we're in a pretty good spot.
[00:28:21.920 --> 00:28:31.840] Now, there is one pitfall that we definitely ran into, which is like you can incentivize the wrong things in your product because we do have a lot of users who love the game system.
[00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:34.560] Like, they love the achievements and the quests.
[00:28:34.560 --> 00:28:41.600] And if you incentivize the wrong things, then you get people beating your game, but not learning as effectively as they can.
[00:28:41.600 --> 00:28:46.480] So, we've had to retweak a bunch of times how we award achievements.
[00:28:46.640 --> 00:28:47.520] Let me give you an example.
[00:28:47.520 --> 00:28:56.720] So, in the early version of boot dev, you had one button after you wrote your code in the browser, and it was the run button.
[00:28:56.720 --> 00:29:01.200] And when you run your code, you could see afterwards if you got it correct or not.
[00:29:01.680 --> 00:29:06.480] And we had an achievement that would incentivize you to never get it wrong.
[00:29:06.480 --> 00:29:09.680] So, you get it right the first time, and then you go on the next one, you get it right the next time.
[00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:11.360] You have the streak building up.
[00:29:11.360 --> 00:29:19.520] That is terrible practice for like real-life coding because, in real life, you're sitting there with a debugger, like you're getting it wrong over and over and over again.
[00:29:20.160 --> 00:29:22.640] There's no value in getting it right the first time.
[00:29:22.640 --> 00:29:24.000] So, we had to tweak that.
[00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:27.440] So, now there's two buttons: you basically have a debug and like a submit.
[00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:29.920] And so, you can sit there and test with the debug as much as you want.
[00:29:29.920 --> 00:29:32.560] And then, once you think you have it right, you can submit.
[00:29:32.560 --> 00:29:35.120] And, like, that changed a ton.
[00:29:35.120 --> 00:29:39.360] Now, like, people are cheating way less, like, all that kind of stuff.
[00:29:40.160 --> 00:29:43.600] I mean, the way you've got it set up, like, the gamification is it's actually like a quest.
[00:29:43.600 --> 00:29:46.400] And the quest is basically like to become a developer.
[00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:51.760] And so, you got these little missions you go on, which are like, you know, in any other coding course, it'd be called like courses.
[00:29:51.760 --> 00:29:56.000] But at the end of it, like, are people graduating and getting hired?
[00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:01.160] Yeah, so I know pretty much everyone who's gone through the course, like all the way.
[00:30:01.160 --> 00:30:01.800] It's huge.
[00:29:59.760 --> 00:30:06.600] There's like 20 courses on the platform, and they're all kind of lined up in a linear fashion.
[00:30:06.760 --> 00:30:10.440] So it takes people, you know, six to twelve months to actually get through it all.
[00:30:10.680 --> 00:30:12.200] So there's a lot of content.
[00:30:12.360 --> 00:30:15.080] So I pretty much know everyone who's been through all of it.
[00:30:15.080 --> 00:30:19.080] And at this point, I'm pretty sure all of them are employed.
[00:30:19.320 --> 00:30:25.000] A couple of them were employed before, switching into like a new tech stack, but some of them weren't.
[00:30:25.320 --> 00:30:30.920] In fact, I think the top two on our leaderboard came to the platform learning to code, never been employed.
[00:30:31.240 --> 00:30:33.160] Now they have jobs as developers.
[00:30:33.480 --> 00:30:35.240] So success has been awesome.
[00:30:35.480 --> 00:30:41.000] But it is like, like I said, our approach is take your time and go deeper on this stuff.
[00:30:41.320 --> 00:30:47.240] We don't want to produce people who have a very shallow understanding of JavaScript who are then out struggling in the market.
[00:30:47.240 --> 00:30:48.440] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:30:48.440 --> 00:30:54.040] I've been thinking a lot about AI and its role on and basically coding.
[00:30:54.040 --> 00:30:56.440] I was using ChatGPT the other day to help me code.
[00:30:56.440 --> 00:30:58.120] Have you used it yet?
[00:30:58.440 --> 00:30:59.480] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:59.720 --> 00:31:02.360] We actually, so we have a new mascot for the site.
[00:31:02.360 --> 00:31:03.320] His name is Boots.
[00:31:03.320 --> 00:31:07.960] He's a cute little wizard bear who helps you learn to code.
[00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:11.160] He's like your mentor as you go through these assignments.
[00:31:11.160 --> 00:31:17.400] And basically the way he works is you can highlight any code snippet in the courses and click explain.
[00:31:17.400 --> 00:31:24.360] And then Boots uses the GPT-4AI or API to explain what that code is doing.
[00:31:24.840 --> 00:31:28.440] So I'm a huge fan of that assisted learning.
[00:31:28.680 --> 00:31:33.640] I've been using it every once in a while to convert data from one format to another.
[00:31:34.280 --> 00:31:40.920] I've actually found GitHub Copilot to be more helpful when it comes to efficiency just because it's baked into my editor.
[00:31:40.920 --> 00:31:44.120] It'll just auto-complete your code for you while you're writing code, which is amazing.
[00:31:44.120 --> 00:31:46.960] And it's like right 99% of the time in my case.
[00:31:46.960 --> 00:31:47.680] It's amazing.
[00:31:47.680 --> 00:31:52.000] Actually, I was struggling to come up with a good This is gonna be a little tangential.
[00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:55.760] I was struggling to come up with a good challenge yesterday for our Go course.
[00:31:55.760 --> 00:32:02.320] And we have this unique problem where Go is a highly meant to be run on multiple CPU cores.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:06.080] And when we run it in the browser, we're running in WebAssembly, which is single-threaded.
[00:32:06.080 --> 00:32:12.640] So I like I needed a challenge that would get you to understand the idea of concurrency, even though you're working in a single-threaded environment.
[00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:19.520] And ChatGPT came up with like the formula for the challenge that I'd been struggling to come up with for quite a while.
[00:32:19.920 --> 00:32:20.160] Good.
[00:32:20.320 --> 00:32:20.960] So good.
[00:32:20.960 --> 00:32:22.480] Yeah, so we'll be using it a lot.
[00:32:23.200 --> 00:32:26.080] Do you think this is going to change the way that people code in the long run?
[00:32:26.080 --> 00:32:27.840] Like, obviously, it's early days, right?
[00:32:27.840 --> 00:32:35.280] Like, chat, like, GPT-4 or ChatGPT has only been out for, like, I mean, it feels like it's been an eternity, but it's like a month, you know?
[00:32:35.280 --> 00:32:37.120] Like, it's like not that long.
[00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:48.560] Once people start building actual tooling on it, like, you've built, you know, you've got your wizard bear in there, and it's kind of helpful, but like, you can also imagine like something that's helping you write the code and kind of talking about what you should do next, et cetera.
[00:32:48.560 --> 00:32:51.360] And these aren't like improvements to the underlying technology.
[00:32:51.360 --> 00:32:53.280] You know, the underlying technology is already out.
[00:32:53.280 --> 00:33:00.480] These are just improvements to the user interface that allow you to sort of corral the AI to help people write a lot more effective code.
[00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:07.760] And you have people like Amjad Masad from Replit and other people who are predicting that every developer is going to be, you know, quote-unquote 10X developer.
[00:33:07.760 --> 00:33:13.840] And every 10X developer is going to be 100x developer, which sounds fanciful, but it's like, at this point, I believe almost anything.
[00:33:13.840 --> 00:33:14.480] What do you think?
[00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:18.720] Do you think this is actually the future that, like, it's going to revolutionize how people code?
[00:33:18.720 --> 00:33:23.440] Or is it just going to be a little bit of a co-pilot, a little bit of a helper on the side?
[00:33:23.760 --> 00:33:30.000] So, I think, like, an order of magnitude improvement for developers is probably an exaggeration.
[00:33:30.520 --> 00:33:39.240] Um, in my experience, like co-pilot and chat GPT maybe make me like two times, like at most, two times more productive, depending on the situation.
[00:33:39.240 --> 00:33:43.480] Like, there have been situations where I like got me unstuck, and so you could argue that's like amazing, right?
[00:33:43.560 --> 00:33:44.520] Saved me a ton of time.
[00:33:44.520 --> 00:33:48.600] But then, like, in the normal case, it's it's not quite as helpful.
[00:33:48.600 --> 00:34:06.440] Um, but yeah, I think it's it's pretty accurate to say, um, for people learning, like people who are like very junior, chat GPT and like AI code generation is going to be super helpful for kind of getting you unstuck, especially in the sense that like it can write the code and then explain what it does, right?
[00:34:06.440 --> 00:34:08.600] Because that's what you really need when you're learning.
[00:34:08.600 --> 00:34:17.000] We already had, like, this is the thing: we already had the ability to like, oh, I need a binary tree, let me go copy-paste that from online.
[00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:18.680] Like, we already had that problem.
[00:34:18.680 --> 00:34:23.400] The fact that ChatGPT can code a binary tree is like not super interesting.
[00:34:23.400 --> 00:34:31.160] The fact that it can explain to you what every line does without you having to interact with another human, like, that's pretty interesting to me.
[00:34:31.560 --> 00:34:36.600] So, I think it's fair to say that it'll make the more productive people even more productive.
[00:34:36.600 --> 00:34:39.480] And I think it'll also help at the bottom end of the curve.
[00:34:39.640 --> 00:34:45.800] I think the takeaway is that because people are getting more productive, like, you just need to get better.
[00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:52.200] Because as you get better, you can use these tools to kind of magnify your impact in whatever you're doing.
[00:34:52.440 --> 00:34:57.960] There's something that I really like when I think about the disruptive potential of ChatGPT.
[00:34:57.960 --> 00:34:59.880] Because a lot of people are really worried.
[00:35:00.600 --> 00:35:04.600] But probably the best take that I've heard is from this guy, Cal Newport.
[00:35:04.600 --> 00:35:07.080] You may have read his book or heard of it, Deep Work.
[00:35:07.080 --> 00:35:18.160] His whole brand is: we all are doing way too much running around hair on fire, like shallow work, and we should be spending more time doing things that are more difficult.
[00:35:18.160 --> 00:35:19.120] And he did a deep dive.
[00:35:19.120 --> 00:35:28.480] He's a computer scientist on ChatGPT, and he's like, hey, look, this is going to be disruptive, but it's going to be disrupting a lot of the work that none of us really want to do.
[00:35:28.480 --> 00:35:32.640] Just like you said, hey, you can already go look up code snippets on Google.
[00:35:32.640 --> 00:35:36.240] This thing just kind of makes it happen in a couple of clicks, right?
[00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:42.720] There are a lot of admin type, you know, sort of communication overhead type jobs that this thing is going to make go away.
[00:35:42.720 --> 00:35:50.880] When we think about ChatGPT and its ability to do writing work, it's like, you know, it does good listicles that are kind of superficial.
[00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:51.920] It gives you ideas.
[00:35:51.920 --> 00:35:59.760] But if you're a really, really good, insightful, you know, writer saying the kind of surprising shit that we talked about, right?
[00:36:00.080 --> 00:36:03.680] ChatGPT, at least at the moment, isn't making that go away.
[00:36:03.680 --> 00:36:11.760] So I like the idea of having this thing that makes the shallow work go away and gives me more space for deep work.
[00:36:12.080 --> 00:36:19.120] Yeah, I think, like, generally speaking, job displacement is a good thing as long as it doesn't happen too fast.
[00:36:19.520 --> 00:36:19.760] Right?
[00:36:20.320 --> 00:36:21.760] Like, you want this advancement.
[00:36:21.760 --> 00:36:23.760] Like, you want people not doing data entry.
[00:36:23.760 --> 00:36:25.920] Like, data entry is awful.
[00:36:25.920 --> 00:36:27.680] It is soul-sucking work.
[00:36:28.240 --> 00:36:33.440] But you also don't want to, like, tomorrow put, you know, 4 million people out of the job.
[00:36:33.440 --> 00:36:33.840] Right.
[00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:38.000] So, as long as it happens at a reasonable pace, I think it's fantastic.
[00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:47.120] Well, it's interesting because I think we also, like, especially as software engineers, have been living in an environment where we, it's kind of a matter of course that we have to update our skills.
[00:36:47.120 --> 00:36:47.360] Right?
[00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:52.880] Like, for example, if you're a front-end developer, it's like every two years, you gotta forget everything you know.
[00:36:52.880 --> 00:36:55.280] There's another framework out that's completely different.
[00:36:55.280 --> 00:36:57.920] And I think most careers in the history of the world have not been that way.
[00:36:57.920 --> 00:37:05.720] You know, if you're making horseshoes in like 1835, like you're making them the same way in like 1865, it wasn't a big difference.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:07.800] And so if you're out of a job, you're screwed.
[00:37:07.800 --> 00:37:10.360] Like you just haven't really had to learn anything.
[00:37:10.360 --> 00:37:15.720] Whereas now it's like, okay, like you see a lot of programmers who are like, okay, how do I learn like all this AI stuff, right?
[00:37:15.720 --> 00:37:17.160] And it's not that bad.
[00:37:17.160 --> 00:37:30.040] And so I think as you get a workforce that's more adept at changing, it's kind of like better than it was in the past to have really rapid disruption and put more people out of work because those people can adapt much more quickly.
[00:37:30.040 --> 00:37:31.560] Or so I hope.
[00:37:31.880 --> 00:37:38.280] Yeah, the idea that like we teach you from the time that you're five until the time that you're 22.
[00:37:38.280 --> 00:37:44.120] And then after that, you just stop work is, I think, terribly outdated.
[00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:55.480] It makes way more sense to me to have, especially with how fast things are moving, to just expect that all of your working years, you'll be to some degree learning new stuff.
[00:37:55.480 --> 00:37:59.480] And we need to get comfortable with that idea and figure out the right ways to do it.
[00:37:59.480 --> 00:37:59.960] Yeah.
[00:37:59.960 --> 00:38:01.560] And it's kind of hard as a founder.
[00:38:01.560 --> 00:38:06.360] I think when you're starting companies, it's like you've got this pull in one direction.
[00:38:06.360 --> 00:38:09.000] It's like, hey, I want to make money and have this actually work.
[00:38:09.160 --> 00:38:11.080] I want to just keep failing for years.
[00:38:11.080 --> 00:38:16.680] But on the other side, you have all these tempting things that can like, maybe you move a little bit slower, but they're better.
[00:38:16.680 --> 00:38:21.560] Like, for example, like I failed at like four or five companies in my 20s, but I learned something new every time.
[00:38:21.560 --> 00:38:23.320] And not just like fluffy stuff, but like hard skills.
[00:38:23.320 --> 00:38:30.680] Like I became like a much better writer, a much better visual designer, a much better backhand and front-end programmer and sysadmin, like all these skills.
[00:38:30.680 --> 00:38:37.320] So that like by the time I was 30, I was like this badass who accumulated all these skills, even though I hadn't had any like real wins and business.
[00:38:37.320 --> 00:38:51.600] And I think it's worthwhile for founders to essentially slow down a little bit, worry a little bit less about like succeeding with the current thing, and like accumulate skills because that's something that's guaranteed that you can always take with you no matter whether or not your business succeeds.
[00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:54.240] Yeah, I was actually just thinking about this yesterday.
[00:38:54.640 --> 00:39:00.000] The whole idea of like an MVP is like super subjective.
[00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.800] Like my first MVP, Q Vault Classroom, was truly terrible.
[00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:10.640] Like it was not good, but like not because I needed to put in an extra month of effort.
[00:39:10.640 --> 00:39:12.960] That probably wasn't the right call either.
[00:39:13.280 --> 00:39:16.480] I just was really bad at UI UX design.
[00:39:16.480 --> 00:39:19.520] And like it took me a while to figure it out.
[00:39:20.240 --> 00:39:21.520] So yeah, I'm with you.
[00:39:21.520 --> 00:39:26.880] It's like you have to figure out the right amount of effort to put in, but just expect that it's going to get better if you keep doing it.
[00:39:26.880 --> 00:39:31.280] Like the next product or the next iteration of the product is going to get better.
[00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:38.480] So figuring out that right amount of effort to put in up front is actually super challenging because it's hard to like figure out what minimum is.
[00:39:38.480 --> 00:39:46.240] Like minimum for me right now is a much higher bar than it was back then, even though I don't know, the amount of time is like pretty much the same that I'm putting in.
[00:39:47.920 --> 00:40:01.120] That's such a fascinating topic to me because I think that it takes that falling on your face and like the error correcting forward to get good at literally any of the skills that go into being an entrepreneur, right?
[00:40:01.120 --> 00:40:04.400] To be just a back-end developer or a front-end developer.
[00:40:04.720 --> 00:40:06.960] A front-end developer took me many years, right?
[00:40:07.360 --> 00:40:08.080] I was in sales.
[00:40:08.080 --> 00:40:12.480] It took me a while to get good at sales, but you have to do all of these things all at once.
[00:40:12.480 --> 00:40:24.000] And yet, a lot of the narrative with making a company work, I think of like a lot of the Mark Zuckerberg being a college genius and having this thing that works right out of the gate.
[00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:31.800] Like, you often don't hear about Cortland, what he just mentioned, his four big failed projects that like taught him here.
[00:40:31.960 --> 00:40:41.080] He just sort of shows up like the tip of the iceberg with you know, indie hackers doing really well, and you don't see the 10 years of compounded growth and learning.
[00:40:41.080 --> 00:40:44.520] I think it's really hard and scary to like branch off and learn something new.
[00:40:44.520 --> 00:40:47.400] Like, let's say you're a founder right now, you don't know how to code, right?
[00:40:47.400 --> 00:40:55.160] Like, on one hand, you're like, okay, well, I can just use all these no-code tools and AI, and I could just be, you know, be a writer, and I can make money next month, right?
[00:40:55.160 --> 00:40:59.000] But, like, at what point do you decide, like, hey, maybe I just should learn how to code?
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:01.880] And I know that if I do that, I will not be making money next month.
[00:41:01.880 --> 00:41:05.880] Like, my company will not be off the ground because, like, I'm investing in my skills.
[00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:07.960] Striking the right balance there, I think, is hard.
[00:41:07.960 --> 00:41:11.640] But I don't know, as I've gotten older, I've leaned more on, like, err on the side of learn.
[00:41:11.640 --> 00:41:15.720] Like, it's not as big of a rush as you think it is to get to the point where your company's successful.
[00:41:15.720 --> 00:41:17.320] Like, that time is going to pass anyway.
[00:41:17.320 --> 00:41:20.600] But if you become more of a badass over time, it's just worth it.
[00:41:21.240 --> 00:41:24.360] I'm a big Age of Empire StarCraft 2 fan.
[00:41:24.360 --> 00:41:26.040] And, like, there's a lot of stuff.
[00:41:26.120 --> 00:41:28.040] So, I'm going to throw it down.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:33.240] I think erring on the side of investing is you're building more worker units.
[00:41:33.240 --> 00:41:34.120] You're investing in the economy.
[00:41:34.440 --> 00:41:35.000] Your economy.
[00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:36.040] It's your macro.
[00:41:36.040 --> 00:41:37.080] Yeah, it's your macro.
[00:41:37.080 --> 00:41:37.800] Exactly.
[00:41:37.800 --> 00:41:41.480] Taking the shortcut and deploying next month, that can work.
[00:41:41.480 --> 00:41:43.400] But it's the rush build.
[00:41:43.720 --> 00:41:47.400] And if it doesn't work, then you're not any farther forward.
[00:41:47.400 --> 00:41:48.200] Yeah, you lose it.
[00:41:48.280 --> 00:41:49.640] You got to play another game.
[00:41:49.640 --> 00:41:57.560] There's a niche of 10 now super fans of this show, like just hardcore StarCraft fans who are like geeking out.
[00:41:57.560 --> 00:41:59.720] Like they're driving, listening to this podcast.
[00:41:59.720 --> 00:42:01.560] They pulled over to the side of the road.
[00:42:01.560 --> 00:42:05.800] And then the other 90% of our audience is like me.
[00:42:05.760 --> 00:42:07.160] Like, they can go take a hike.
[00:42:07.160 --> 00:42:08.840] I'm here for the 10%.
[00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:12.680] There was another lifetime where I was, StarCraft was all I did.
[00:42:12.680 --> 00:42:14.520] I was a grandmaster StarCraft 2 player.
[00:42:14.520 --> 00:42:16.960] All I did was play StarCraft non-stop.
[00:42:16.960 --> 00:42:18.720] A game is amazing.
[00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:20.000] So, Lane, I'm glad you're a fan.
[00:42:20.640 --> 00:42:22.560] We haven't made a better game since StarCraft 2.
[00:42:22.560 --> 00:42:31.280] Why isn't it the case that learning how to code online and gamified versions of learning haven't reached the levels of fun that a game like StarCraft has?
[00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:34.400] When you're making a gamified coding thing, it's fun.
[00:42:34.560 --> 00:42:35.200] I signed into it.
[00:42:35.200 --> 00:42:36.000] I did the demo.
[00:42:36.240 --> 00:42:39.120] For your homepage, the sort of sign-up button is not even sign up.
[00:42:39.120 --> 00:42:42.000] It's like, do this three-minute demo, immediately jump in.
[00:42:42.240 --> 00:42:42.640] It's fun.
[00:42:43.040 --> 00:42:43.840] It's not bad.
[00:42:43.840 --> 00:42:51.840] But nothing I've ever seen is at the point where I'm like, this is actually the same level as a real game.
[00:42:53.440 --> 00:42:54.960] That's a really good question.
[00:42:55.840 --> 00:43:04.720] I think it's because when you're designing a game, you have one goal in mind, and that is just to make it as addictive as possible and as fun as possible.
[00:43:04.720 --> 00:43:15.280] When you're designing something like Boot Dev, you're, okay, how can I make this as fun, as addicting as possible while the North Star is getting you through all of this content?
[00:43:15.600 --> 00:43:21.440] And some of that content is like, well, here's the thing: coding actually is inherently fun and has a game loop built into it.
[00:43:21.440 --> 00:43:21.520] Yeah.
[00:43:21.920 --> 00:43:24.800] Like, you write some code, you get some feedback.
[00:43:24.800 --> 00:43:26.480] I can throw some confetti in your face.
[00:43:26.480 --> 00:43:27.520] Like, maybe that helps.
[00:43:27.520 --> 00:43:39.600] But, like, the actual game loop of write code, get feedback, solve a puzzle is there, like it is in Diablo, where you're like, you know, running around, monsters exploding, and like, that's the core game loop.
[00:43:41.040 --> 00:43:43.120] It just takes so much more effort.
[00:43:43.120 --> 00:43:48.240] Like, it's funny, like, on the topic of StarCraft, that is a hard game.
[00:43:48.240 --> 00:43:50.960] And I have friends that won't play it because it's hard.
[00:43:50.960 --> 00:43:53.840] And so they go to other games that are like lower effort.
[00:43:53.840 --> 00:43:56.400] I think coding is like an even harder game.
[00:43:56.400 --> 00:43:58.960] Like, it is a game, but the effort bar is much higher.
[00:43:58.960 --> 00:44:03.320] So it's like just taxing to do it for long, long periods of time.
[00:44:03.480 --> 00:44:07.320] Well, it's also kind of a catch-22 for you, right?
[00:44:07.320 --> 00:44:18.760] Where you, if you somehow, theoretically, if you were able to make your product as fun as StarCraft, then in a lot of ways, it would defeat the purpose.
[00:44:18.760 --> 00:44:25.880] Like you said, you don't necessarily want people to be kind of stuck and playing the learning game over and over again.
[00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:27.400] You want them to get to the end.
[00:44:27.400 --> 00:44:35.640] Like the entire philosophy book's written about how do you distinguish like, you know, what a game is from other types of pursuits.
[00:44:35.640 --> 00:44:42.760] And one of the big distinctions is like, look, if you, in a way, we have a game of hiking, of like trying to climb a mountain.
[00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:50.040] And you know it's a game because if you were given the option of getting helicopter to the top of the mountain, you'd be like, why would I do that?
[00:44:50.040 --> 00:44:50.280] Right?
[00:44:52.120 --> 00:44:53.800] Yeah, it's like, isn't the point to get to the top?
[00:44:53.800 --> 00:44:56.520] It's like, the point is to climb to the top.
[00:44:56.520 --> 00:44:58.040] Like, that's what StarCraft is, right?
[00:44:58.360 --> 00:45:00.760] You want to get there, but you want to have the process.
[00:45:00.760 --> 00:45:10.360] You want to see the, you know, you want to feel your heart pounding and all that stuff, but you have to somehow make the game fun, but also like have people want to graduate and go do something else.
[00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:12.040] That's a great comparison.
[00:45:12.040 --> 00:45:17.640] Whereas if you could snap your fingers and know how to be a great backend engineer tomorrow, like, let's just do that.
[00:45:17.640 --> 00:45:17.880] Yeah.
[00:45:18.840 --> 00:45:20.840] What's this boot dev bullshit?
[00:45:21.800 --> 00:45:24.200] Well, should we, maybe we should be doing this for any hackers, right?
[00:45:24.200 --> 00:45:27.400] Maybe having a podcast and a community forum is the wrong approach, right?
[00:45:27.480 --> 00:45:35.960] Maybe we should have a game that turns you into a good founder, almost like the Semes or something, where you're sort of controlling this virtual company, but you're making all these decisions that.
[00:45:36.120 --> 00:45:37.320] You know that exists, right?
[00:45:37.320 --> 00:45:44.760] Like, there is, I don't, I think, number one, there's a VR game that's like, I think it's like, you know, start whatever business, right?
[00:45:45.280 --> 00:45:46.960] But it's like, it's such bullshit.
[00:45:46.960 --> 00:45:52.000] It's like, it basically is all of the process of it, all the stress.
[00:45:52.000 --> 00:45:59.920] But if being a founder is so intrinsically not that fun, that like it's just, you know, you're sitting in a cube and like you're watching these numbers go up and down.
[00:46:01.360 --> 00:46:04.640] Pretty sure it's not like flying off the shelves.
[00:46:04.640 --> 00:46:07.280] Well, I think part of being a founder is that there's no prescribed path.
[00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:08.720] There are no railroad tracks, right?
[00:46:08.720 --> 00:46:10.960] Like if you're playing StarCraft, like there is a tech tree.
[00:46:10.960 --> 00:46:14.080] You do this, you do that, you do this, and you unlock this building, you unlock this unit.
[00:46:14.080 --> 00:46:22.720] Whereas being a founder, like there might be paths that get carved out, but like due to the competitive nature of markets, they get a little bit like saturated by the competition.
[00:46:22.720 --> 00:46:32.960] And so essentially, if you really want to be a step ahead and actually be able to market your product or come up with new ideas, you have to abandon the existing path to some degree.
[00:46:32.960 --> 00:46:38.160] You can't just make the same thing and market it the same way as everybody else and actually build a successful company.
[00:46:38.160 --> 00:46:43.600] With boot dev, like, maybe you got to change your font to like a video game font and like niche down in some way.
[00:46:43.760 --> 00:46:47.520] Like Andy Hack is like, maybe we needed a blue website and we had to have revenue numbers.
[00:46:47.520 --> 00:47:01.200] And so it's like kind of hard to think of like how you would have a game that even enables this because a huge part of it is trying to explore and figure out like what isn't part of the default user interface, the default path that I can do to make my company successful.
[00:47:02.160 --> 00:47:09.040] The interesting thing is like being an entrepreneur like learning to code is kind of inherently a game in the sense that there is a feedback loop.
[00:47:09.040 --> 00:47:10.480] Like I log into Stripe.
[00:47:10.480 --> 00:47:17.040] There is like no greater dopamine hit than like having a good day on Stripe where the revenue hits, and you see that.
[00:47:17.040 --> 00:47:22.240] In fact, I had to uninstall the Stripe mobile app for my phone because I was checking too often at one point.
[00:47:22.320 --> 00:47:24.400] Like when we started to grow, it was bad.
[00:47:24.400 --> 00:47:26.880] I was like compulsively checking.
[00:47:27.520 --> 00:47:29.720] It's like the dopamine hits are there.
[00:47:29.720 --> 00:47:36.520] And like, I guess the social aspect, there's like a, there's something amazing about like, you know, your company's doing well.
[00:47:36.520 --> 00:47:38.440] You're sharing with the community and all that stuff.
[00:47:38.600 --> 00:47:41.080] That stuff I think you guys are doing a great job with.
[00:47:41.080 --> 00:47:46.760] And like, but like, those are like really the only things, at least in my experience, that are like part of the game loop.
[00:47:46.760 --> 00:47:48.440] Like, I'm growing this thing.
[00:47:48.440 --> 00:47:50.680] Like, people are seeing me growing it.
[00:47:50.680 --> 00:47:52.360] That's that's encouraging.
[00:47:52.360 --> 00:47:53.800] Number go up, money go up.
[00:47:53.800 --> 00:47:54.520] That's it.
[00:47:54.520 --> 00:47:54.840] Yeah.
[00:47:54.840 --> 00:48:02.600] The final, the final part of the game loop that's actually harder to recognize is something that we talked about before, which is self-growth.
[00:48:02.600 --> 00:48:06.680] Like, I'm convinced that our brains are made for games.
[00:48:06.680 --> 00:48:09.160] Like, there's a reason why we like games.
[00:48:09.160 --> 00:48:24.200] And it's that the brain has evolved to like take in these signals from the environment, like, oh, hey, I had this goal and it was hard and I overcame the challenge and I did it because it just so highly correlates with you becoming smarter, right?
[00:48:24.200 --> 00:48:30.760] With you become like, you know, sort of being, I don't know, more articulate or better able to write something if that's what your challenge is.
[00:48:30.760 --> 00:48:38.600] And in those rare moments where you recognize, I mean, hey, with me with coding, like, hey, I really struggled to get a web page up really fast.
[00:48:38.600 --> 00:48:42.680] And then I struggled in these ways and I had these, you know, vanity metrics come my way.
[00:48:42.680 --> 00:48:45.800] And at the end of that, it was actually really easy for me to whip things up.
[00:48:45.800 --> 00:48:53.320] Or I used to fucking have an email phobia where I really didn't like opening emails like back in college because it was just, you know, such a slam.
[00:48:53.320 --> 00:48:55.160] It was a point where I got over that.
[00:48:55.160 --> 00:48:57.720] And then just opening an email was fun for me.
[00:48:57.720 --> 00:49:06.040] I think that there's nothing like entrepreneurship for having like a million of those types of experiences every single year.
[00:49:06.040 --> 00:49:08.040] Yeah, I don't know what you do there.
[00:49:08.040 --> 00:49:13.960] It's like I have struggled so much to put gamification stuff into boot dev.
[00:49:14.040 --> 00:49:20.080] Like the problem of gamifying entrepreneurship in like an online platform, I think is like two or three X.
[00:49:20.640 --> 00:49:29.280] Like it is a much greater challenge, just like thinking as a user of indie hackers, like, do I care about it?
[00:49:29.280 --> 00:49:29.680] I don't know.
[00:49:29.680 --> 00:49:31.600] I don't know if it even should be done.
[00:49:31.600 --> 00:49:33.360] I mean, but like, I mean, just basic stuff, right?
[00:49:33.360 --> 00:49:36.240] Like the sort of feedback loop of like, okay, Stripe, you get like a little ding.
[00:49:36.240 --> 00:49:37.280] You see, you've made money.
[00:49:37.280 --> 00:49:39.120] That's an addictive reward.
[00:49:39.360 --> 00:49:40.640] But there's also social rewards.
[00:49:40.640 --> 00:49:41.840] Like, people want status.
[00:49:41.840 --> 00:49:43.200] They want to compare themselves to others.
[00:49:43.200 --> 00:49:46.160] Like, one of the biggest things in any game is a leaderboard.
[00:49:46.160 --> 00:49:51.680] Like, I play a ton of Beat Saber on my VR headset, and it's like partly exercise, it's partly fun.
[00:49:51.680 --> 00:49:55.120] But what drives me is I beat a song that I've never beaten before.
[00:49:55.200 --> 00:49:58.640] Then I look at the leaderboard and it's like, you remember, you know, 13,000.
[00:49:58.640 --> 00:50:02.720] You know, 12,999 people have beat this song harder than you beat it.
[00:50:02.720 --> 00:50:04.080] What are you going to do about that?
[00:50:04.080 --> 00:50:07.520] And it's just fun to come back and get sucked into, like, okay, I'll play it again.
[00:50:07.520 --> 00:50:11.440] I'll do the exact same thing again just to see my name go up that chart.
[00:50:11.440 --> 00:50:12.880] And we could do that with indie hackers.
[00:50:12.880 --> 00:50:13.760] Like, we have a ton of products.
[00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:14.880] We have a ton of revenue.
[00:50:14.880 --> 00:50:17.360] We could show who's growing faster, who's doing what.
[00:50:17.360 --> 00:50:23.680] And that's just one more motivational factor, especially in the early days when the dollar amounts aren't that high.
[00:50:24.320 --> 00:50:27.040] Just comparing yourself to others is motivational.
[00:50:27.040 --> 00:50:28.160] Or it could be demotivational.
[00:50:28.320 --> 00:50:28.880] That's the challenge.
[00:50:28.880 --> 00:50:31.280] That's why it might not be a thing we want to do.
[00:50:31.280 --> 00:50:33.280] Right when you said it, I was like, that's the thing.
[00:50:33.280 --> 00:50:39.440] Because we have a leaderboard on boot dev, and it's arguably our most effective gamification thing.
[00:50:39.680 --> 00:50:43.600] And I would definitely check the indie hackers leaderboard after a good month.
[00:50:44.480 --> 00:50:45.520] Am I at the top?
[00:50:46.320 --> 00:50:46.880] Where am I?
[00:50:46.880 --> 00:50:48.480] Yeah, what's going on?
[00:50:48.680 --> 00:51:00.440] We have this, we have this really fun dichotomy where any comparison like signals that we have on the site, because we've had not necessarily leaderboards, but we have featured sections.
[00:51:00.440 --> 00:51:04.440] You know, we used to have people that had like the most popular milestone posts.
[00:51:04.760 --> 00:51:05.400] Everything is a feed.
[00:50:59.920 --> 00:51:06.040] It's all a ranking.
[00:51:06.360 --> 00:51:08.920] Everything is a feed, and there are two types of people.
[00:51:08.920 --> 00:51:13.560] There are people who see these competitive dashboards and they go, I'm going to be number one.
[00:51:13.880 --> 00:51:17.960] And then you have the people who are like, fuck all those, you know, sort of posers.
[00:51:17.960 --> 00:51:19.320] It's all fake anyway.
[00:51:19.320 --> 00:51:20.520] It's all vanity.
[00:51:20.520 --> 00:51:21.880] Like, this isn't, you know, healthy at all.
[00:51:22.040 --> 00:51:23.320] This is not what we should be doing.
[00:51:23.320 --> 00:51:24.680] Yeah, but they suck.
[00:51:25.000 --> 00:51:25.560] Yeah.
[00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:28.760] This is like the people who don't like StarCraft.
[00:51:28.920 --> 00:51:31.240] That is not a winner's coping strategy, but.
[00:51:31.560 --> 00:51:34.120] Well, I think if you're making a product, you got to have opinions, right?
[00:51:34.120 --> 00:51:36.040] Like, there's room in the world for multiple indie hackers.
[00:51:36.040 --> 00:51:38.760] If we decided we want to do all this gamification stuff, like, we could do it.
[00:51:38.760 --> 00:51:41.560] Somebody could build the other super nice, non-competitive indie hackers.
[00:51:41.560 --> 00:51:42.840] Like, same with boot.dev, right?
[00:51:42.840 --> 00:51:45.400] Like, you've taken a stand, you want to have a leaderboard.
[00:51:45.640 --> 00:51:49.240] This is what's great and allows for multiple people in any industry to win.
[00:51:49.240 --> 00:51:59.160] This is part of why you can't enter a crowded marketplace where people are already doing stuff and still make a business that's doing $26,000 a month in revenue because you can have your own opinions.
[00:51:59.160 --> 00:52:11.080] And in fact, not having opinions and not taking a stand is probably as detrimental for building a product as it is for writing because you have this lukewarm, boring thing that nobody knows why they should read it or use it compared to what's already out there.
[00:52:11.400 --> 00:52:16.280] Where we've positioned ourselves today at Boot Dev, I've found that we have very few competitors.
[00:52:16.600 --> 00:52:18.600] A lot of our users use other sites.
[00:52:18.600 --> 00:52:23.160] Like, they'll learn back in on boot dev, they're interested in HTML, they'll go learn it somewhere else.
[00:52:23.160 --> 00:52:26.040] There's like a hundred sites where you can go learn HTML and CSS.
[00:52:26.040 --> 00:52:33.080] Like, the last thing I'm worried about is another person starting another site where you can learn HTML and CSS by watching videos.
[00:52:34.280 --> 00:52:40.840] And yeah, the more you can lean into that, like you enter a crowded marketplace and you think of it as this huge thing.
[00:52:40.840 --> 00:52:49.280] But once you start to figure out what you're about, like you take the intersection of like, you know, gamification and back end and the programming language go.
[00:52:49.280 --> 00:52:56.240] Like all of a sudden, your market starts to get really small and you can do really well in that in that small market.
[00:52:56.240 --> 00:52:58.000] So what's what's next for you?
[00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:00.800] I mean, you're profitable now, which is a really cool place to be.
[00:53:00.800 --> 00:53:02.880] Like everything beyond this is kind of just great.
[00:53:02.880 --> 00:53:06.000] You can try to grow and get more and more employees.
[00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:10.560] It's kind of like you're playing a game with your life and you get to design what you want your life to be, right?
[00:53:10.560 --> 00:53:12.720] Do you want to be the wizard or do you want to be the warrior?
[00:53:12.880 --> 00:53:25.440] Do you want to be a bootstrapped, scrappy anti hacker who just like has fun tinkering on the coolest things you want to you want to build or do you go hard, build a huge team somewhere in between, something on a different axis?
[00:53:25.440 --> 00:53:28.160] Like what do you what do you want to do in the future?
[00:53:28.480 --> 00:53:36.480] So we raised a third of a million dollars and we we just had a profitable Q1.
[00:53:36.720 --> 00:53:42.400] Our biggest expenses are my salary and my employees salary like by far as tech companies go.
[00:53:43.040 --> 00:53:48.800] But I'm taking half the salary that I was taking as actually less than half as an engineering manager.
[00:53:49.120 --> 00:53:55.520] So the goal is to stay profitable whilst growing my salary back up to a reasonable level.
[00:53:57.040 --> 00:53:58.880] That's like this year's goal.
[00:53:59.440 --> 00:54:04.480] After that, like my investors, I actually knew them from a previous company.
[00:54:04.720 --> 00:54:06.480] So I had a really easy and fast raise.
[00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:09.600] It took like a week to get it closed and done, which was awesome.
[00:54:09.680 --> 00:54:11.600] They were the only investors I talked to.
[00:54:11.600 --> 00:54:15.040] But I was upfront with them, like, I probably don't want to raise again.
[00:54:15.040 --> 00:54:18.560] Like, I want to do this the like, slow growth, profitable way.
[00:54:18.800 --> 00:54:21.040] I think it'll be a much healthier EdTech business.
[00:54:21.040 --> 00:54:30.600] There's there's been a lot of EdTech companies in the last 10 years that have, like, blown up and then, like, died um because they grew on the back of, like, I don't know, Facebook ads that weren't profitable or something like that.
[00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:34.360] So, no, the plan is to, like, keep growing profitably.
[00:54:29.840 --> 00:54:37.080] Maybe even 37 signal style.
[00:54:37.240 --> 00:54:40.760] I agree with maybe 20 of the 37 signals, something like that.
[00:54:42.280 --> 00:54:43.560] That's the plan.
[00:54:43.560 --> 00:54:45.080] What do you what inspires you?
[00:54:45.080 --> 00:54:52.040] I mean, obviously getting to the point of paying yourself what you are making at your normal job is tremendously inspirational.
[00:54:52.040 --> 00:54:54.920] I think there's almost like this like sort of ladder of what inspires indie actors.
[00:54:54.920 --> 00:54:57.960] Like, getting to quit your own your job is usually the first one.
[00:54:57.960 --> 00:55:00.360] Getting to the point of profitability is the second one.
[00:55:00.360 --> 00:55:03.640] Getting to the point where you can, you know, actually, like, make a living wage.
[00:55:03.640 --> 00:55:05.480] That's, like, great is the third one.
[00:55:05.480 --> 00:55:07.400] What is after that for you?
[00:55:07.720 --> 00:55:10.280] Yeah, so, um, I have expenses.
[00:55:10.280 --> 00:55:12.280] Uh, I'm married with two children.
[00:55:12.280 --> 00:55:14.520] My youngest was just born two months ago.
[00:55:14.520 --> 00:55:14.840] Nice.
[00:55:15.640 --> 00:55:16.120] Congratulations.
[00:55:16.360 --> 00:55:16.920] Thank you.
[00:55:16.920 --> 00:55:21.320] Yeah, the plan is like, okay, I want to get back to making a good amount of money.
[00:55:21.320 --> 00:55:24.600] And like, I actually kind of just have tunnel vision to that point.
[00:55:24.600 --> 00:55:35.480] But I guess like the dream after that is like, how can I just work less so that when my kids are, you know, five, ten years old, I just have a ton of time to do stuff with them.
[00:55:35.480 --> 00:55:37.240] That's kind of the thing.
[00:55:37.240 --> 00:55:39.560] I almost have the opposite of that.
[00:55:39.560 --> 00:55:47.640] I like having a full plate, but there's something about the nature of that full plate that I want to get better at, which is...
[00:55:47.640 --> 00:55:54.760] It would be very odd if as somebody with no kids chanting your dream was to have enough time to spend all your time with somebody.
[00:55:54.760 --> 00:55:55.560] So here's the thing.
[00:55:55.560 --> 00:55:57.480] We're actually the same, I think.
[00:55:59.160 --> 00:56:02.120] I hate boredom more than anything in the world.
[00:56:02.680 --> 00:56:07.720] Like summer days as a child when like all my friends were out of town were the worst days of my entire existence.
[00:56:08.360 --> 00:56:14.720] So like when I didn't have kids a few years ago, I filled like all my time with side projects.
[00:56:14.440 --> 00:56:17.120] Like that's what this like whole thing, that's how this whole thing started.
[00:56:14.520 --> 00:56:19.680] Like I can't not be working on stuff.
[00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:27.680] But man, kids, like, they really ch like the definition of a full plate is so fundamentally different with two kids.
[00:56:27.680 --> 00:56:29.200] Yeah, I'm talking about having a full plate.
[00:56:29.200 --> 00:56:31.440] You're like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
[00:56:32.080 --> 00:56:44.320] So like a full plate for like in 10 years, if I'm like, don't have to work, like just waking up with a few kids is already like so much of a full plate that it's fine.
[00:56:44.320 --> 00:56:47.120] Well, listen, Lane, appreciate you coming on.
[00:56:47.120 --> 00:56:50.240] Hope your life with kids doesn't get too full.
[00:56:50.400 --> 00:56:52.560] You still have time to keep working on boot.dev.
[00:56:52.560 --> 00:57:01.440] What would you say is one takeaway, something that you've learned from your journey that Andy Aggers might not have heard from somebody else that you think people would benefit from hearing it?
[00:57:01.840 --> 00:57:03.760] What's your philosophy?
[00:57:04.080 --> 00:57:06.560] Yeah, we've covered a lot of the important stuff.
[00:57:06.560 --> 00:57:16.640] I guess the one thing I have in my notes that we didn't really talk about that I think is super critical is the idea that all of the worst ideas that are going to like stop you from growing.
[00:57:16.640 --> 00:57:22.960] So all the stuff I was working on in those first, like that first year and a half, they sound like good ideas.
[00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:24.880] And almost objectively they are.
[00:57:24.880 --> 00:57:30.640] So like for example, the idea that oh, maybe we should do a hackathon.
[00:57:30.640 --> 00:57:34.720] There's like no world in which doing a hackathon like hurts the business, right?
[00:57:35.200 --> 00:57:38.400] It'll either help a little or help a lot.
[00:57:38.800 --> 00:57:41.920] But it can be a giant waste of time.
[00:57:41.920 --> 00:57:47.920] And you could be doing something so much more like focused on what you're trying to do.
[00:57:47.920 --> 00:57:52.960] So, like, avoiding the shiny ideas as they come up has been so helpful.
[00:57:52.960 --> 00:58:04.920] Just trying to be as focused as you can on your niche, on your customer, and avoiding all the shiny stuff, I think is one of the best things that's helped in the last 12 months with boot dev.
[00:58:05.160 --> 00:58:07.640] Niche down, focus, avoid the shiny stuff.
[00:58:07.640 --> 00:58:09.400] Wayne Wagner, thanks for coming on.
[00:58:09.400 --> 00:58:10.840] Thanks for having me, guys.