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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_04: We do this podcast two or three times a week and have done so for over 10 years and over 1,000 episodes. How crazy is that? Really excited about our next guest. His name is Cortland Allen,

SPEAKER_05: and he runs a website called IndieHackers.com. And it's kind of a blast to the past, a throwback of a site. When I came into the industry, hackers, hacking, was a new term in the 90s and in the 80s, actually, into the 90s. There was even movies like Hackers, and there was hacking culture. Hacking culture, phone freaking culture, basically meant you had a computer and you had some device and you wanted to see if you could just make it do something. And sometimes you wanted to see if you could build something. Sometimes you wanted to break something down. And hacking just meant solving a problem, essentially. And the industry that I'm in now, the technology industry, is driven by that spirit. But something weird along the way happened. Money. And money changes everything. Whether it's music and the music industry, the movie industry. If you look at any industry, once money gets inserted, all of a sudden, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and that era turns into pop. And then, and disco in the 70s, or in the movies, Martin Scorsese, and the directors from the 70s, the Easy Rider era, turned into the 80s big movie era, Rain Man, which then, of course, turns into the CIA era, which then turns into the Marvel era, right? And money changes everything. It just accelerates everything. It perverts everything. And you get a little bit of distance between the art and the creation moment and that consumption moment, right? And this is something that I've been watching and even filled up a big portion of my career. For some people who don't know, I started a zine. A zine was another version of this. We didn't have blogs. We didn't have the internet back in the day. So if you wanted to get your ideas out, you created what was called a zine. It meant a magazine that was photocopied. It means you didn't have glossy paper. Well, I think some young people are starting to realize that it's kind of cool when you strip away the producers and the managers and the agents and the money. And you just think about the moment. And you just think about the hack. When you think about the product, when the synapse is burned, when the problem is solved, or you can kind of see the new land, the promised land, you know, from the deck of the boat, like we're going to make it. There's a possibility this could work and this could create something amazing. And I long for those days because so much of what I do as an angel investor is just big companies now, not little companies doing hacks. And so over the last couple of years, I started saying, where are all the hackers hanging out? And there's, there's hacker news. Everybody knows about that product hunt. And I came across

SPEAKER_08: pioneer labs and I came across indie hackers, just talking to people who are making projects. And I just started hanging out in those communities and reading the comments. And I just thought it'd be a great moment to have Cortland on to talk about how he, cause he's a little younger than I am. I think a lot younger. He's just another one of these MIT kids, one of these fancy MIT kids. But welcome to the program, Cortland founder of indie hackers. You heard my little introduction there of the moment. Tell me what was your moment of inspiration for indie hackers? Why did you create it? And then maybe you could expand on if what you see in this sort of moment of creation and money changing things and how that relates to the hacking movement in 2020.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Um, really, I think the moment of inspiration for me was probably in 2011, when I moved to San Francisco and got into Y Combinator. And if I am being honest about my motivations, like I wanted to start a company, I wanted to get rich and I wanted to do it basically having a lot of fun, which for me meant writing a lot of code, being creative, not having a boss, not having to report to anybody. I would much rather make a lot of money doing it that way than, you know, working a desk job or going to wall street, like a lot of other people that I knew. Uh, but when I showed up at YC, it was a little bit different than I thought. Um, there was, there's almost this weird, like, I don't know how to explain it, like this culture of like hero worshiping. It was a little bit, um, off-putting to me. I remember a day when Mark Andreessen came into YC and, you know, he's this very tall, like six foot two, like, you know, egghead looking guy. He's very striking figure. And there are like hundreds of founders, just like huddled around him, trying to ask him a question and people asking for his autograph. And I was like, well, what about like the part where we build stuff and we're not just, uh, sort of sucking up to these different figures. And the people who I really looked up to NYC were the people that nobody else mobbed. I remember Kevin Hale came and gave a talk and he was running this company, WooFoo. And he talked about how they packed their bags, left Silicon Valley, moved to Florida, and they were making millions of dollars a year. They're turning down all their investor phone calls and they're like sharing their profits with the team and just chilling out, living a great life. And I was like, that sounds like the company that I want to build. That sounds like the perfect combination of not only achieving financial independence, but also building a company that gives you basically the perfect lifestyle where you can choose who you want to work with, what you want to work on and all that great stuff. So that was 2011. Fast forward, maybe six, seven years of a lot of startup pain, a lot of startup failures. And I decided to start IndieHackers, uh, not only as a way for other people to learn how to build these sort of self-funded profitable businesses, but also as a way to do

SPEAKER_04: that for myself. And when you watched, how did you come to think that the route was coming to Silicon Valley? Why Combinator? Was this just something you were just exposed to at MIT or on the East Coast? You just said, that's the way it's done, right? That you, you almost had a, I assume just from the press, from blogs, from podcasts, just assume that's the way that's the status game. That is the path. And in a way it is a really viable path. The industry is super open in that way. They accept

SPEAKER_07: whatever four or 500 people into four or 500 startups into Y Combinator. And if there's two or three startups, founders at each, a thousand people get to go into the industry through that way. And tech stars is probably similar numbers. So how did you, how did you think about how open our industry is to new people, new ideas? Because it is easy to be cynical in one way. Oh my God, everybody's surrounding Mark. Um, you know, somebody who the last thing he created was Netscape in 95. Oh no, he did Opsware after that, I guess, whatever. But anyway, you know, it's, he's a,

SPEAKER_08: he's a long distance from that. And there is this like hero worship.

SPEAKER_10: Right. Um, yeah. Well, people were surrounding him because they wanted his money. And he's a cool

SPEAKER_04: guy. He's a very historic figure. I think that's an astute observation, by the way, Cortland. It's a

SPEAKER_10: very astute observation. Yeah. But I, it was off. I mean, it was off putting to me in other ways too. I remember there was a guy in my YC batch who had raised from A16Z and like the first week of Y Combinator. And the way people were talking about them, they're like, Oh, have you talked to so-and-so?

SPEAKER_20: Oh, it feels like talking to Mark Zuckerberg before he made it big. Yeah. And like eventually

SPEAKER_10: his company sort of like flamed out and it didn't go anywhere. But like everybody was celebrating the fact that he had raised so much money. Nobody was celebrating how successful his business was, how much it had changed his life and other people's lives. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the press, you mentioned, you know, Cortland, how did you come to this? Well, if you have at all followed startups in the last 15, 20 years, you get your news from like podcasts like this one from tech crunch, from the other tech press, from Twitter. And while there isn't any sort of secret cabal meeting in a dark room to try to, you know, push the sort of VC funding narrative, I think just the nature of the tech media is going to do that already. So there's kind of like three different ways this happens. Number one, the press is going to write about what people want to read about. And people want to read about these giant consumer facing, you know, B2C startups, the Ubers or Facebooks, your Twitter, Airbnb, exactly. And these are always going to be well-funded companies. So that's going to be like one situation where you figure out you know, what story do they have? And it almost always is going through YC or raising a ton of money. The press is also going to want to talk to people like you, who are very well connected, who have broad knowledge, who have deep access. Generally, you're going to be investors. And then finally, a large, a large number of stories in the press are going to come from the comms departments of well-funded startups or from PR companies. And so if you read any of the tech press, basically, you're just going to like, if I go to techcrunch.com right now, I guarantee you like four to the top five stories going to be this company raised this much money XYZ. And so you just don't really get exposed to another path if you're reading about this kind of stuff. And when I was in college reading about all this stuff, it was basically tech crunch and Paul Graham's blog. And every single source said the way to do this is you raise money. And what I think is insidious about it is that when you consume this much information that doesn't really give you a full picture of the world, it turns out like human beings, we aren't that creative. We don't tend to create new things from scratch. Instead, we're more like remixers. We take the knowledge and the experiences we have from our past, and we remix them into other things. And so if all of your knowledge comes from this sort of biased source, which says the only way to start a company is to go through YC or beg angels for money, then you're going to think that's the way to do it. And so that's what I did. But I think the reality is, and you know this just as well as I do, that you don't need permission to build a business on the internet. No one's going to stop you from going online and putting up a website, charging customers. I mean, you had Dave Weiner on your podcast a week or two ago. Yeah. And I didn't know anything about him. Great guest, super inspiring guy, brilliant, played like this great role in sort of pioneering and spreading RSS and a bunch of other technologies. But he had this other thread running through his story where he just seemed so bitter and upset at investors for never taking a shot on him. And he's a brilliant guy. And I was thinking the entire time listening to it, like, you don't need investors to take it. You don't need anybody's permission. Like you clearly were able to do things on your own.

SPEAKER_04: It's such a great observation. And it's kind of the anti-Mark Andreessen in that he doesn't have a billion dollars sitting there to invest. But he did his best work, I believe, when he was just writing code and putting ideas into the world, that if you take RSS out of the world, the podcasting doesn't exist and blogs don't exist. Totally. So you just think about that sort of like thread of his life. Now, did he properly get compensated for it? He feels he did with the first company. But yeah, I think it's easy to look at that situation and both take two messages from it. One, it's possible to make massive contribution and have a great life. But it's also possible that this VC machine is sending you a false narrative that this

SPEAKER_05: is the only way it can be done when we get back. I want to talk about the Indie Hacker way and how you built and constructed the site, which I think is super interesting. And then you're really learning

SPEAKER_25: a lot about community. I can see your iteration as you go with groups and threads and how you're using gamification on the website IndieHackers.com, which you can take a look at when we get back on

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SPEAKER_07: this amazing episode. All right. Welcome back to the pod. Courtland Allen from IndieHackers is here. And yeah, he came to Silicon Valley, did the VC thing. Y Combinator checked the boxes. MIT checked the boxes and then decided he wanted to do IndieHackers. Tell me about how the site works

SPEAKER_04: because I think that's the most interesting thing for me because I was looking to get closer to the people who are builders. I look back at my portfolio, you take stock of your investments and almost universally the people who had the biggest success with were product people, developers, just people obsessed with products. So I was like, okay, where are they hanging out? Because I'm getting too many people who are hitting me with slick presentations

SPEAKER_05: and pitches that are derived from the training I put out in the world on how to pitch.

SPEAKER_37: They're gaming your system. They're kind of like gaming the system that I put out there in the world. So it's an inception point for me. So I've been trying to strip that away and just say,

SPEAKER_41: just play this. Can you play the song acoustically for me? Where's the acoustic version of the song?

SPEAKER_05: Here's a guitar, no microphone, no post-production. Just let me hear the lyrics and the song and let me take a look at it. And so I've been trolling IndieHackers as well as Pioneer Labs,

SPEAKER_44: which I think is super cool. And I had the founder also on the pod. But tell everybody how the site

SPEAKER_10: works. Yeah. Maybe it's best to start with a little bit of a history of what IndieHackers is. So it's a community. The people on IndieHackers, as we've been discussing, are people who, I think, prioritize freedom above everything else. So they are in it for the glory. They're not trying to blitzscale their way to a unicorn valuation. In fact, they don't really even want to have investors or any sort of boss telling them what to do. What they want is to gain their financial independence, usually on their own terms. And that means they want to have creative freedom to do what they want. They want to work on their own schedule, whatever hours, whatever months of the year they want to work, from whatever location, with whatever people they choose to be around. So it's all about freedom. And these people were all hanging out on Hacker News four or five years ago. And kind of like these little discussions that would pop up every few months. What's your one-person SaaS company? How are you making money online? And there wasn't really any other place on the web where you could go to find out these stories. And so I was one of these people. This is what I wanted to do as well. And I would go there religiously. And I would just devour every story of the Peter Levels of the world or the Josh Pickfords who had these bootstrap businesses to try to figure out how they were doing it. And eventually, I realized, hey, this is an unsolved problem. There are clearly many thousands of people just like me who are trying to figure out this information. And there's just no place for them to go because the tech press has basically got a monopoly on all startup stories. They only care about the giant, glitzy, B2C, well-funded startups. And so IndieHackers got its start actually as a tiny little blog. V1 of IndieHackers was a blog with 10 posts on it. And every one of them was an interview with a different bootstrapped founder, usually developers. And they would all share, here's how much money I'm making. Here is how I came up with my idea. Here's how I wrote the first lines of code, got my first customers. Just completely transparent, giving back to the community because someone in their history had helped them get started. And I think that was really the backbone of IndieHackers. But it was only a blog for maybe a month. Within a month or two, I built a community forum. There's also a mailing list. And now there's a podcast as well. And today, the community forum is front and center. So if you go to IndieHackers.com, you've got a giant thriving forum. There's 140,000 members. And these aren't like the peanut gallery. These are people who are actually building businesses. And they're asking each other questions. They're helping each other out. And there's a bunch of ancillary supplemental resources where people can share their

SPEAKER_23: stories. So there's groups in these communities where people who have similar interests can help each other. So for example, we have the largest no-code group on the internet. 17,000 IndieHackers are part of that group. And they share their stories and tips about no-code tools and no-code

SPEAKER_10: startups. We've got a giant directory of about 12,000 products where IndieHackers can say, this is what I'm working on. Here's my timeline. So you can go read anybody's history of

SPEAKER_23: all the steps they took to build their company. And most of the products on there are transparent. So they'll either plug into Stripe and share their revenue numbers, or they'll just type in their revenue numbers.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I want to pause on that because I think that's kind of the most interesting part for me. There's a lot of forums. And like you said, there's Hacker News, there's Reddit, there's Quora, plenty of places people have to discuss tech news. Product Hunt takes the product's vision of it first, as opposed to the building piece. But like you're saying, those things quickly devolve. They become sort of, as you said on your Twitter, haters as a service.

SPEAKER_53: Because Hacker News is basically like a way to post something and get demolished.

SPEAKER_54: Because like all communities, it gets too big and collapses on itself.

SPEAKER_10: But you've really don't have skin in the game. Like you post on Hacker News, and you get a bunch of haters who've never built anything, who are just going to talk down about what you're doing. But if you post on IndieHackers, guess what? Everybody commenting is another founder who's probably failed a bunch of times. They have a lot of empathy, they have a lot of understanding. And they can put themselves in your shoes. And they can say, okay, even if I make this mistake in the future, like, I don't want to get hated on. So I'm not going to hate on this person. Yeah. If you've been in the kitchen,

SPEAKER_05: and you've cooked, and you're talking to another chef about what you're making,

SPEAKER_08: you're going to have a different conversation than talking to the reviewers who review the restaurants for a living, who are completely cynical, who have eaten at the best places for the best years. And they're not thinking about the heat of the oven and the spice or whatever you're going to use in the cooking technique. And the fact that you broke it apart, I thought is really super interesting. And connecting your Stripe, I know Stripe bought the website, we'll get into that in the next segment, or bought the business. But they kind of leave you alone, which was kind of interesting. But you had that idea before that. There's somebody else who does that, Bear Metrics, I think, allows people to just share their metrics publicly.

SPEAKER_07: There's this weird group of people who are building transparent companies. It's another sort of

SPEAKER_04: movement. Would you know what the name of that movement is? It kind of fizzled. Open startups. Open startups. Yeah. Like maybe 10 years ago, 5, 10 years ago, open startups were a thing where I would just talk about everything I was doing. It's almost like put your slack public and just talk about what you're building. It never really worked. I don't know if there's a big example of it,

SPEAKER_07: but there was a company called Buffer that became famous because they made 10 million in revenue, and they just published it on Bear Metrics. But you broke down into the components that helps how to do this. And you really put a mission statement at the website. And I think it's worth

SPEAKER_04: pausing on for a second. When you click the Start Here button at IndieHackers, when you first come to the website, you see all the discussions. So that's great. But when you click the Start Here, which is where a new person would go, it defines what an IndieHacker is as somebody who's building an online project that can generate revenue. That's very intentional because you see this as

SPEAKER_07: a business proposition here. And a person seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule. So again, back to that personal freedom. I think that's super cool. And whether it's 500 a month on the side or 10,000 a month so you can quit your job, it's never really easy to draw an income from your own projects. Follow the steps below to get started. It's really intentional to be capitalistic and to be about freedom, which by the way, is kind of what America is about. Tell me about that sort of intentionality of telling people like, you're here because you're going to make yourself independent and free of work, of financial freedom, basically the American dream. Why have you chosen to fight and make your life's work

SPEAKER_64: to show people how to build the American dream in the 21st century?

SPEAKER_10: I mean, I think it's just a natural thing for people to want. This is not something where I'm having to convince people that this is a good dream to have and people are sort of resistant. A lot of people are almost constitutionally unable to work for a boss, or they feel really down about having a nine to five job, or they feel like they could do something bigger and better with their lives. And there haven't been traditionally great avenues for doing that. And the internet is this great democratizing tool. Anybody can get on the internet. And again, there are no gatekeepers. Just because there are investors who have money doesn't mean you need to take their money. Anybody can just get on the internet and build a transformative business. And I think it's naturally inspirational to lots of people. When I was reading those threads on Hacker News, I was inspired by the thought of what I could do. And when I looked around kind of my tribe, for example, when I was in Y Combinator, someone in my batch sold their company for like, I think, $2 million, like a few months after starting it, which I thought was amazing. Like, holy crap, you could start a company and make millions of dollars in a few months. That's life-changing. Doesn't happen anywhere else. And everybody else around me was kind of like, oh, they sold out way too early. I can't believe they didn't have the right ambition. And that was bizarre to me. And I didn't want my values to become like their values. I think your values can easily come in from whatever tribe you're a part of. And that's kind of like the high growth startup mindset. You go big or you go home. When I introspected about my life and the people who I respected and the people who I wanted to respect me, I thought about, well, I'm a software engineer. I could sit down and code something that there's no reason it can't make 10 or 20 grand a month. And then I can pay all my bills, pay my rent, and then do literally anything I want with my life. And that would make me happy. I'm pretty sure everyone that I know would be like, that's cool as shit. I would love to do that too. And then I can decide if I want to go bigger or I want to go to a new career or new profession. And a lot of other people have the same mission. They want the freedom. They want the financial independence to have the optionality to choose what they want to do with their lives later on. And so it wasn't this flash of insight like, oh, aha, I know what people want. It's just kind of obvious that people have this desire.

SPEAKER_68: It's really interesting to me because on paper, you look like the overachieving checkbox,

SPEAKER_05: like stereotypical, like overachiever, MIT, Y Combinator, software engineer,

SPEAKER_07: starting their own company multiple times. But actually you got red-pilled in the original sense of the red pill, not red pill like becoming a Republican Trump bullshit. But you got red-pilled into realizing you can actually control your own destiny and define success for yourself as opposed to having it put on you by a bunch of sycophants at Y Combinator who have now decided that the only way to define success is if you beat whatever the previous high score was. It's literally like looking at the Donkey Kong machine and going, okay, this person hit this high score. Anything less than that high score equals failure. When we get back, I want to talk about the six steps to being an

SPEAKER_04: indie hacker as defined on your website with the first one being, I think, super informative and

SPEAKER_05: empowering, which is committing and defining. I'm adding the word defining, but I think committing and defining are kind of similar. Committing and defining to a goal as step one when we get back on

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SPEAKER_44: Cortland Allen from Indie Hackers is on the pod. What a great guest. And we were just talking a little bit. You're a

SPEAKER_07: podcaster as well. What's the name of your podcast? The Indie Hackers Podcast.

SPEAKER_37: Okay, so very creative branding there. You literally added the word podcast to the domain name. Very smart, by the way. Very

SPEAKER_07: smart. People name their podcasts too creatively. They're like, instead of calling this like, what our company name is, like, we'll name it something else. And how many pods have you done so far?

SPEAKER_10: Think about 180 episodes. Oh, wow. You're the branding. I mean, I specifically wanted to call like Indie Hackers is a made up term. Four years ago, there was no word Indie Hackers. But now a lot of people are describing themselves as Indie Hackers, rather than startup founders, etc. So I try to use that term everywhere possible to talk about the kind of this new breed of founder.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah. And let's go through the steps here. Okay, number one is commit to a goal. Why did you choose this as step one? It's pretty simple. I think if you look at what inspires people, at least in the Indie Hackers sort of startup space, what I found is it's almost always achievement. So we do it in the hackers, we put out a lot of stories that sort of counter like the mainstream tech press stories of people raising money. And we'll say, Oh, look at Tara Reid. She's got her business. She bootstrapped it to $5 million a year in revenue. Look how great her life is. Look at Mike Carson. He's got his business. He's a one person company. He bootstrapped to $1.5 million in revenue. Now he's just like,

SPEAKER_10: chill and doing whatever he wants. Yeah. And so I think the very first thing you should do is have some sort of goal, some sort of timeline, so you know when to call it quits, or you know why you're going to keep going when things are tough. You know, when you're on a flight, and you're flying to Australia or something, they have the little monitor that shows your flight path, yeah, and how many miles to go, you know, and I always wish they put that in there. Yeah, because I think the reason that it's going to be like, you know, I mean, I don't think I'm going to keep going. I mean, I mean, I think it's really just to be like, you know, you know, I'm really going to be like, you know, I'm really going to just give it a limited license. And so I think that's a little, you know, you know, I'm really going to take a minute and it's really important.

SPEAKER_05: And I always wish they put the percentage on instead of miles because I don't know if you're like me where you or your mind automatically calculates the percentage. percentage and i'm dividing the number two numbers and the denominator and i'm like okay 72

SPEAKER_07: percent of the way to sydney uh and it's very important because if you don't define what success is to you then that means your brain is going to fill it in and where does your brain fill it in from it's going to fill it in from the press i mean the mind is a wonderful way to make yourself go mad because your mind just spews ideas constantly and your mind is just my friend sam harris name drop um of another podcaster but you know sam told me at one point like don't don't listen to what's in your head too much you know sit back and look at your thoughts as a river and look

SPEAKER_08: at yourself as sitting on the bank of the river watching your thoughts go by and you can really

SPEAKER_07: pay attention to one of those thoughts or you can just let them go down the river it is your choice

SPEAKER_05: because your mind is going to flow all of those ideas constantly you're a genius you're a failure your average whatever it is the the or the goals i have to make a billion dollars i gotta make a

SPEAKER_07: million dollars well i mean one of the things that's happened and i'm curious how the pandemic has it must have had a creative effect to indiahackers.com because people have now realized wait a second i set the goal at making 150 000 a year because i wanted to buy a house in san francisco and i needed to pay 7 000 for a mortgage and they worked backwards from some crazy

SPEAKER_84: you know household goal living in the bay area now that's cracked and people are like wait a second i can be i saw one of my previous uh employees and collaborators took the barbados deal where you can go to barbados for a year on a visa and i was like and you don't pay any tax uh you just pay

SPEAKER_07: two grand or something and you get to get a visa there so how has how has this committing to a goal and the cost of a lifestyle that suddenly again people got red-pilled i'm not saying red-pilled in the trump sense i'm saying red-pilled in the matrix sense of like understanding the truth the truth of

SPEAKER_25: the world is we coming to san francisco will pervert what you think you need to make for a living

SPEAKER_10: totally i think you're hitting on something really important which is you'd never want like you don't want to live a very undeliberate life you don't want your goals to be these unquestioned things that come into you from your tribe or from society where you just suddenly want all these things that you don't like you didn't choose to want and a place like silicon valley or the tech industry where you have all of these very strong driven ambitious personalities you have these crazy inspirational stories of people making billions of dollars and changing the world it's really easy to have unconsidered goals so i think you know i'm right there with you like the sam harris like transcendental meditation reference too uh you want to be considered you want to watch your thoughts and like make sure you know that your goals are ones that you set because

SPEAKER_70: that's what you actually want to accomplish you can also change them correct and so when people start hitting their goals how does one decide to move the goal posts do you have a process for that

SPEAKER_10: or have you thought about it i've thought about it a lot but it's really very personal because everybody's goals are different so there's kind of like you know one language that almost everybody can speak everybody can speak the language of money so if i say oh i started a business and now i live on a beach well that'll resonate with some people but other people are like i don't want to live on a beach but if i say i started a business and now i'm making a million dollars a year well money's fungible everybody can imagine what they would use a million dollars a year to do in their life some people would live on a beach some people will buy a bunch of houses some people would hire a big team and like build a bigger business so for example um you know there's a group of indie hackers two brothers actually who host the platform that i use to record podcasts on it's called riverside.fm they started their company i think they launched in march of this year right before the pandemic got big and their revenue blew up so quickly it's got a life-changing amount of revenue just these two

SPEAKER_91: brothers that they had quickly to decide like you know what do we want with this business you know do we want to just like sit on a pile of money do we want to and what are we talking about like quarter

SPEAKER_93: million dollars a year million dollars a year in revenue they're public about it on the site i talked

SPEAKER_10: to them about it i mean they're not so they're in the indie hackers product directory but like the revenue is way way less there than it is in real life um i can say it's a life-changing amount of money but they decided what they wanted to do was raise money so they raised a seed round two and a half million and now they've had like all sorts of like hillary clinton did a podcast on their platform and they've got like a ton of people using it um but like they decided to go big another example would be tara reed who i mentioned earlier she's got a business called apps without code where she's basically teaching people how to build online businesses without using any code and she's putting up crazy numbers i mean she's enrolling i think 300 or so new students a month and if you compare that to lambda school like the last i heard they're enrolling like four or five hundred students a month but the difference is like lambda schools raised like 100 million dollars tara bootstrapped her business she's charging like a couple thousand dollars a head she's doing five or six million dollars a year in revenue and it's growing rapidly and she's at a point where she has to also decide you know what do i want to do as an indie hacker do i want to like just live off this money do i want to go big uh and like that's a decision that's very personal but like as you said the goal is something that changes and you have to realize that like once you hit certain milestones your goals are going to change and what i think separates indie hackers from a lot of other people is that they understand that in order to build something ambitious you don't necessarily have to start with something ambitious you can start somewhere small and leverage that to get to sort of jump to the next pond and then you know you can build up advantages there and if that goes well you can jump to an even bigger pond or you can just stay there and relax and do what you want to do or go back and

SPEAKER_23: start a totally new business from scratch the whole point is it's freedom right the whole point is

SPEAKER_07: you can choose what you want to do i've always had a very simple philosophy of these goals like i i never even thought about being an angel investor i just wanted to be rich and buy the knicks and bring a championship to new york i'd also wanted to be a millionaire at one point and just be financially independent because it was financially insecure as a kid but once you start doing something like say investing in startups it's very easy when you hit two unicorns to say you know what i wonder if i could hit five or i've hit five can i hit ten and i've i've already set the lifetime goal now i just said well you know what at the pace i'm going and the you know the number i hit it's conceivable i could hit 25 unicorns if i work for 10 more years i'll be 50 i think in a week or two november 28th we're taping this on the 18th i think uh so in 10 days from the table is i'll be 50 years old and i could obviously very clearly retire and i was like i kind of love

SPEAKER_84: what i do i'm trolling indie hacker to try to find new products and services to invest in like i wake up

SPEAKER_05: and i don't want to retire so i was like okay so what's a goal here and i just posted it to my uh you know my twitter feed and i pinned it and i kind of did that in a way to be aspirational like

SPEAKER_07: you're saying i literally my pinned tweet right now is explaining what i'm trying to do with the last you know 10 years of my professional life which is make enough money to buy the knicks or at least have a chance at it um because as a young adult that was a dream so why not try for it but also to just be the best investor of all time why not set a goal and people are so i don't know what's the

SPEAKER_05: word it's not woke but it's the sort of anti-capitalist it's not socialist but whatever it is on twitter

SPEAKER_37: we need to discuss this because there is an anti-capitalism anti-success that you're actually

SPEAKER_05: not part of no but you're also not part of the venture machine so you have the venture machine

SPEAKER_84: all the way on the right which is like go big go home blitz scale then on the left you have the

SPEAKER_37: i call it the hysterical left where nobody should have any choice everything should be provided by the state socialism communism for the win break up big tech uh i wonder what your thoughts are in terms

SPEAKER_07: of living between those two extremes when we get back on this week in startups why is sock two

SPEAKER_28: compliance so critically important well if you don't have your sock two buttoned up you can't close major customers it's really that simple and guess what vanta v-a-n-t-a is going to give you one thousand dollars off right now uh vanta's compliance software makes it easier to get and renew your sock two so if sock two is part of your 2021 plan sign up with vanta right now so you can get the prep work done and start your new year's really quickly you go to vanta.com slash twist and twist listeners i kid you not will get one thousand dollars off on average you know vanta customers will get their sock two compliance in just two to four weeks which is compared to like three to five months without vanta we recently had a twist listener email us about how much they love vanta john i'll just leave it at that as a ceo of a drone startup called kitty hawk we know well and he told us vanta was essentially helping them get sock two compliant quickly and easily and he was so thankful of that discount and getting that thousand dollars and he loves the tie-ins with google slack github and aws which are all essential apps to run kitty hawk's business the software continuously tests against technical and non-technical sock two requirements and they partner with over two dozen auto firms who have been trained to support sock two reports directly with vanta on average as i said vanta customers get compliant within two to four weeks compared to three to five months that's all you need to know they make it easy they make it fast easy breezy and one thousand dollars vanta.com slash twist

SPEAKER_07: portland allen is here from indie hackers go check out the indie hackers podcast uh and uh visit

SPEAKER_08: indiehackers.com you can join my uh group which is ask an angel which is right now uh defunct because i haven't been in the community as often as i should be i'm gonna set i gotta set a calendar just to look at it every sunday morning when i'm having my coffee i love the website and i love the fact that you tell

SPEAKER_113: you you intentionally tell people these steps find a partner that's obvious partner's good because

SPEAKER_10: i mean ultimately it's a huge uh motivator there's a number of reasons why you want to have a partner um social accountability is one of the strongest factors to get you to do stuff and i think one of the things that a lot of new founders find when they quit their job and start working for themselves is that hey a reason why you got a lot of the work done that used to get done is because you had a boss because somebody would hold you accountable and if you're a software engineer or not uh and you suddenly left with all this free time to yourself to build your own business it's very easy to just do the things that you want to do all the time and it's very hard to get kind of off the ground and force yourself to do these other tasks that your business needs to survive so i like the accountability aspect people can complement your skill set as well uh so if you don't you know like i'm sort of a jack of all trades designer full stack engineer but most indie hackers are not in fact a lot of indie hackers don't even know how to code and so if you can partner up with somebody who knows and kind of fill in these gaps that you don't have it's just much easier to build a successful business you're

SPEAKER_117: also a front man you're like a lead singer like don't i wouldn't leave that part out like

SPEAKER_07: you know every band needs the front man like the front woman i don't know what the non-gender

SPEAKER_04: specific word is but you know the lead singer uh to get out there and be there at the front of the band and say hey listen to our music so the first two commit to a goal and find a partner they're both about accountability right and sort of framing what we're going to try to achieve or brainstorming an idea um this is one where we could talk for hours um and we'll get to that in a second but

SPEAKER_05: you are now sitting between this and maybe it's just a function of being on twitter too much

SPEAKER_37: but there seems to be in addition to what we've already unpacked so we don't need to unpack it again the venture industrial complex i'll call it yeah you got the the vc ic venture capital industrial complex on one side you have to do it this way you have to blitz scale even though they

SPEAKER_07: don't say that it is implied and and the scorecard is how much money you raise and your valuation not your customer delight and you know personal goals but then on that we haven't really talked about what i'll call the historical left party the h uh lp or a historical socialist party okay hsp and then you're not saying that i am so when they come to cancel anybody you cancel me but you have the

SPEAKER_05: bernie bros elizabeth warren aoc you know sure just anti-tech but they also seem to be anti-opportunity at their worst where they don't believe that people can achieve and i will i'll once in a while tweet and

SPEAKER_07: i just i literally do it on purpose i'm just like i'm gonna just crack open a red pill here and just put it on the counter and snort it and just tweet something like the core controversy i i like to just

SPEAKER_37: troll i mean i'm at this point i'm gonna just admit it i'm just trolling with half these tweets just my own entertainment but i'll say something like i believe people can learn any skill if they

SPEAKER_70: work hard enough and that will make the his the the the hysterical socialist party go bonkers no nobody

SPEAKER_05: can achieve their goals nobody can learn anything and i mean the truth is you went to mit how much of

SPEAKER_17: that gatekeeping determined getting into yc starting indie hackers or being part of this in all i mean it certainly helped i'm not saying it didn't but totally yeah how much does it help the

SPEAKER_25: indie hackers how much does it help tara reid or other folks who are building stuff i mean the the

SPEAKER_10: indie hackers who i look up to almost none of them went to like elite schools and we talked about this earlier like you don't need permission i think the idea that you're going to go to an elite school or that you're going to join a prestigious company and work your way up the ladder a lot of that is based on this desire to always like get recognition from other people and capitalism especially creating companies is based on the idea that like it doesn't matter if somebody gives you a job or somebody pats you on the back or gives you a degree or a title or anything what matters is that you build something of actual value for another person such that like they're willing to give you money for that thing and ideally it's like a win-win situation it's not this evil terrible thing where you're just extracting money from uh the poor people of society like you're providing goods for them and they like

SPEAKER_41: it and everybody's happy so i don't think anybody choice to consume that product i mean that's the

SPEAKER_07: other thing left out of this like hysterical left they're like uh and listen i i'm a libertarian i'm on the left i voted for hillary i'm you know i would never vote for trump i hate him like they they they literally believe that people are not able to to learn a new skill i mean that's where we've gotten to in the narrative that people can't open up youtube or brilliant.org or khan academy or lambda

SPEAKER_127: or you know apps without code whatever it is i mean you're how do you feel about the i don't know

SPEAKER_46: if i agree okay let's get into that because i don't know if you could you would go on twitter and say like if you were to ask aoc like do you believe people can learn any skills you would say no you

SPEAKER_10: know and i don't i don't think it's like i think it's a little bit disingenuous to say that somebody believes something that they almost certainly wouldn't agree with but i get like i get your point and i think where a lot of the discussion i get on mass which is

SPEAKER_08: right the system is rigged people can't i don't know aoc so i can't specifically pin the quote to her but that that whole left side says listen we we you people are not people are being held back from learning new skills so if we think first principles do you think people can learn most skills

SPEAKER_10: online i think there's an explosion in the number of skills that people are learning online obviously you see like a lot of these creator economy platforms where people who aren't even part of the tech industry are learning how to like make amazing videos on youtube or tiktok or become great streamers or open up shopify stores and are making lots of money providing lots of value for people because these platforms exist to make them sort of amplified versions of themselves i also think that a lot of this discourse gets confused because we end up just taking the most extreme version of every single statement instead of just like meeting in the reasonable middle and perhaps it's twitter's fault it's very hard to have a nuanced conversation on twitter but like it is it's possible to say that you like capitalism but also that capitalism has some problems that need to be fixed and like there are ways in which the system is sort of rigged and for whatever reason everybody feels like they need to be on one extreme or the other where something is perfect or something is not or if something is not perfect then we might as well get rid of it i mean you see this uh in politics all the time nowadays where it's the media is rigged down with the media and it's like well like yeah there are issues with the media we would all agree but like what's the second best alternative like

SPEAKER_134: conspiracy theories and yeah on youtube on the blogosphere yeah like like we don't want to throw

SPEAKER_10: the baby out with the bath water we want to actually like look at these systems and figure out okay what are the issues and let's make them better and a lot of what i want to think i'm doing at indie hackers is teaching people that like hey this is actually a very democratic system you don't need to go to a top tier college you don't need to you know email jason and follow his playbook and beg him for money like you can basically follow these steps put in some work and build a company that changes your life and other people's lives and like there's no sort of gatekeeping anywhere in

SPEAKER_07: that process so when people say to you um well i you know i have to work a job and i you know i work 40 hours a week 50 hours a week i can't do this and i don't know how to code and i don't have any skills what is the advice you give those people because i get this a lot too i get this all the time like what about this person like there's some there's some ideal customer profile that people

SPEAKER_25: put in their head of somebody who is unable to learn a new skill and to create a company

SPEAKER_140: yeah i mean like does that idea customer profile of the person who can't do it exist and

SPEAKER_10: how do you think about that the playing field is obviously not level there are obviously people who are born like with a lot more hardships or a lot fewer advantages than others like if i look at my own childhood i was born in the united states of america i had two loving parents who were like very invested in my brother and i's childhood and like i grew up in a nice community where i didn't have to worry about like drugs or violence there's a bunch of different stuff where it's like these are the sort of hidden advantages that like i have and lots of other people have that being said i think when you get to this bar of like people can't learn i don't think that's true i think people just have to overcome more challenges and i love the internet because it makes it easier to overcome a lot of these challenges so for example let's say you are working a full-time job perhaps you have a spouse perhaps you have kids well you know 10 or 20 years ago it would have been unheard of for you to like on the side build a tech startup like you didn't have the money to even buy servers it's a non-starter yeah but today like we have like the level to which technology has progressed uh it's almost like this runaway reaction like in physics there's this idea of the self-sustaining reaction or an ai there's this idea of like the the um what do you call it like the singularity where like the ai can build another ai and it gets better if you build a fire and you have hot coals when you put the next log on it burns quicker like the same thing is happening with tech startups like in almost like three or four different ways where there's so much going on to make it easier to start a company it's hard to even catalog but like you when we mentioned open startups and transparency it's so easy nowadays to go online and find like a million stories of founders who've told you exactly how they came up with their ideas exactly how they overcome all these challenges exactly how much money they're making and you can learn way easier than ever you can learn how to code for literally free at lambda school you can learn how to build apps without code using um terror camp free code camp like there's a ton of resources that just make it easier and therefore more people get started and those people build more resources and it's like a chain self-sustaining reaction plus there's also tools that make it easier to code podcasts um like no code tools low code tools like i just interviewed david shu from retool and like they're allowing basically programmers to build interfaces like drag and drop style so suddenly if you like you know couldn't have worked nights and weekends to build your company in the past now you can build an app way faster even as a software engineer than you could in the past and i talk to nd hackers every day who've built businesses that are generating 10 20 30 grand a month in revenue working nights and weekends i mean there's this guy jordan o'connor who's got this app closet tools and it's like he had kids he had a spouse he had a full-time job he would get up and just like work two or three hours a day on his app and now i think it's making 20 grand a month and he's quit his job so i think there's a path i bet he

SPEAKER_04: might have had debt could have had a mortgage right yeah he's got like real responsibilities but

SPEAKER_10: it's just like the world is just making it easier for people like this like our community manager at indie hackers rosie sherry she was one of the very first people that i interviewed she has this community um of software testers that she bootstrapped to like a million in revenue she has five kids she homeschools her kids she was doing this before the pandemic she's a spouse she has a bunch of stuff now she has her own paid newsletter like she's a machine but like she's not like some superhuman machine she's taking advantage of the latest tools and technology and resources out there to allow her to get more done in the limited amount of time that she has and so like when i look toward the future i think a lot more people are going to figure out like oh hey uh this is way easier than it sounds it's not easy but it's easier than it sounds you're optimistic you believe anybody can

SPEAKER_04: do it in a way that at least in america let's say let's keep it here in america as a conversation because we can't control what's happening in north korea as an example afghanistan but in america

SPEAKER_07: anybody who's in america who hears our voice it's never the opportunity has never been more open

SPEAKER_05: correct the knowledge has never been more freely available the tools have never been cheaper and are more often than not free and it's going to keep going in that direction directionally it's

SPEAKER_10: only going to get easier to build make a living for yourself online yet people feel it's unfair yet

SPEAKER_05: people feel it's rigged yet i think you can have both of these ideas victims at the same time why

SPEAKER_10: is it why do you can like i just don't understand why you can't have both of these like they're both true you can say a system is unfair and you can also say things are getting better those aren't contradictory statements they're both true and i think one of the issues is for some reason we look at them as being mutually exclusive like you can say okay racism in america exists but you can also say that like america's probably less racist than it's ever been there is no year in the past

SPEAKER_158: true truth it's probably two very correct statements right i mean they're two truths right

SPEAKER_10: i would not maybe it's an obvious one right it's almost like it seems obvious and if you talk to people in person like you can like you and i can resolve this and find agreement on twitter it's

SPEAKER_91: really difficult to find agreement so maybe we just need to spend less time on twitter i think

SPEAKER_07: there's a twitter piece but i i do think that there is definitely a victim mentality for a group of people who want to create this ideal profile of somebody i'm using the ideal customer profile because it's kind of paradoxical as we do that in building startups we try to find this customer profile they're trying to find this person who can't do it and i always when i meet these folks

SPEAKER_04: who are having a hard time i just say well what tell me your skills and they're like i have ideas i'm like okay that's not a skill that's you know like uh and we we all have like 50 ideas when we're asleep every night like it's the ideas is not it so do you have a skill yet and if not what skill do you think you could acquire quickly like growth marketing no code sure writing social media there's so

SPEAKER_05: many of those available you know add one of those skills and then the next sort of card i turn over is uh i asked them did you watch breaking bad have you watched the sopranos or did you watch game of

SPEAKER_07: thrones did you watch any of those shows i've watched all you watched all three of them okay so i don't

SPEAKER_37: know the number of hours but i'm literally going to calculate the hours for how many hours those each are because i think if you watched game of thrones breaking bad the sopranos or any you know pick five popular series which were well worth watching incredible tv it would be a thousand hours wouldn't

SPEAKER_05: it yeah or 500 it's a time if you just said i'm going to miss those three amazing amazing shows the next three of those amazing shows and i'm not going to let myself watch them until i know how to do a paid newsletter until i know no code or i'm going to do half and half right and i try to explain that discipline to people what i love about what you're doing is you're kind of telling people build in

SPEAKER_08: public accountability find a partner accountability and commit to a goal accountability well if you're going to be accountable to this goal then some other discretionary time has got to go away whether it's with your kids whether it's with you know playing poker with your friends like i do every or used to do every week you know or watching tv i mean that's basically what has to happen is people

SPEAKER_10: have to want it right i was uh at one of the stripe q a sessions with the founders so every friday stripe will do q a with patrick and john and this must have been two or three years ago when like game of thrones was still on but patrick was describing how his uh strategy is to go to wikipedia read the episode summaries in like five minutes so he could pretend like he's seen the show uh and not actually

SPEAKER_91: and get back to 65 minutes and then get back to the yeah i get back to 65 minutes and do the things

SPEAKER_10: he's more passionate about doing so i mean i'm not like i've watched all the shows that you've named i live like a rich and enjoyable life i have lots of friends um and i think that's like what's cool about technology today is you can do a lot of fun stuff and still have time to build your company you can work a full-time job and still have time to build your company but i think one of the most important ingredients that you need to have is you need to have optimism it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you believe that you can do something then you're going to try harder to do it and when you fail you're going to keep trying and like that leads to more success because you just get more shots on goal and when you succeed you're going to be more optimistic about it in the future so it's just like a self-fulfilling prophecy and the people i see who you're literally making the

SPEAKER_04: you're making the flywheel image for people who are who are you know listening instead of watching

SPEAKER_10: and so what i worry about is this this message that you can't do it um that like the deck is stacked against you that you might as well not even try because that's like a negative flywheel and it gets people to not try and not succeed and believe they can't do it and so i think to be a founder like you need to have optimism and you need to ideally not quit um because you know we talk literally we talk about the reasons why companies fail you could say the market wasn't big enough for the competition out executed you or you had a co-founder dispute but like really all this comes down to is quitting okay the market wasn't big enough and then what you pivoted no you quit um that's why you failed so ultimately i think optimism and that flywheel powers you to not quit what you're working on and not quitting is why you can eventually succeed

SPEAKER_84: it's really interesting like i've never really thought of the flywheel in reverse but the flywheel

SPEAKER_07: dragging you down oh yeah it's terrible it really is terrible if you just i mean if you think about addiction is one of those parts of the flywheel people get depressed they you know they lost their job they start drinking drinking leads to popping pills or whatever it is well this is why i've i've

SPEAKER_10: a lot of sympathy for people who say capitalism is broken and like there isn't equal opportunity and

SPEAKER_154: like there are people trapped in negative flywheels they're really no fault of their own and like

SPEAKER_81: those are systems that need to be fixed yeah there definitely are and then i the i think the problem

SPEAKER_07: is the two sides blame each other so it's like capitalism is in fact the flywheel that can pull you out of the negative flywheel of you know injustice racism drugs depression whatever it happens

SPEAKER_10: to me right my favorite thing is to see somebody from like a the underdog succeed somebody from like an underrepresented background or all the disadvantages stacked against them and then they

SPEAKER_72: build a successful company that's that's how i always felt about myself and then people told me

SPEAKER_178: jason you're a white kid from brooklyn i was like yeah but i feel like i went to like school at night

SPEAKER_84: i didn't go to mit everybody's the hero of their own story i i do think that uh for people who are

SPEAKER_05: uh you know listening not watching uh you're an african-american i'm a white guy how does how do you feel about racism in tech about the industry in general uh and i'm not like forcing you like

SPEAKER_25: you're a black guy you've got to like address this for the entire black community but

SPEAKER_37: we we are here at this crossroads of opportunity and let's face it it's not even a black and white

SPEAKER_05: issue right now a lot of the people who voting for trump now uh you know feel are the middle are the middle class or people who are the lower middle class who feel um that they're disenfranchised which was very weird that 70 million people voted for him when it's kind of voting against your own interest hard to understand except maybe under the guise of burn the whole system down but i don't

SPEAKER_07: know i'm sort of how you feel about waste in the tech industry and what we saw in the election to

SPEAKER_82: the extent you care about these things yeah i i wish we could have more nuanced conversations

SPEAKER_10: about it and again i think twitter is just a horrible platform for having these conversations and yet it's where everybody is and so that's where the conversations end up we can do fleets though we can do fleets now i haven't i haven't sent a fleet yet but uh maybe it's horrible

SPEAKER_08: it's horrible and it's going to be so addicting i mean i'm getting like five six thousand i'm getting like one percent of my following or or two percent or maybe seeing them now and i can and the number of dms i'm getting back because i have open dms is bonkers like hundreds of them it's bonkers i think

SPEAKER_07: they might have ruined the platform or just totally unlocked it it's we'll see what happens at least

SPEAKER_151: they're at least they're changing something so when you think about the nuance and we just we just

SPEAKER_07: got through the election we're going to be going into a new world it's been listen race has been a

SPEAKER_44: major issue race and tech has been a major issue i don't know if you have any thoughts on it yeah i

SPEAKER_10: can't comment too much on like the politics of the election but i think yeah when it comes to race uh i wish we talked a little bit more about culture i think we we get obsessed with race and racism and how people look but i think the cultural norms that different ethnic and social and racial groups have can sometimes act as barriers and america in a lot of ways if you look at other like big rich western countries like we're an experiment in having uh a very high degree of multiculturalism and i think it's just difficult when people from different tribes or cultures come together sort of interact like i have a good friend from east palo alto he's mexican he looks white but he grew up in a very different culture than like right up the road in silicon valley and now he's worked at tech companies and he's had trouble sort of blending in and finding people who like dress the same way he does and listen to the same music that he does and it's not about race really it's about like a shared understanding and like sort of these cultural norms that we don't um align on and so what i like to see are initiatives that bridge people together almost like the opposite of cultural appropriation i like cultural integration where people can like listen to the same music and like basically come to understand each other a lot better and break down a lot of the allow people to work together and understand a nuanced point it's like such a nuanced point i

SPEAKER_07: think east palo alto for people who don't know is you know it's it's um it would be the equivalent of like bed stye or something in in the brooklyn analogy so in the same in the same tapestry where brooklyn could have you know the heights you could also have fort green or bed stye or red hook which are a completely different experience to have been raised in right right they're so close proximity to each other that it does lead to this weird um uh disjointedness where you feel like maybe we should

SPEAKER_25: be closer because we're both from palo alto but you're from palo alto and i'm from the one that has east in it so i'm kind of ghettoized in this little you know east part of it where facebook has now gentrified which is super weird as well um but i wonder when you went to school did they talk about

SPEAKER_05: america being the melted by you're a millennial i'm a gen xer we were like they kind of indoctrinated

SPEAKER_25: us to exactly what you're saying which is america is great it must be that somewhere 100 years ago people really started to see this like we need to resolve this race issue or we need to work on it

SPEAKER_41: so let's just call it a stew and everybody brings something and it's the melting pot and right they said i mean they made us draw the melting pot i think the melting pot will get me canceled if i say

SPEAKER_10: there should be a melting pot right now i like the idea of a melting pot like i don't think that's what we have like we have like what did you say stew or these very distinct ingredients and everyone's sort of segregating and keeping themselves separate and like to a large degree i mean that's not necessarily by choice a lot of that is like financial uh disparities between different groups you know um but i think things that tend to erase borders and melt people together i think shared cultural norms shared communities breed understanding and we need a lot more understanding in community in america and uh you know if there's any silver lining to the pandemic i like the idea that like lots of people from sf have just left and are dispersing all out over the world i like the idea that cities like nashville and atlanta are having a burgeoning tech industry and people who don't come from like you know sort of the elite liberal west and east coast cultures can take part and like the tech boom and take part in like these shared cultures and i think the extent to which america segregates is the extent to which we can't understand each other like i don't think there exists as such a thing as separate but equal and i think any form of segregation is really just

SPEAKER_07: bad and the shared cultural experience is the thing that is getting lost i was talking to a friend of mine who's like i'll go with you on this trip but i can't be in gen pop and i just you know like i i gotta fly private i you know and i was like well i'm not flying private i you know i can't afford to do that like you know i'm gonna fly pre-pandemic um and the idea of waiting online everybody had to wait online to get through the tsa everybody had to go to the dmv to get their license so there was this possibility that if you were waiting in line at starbucks or you know and getting a cup of coffee or taking the subway in new york you might be next to the mayor you might be next to the mailman you might be next to the mom you might be next to the the grandpa whatever it was we had this forced uh shared experience and now everybody's trying to rip those apart they're

SPEAKER_37: like here's how you can hack not having to wait in line which i can appreciate taking our friction but

SPEAKER_08: it always seems to be a long like you don't want to go through the the regular terminal we have surf error and jet suite x you specifically don't need to be with that group of people you know like you don't have to take the bart and i remember when i moved to san francisco and i've only been in san

SPEAKER_64: francisco like six years people think i've been here forever you've been here i think longer than

SPEAKER_08: me i was in la and i wanted to go to the warriors game and i just looked at the traffic and i'm like i'm not sitting in that traffic and i just looked at the bart times i took the bart and people like you took the part i was like yeah i'm gonna take the bart home too and my car's parked in the city i'm just gonna drive back on the bart and they're like what's it like i was like what's it

SPEAKER_210: like you've been here for 20 years that's like i haven't been on the bart in 20 years i'm like a bart to the you know the the old oracle arena was pretty delightful and fast it took 25 minutes

SPEAKER_07: compared to 90 minutes to get to a playoff game i would never actually do that um create your own mvp obviously that's the part of the process number four in uh this you know indie hacker process creating an mvp kind of the lean startup process you kind of just plug that in right there start small

SPEAKER_10: uh some of my favorite stories are people who created these really small things that eventually became big so like one of the guys who inspired me peter levels he runs this online community of digital nomads called nomad list and he's just a digital nomad it started off like just deceptively small it was a google sheet where all these digital nomads would get in and put in information about um you know which city has the fastest wi-fi speed or which cities are the safest etc and i think most people would create that google sheet and be like oh this is great you know and just stop there but then he took that information he put it on a website he improved the website he made it sort of the destination of choice for anyone who wanted to be a digital nomad to do the research you need to do he leveraged that to create a community for digital nomads so people could talk to each other and ask each other questions and meet up in these areas he launched a bunch of ancillary tools uh job board for remote workers and now he's making like he's made millions of dollars from this bootstrapped all of it and he didn't like he didn't need to start big he didn't need to ask anybody for permission he didn't need to raise money he started with like a google sheet and i kind of follow the same playbook with indie hackers where it's like okay indie hackers was a blog for about a month and a half and then it was a newsletter and then it was a community and now it's you know i think when i joined stripe in 2017 our community had like 100 conversations a month now it's got like 40 000 conversations a month and it's like well how did how did this start like it started off as like a tiny little blog and so that's another thing i love about like you know the mvp mindset it's not merely start with a minimum viable product but it's also like think consciously about how when you take one small step you can leverage that to get to the next step for my story in

SPEAKER_23: particular it was like okay i'm putting out these interviews people love these interviews with transparent you know stories from founders let me make sure i get all of these people on a mailing list okay people are on the mailing list now i can start a community a community is very hard to start but i can email the people on this mailing list every single week with different discussions and threads on the community and it's kind of like an unfair advantage that i would never have had if i

SPEAKER_206: just tried to start with the community which is your fifth point of the six steps uh find your

SPEAKER_07: first customers which you just explained beautifully which naval uh and nivi used to have something called venture hacks yeah and it turned into angel list before they had any code they would just send out a list and then before i had the syndicate or did sequoia scouts i used to do something called open angel forum which was just start a company yeah six companies presenting to 15 people and then

SPEAKER_25: build in public why is this important this one is not in the normal play startup play build in public

SPEAKER_151: build in public is a little bit of a selfish one i like that people build in public because uh it's

SPEAKER_10: very helpful to me running indie hackers it's also helpful to i think other people starting businesses and i think it can be helpful to you because there's just so much information out there and people like let's face it are not like natural born marketers a lot of people start and like well what what am i going to write that's going to get anyone to even take notice of what i'm doing and a substantial number of the founders that i talked to uh ended up building things that blew up because they were willing to be transparent about what they were doing so i just talked to this guy named traf the other day he made something like 300 grand in a month releasing a set of icons and like it happened because he was like ios came out with like a new version they allow you to sort of reskin your home screen with your own custom icon set he had some icons laying around he could sort of tweeted them out they got popular and he didn't stop there he's like wrote about how we made the icons and he wrote about like how much money he was making and then like because he shared his revenue numbers um mkbhd this huge youtuber was like oh this is a really inspiring story he put them and his youtube video the revenue numbers blew up then traf like went on like my podcast and a bunch of other shows and like he's just like building in public and not hiding his numbers and hiding what's going on and it's a very inspirational story other people also want to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and so i think by being transparent with what he did he was able to sort

SPEAKER_07: of magnify his own success i i it's sort of to me the equivalent of like looking at the box

SPEAKER_04: scores after a basketball game and studying them which i would do after every next game and i'd be like wow who's this person getting nine assists 10 assists 11 assists sure oh and you know who's this person taking down 14 rebounds it's like oh that's charles oakley yeah that's what he does he

SPEAKER_07: scores no points and gets 14 rebounds and he's like you know the knicks dennis rodman or whatever and when you build in public like that it does draw people to it hey why why is there this statistical anomaly or why i was looking at one today which was just fascinating they were saying who has the most i don't know do you follow basketball much or a little bit nba yeah so there's a concept of isolation plays which is basically james harden camrello anthony chris paul westbrook you dribble the ball a whole bunch yourself and then you shoot you take 20 of the 24 seconds iso play means you isolate the one player boom you know the term for people who don't and they were just like

SPEAKER_53: two of the four players in the last like three years with the most iso plays it was like james

SPEAKER_84: harden obviously number two and then westbrook was number two or three like and you're like

SPEAKER_05: okay maybe these two players don't need they're talking about them being traded out of houston maybe they don't need to be traded maybe they need to play basketball differently like maybe shoot a

SPEAKER_08: two-pointer once a while or maybe not dribble the ball for 22 seconds um it's it's just really interesting this growing stuff in public it does um it shows people demonstrable growth

SPEAKER_07: um i know when my magazine went from black and white photocopy to color photocopy to newspaper color to glossy everybody talked about it differently and they treated me differently based on the paper stock now i think about that the paper stock and i can remember it i was meeting with the printer and i was like okay show me this paper stock show me this paper stock and i'm like looking for the new printer and i said this this is not heavy enough and he's like you know you can't really mail this stuff like you want you already have a 60 pound stock cover which is the weight of the paper you know whatever uh and i said well what's the next level up he's like you don't want the next level up i was like tell me about the next level i was like that's 80 pound stock and i was like who does that and they're like art form is the only magazine that's ever done it i was like okay what's the level above that he's like it doesn't exist nobody you know it's like okay i'll do their thing and so i just traded the stock of the paper and when you felt the cover you're like you

SPEAKER_37: couldn't rip it it was like that heavy you ever get like an art magazine and it's like so heavy substantial it felt substantial and then i upgraded the paper on the inside to what my competitors

SPEAKER_05: were doing as their cover in other words the paper stock inside was like became like 60 so this made it feel on a tactical basis tactical basis that it was transforming into something really

SPEAKER_07: important and it's it's almost the difference between hardcover softcover books or when people do i just ordered some books i don't know if it was stripe or somebody has their own publishing arm and they had the prince of persia book yeah straight straight press straight okay so i didn't mean to

SPEAKER_08: give you a plug but i bought all i just saw stripe had stripe press and i literally just bought all the books they're all great because i was they're all great and i was like look at these books is really interesting i don't know what they're up to at stripe but whenever they do something i pay attention so i bought all the books and i started reading the the story of the prince of persia and it was on its own like different type of stock paper and i was like oh somebody's paying attention to detail so you sold the company to stripe in three years ago four years ago yeah three years ago april of

SPEAKER_10: 2017 so about nine months after i started nd hackers uh i joined stripe you joined stripe

SPEAKER_44: stripe's valuation has gone 20x since then so you're timing 10 20x in that time period so i hope you got

SPEAKER_07: equity i'm assuming you did 4 or 5x so you did amazing if you took equity i'm assuming you did why did stripe want to buy it and why did you sell it because it seems to me that if you were independent right now it could be making millions of dollars in advertising and memberships like you know uh possibly without code making five or lambda i could see you being easily making five to ten million dollars a year and being worth 20 times that and you could be uh you know your own boss like

SPEAKER_10: what were you saying earlier about like the scorecard money being a scorecard and it's always easy to not be happy and think about who's making more money than you and i think that's kind of a like there is no ancient religious or philosophical or modern self-help book that says that uh you could you know be happy by comparing yourself to others and yeah uh so i don't think like a ton like what what if i didn't sell what if how much you know there's really no point like i'm doing fine uh and i think it's kind of a match made in heaven like i never thought of selling indie hackers indie hackers was my own indie hacker business i think in nine months i grew the revenue to about eight thousand dollars a month which in san francisco was enough to pay my rent my bills and kind of get to that point where i could do whatever i wanted and i flew down to mexico for a buddy's sort of bachelor party and i was checking my my email after i got off the plane and there was one like at the top of my inbox that was from patrick collison at stripe you know acquire indie hackers and i thought it was fake to be honest i was like this is makes no sense uh so i opened all my other emails first and then i went back to read that one uh and it was patrick saying like yeah we've been admiring what you're doing at indie hackers we think it's cool we could work together would you ever kind of sort of maybe be open to stripe acquiring it so we ended up meeting and getting brunch and kind of feeling each other out and i think what was important to me was that our goals and our incentives just really aligned i think a lot of people enter into these partnerships or deals or acquisitions where it's like oh you know they want this and i want that and it's only slightly off but like even like a small degree of difference over time widens into a huge gap and like you have these very unhappy founders where the company gets trashed by the acquirer and there was no gap with stripe and indie hackers which stripe wants or the acquirer

SPEAKER_25: or the acquired company trashes the parent company as is the case with instagram and the whatsapp

SPEAKER_84: founders exactly who both became worth billions and billions of dollars and publicly derided the

SPEAKER_246: person who made them a billionaire that's like so weird when you think about it yeah uh like

SPEAKER_84: talk about misalignment just i don't know what zuck's doing what's that i don't know what zuck's doing

SPEAKER_91: to get people to say the stuff about him but uh well i mean it's actually a discussion i've had

SPEAKER_34: you know with like insiders and he does have friends i think you know maybe some of the product

SPEAKER_08: decisions like move fast break things and you know maybe not caring about the outcomes if you think about applying that to your personal life um if you did if one did that what would that look like would be the outcome if you didn't nurture relationships with friends if you didn't maintain relationships yeah you they would drift and the person might feel like maybe our country feels or other countries feel or both political parties feel which is that facebook doesn't care about them and that maybe facebook is just not thoughtful yeah if you were to apply that to personal relationships and i really don't want to be mean to an individual person but it is very

SPEAKER_07: interesting on a business level that almost universally you know if you took the top 20 people who made money from facebook 15 of them are probably public massive critics of zucks and not

SPEAKER_10: his friends anymore very weird super singular personality and i think uh i don't know anything

SPEAKER_25: about him so i'm not going to say it yeah i know that's the thing is you know like i i literally met him the first week he was in silicon valley it was like very weird yeah uh but i think like i was

SPEAKER_10: tweeting about this earlier um yeah it's easy when you start a business to get wrapped up in this mission and like i think often like the more correlated that mission is with making lots of money like you're starting this huge unicorn the easier it is to just become all consumed by it and start sacrificing your personal relationships and one of the things that i've seen a lot of indie hackers yeah all that stuff can go easily go out the window there's a dollar amount where people are pretty much a man in anything and one of the things that i've seen with lots of indie hacker businesses including my own is all these other intangible ways that like your business can actually make your life better so if you think about starting a company it's like you're paying with a lot of time you're working on your business for like five years that's five years of your life you're never going to get back like ideally the time you spend working on it is rewarding not just a cost that you paid yeah so like you can start a business to make yourself financially independent but you can also start a business that like forces you to do a bunch of other things that you probably want in your life anyway so if like you and this podcast for example you get to spend your time talking to a lot of like really creative smart successful literally the joy of my

SPEAKER_08: life is getting to meet people like you and just like we're now friends like we have like a real

SPEAKER_07: conversation i feel like if we saw each other or we wanted to go out and have lunch we'd talk for

SPEAKER_46: another two hours right yeah and you can do that because of your business right like it literally

SPEAKER_10: probably wouldn't do this right you can with indie hackers we started these meetups uh which are now dead thanks to the pandemic but for a while there we had like like 70 meetups a month in cities all across the world i went to cape town there are like 60 indie hackers there they're all super smart cool driven everybody wants to take a selfie with you they all wanted to go out drinking and take

SPEAKER_261: going out drinking till 1am yeah like you basically created the world you want to live in yeah i can

SPEAKER_10: travel anywhere i want and now like i have friends in any city and uh go figure any other any hacker could do the same thing they could start a business that allows them to do learn whatever they want to learn or hang out with whoever they want to hang out with or visit whatever country or like you could start a business that gets you in better health you know maybe you want to be in good shape start a business that like literally forces you to i don't know review health food products or like do a podcast interview show on youtube where you have to like run uh while doing these interviews

SPEAKER_23: with like i just you could just like do something creative to force yourself to do as opposed to if

SPEAKER_93: you decided like i don't know i want to be an options trader because i i read that's the way to

SPEAKER_07: make the most money is to be a quant or something now if you love that work you know and you're tailor from billions and like solving quant problems makes you stay up for 24 hours straight great mazel tov but if you're doing it just to make money and 20 years of your life go by well what you missed out on was the alignment of going to work every day and having making money align with

SPEAKER_10: enjoyment totally and this is me when i moved to silicon valley i mean i spent a good two years of my life in my 20s doing nothing but writing code for an idea i didn't really give a shit about and i made like very few memories that year i turned down a lot of like hangouts with friends i was trying to do this sort of deferred life plan like you know work super hard for a few years and then like it all makes sense later on because now you're rich and you can go live your life and it's like well why do you need the journey of building your setup to be this miserable process like it doesn't have to be like it can actually be a fun process where you're making friends learning new things visiting cool places a million other things while you're building your business 100 correct you got to

SPEAKER_206: enjoy the journey listen uh oh and by the way when stripe bought it was that when they launched atlas

SPEAKER_08: the the tools before before indy hackers see i think that was like the motivation like i i mean in addition to it being brilliant and you being obviously brilliant they have a really cool product uh atlas i'll give it a free plug but you can basically do company formation through it and so if people want to you know charge people uh you know and they want to start a business like that's

SPEAKER_10: exactly stripes wheelhouse so go to good example of capitalism gone right where it's in stripes best interest to make it as easy as possible for other people to start businesses to educate them to help

SPEAKER_07: them to inspire 100 shopify same thing yeah everybody wins says and you know i think that's a i just had a company on the pod yesterday um that was um you know doing a dish cleaning robot and the founder was talking about yeah i was just talking about it'd be great to eliminate the job of dishwasher having done that job it is so miserable to spend 12 hours washing dishes like your hands are raw it just sucks yeah and uh and i was like we and we always create more jobs we always create more jobs and indy hackers you know patreon i listen to podcasts now and then i go look at they they you know talk about building in public the the the women who do red scare or some of the other podcasts on patreon they they show how much money they make and i'm like look they're making 20 000 a month they're making a quarter million dollars a year they they're making 125 000 each talking to it into a microphone for two hours a week one they do public one they do private i'm like literally i could have

SPEAKER_265: lived in new york and made 125 000 a year doing two hours of talking a week and then what would i do for

SPEAKER_10: the rest of the week there's a lot of trouble i could have gotten yeah i think it's like this whole idea of these platforms is fascinating because if you look at kind of like v1 of social networks they're all about connection you know facebook connect with their friends connect with their family and then v2 is all about like status so there's connection on twitter and instagram but there's also the status component where it's like look how many subscribers and followers follower count like or i got like the you know the only i'm the only person who's got the handle jason right like yeah that's cool for you like it's hard for you to walk away from but now i think a lot of these platforms are like not just connection not just status but it's also like make a living earn revenue on youtube i think you know if you look at substack and medium and a lot of these other platforms are pulling people away from twitter who work in the tech industry who are giving all this information away for free via tweets and they're saying no i actually want to get paid to share a lot of my wisdom instead of just tweeting it for free yeah so i love this idea of like yeah let's get rid of the old jobs let's replace them with newer jobs that are just more pleasant that are easier than a more productive and valuable to society and i think the platforms that win are going to be the ones that not only provide connection and status but also provide a way for people to make money and then also as you're saying like broadcast the stories of people who are making the most money on those platforms that's why in nd hackers i'm always saying you know what's your revenue number how much money are you making and i always like try to share these stories far and wide because it's super inspirational to hear somebody succeeding there's websites you can go to and like see the top creators on patreon and see exactly how much money they're making and like that can light a fire under

David Friedberg: your ass to actually get started i literally have had this happen to me where people have said you know you've been my great inspiration i saw you do this and i realized chasing calacanis can do it

SPEAKER_247: i can do it and i was like thanks i think that's sort of a compliment it's like if that dipshit can make it work i can make it work that's great that's what we need more of we need more of that

SPEAKER_53: this idiot figured it out you can too uh listen cortland you have been an amazing guest uh we got

SPEAKER_44: to do this again uh anytime congratulations on the success great great great guest on a pod wow

SPEAKER_07: um everybody go and just it's nice to have some optimism uh and in the world too i mean i think we need it right now because people it's been a rough year for people right it's been rough and the opportunity i think 2021 for it is going to be amazing like the lift of getting trump out of office and getting these vaccines and everybody learning how to work remote and all these tools being adopted it's going to be sick like i call people up i have people as guests on the pod i would only have people in person for five years if you didn't want to come in person you couldn't be on the pod so people would make trips to san francisco to be on the pod do meetings have dinners with

SPEAKER_08: people it's just you know i tell people when you're in town then you can be on the pod we took that out now i get podcast guests that i never thought i would get like i just had that chairwoman or one of the chair men or women of the sec on the pod right she's like yeah i'll come on the pod sure yeah and then you call them and it's like they already have a podcast setup it's like of

SPEAKER_17: course i've got a podcast setup yeah who do you think i am it's 2020 it's the year of remote it's

SPEAKER_278: it's the year of remote of course i've yes of course i've got a professional microphone and headsets

SPEAKER_02: and an hd camera digital slr all right everybody follow cortland allen uh c s allen a l l e n he does not have at cortland yet go buy it who's got at cortland man i should i don't know i'm committed

SPEAKER_04: to csl and i don't care i don't tweet that much but i try to make a good one i do oh are you in

SPEAKER_56: the naval camp do less is more i mean i'm on indy hackers i've got like yes like 95 000 followers on indy hackers i make a post there everybody gets an email i've got like 30 000 on twitter it's not as high value i think it's hard to have deep conversations there but um it used to be cool more it used to be cool yeah that's the way things go i think you're right though i think

SPEAKER_07: it's going to be like this segue into um you know private communities and vertical communities because the big ones are just becoming they all just collapse at a certain point and we're i think twitter's at that like collapse point like facebook hit and myspace hit where you're just like oh i just it's it's it's it's oppressive to be on twitter like you feel the weight of it it's like bricks i feel like having a twitter handle for me is like 20 of the 100 bricks i've been carrying in my backpack the past year you know like when the pandemic's over that'll be like 30 bricks trump's out of office another 30 bricks if i could just shut this goddamn twitter account off and it's gonna be hard it's hard i'm so addicted and it's so important for my business to be there but i gotta rethink it i gotta rethink it maybe somebody just buy at jason for a million dollars for me jason statham you can have

SPEAKER_08: it get me off this platform all right listen cortland uh hopefully we'll get to meet in person someday when the pandemic's over and play some poker oh yes oh yes you you play plo you play uh

SPEAKER_91: i play no limit i play with uh some of your portfolio companies jeff from underground seller oh yeah jeff's great play from the stanley from doordash oh you know what we gotta do is we gotta

SPEAKER_113: get a uh a poke or do you play the poker app yeah okay too yeah i've been i mean i went into the

SPEAKER_08: pandemic up significantly in my game and coming out of the pandemic i will be down because my friends are like let's play plo i was like sure i mean plo is the devil's game i mean you can lose so fast

SPEAKER_05: in plo it's like oh i've got the best hand and everybody else was like i think i could have the best hand yeah i'm drawing to the nuts yeah i'm drawing to the nuts yeah i'm drawing to the second

SPEAKER_07: nuts and all of a sudden you have four people in a pot and you're you're up against and then people are running it twice and all of a sudden it's like the cards come out so fast i don't even know

SPEAKER_37: what happened i have to replay the hand to just see how did i lose that hand when i had top set and it's like oh you had top set you're totally gonna lose but you don't lose in no limit hold

SPEAKER_178: them it's like yeah because you don't have the other two cards i i want to hand the other day

SPEAKER_56: we had a royal uh flush which obviously you got your first royal i got my first royal and of course

SPEAKER_91: it was in plo and someone else had like something like uh i think they had a boat and of course yeah i mean of course they went hard piled it all in and i was uh very happy about that hand i've had

SPEAKER_07: hands now where i flopped like the nuts the other person turned the nuts and then i rivered the nuts like the nuts to the nuts to the nuts so you you you flop top set the next person flops the top

SPEAKER_88: straight and then you flop top flush you know or something or you know or you pair the board pairs

SPEAKER_08: and you get your boat and just the back and the fourth and then if you have a three-way hand and do you guys set run it twice on yours yeah we do so that takes the variance down a little bit so you take the variance and you have three people in a pot and then you run it twice and then like it's like oh yeah the board paired twice on the river and so like this person boated up after you had the nut flush and you're just like what is going on this game is crazy such a crazy game i and you know it hasn't been solved that that's what all the poker people tell me is that it largely hasn't been solved to the level no limit has so it's just it's it's still got a lot of like the best players are still trying to figure out how to level each other in it you know a lot of fun which is a lot of fun like i know somebody who literally in a very large game will go all in um like three or four times without even knowing what their cards are and somehow they they get out of the box every time because they're just doing a marig the marigold strategy whatever this be a double your bets

SPEAKER_91: so they're just well you play with these huge maniacs yeah you play with maniacs but the flat size is probably a lot bigger than i play with yeah yeah yeah so as we say in our home game

SPEAKER_304: win a prius lose a prius it's pretty brutal i'm not trying to gamble a prius so maybe we won't play

SPEAKER_104: but uh yeah we'll talk about it okay lose an uber black win an uber black that's probably a little bit better all right talk to you soon uh thanks for coming on the pod cheers bye yeah anytime