What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both in their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Cesar Curiyama. Cesar,
welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat.
You are the creator of an app called One Second Every Day, or One SE for short. And every
day for the past eight years, I think, you've recorded...
I'm at over eight and a half at this point.
Eight and a half years of every single day you record a one second video of what's going
on in your life, and you stitch it all together. So every year you have basically a six minute
video. So now I guess you're like something like 50 minutes of video for the last eight
and a half years of your life where you can easily go back and watch everything you're
doing. This is now recently my favorite app. So I've got like eight seconds of video. I
can see what's going on for the last week, but it's pretty cool, man. I really love what
you're doing. And now it's not just you. It's many millions of people have used One Second
Every Day and are recording one second videos of their life every single day. Why did you
start this? What set you on this journey?
So you know, my background is in like visual effects and animation. I work like agencies
and advertising at the beginning of my career after I went to art school. I was always doing
film stuff, video stuff, graphic design, photography. I kind of dabbled in a lot of different mediums
beyond animation. Animation was kind of like just how I ended up in art school accidentally.
I was a computer science guy. I thought I was going to go do computer science stuff.
And I started doing animations. I started winning these local kind of animation things
in high school. And I thought, oh, I want to be an animator because I want to tell stories.
And then I went to that's how I ended up in art school. Took a little bit of time working
in advertising to realize, oh, like, I'm not actually in control of my of the ideas that
I wish I was working on. I'm just kind of like executing on other people's ideas. And
so I kind of became disenfranchised with with it pretty quickly. But that was a that's kind
of how I got started and kind of didn't know what my exit strategy was out of working in
advertising. And then one day I saw this TED talk by Stephen Sagmeister, who is an alumni
of my art school, Pratt Institute here in Brooklyn. And he gave a talk called the power
of time off. And it like instantly like changed my life. And, you know, he basically talked
about how every seven years he closes down his studio and takes a one year retire, many
retirement. And he's going to do that. And he's just going to retire five years later.
But he's going to have like these little retirements happening throughout his life. Because when
he's old, you know, he may not have the energy or the capacity to do some of the things that
he can do when he's young. And that really, really hit a chord with me because I was working
100 hour work weeks all the time. I was, you know, 100 hours. Sometimes, yeah, you know,
we would be on deadlines and I would literally work until like 2am. Sometimes literally sleep
at the studio. Sometimes, you know, a car would take me home, I'd be up at nine, I'd
be back at work at 10. And I would just repeat, repeat for like two or three weeks sometimes
if we really were on a crazy deadline.
What was so important that you needed to work 100 hours on it?
The deadlines we were, I feel like we were famous for taking on the project, like the
tight deadlines that every other studio would just laugh and say, like, there's no way we
could do that. And we would say, we will, we'll do it. But we would charge crazy money
for it. And that money would basically go towards overtime. And it was just yeah, it
was just like, oh, we got to get this commercial out by, you know, by the holiday season or
something in this case, it was just whatever it took to get it done. And that almost always
took just like staying up all night for and then of course, the next looming deadline,
right on the other end of the other side of that one project when we find out that you
know, and so sometimes it was just months and months of that. And it broke me. And frankly,
I'm kind of grateful that it broke me, like, because it broke me at an age when I was still
capable of like, pausing, like, and re doing something like figuring out how to do something
else with my life, because I was like, I can't, this is not sustainable. This is not how I
want to, this is not how I want to spend my time, you at least getting paid well and compensation
for working these 100 hour weeks are totally I think up until this year, I was I was still
making more in advertising than I was like, like, like running this company, because we
were we were we've been bootstrapped for for this entire, you know, journey. And, you know,
me and my co father were paying ourselves as little as possible so that we could make
the next hire and make the next hire. You know, and so yeah, it was a Yeah, those were
lucrative times. But luckily, I was never, you know, I ended up saving my money. And
that's what allowed me to quit my job eventually. So I could, I could take a year off from
work. And that's how I landed on one second every day. If it wasn't for that, I might
have, you know, gotten a better apartment and like, you know, bought faster clothes
and got used to like what I was making. But instead, I'm pretty frugal. And I'm pretty
I don't, luckily, like I, you know, the only thing I basically splurged on is like tech
stuff like, you know, like a drone came out, I want it, you know, it's like, that's, that's
the only thing I'll spend on that. Maybe I don't need to, but I do. But basically, this
TED talk essentially kind of convinced me that I needed to in order to really figure
out my exit strategy, I needed to make like built time for myself, like it wasn't about
figuring out what I was going to do after advertising, it was I needed to buy myself
enough time to figure it out. And my headspace was, you know, 90% work. And so like, there
wasn't a lot of headspace left in my brain for me to think about like, Oh, maybe I should
be an entrepreneur, like never, you know, and so it never really crossed my mind. And
so what I did was, I literally went up to accounting as soon as that power of time off
talk was over, I said, I just opened up the savings account, I need to put half my paycheck
into this account from now on. And I'm not gonna and I didn't touch it for two years.
And literally, I gave my job like a, you know, two years, that's up. I was like, I'm quitting
my job in two years, basically will live off half my paycheck and figured out how to do
that no matter what. And so just, you know, drank up a flask, you know, when I was hanging
out with friends, like cut off cable and all the things, it just, you know, very bare minimum
lifestyle. But that bought me a year. And leading up to that year, I knew that I had
this lifelong frustration with my memory, I've always wanted to keep a diary or a journal,
and I could never keep the habit, I would do it for a couple of days, I'd stop. And,
you know, and I thought, man, this might be the only year of my life that I ever get to
like have total freedom. So like, I may not be able to pull probably won't be able to
pull a step in second, I just took a year off every seven years, this might be it, let's
make a count. And I don't want to turn 40 one day and like not really remember the day
to day of that year off. And so I was like, what's the little breadcrumb that I can leave
for myself every day, where I'll never forget a day of this year, you know, no matter how
old I get. And I realized, well, the iPhone had gotten pretty good. Writing was over my
medium, but the iPhone had like was shooting HD now, it was like the iPhone four, or from
four s, and I realized, oh, like, this is like, I've always like, videos, always been
my medium, like, I should be journaling with video. But also, I was somebody who would
go on vacation and like, take a million photos in the mail, you know, with a tripod and everything.
And it would, you know, all end up in a hard drive that I never had time to look at. So
I thought, I should record what is the minimal amount I need to record every day, to still
give me enough of a memory trigger. And so that's how I landed on one second. And I think
my background in animation helped, because I realized that a second was actually a pretty
substantial amount of time. A lot of people will think it's like a photograph, but it's
like, there's a lot more to it, not to mention sound is a big memory trigger. And so I also
wanted the final product to be easy to, to rewatch. And so, like landing at one second
per day meant that every year came out to six minutes. And six minutes is like that
sweet spot of like, I can always make six minutes of time to like, relive a year of
my life. But if it's like 30 minutes, like that's like, like, how often am I gonna sit
around and like watch 30 minutes of my life? You know, so the idea was just the bare minimum
and that came to one second. And that's how I landed on one second. And that was meant
to just be a one year project for that year off. So that I'll never forget that year off.
But even just like after a couple of weeks, I realized what a positive impact that was
having on my day to day life that I thought, well, I should actually do this for the rest
of my life. Like, why would I only do this for a year? That's how it came about.
Yeah, I've been using the app for the last week. And it's taught me that my life is pretty
boring. Trying to figure out like a new second I can record that I haven't recorded that's
just not, you know, me sitting at my computer. And I could totally see how doing this and
getting this habit makes you want to live a more interesting, varied life. You mentioned
taking a year off from your job. And then the talk that you mentioned that inspired
you by Stefan Sagmeister, he also was taking these years off from his job every seven years.
And you basically go on a sabbatical. What is it that makes that year off successful
for you? Well, the thing that he said that really resonated with me, among other things
is he talked about how all the work that he was doing, you know, on a date for seven years,
right, working at the studio, like his creative work was the work for clients. So it was like
he was being creative, but in in pursuit of an of a crew of like, you know, selling something
or whatever it is, right, like it's a job, right? You're being creative, because like
you're being hired to be creative about about a particular, you know, company or brand or
whatnot. And that year off allows him and all his employees to essentially have a year
where they can be creative for just whatever they want to do, just whatever is actually
just their version of exercising their creativity. And that is essentially how I felt, because
I always had never short on ideas. I have a mail, I have a never note. That's like got
1000 ideas that I'm just happy to give away. And my day to day life was just spending it
on working being creative, quote unquote, on things that like, was in lieu of some brand
or some project for other people. And, and so it was like once I can every day is a perfect
example of like, I was just doing that for me as like, how do I? Okay, I'm going to try
to finally keep a journal, like, what are the things that work for me that's actually
going to get me to not do the journal thing for like three days on a stop, like I always
do. And so I was like, all right, I'm a video guy should be video, like I needed to be short,
I need to be this needs to be that. And, you know, all that essentially came about of a
my frustration and my pain point, but it also came about for me having the headspace to
actually like, to do that. And, you know, what I mentioned earlier about like, when
you like 90, when you're just like, so much of your headspace is taken up by work, let's
just say 60% of your headspace is taken up by work. Like, what happens when you remove
that? And you just have this empty 60% of your headspace? Like, what do you fill it
with? Right? And that's where the magic goes, like you need time to let that linger and
see what happens, see what manifests, you know, and that's a, that's the thing that
like, was so powerful about that, that you're off was giving your headspace emptiness. And
then who knows how you'll fill it, you just live your life and gravitate towards whatever,
whatever you gravitate towards, you know, because now you have free time.
So I took a year off when I started and the hackers and I took that year off not to have
a sabbatical not to just enjoy life and remember every day, I took it off, basically, with
the express purpose of starting a profitable business so that I would never have to get
a job in the future. And what I did when my headspace was cleared was I spent six months
basically just messing around, not building anything that was serious, nothing that worked.
And then after I saw that I drained half my bank account, I got very serious. And I was
like, Oh, I need to actually figure out what's gonna make money. You didn't do that. You didn't
have that that plan when you started. And yet you ended up coming up with this idea
for an app. How did you eventually turn it into a business and then, you know, get out
of the situation where you had to go back to this job?
So I, I actually had an almost identical journey to you. So I did not intend to just squander
the year off. I actually did intend to figure out, okay, I have a year to figure out how
do I do? How do I make a living? How do I change the trajectory of my life so I don't
just work in advertising on things that I'm not passionate about until, you know, I die.
And I, in the first couple of months, like I've made very little progress. I didn't know
what I needed to do. I played around with some ideas. I, I directed a music video that
did really well before, like a couple of years before I quit my job. And I did that in my
spare time, which was, took me 14 months to put together that music video, because I had
very little spare time, but it ended up doing really well, like in millions of views. And
I thought, Oh, maybe I'll be a music video director. Maybe I just need to direct a couple
more music videos to build a name for myself. And so that was one idea. But I had a whole
bunch of ideas. I even had an idea of going back to, like graduate school to do film and
do that or whatever. But it wasn't, it was really after just a couple of months of doing
one second every day, which was just supposed to be my way to keep it dire. It wasn't ever
meant to be a business. It just started becoming clear to me that this was me scratching an
itch that I've had for a long time that seemed to finally solve my problem. And I thought
I really believe that if I, if this is helping me, it could probably help a lot of like enough
other people that there's value in finding a way to make this something that everybody
like other people can do easily. Because at the time, I mean, unless you were pretty good
at Final Cut Pro or iMovie, and even I mean, you're talking about like 365 videos per year
that are being spliced in. I mean, it takes work and skill and some knowledge of the software.
And I thought, man, this should be as easy to do as Instagram. Like I'm literally just
grabbing a moment from from a video per day and logging it. And I'm not even watching
the video until I'm done. So yeah, I came at it from the same way. And it wasn't until
the second half of my year off that I was like, Oh, wait a minute. I think this can
be the thing. But it wasn't it didn't start out that way. I had all these other ideas.
So you weren't a software engineer and you're not. You didn't have a ton of money saved
up. You mentioned you were drinking from a flask, you're saving money, looking frugally,
however you could. How do you get a quality, you know, iPhone app built with no money and
no coding skills?
Yeah, so the journey on that is, you know, I literally, I literally started by googling
how do I make an app like I just didn't cook like I went to art school, put together a
mock up of what I what I wish existed. I'm also very techie. So like I you know, I bought
iPhone on day one, you know, I was early adopter, blah, blah, blah. And so, um, so I knew what
I wish existed. I have no idea how to build it. I took some programming courses in high
school and stuff, but I wasn't I wasn't remotely proficient for it. So basically, I just started
out by asking everybody that who would listen to me for coffee asking questions, you know,
all right, I need this kind of program and this thing I started emailing cold emailing
every development shop in New York City that I could find on Google. I started showing
up to iOS developer meetups in New York, even though I was in a developer, and I would just
like blend in and just like try to cope that nobody asked me a programming question. And
I was just trying to make friends and see if I could, you know, meet somebody who might
be a good co founder or something like that, you know, I was getting ready to give up.
And then I was excited to talk to everybody. And they said, basically, every dev shop that
I talked to was like, well, we'll build this free for $100,000. And I'm like, well, I don't
have $100,000. But thank you. And the thing that like, made me even more, you know, queasy
after they would say the 100k is that they would say like, and this is a very difficult
thing. We don't know if we can do it. And we're just gonna keep charging $100 an hour
while we figure it out. So it could end up being way I'm like, I'm like, all right, well,
I mean, I don't I mean, because, you know, yeah, I mean, this is 2012. Like people don't
like building there's like a lot of I like there's a lot of stuff about building an editing
app that just didn't exist like it exists today. And so like out of the box stuff, essentially,
you know, I got lucky I ended up at this agency party that a friend of mine was was that invited
me to he was the only person I knew. And he was busy mingling with like 40 other people
he invited. And so I just stood there and I did the classic like just sit next to someone
I was sending sending somebody who also wasn't talking to anybody. So I just said, hi, Caesar,
what do you do? And he's like, I'm a developer or I'm I work at a development shop. I'm like,
wait a minute, which one? Because I've talked to all of them. And he he said, I'll come
in 50. And I'm like, I how have I've never heard of you guys? I've googled there all
of them. And he's like, Oh, we just started we just opened up shop. We all quitter. We
all put our jobs at this financial place. And we're all we're all gonna we're all gonna
like we're all starting our own thing. We just like we don't you know, we don't have
SEO yet. I'm like, well, can I have your card? Can we meet? I'm trying to build an app. Two
weeks later, I was at their offices. I pitched like I showed them the mock ups. I was like,
this is what I'm trying to do. And I caught them at the perfect time. Like they were trying
to get their business going. Like they saw that I spoke at Ted and there was like some
credibility to the idea because the video had done really well. I have gotten millions
of views the original ones first one second everyday video. And so you know, they came
back to me two weeks later to their credit. They even like spent time on their own before
they gave me a quote or anything like making sure they could do it like they were doing
their own internal testing, making sure that they couldn't they weren't over promising
something. And they said, Hey, we want to be the guys who made this. And so because
of that, and we know you're don't have money. So we're going to do this for the lowest possible
amount that we can give it to you for a flat fee of 20k. And I'm like, Oh, amazing. All
right, high fives. I'm in, let's do it. And then I followed that by saying I also don't
have 20,000. But I will I am going to find it. And it came to them like a week or so
later and said, I'm gonna launch a Kickstarter campaign. That's how many raised 20k. And
I hope you guys trust me, that I'm going to pull it off. Because my request is that I
don't launch the Kickstarter campaign until we have a working prototype of the app, because
I don't want to promise something. I don't want to be one of those Kickstarter campaigns
for like, this is what we're gonna build. We're gonna put a statue of Robocop in Detroit,
right? And I figure it out later. And it's like, no, no, like, here's the app working
and usable. Here's like video and like work, this is gonna happen. And luckily, they, you
know, to the credit, they trusted me, we launched it, it took me months to put it together,
we launched it. And we, you know, we became, you know, we were told the state where the
you know, we got the most backers ever for an app on Kickstarter, we got a lot of press,
we, you know, had over 11,000 backers. And, and that allowed us to build the first version
of one second every day, back in, we launched it in January of 2013. We launched it, we
launched it two weeks after the Kickstarter ended, by the way, which is like a record
for a Kickstarter campaign. It was like two weeks later, launched.
Yeah, that's crazy. Usually, Kickstarter is notorious for like eight months after the
project's over, like, sorry, this is an update, you know, we're behind schedule, it'll be
out another year. It's funny to hear you go around to all these different dev shops to
talk to developers at parties and say, hey, I've got, I've got an app idea. I've been
on the other side of that equation, literally hundreds of times, hey, Courtland, I've got
an app idea, now you can code, you know, why don't you build this for me? And 99% of the
time I'm like, well, what's, why would I do that for you? Why don't I, I have my own ideas.
I'll just work on my own stuff. You know, what do I need you for? But in your, your
case, you're a little bit special because you would given a Ted talk, like you were
actually legit. This idea had legs, there's excitement about it. And we kind of glossed
over that part of the story. You were initially inspired by a Ted talk that you heard from
Stefan Stagmeister, but you ended up eventually on the Ted stage yourself, not TedX, not to
disparage TedX speakers, but like the fully fledged actual Ted talk. And I think your
video now has stage. Yeah. Main stage. And you've got two million views on your video
at this point. How do you, how do you get into that position? What happened there? Yeah.
The threat there, the story is, uh, I had just started recording one second every day
for myself. I was about two months in, maybe less, maybe six weeks in. And the reason I
saw that Stefan Stagmeister Ted talk that changed my life instantly, that just convinced
me to quit that what I needed to do was quit my job and buy myself a year of time to figure
things out. That talk, which inspired me to quit my job, essentially I watched it because
I would watch every Ted talk every day. Like they would, there was every day there was
the Ted talk of the day. And this is back when like Facebook 20, man, this is like,
I don't know. When I watched that talk, it might've been like 20, like 2008 or 2009.
And so the Facebook algorithm wasn't like scoring things yet or stuff like that. Like,
so like, if you liked the page on Facebook, they would just, you would see everything
they posted. It wasn't like throttled where like, unlike unless they paid, then I would
see it right. Like I, every day I would see it. So that's how I knew that the tech, like
I would see it on my feed Ted talk of the day I would watch it. And so because I saw
every post they posted about the first ever Ted auditions and I thought I clicked on the
link. I read it. I'm like, wow, like what an amazing opportunity for somebody out there
to like be able to audition for the first ever Ted auditions. And I was like, I've only
had an idea worth spreading, you know, and I just kind of forgot about it. But the link
stayed on my, on my like, you know, web browser, just like hanging there, just with a little
Ted logo. And I would just like any as I'm on the web, which I'm on the web a lot every
day, you know, I would just see it there hovering and, and it just kind of stayed in my headspace
because of that. And I was at my dad's birthday, I was recording my second of the day at my
dad's birthday. And as I was recording it, I thought to myself, you know, this is having
like a really positive impact on my life so far. It's such a silly idea. All I'm doing
is recording a second of video per day. There are people curing cancer. There are people
like, you know, fixing the planet and countries and I'm going to submit this as a Ted audition
thing because if I better, literally it came to this, like if I don't do it, I'm gonna
regret it forever. So I just need to do it so that I never regret it. And that was the
only reason I did it was just like that itch of like, I don't I don't like regretting things
like, you know, one of my high school, like guidance counselor was like, you know, my
mentor at the time, I guess to some degree was you know, you said, this is something
that to me that just hardwired into my head, which is like, I live to regret the things
you did, not the things you didn't do. And I just like that's just always been hardwired
in my head always. And so I went home. And the deadline was that night at midnight, basically.
And I just like recorded the video had to record a one minute video of me doing the
Ted audition that like my Ted talking essentially 60 seconds, I included 30 seconds of the first
30 seconds of the one second everyday video. This is online, by the way, which is very
embarrassing. I wish like, luckily, nobody, it's it's a little it's a little hidden, nobody
ever finds it. And two weeks later, I got an email from Ted saying like, Hey, we chose
essentially me and 17 other applicants out of about 1000 to speak at an event in New
York City in front of a crowd of Ted attendees, like people who go to the conference, and
they're going to be judging. And that was, man, I can't, that's a whole story on how
I mean, Reggie Watts was one of the auditioners, which is like crazy, like, just give Reggie
Watts a top top. Why is he auditioning? This is nuts. And they ended up choosing four of
us. I got an email two weeks later, they chose four of us to speak at the main stage Ted
and that, uh, yeah, I threw up that entire week. I was just like, I've never done public
speaking. And I was my first public speaking event ever was at main stage. Crazy. That
was, that was a rough, that was a rough day. But I got through it. And you know, that that
really obviously kickstarted the idea because immediately afterwards, people were walking
up to me and everybody was saying like, I want to do this too. I want to do this too.
How do I do this? How'd you do it? And that's the moment that it really clicked on me. Like
I have to build an app that makes it easy for anybody to do this. You know, that explains
why you had the, the wherewithal to basically go from dev shop to dev shop and figure out
how you can get this app built because you had so much validation that this is something
that people actually wanted.
Yeah, it's like a version of traction, right? It's a, it's not like, uh, Oh, I built this
and we're growing 10% a month to month. Like it was just like, Hey, like, look at how many
views this has. Look at the comments. Like everybody's like, cause the outside of the
Ted talk, just the video and it's of itself by YouTube and Vimeo, you know, had a lot
of views and you know, we got the front page of Reddit and you know, it was like the comments
were just heavily on like, Oh my God, I want to do this. That helped validate the idea,
you know, beyond just like, Hey, I've been doing this thing and I think it's cool. It
was like, Hey, I built this thing, put it online. Can those abuse people say they want
to do it too. And I think that goes obviously a long way without actually building anything.
Every now and then I talked to founders who are so secretive about their idea that they
won't even tell it to you like at a meetup or a party, like, Oh, I can't tell you the
details. And yet here you are. You hadn't built anything and you were like on the main
stage at Ted broadcasting your idea to millions of people on the front page of Reddit without
a care in the world, just like putting this out there for everyone to see anyone could
have built it. Did you feel any pressure to hurry up and get the app developed? Did you
worry that other people would take the idea or are you just sort of cruising along a hundred
percent? And I've actually, I was that guy. I'll be honest. Like it took me a long time
to realize that, that, that's just not helpful for anyone. I definitely was secretive. Even
after the, you know, the app came out, people would ask me like, what's next? What are you
going to do this? What are you going to do? Like what, what, what, you know, what's on
the, whatever. I was like, Oh, you know, just be very vague. Like we're, we're working on
some stuff. Like I, I would keep my ideas close to the chest and I can't remember who
it was. It really talked some sense into me on how that just, no one's, no one's out there
trying to steal your idea, you know, and like, and there, trust me, after the app came out,
there were certainly people who were like, Oh, that's a thing. We should make a clone.
But generally speaking, I think that the pros of telling, just sharing your idea to anybody
who listened are garganturally and you're like, you know, better off than the cons.
Like the cons are like very tiny and minuscule and edge cases. There's just always edge cases
of somebody like stealing an idea or something like that. But you know, and ultimately looks,
for example, that, you know, they're, they're like the people who built clones built, built
it without heart, built it very utilitarian, without any insight into like, they weren't
somebody who actually did once every day for a year and then built an app to like figure
out what they wish existed, which is what I did. They just built something that does
the thing. It wasn't, it was functional, but it was, you know, just, they never had any,
they were never able to put the kind of love we put into it, you know? And so, you know,
at the end of the day, obviously execution is king, right? And luckily I came to my senses
and funny and funnily, like, you know, I get so many emails from people who want to want
my help and want to want me to like sign an NDA. And I'm like, dude, I'm not, I'm not
signing an NDA. Like, uh, you know, like it's, and I try to give them like a quick, like,
trust me, this is not the way you want to go about trying to get your idea to the world.
Like it's just, and more often than not, like sadly, like, you know, when I do convince
somebody to just tell me their idea, I'm like, uh, well, okay. Like, listen, first of all,
there's a very, very successful company that's already doing this. You probably, I guess
you haven't heard of and you don't have to be that guy who's like trying to, who doesn't
want to encourage people to like a pursuit. I'm always trying to like help. I answer a
lot of cold emails from people who just are looking for my help about specifically what
you said earlier, which is like, I'm somebody who's not a programmer who had an idea, wanted
to build something. I get so many emails from so many messages from people who are in the
same position where I can't build the thing. I need help building the thing. How do I build
the thing? And I'm like, I know it sucks. It's hard. Here's what I can suggest.
Yeah. I feel like I want to reemphasize some of the things you said because I've talked
to so many founders in this position and you nailed it on the head. Number one, the benefits
of telling people your ideas, seeing how they react, engaging with them about it, or gargantuan
the risks of like somebody cloning your idea or minuscule. It's just like an edge case.
You probably shouldn't worry about it. And regardless, if you build something successful,
people are probably going to clone it. People have cloned and the hackers, people cloned
most apps and those people cloning your app are not really the people you want to be worried
about because they don't really have the knowledge. They don't really have the heart. They're
just kind of arbitrarily cloning what you do. So they're usually not that good. They're
usually not that scary. So it's more than worth it to share your idea with people.
I want to talk a little bit about this TED talk.
Sure.
Ted, obviously, as you mentioned, has a lot of very accomplished people, a lot of people
who've been working on world changing ideas for decades. We've spoken to audiences about
it hundreds of times. This is your first time on the stage, your first time public speaking.
How do you prepare for something like that? And also what are some of the things you learned
from the staff at TED that you think would be generally useful for others to know?
I don't even know where to start. I mean, okay, so the one thing I learned that got me
through it, there's a couple of things that got me through it. One was when I auditioned,
there was like at the event here in New York, I went up on stage during rehearsals, which
was like my me time with the stage. There's only a couple of people like connecting wires
and stuff like that. No one's really paying attention. It's just your time to get comfortable
with the stage. And I had written this, like I had three minutes. I was allowed three minutes
for my talk. And I had this perfect three minute thing that I wrote up of like, here's
my talk. And I went up on stage, I said it, or I tried to say it. And after two sentences,
I couldn't remember what the third sentence was. I just stood there. Like with empty seats,
I just stood there and I panicked. And I just pretended that my mic wasn't working. I wasn't
sure if my mic was working. And I just walked off stage because I was just like mortified.
I mean, I was every bone in my body. I was panicking. I froze. I went up to the bathroom.
I locked myself in a stall and I, and I just sat there like, Oh my God, what am I going
to do? Like I, I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I was shaking.
And I just sat there and I was like, what's my game plan? What's my game plan? The game
plan that I came up with that saved me was I said to myself, if you forget what you're
supposed to say, just keep saying stuff. Just explain the thing in your own words in the
moment. No one's going to know you're fucking up except you. So as much as I mean, I literally
had my little print out and I just said, I wrote, I read the thing I wanted to say for
like the next four hours over and over and over and over again. But I'm just so, yeah,
I got up on stage and exact same thing happens. I said three sentences before I just come
completely just blanked. I'm just, I'm just so nervous that any, all these eyes looking
at me, I'm just panicking and I'm like, just keep talking, just keep talking. And I just
said a bunch of stuff that I didn't mean to say. Like I said, I got pretty morbid. Like
I was like, someday when I die, I want this video to just be what I leave behind. I don't
want a tombstone because like I'm going to, I don't, I don't need to take up space in
this world. Like I just said, like I just blapped, which is I'm good at blabbing. I'm
not good at like rehearsing a set amount of characters to say in order again after I read
it. Like I'm just not a memorizer. I'm just not good at it. And I didn't know that about
me because I've never had to do public speaking, but luckily I got through it. I went a minute
over my time. Sorry, Ted. And, and it's hard. It's funny because like it's, there's the
total possibility that if I had actually said what I meant to say, I wouldn't have been
chosen to speak at the main stage. Like it, I don't know. Maybe it's the random stuff
that I spoke out of my heart in that moment of panic. That is what got me the main stage.
I'll never know. I'll never know what the, what the outcome would have been. But the
same exact thing happened to me on the main on the, on the, on the Ted stage. I got up
there as much as that, that was an eight minute talk. As much as I tried to memorize what
I was supposed to say, I just couldn't do it in the moment. I just froze. And again,
the crowd doesn't know, but I just started speaking from the heart. And so I see them.
I've only been able to watch my Ted talk like three or four times. And it was only because
I wish my parents were watching it and they don't know what Ted is. They're just like,
I don't know. Cute. Thank you. Like, I don't know. Congratulations, I guess. But you know,
like I, when I hear it, like, you know, half the things I meant to say, I didn't get to
say them. I, you know, I feel pain about that, but, but I got through it and people seem
to resonate to it and people message me till this day about it. And, and, you know, so
yeah, speaking of Ted, I don't know. What I learned for number one was what works for
me is speaking from the heart. Ever since I, I give myself like bullet points to memorize
and ideally with even with a power note and makes it super easy. And I just speak from
the heart as I start seeing the, you know, the, the powerful presentation kind of play
out. Like I'm just like, Oh yeah, I know why I put this up there. I want to say, I want
to explain X and that's how I do my public speaking. I was like, speak from the heart
based on a PowerPoint image. I'm the opposite. I will memorize verbatim every line of a 45
minute talk, but you got to do whatever works for you. So you did this Ted talk. You off
the back of that found some developers who were excited to work with you. They built
a prototype for free. You got on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter went well. How many backers
did you end up getting 11,000? 11,281. And they each paid you what? An average of a dollar
or a couple of dollars. Right. The, the, the terrible businesses minded Caesar of that
time was I didn't, I wasn't trying to build a business. I was trying to build the app
and then put it on the app store and have it exist so that people could, I just wanted
people to be able to do one second every day. That was my goal. And, and the additional
cherry on top of that goal ideally was I make enough money passively on through the app
store on the app that I can use that income to like work on my other creative endeavors
that I had, like, you know, make another music video as an example or something. And that
was a terrible business decision. I decided to make the app $1 so that, cause I just wanted
people to have it. So, you know, like 8,000 or something of the, of the, of the pledges
were a dollar. I did spend a lot of time figuring out how to build value without building more,
without adding more work into the Kickstarter. So for $5, we put you naming the credits forever.
So till this day, the app has a credit, like a Kickstarter backers section and every, there's
like about, you know, something like three to 4,000 names in it. And that was amazing
because those people are paying us five times more for the app than they had to for their
name of the credit. So it was like perfect. Cause it's basically an, as you know, it's
an SV file, a CV file we have, we upload into the app. And so it created very little work
for us. Um, that was one of my takeaways from doing a lot of Kickstarter research was like
a lot of, a lot of, uh, Kickstarter's are just like promise like, we'll do this, we'll
do that. If you give us this much. And it's like, yeah, that's going to take you a lot
of them. That's like, you know, somebody who's giving like t-shirts away for $20 or whatever
the $20 tier, it's like, that's going to cost you like a lot. You're going to, you're going
to, yeah, you're going to make like a couple, like $3 or $4 per pledge on a lot of work,
but at least at the time there's better solutions for that stuff now. But anyway, so I, you
know, I made sure to, to make sure every tier, all the way to the $250 tier, which was like,
you get the app right now for two, you know, for $200, you would become a beta tester.
We literally send you the app right now. And we were limited to the 100 beta testers kind
of rule at the time from Apple. So, uh, we only had like 40 slots, but all of them filled
up in a, in a heartbeat. Like if we could have filled that up with like unlimited, oh
God. Oh, I would have been, plus we would have had way more beta testers, way more.
We would have figured out way more bugs before we launched. Like on day one, we had like
50,000 downloads. I mean, it was, it was a support ticket per second. Like it was just
like, boom, boom, boom. I mean, we, we, the first two to three months were rough just
fixing bugs. It was just a part of the limitation of like only being, only having like, you
know, 40, you know, 60 or so people testing, you know, but
it was, um, we at this point when you launched, was it just you and the dev shop?
Yeah. So it's just me full time and the dev shop part time, essentially like they were,
you know, they were, you know, obviously for the first couple of months, I was very, very
active back and forth, but then obviously over time they needed to make money and they
had other clients. And, and so yeah, for the first like two years, I would say, yeah, for
the most part of the first two years, I just still thought in my head, I can't wait to
finish once he finished these bugs and these updates, I'll finish quote unquote the app.
And it took me, it took me a while to realize, Oh, like you don't finish technology. There's
always going to be another iPhone. There's always going to be another iOS update. There's
always going to be a feature that we're like, that's really important. Learn the hard way.
And then that's when, you know, it was kind of like, you know, halfway through year two,
I think when I realized, Oh, this is a business. This isn't just a thing I can finish and move
on to the next thing and just forget about it. Like this is taking up all my time at
the time too. This is around the time when, um, chef, those listeners of yours have heard
who've watched the movie chef, John Favreau's chef that, uh, you know, we were featured
in that movie. John had seen the Ted talks, uh, had started using the app, loved it, asked
if he could write it into his movie. That movie is largely about social media, by the
way, like that it's a food truck movie and it's about like parenthood, but it's also
about social media. At that point, it was like, Oh yeah. Okay. This is a business. And
that's when I really started to think about, all right, how do I actually grow and make
this something permanent and forever? And not just like, uh, I'm done thing.
It's crazy how much attention you were getting. John Favreau, like the app you put in his
movie, you got 50,000 downloads. I think you said like right after you launched, where
was all this attention coming from? Were you doing a ton of marketing? Or was it just because
of the Ted talk? Uh, you know, until this day, we've, uh, we've
never, we've never really spent a dime on user acquisition. Uh, for the most part, we've
it's been entirely, our growth has been organic all these years. The, everything has a story
probably. Uh, so with the 50,000 downloads on day one was essentially because, well,
the Kickstarter did really well. So now we, we had essentially the ability to email 11,000
people, right? So that's pretty powerful. We did not have a way to deliver the app to
11,000 people, which was a problem. Essentially like contacted someone at Apple, kind of like,
like maybe lied that I was in San Francisco and I really would like to talk to somebody
there because we, we were like, how do we deliver 11,000 apps to people? Um, there's
no way to do till this day. I don't think there's a way to do that. They said yes. And
I just like got on the next flight to San Francisco and I, you know, and basically I
just got met with a lot of red tape, meaning like there was just no way for them to give
me 11,000 promo codes so I can give you 11,000 promo codes to 11,000 people. Uh, there's
just no way to do that. And so we were stuck with only one option, which was we are going
to make the app free for 24 hours and we're going to message every Kickstarter backer
as much as we can leading up to this moment and say, please, please, please download this
app during this 24 hour window because it's the only way we can get you the app before
we turn the app to paid because of that. There's a couple of things that happened. A obviously
there's a lot of people who, who run newsletters or whatever, who see this email. And so the
day it goes free, a you have to like, you have a thousands of thousands of people posting
on social media and sending and blasting out everywhere like, Hey, once I get ready, it's
free today only. Um, and so we've got tons of tons of tons of quote unquote free press
from that. So like, you know, we were getting tons of, you know, we were, I was getting
Google alerted like crazy about like, you know, all these like Mac websites that are
like one second every day is 24 hours only once it's free, it's free. And so the word
got out because everybody's like, this is, this is the only time we're going to be able
to download that for free. So that's how we ended up right next to Instagram on day one.
And that's how that happened. That was a headache because like, obviously a lot of people that
in CD emails and a lot of people for the next many years were, I was getting emails from
Kickstarter back or saying like, Hey, I never got the app. I missed the 24 hour window and
I would have to send them a promo code, which we only got a hundred of every time we submitted
an update. So sometimes it would take us a while to get the app to people. I was, oh,
it was an ongoing nightmare in that regard. And yeah, it was, it was rough, but in regards
to, to chef, basically I'm a giant nerd and I read comic books throughout, you know, growing
up, you know, and I was, uh, I was a, I was an intern at Marvel comics when I was in high
and, and, and, and in college and you know, Marvel had started making their own movies
and I was a huge John Favreau fan. So I was following him on Twitter when he was, when
Iron Man three came out, like he, he directed Iron Man one and Iron Man two, but he did
not direct Iron Man three and he cast himself in Iron Man one and two as like, you know,
Iron Man's driver, happy, happy, happy. And he still showed up for Iron Man three, even
though he was no longer directing it. And I thought, why isn't anybody giving this man
credit for having the class to still show up as like Iron Man's driver in an Iron Man
sequel, even though he's no longer directing the movie. And I was like, why isn't anybody
giving him like his due credit? So it was like four in the morning. Like I just like
tweeted out on that. Like it was just like, Hey, John, thank you for having the class
to still be, you know, play, you know, still play your role in Iron Man three, even though
you're no longer directing it, something like that. I didn't even send it. I was too, if
I was like, I was like afraid somebody would see it and like judge me. And I just, I was
like, I just fell asleep on the couch and I woke up like at six in the morning and I
was walking to bed and I saw, I swiped up my phone or whatever at the time I hit the
whole button and it opened and I saw that I had that draft of that tweet that I didn't
send. And it's like, I'm groggy at six in the morning and like, whatever. And it just
hit send and I went to sleep. And then yeah, cut to me like on the set of the movie of
Chef like, you know, a year later and I was talking to the guy who was shooting the making
of, uh, he shoots the making up for all the Marvel movies and he's like, do you know how
like you, you know, John found out about your app and I'm like, I have no idea. And he's
like, I guess he tweeted something nice at him. Like, you know, a while back and I was
like, Oh, like that's how this all happened. Like it was just like key. Saw that tweet
looked at my profile so that I had given a Ted talk, clicked on the talk, watched the
talk. So I, there was an app, the app started using the app, loved the app. And then eventually
I got an email from a producer of chef saying like, John Favreau would like to include your,
or your app in his movie. And then of course they send me like the script of it and for
my approval. And it's like the best, most important part of the entire movie. And I'm
like, Oh my God, like this, I mean, this is incredible. Uh, and so that's, uh, that's
how that happened until this day. Obviously we've got people who watch chef and, and find
us through, through that movie.
It's crazy because there's so many bad things to be said about social media. In fact, most
of what people share publicly about social media is negative. It's about how it's ruining
the world. It's ruining our attention spans, et cetera, et cetera. But never before has
it been possible to get in touch with a celebrity or somebody you find so inspiring, uh, so
quickly and trivially and easily as just pressing send on a tweet, you know, at six in the morning
when you're groggy and having that be kind of a life changing event.
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I think about, you know, like, you know, in a multiverse kind of way,
like what is that perfect tweet you can send to someone that will change your life? Right?
Like there must be something you can write at the, that you can write a cut, like a set
of 180 character or 280 characters that you could send, you know, if you were to nail
it and you were to time it, right. Could literally change your life. Right. Your whole life static,
your whole life's different, right? Everything, the trajectory of life changes, but you know,
and so like, you could play out like millions of simulations on like on, on life and by
the right thing, uh, that would, you know, it's a, it's a fun thing to think about because
yeah, you could totally do that. Anybody has the power to do that. It's social media. I
mean, we, you know, I'll set, you know, at one second every day, we're, you know, we're,
we spend a lot of time thinking about what are the, what are the things about social
media that, that we love? What are the things that we hate and how do we unbundle those
into something that we think will benefit our customers and hopefully stick, you know,
be around for a long time without having to compromise with, uh, with the user experience.
You know, it's funny because there are a lot of people out there who aren't really doing
very much. Maybe they have big dreams, but they're not taking action. They're not, you
know, trying to figure out that perfect 140 character tweet they could send. But on the
flip side, here you were basically sitting on this rocket ship that was getting so much
press, somebody download so much attention and you didn't really conceptualize of it
as a real business. And for you, it was sort of a temporary means to an end. You're going
to move on to other things. Why do you think that it took you so long to really double
down and figure out that one second every day was something that you really should be treating
as a business?
Well, I think, uh, one of one thing I, I used, I think it used to be on my Twitter bio. I
think I took it out, but I used to say I was an accidental entrepreneur. Like I, I never,
if you, I literally would have conversations with friends in college saying like, Oh, owning
a business. That sounds like the worst possible like scenario. Like I just, everything about
it seemed awful to me. I mean, it just seemed like so much responsibility, so much, so much
weight on your shoulders. Like you're responsible for like making sure all these people get
paid and blah, blah, blah. And like, it just seems so stressful. And I was like, I just
want to go work at Pixar and nine to five walk out, work on Toy Story seven. You know,
like I just, uh, that that's where my head was at, but it wasn't really until I, you
know, got into the real world that I realized, Oh, actually being an entrepreneur is the
only way to really be in control of what you do and how you do it and, and really, really
actually have creativity or have the power to really, it's the same stuff. The same reasons
why I got into computer animation and all that, which was like, Oh, I wanted to tell
stories and I was in high school and making my own little animated shorts. I mean, those
are my ideas. I was executing them on my own. I was like distributing them up, distributing
them on my own. I mean, I was in charge of my destiny with all that. And I realized after
just working in the, you know, in the real world for a bit, like, Oh, I'm not in charge
of my destiny at all. Like I'm relying on all sorts of other factors that I have no
control over all the time. Being an entrepreneur was actually the only way to actually like
literally feel like I'm in control and I could make it whatever I, you know, if I worked
my ass off, I can make it work like I can make it happen. Right. So yeah, it took me
a long time to really kind of, uh, there was a, there was a book called the art of nonconformity
that I read right when I was, uh, right when I quit my job. And at that time I still had
no, I just was going to take your year off and go back to work. And hopefully by then
go back to work on something more, I'm more passionate about or whatnot. And that book
was the, uh, I feel like a huge catalyst for helping me because my entire bubble was just
like other animators, you know, other artists who there, what they did is, I mean, our school
doesn't prepare you to become an entrepreneur. Our, our, our school prepares you to go and
be an artist for other people. So, which is like a huge pain point for me. Like I literally,
I was a T I was, I was an adjunct professor at Pratt, which is where I went to school
afterwards. And I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm like,
23, 24. I'm like, I'm going to change the system. And I'm like, I'm going to like, I
was having all these meetings all the way to the president of the university, trying
to like change. I was like, there should be entrepreneurship class. There should be this,
there should be that like, and you know, I just read tape, read tape, read tape. Um,
but it took a long time to figure all this out, you know, frankly. And yeah, that book
opened up my eyes beyond my bubble of you go and you get a job and you get the best
job you can. And that was it. And that opened up my eyes to all the possibilities to really
be in control of your time in your life. And yeah, I'm very grateful to that book for helping
me see that like, actually, entrepreneurship is not what I thought it was like, I also
we always thought of entrepreneurship as like, Oh, like you become an entrepreneur because
you want to get rich. And like, that's never been my goal. That's just not what drives
me in any way. Like I'm driven more by like helping people or doing cool stuff and enjoying
who I'm around. And then like, I don't, I'm just not driven by those elements. It's why
I went to art school, which everybody said would be the worst possible thing I could
do for my career, because I'm never going to make money. And you know, it's when every
artist gets told when they go to art school, it's your, well, you're never, you're just
going to be a starving artist. The rest of your life was a lot of elements.
So when you decide to turn this app into a business, when you realize, Hey, being an
entrepreneur is not what I thought it was. It's actually a pretty cool thing. I can structure
my life how I want it to be. What's the process from going to just having a passion project
to having something that you're really serious about? What did that look like for you?
Well, the immediate thing for me was I can't do this by myself. Like once I realized, all
right, this is going to be a business. Also, I'm killing myself, running the business.
I mean, I was, man, I was wake, I mean, it was those first couple of years were rough.
Like I was waking up, checking my inbox, and there would be just endless emails, hundreds
of them were support tickets. And I would just put headphones on and block out like
three hours just to reply to reply to, to support tickets. So replying to support, a
lot of the support tickets were really rough because some things were, all right, yeah,
that we're working on that fix. And some things were like, yeah, like, you know, we have part
time development, like somebody, like everything was just slow. Everything was just like, you
know, I'm not going to be able to help up some of these people out. Like I had to start
making some hard decisions about like, where I was distributing my time best. And sometimes
that didn't meant I had to like ignore some support tickets, just because it meant that
I could fix the thing that they're writing support tickets about, right? Like, it's just
a really, really tough stuff. And at the same time, I know what I'm like, I know what my
strengths are and know what my strengths are not. You know, I just kind of started thinking
about like, man, what are all these things that like, just I'm never I'm like, I'm okay
at them, but they're just not, it's just not, it's not what the value of bring to this.
And luckily, you know, as I was putting, you know, piecing together these pieces of things
that I just didn't feel like I was really good at, I started thinking through the rolodex
of my brain of like, who are the humans in my life that like, into these these these traits.
And luckily, you know, it was pretty quick. I thought of, you know, one of my best friends,
Sean, who I went to art school with, during my year off, from work, he also quit his job.
And we drove around the US, US and Canada for like 95 days throughout the summer of
like 2012, and, you know, 25,000 miles. And, and during that time, you know, we did not
kill each other. You know, 95 days in a car together, camping together, you know, crashing
on couches together, we, you know, we got along, you know, and I thought, well, if I
was gonna, quote unquote, get married, because of being in a co founder relationship as a
marriage, if I was going to get married with somebody to really, you know, you know, stick
it out with me on this journey for the long term. Like, you know, I think Sean and I make
a good team. And he's the perfect other half of the brain where he likes making pie charts
and graphs and systems and like business models. And I'm like, Oh, like all that stuff just
makes me like, run away from the hills. I'm just I like the product. I like the ideas.
I like to like, you know, talk to people like that. There's just like all this other stuff
that I am way better at. And he was perfect for the other stuff. So I took him out to
drinks. I said, Hey, what will it take for you to quit your job Nickelodeon and join
me full time. And it took it took some courting. It took a couple of couple of drinks. It took
a couple of meetings. You know, one of his stipulations was like, I don't want to live
in New York anymore. And I'm like, cool, we're a remote company. And that was the day we
became a remote company. It just when we were two, that got the ball rolling. Like at that
point, up until he came on board and he quit his job and joined me, like at that point,
like, man, like things started moving, like, because I was just drowning in all the to
do's of trying to be a single founder with like part time development.
I think a lot of people in that situation would say, Hey, I've got a tech company, I've
got an app. And what tech founders do is they go to Silicon Valley, and they find some investors
and raise millions of dollars. So that's what I'm gonna do. And that's not what you did.
You decided to bootstrap at least for a while. Was that a conscious decision that you made?
There's a couple of ways we got to that. One of them was, I just, I'm so removed from Silicon
Valley land at the point where I'm starting one second every day, that I just don't know
this stuff. Like, I just don't know that you go out and you raise money. It just never,
my head doesn't think like my I didn't know, I didn't know the space, I came from art,
I would go to art galleries, not like, you know, VC holiday parties, you know, like I
came from a totally different space. And so I don't know anything about business. I went
to a this is like, one of my early seconds of the day was me at a book signing that Ferris
did in New York City at the Apple store. He had just released the four hour body. I had
read the four hour workweek. And so that's kind of like, kind of like started, you know,
like catching up on like Tim Ferriss blog. And I just like hovered around him, hoping
to talk to him. But I'm the kind of guy who like, I'm not pushy. I'm not I'm not the guy
who's just gonna like, screw all these people, I'm gonna get my way. And I'm just gonna cut
through everybody and say my thing. Like I just stood by wait, hoping that the crowd
around him would dissipate after he finished his talk. And I waited two hours, basically.
And there were still like 10 people around them. Clearly, some people were like, I'm
not leaving, I'm just gonna hang here. And I could hear Tim say, listen, guys, I've been
here for two hours. Sorry, like I really gotta have dinner. I'm gonna be late. And I'm like,
no, and I'm like, because I was hoping to just be the last person to talk to him. And
I just like, all right, I just mangled my way in there. And I just said, Tim, I just
gave a TED Talk about this thing. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to build
an app for it. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And I don't know how to get money to
build it. And he said, don't raise money, like figure out a way to build the build a
prototype without investors. And that really stuck with me. And that's how I landed on
because it's one of the reasons one of the main reasons that I landed on Kickstarter, as a means of funding the app. But that also
resonated for me long term in the sense of like, so once I started being a part of the tech
ecosystem, early on that first year of after launching the app, I'm like, all right, I
guess I'm a tech guy now. Um, you know, I started becoming pretty to this, like, VC land.
And I can't, it's like, it sounded alien to me, like, I couldn't believe that I could
just pitch someone this thing. And then they'll just write me a check for 100 that like a
million dollars, for example, right? Like, and all they get in return is, you know, on
paper, 20% of it. And if I fail, I never have to pay the million back. That sounded insane to me,
like, I just couldn't, I couldn't, couldn't believe that that was real. And I always
thought to myself, there's gotta be a catch. There's gotta be a catch. Like, what's the
catch, right? And it really, it really took some time for well, now that being said, at that
point, I did try to raise money. Like I, as I was understanding this ecosystem, I was like,
Oh, like, all right, like, but then comes the problem of like, well, how do I, where are
these investors? How do you get a meeting with these guys? Like, you know, like, there's
again, I don't come from the from a background where like, I just asked for an intro from my
my good, you know, a good friend who knows all the VCs or whatever, right? Like, which is what
like, most people seem to do, like getting that access to actually get a meeting with an
investor was like, just something that I just also alien to, like, how do you do that? And coming
into this, like, idea of, all right, I'm going to try to I would walk into these once I actually
started getting some meetings, I would get the meetings and the investors would be like, well,
like, wait, like, who's your technical? Who's your CTO? And we're like, we're like, outsourcing it
to your developer shop. And giant red flag, right? Like, we're, we're not the technical co
founders. So they're, that's, that's a red flag. There was a, you're charging for it. Why is it
the app free? It's like, we can't afford to make money. You know, like, it was crazy to them that
we would charge for the app instead of just like, you know, whatever. And there's just all this
stuff. And at the same time, like, these conversations would lead into like, what are you
going to do with it? What are you, you know, blah, blah, blah. And at the time, like, you have to
remember the ecosystem. This is 2012 2013. I am positive that if we had raised money to build this
company in 2012 2013 2014, we'd be dead, we wouldn't have made it because like iPhones had
storage of like eight to 16 gigs. Sharing video was very difficult. Sharing video at the time was
you had to connect your phone to your computer to get the 600 megabyte HD file that our app created,
put it into your computer, and then you had to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, which is the only
basically two platforms that could take that much, you know, for free. And then you can share a link
out on your social medias, right? Nobody had native video yet. And that was it. You know, we're
talking 3g. At best, if you were lucky, you have 3g. And so you couldn't upload directly from your
device, cameras, video, you know, there's so much that we are like the zeitgeist wasn't ready for
what we were doing at a huge scale, like we weren't going to be growing 10% month to month,
not to mention because we're kind of we were we know we were we launched as a thing that was a
bird's eye to view of your life, not this daily sharing, we weren't an instant share platform,
like our platform was, you're going to build up to this thing that eventually you watch, you know,
you know, you know, within a couple of months or, you know, it's in most cases a year. So like, we
weren't going to give like, you know, investor wants to hear that like, well, yeah, people are
going to download it today. And they're going to share something a year from now. You know, it's a
so we were we just we had red flags left and right for the VCs that we met, you know, just we just
we weren't a venture scale thing to any of them. So on the one hand, like, yes, I tried to raise
money. And I probably would have been and I was probably not educated enough at the time that if
somebody had offered me money, I would have been like, Oh, yeah, take it, you know, 20%, whatever,
sign me, I'll just sign anything. I was just I'd be so excited to just do anything. But yeah,
we got lucky that like that we never raised it. And as obviously I just started, I started speaking
a lot, I started getting more and more friends who were CEOs, and we'd sit around and we chat,
and they tell me their experiences of venture capital, and it always sounded awful. Like no,
like none of my VC venture capital backed friends would be like, Oh, yeah, like, well,
I mean, maybe some. There's there's always exceptions. But, you know, most of them would
just talk about the really difficult hardships they would go through to like,
grow their company as fast as possible by any means necessary. And timing is a huge thing. Like,
like our, you know, we, you know, we would not we would never have made it this far,
if we had raised capital at the time, because the timing would have been awful, like we weren't
ready to do the kind of things we could do now today, like people can share, you know,
a video very quickly, they can share it straight to Instagram feeds. And you know,
this has all been a driver of our growth. And we've been lucky enough to be sitting on the surfboard
so that the waves started coming every time there's like a new, you know, thing that allows
people to share easily or do something, you know, better stories was huge for us, because
people had a place to like create, you put their story somewhere where it wouldn't disappear in
24 hours. And you know, we were able to write those waves as they've come. So it's all a weird
part of the journey on getting to a place where we realized, Oh, you know what, I don't know
if bootstrapping, I don't know if VC funding is actually what we want, or will be good for
the company long term. So we kind of got lucky. But also, like, it came a little bit from the
fact that we just didn't know what we were doing. Yeah, you kind of intuited, this can't be real,
there has to be some sort of a catch. And then I guess they're talking to VCs, you realize there
was a catch. And it's kind of a psychological one, you know, the pressure to grow at all costs.
I know a lot of founders and SF I live in the Bay Area, who have raised money, and they're
usually so gung ho and so excited when they do it. But then after that, you know, if you're not
growing 5x a year, even if your business is doubling every year, that's not what your
investors want to see, they want to see more growth. And so you can actually feel pretty
bad about what you're doing, even if it's helping people, even if it's growing, if it's not growing
at the level that your investors want. And that's just an awful feeling to feel like you're letting
down people who've given you millions of dollars at the same time, they're driving you to make your
company into this growth monster that isn't necessarily healthy or what you want to do.
Yeah, you know, it's like part of the issue is that you're forced to grow something that the
market might not be ready for. With that, because you have this runway, you're burning cash, right,
like you're, you're not monetizing yet. So you're just like, you're hoping that the timing is going
to be right within the burn, the amount of, you know, cash you have for your burn, for your runway.
And so there's no, you know, the VC, you know, as we, it's all way more, way more obvious now
that you know, the VC model really is a, you know, rocket fuel for companies that are gonna,
you know, that that are already mature enough to like, or markets that are already mature enough
to grow very quickly and whatnot. But the issue is that like, if you have a, you could like the
fact, the thing that always killed me or those early days was, like, I'd be perfectly happy
building like a hundred million dollar company that like, is doing good and it's, it's still
growing. It's just not, you know, it's not like, we've been growing like basically like two X a
year, essentially. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff we're working on that, that we
think is going to make that escalate that dramatically. But the problem is like, I just,
over all these years, like, I just see so many great ideas die just because they,
like, they had a, they had a great product. They just didn't either have the business model or the,
or the, or the ability to stop and just say like, this is pretty good. Like,
maybe we don't need to keep forcing. I mean, path is a great example of something that so many
people loved. Except of course, at the time, like, subscription models weren't really a thing yet.
And, you know, that, that's something that, you know, just couldn't, you know, was something that
could have, could have still been around today when, when Facebook was going through their
privacy issues and they could have wrote, wrote that wave if they had still been on the board on
the surfboard, they sadly, you know, were forced into a whole bunch of stuff that maybe wasn't
best at the time. It was just the timing was off for, in my opinion, for purpose.
That's a pretty tragic story. I think they raised like, I don't know,
like 50 or 60 million, like a crazy amount of money. And they were turning down acquisition
offers. I think Google or something offered to buy them a hundred million dollars and like,
no, we're going to grow. And, you know, now it's, it's dead. It's no longer even a thing.
Yeah.
I talked to a lot of founders who are kind of like you were, where they are coming into tech and they
didn't know a ton about the ecosystem. They certainly didn't know a ton about business and
business strategy and what it took to run a company. And yet they were able to successfully
kind of wing it and learn on the job and figure out what they needed to learn.
And obviously a lot of listeners are in the same situation. Maybe they're artists, maybe they're
marketers, maybe they're developers, but they, you know, they haven't gone to business school.
They don't know exactly what it takes to run a business. And your experience is someone who's
been learning all this on the job. Do you think you're at a disadvantage not knowing all that
stuff in advance? And how do you learn on the job while you're running your company?
Yeah. If anything, I probably just because of like things like I don't know about venture capital,
like my lack of knowledge actually probably helped and saved the company. Like I just
wasn't tuned into like, this is how you do things. Like, like, I think a lot of people fall into,
into this as like, here are the, here's what you do. Right. Like, and I just asked a lot of
questions about like, why do I do that? Like, what about, what's the catch? Right? Like,
um, so I, one of my quote unquote ideas for when I quit my job was I was, I was thinking
of going to business school because I thought, well, I'm a sort of business. I got to go to
business school. That's just where my head was at. I don't, you know, I didn't really consider
that you could just wing it. And then it turns out, yeah, actually I would say everybody should
just wing it. Like I find, uh, it seems, it seems like business school is really built for just
like getting a job at a giant corporate thing that's already just got its systems built.
It's not built for just like, I mean, with some exceptions, probably, you know, Stanford or
whatever. Like, we're, I think the ecosystem is probably more geared towards like people
becoming startup founders. But I know a lot of people who went to, uh, GSB, Stanford's business
school and they are all working for bigger companies, not starting their own company.
Right. Right. And we're just like, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I, uh, like,
not every, not everyone is, you know, uh, is, uh, is, is necessarily meant to start a company.
Obviously not everybody's, uh, you know, like, uh, not everyone's an entrepreneur necessarily
for sure. And it certainly requires a lot of, you know, emotion. It's, it's an emotional,
emotional journey that, uh, is very difficult. I, I was recently chatting with a friend of mine.
Well, I had just met her and she was, I was asking, she was saying all this stuff and I was
like, have you considered like serving your own company? She's like, Oh, I did it for five years.
Realize not for me. That's not, that's not what I want. Fair. Great. Like you scratch your itch
and you know that that's not what you want. And now she's perfectly happy working at a, at a,
at a big corporate, you know, whatever. Um, so, you know, I think everybody has to figure out
there where they, that fit diagram of like what you're good at and what like makes you happy and
like what, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so I think with the whole business thing,
I really just, I consume a lot. Like I, I'm on, you know, I'm, you know, anybody that some,
anybody, if somebody would retweet something for somebody, like something wise on Twitter or I'm
going to start following them, you know, like I, if somebody posted like an article somewhere,
it's like, all right, I'm going to start, I'm going to check out what else this person's written.
You know, it's just, honestly, it's like a lot, a lot of reading, a lot of blog posts. I remember
when I remember Y Combinator did their like startup, you know, start a startup school
thing where they put the videos online, you know, those, those classes that they were running that
would kind of go, you know, basically hour to hour through like kind of basically build a startup.
And that was, that was really useful. I mean, I consume that. And, and so yeah, I mean, I,
especially today, Jesus, 2019, like there's just so many resources online to really like figure
most of the hard things out yourself, not to mention all the pre-built stuff that makes,
you know, banking, for example, Oh my God, things like banking were like, for, you know,
for me and my co-founder, we're like, Oh, but now there's great startups and great, you know,
great, great resources for making a lot of that, you know, taxes and lawyer stuff, like, you know,
easier to for sort of adjust works. I mean, just works for like just HR purposes, makes our lives
like million times easier with like W twos and blah, blah, blah. It's a totally different space.
I mean, for like, it is a beautiful, not to mention now you have like the no code
movement, or, you know, there really are very little excuses at this point for somebody who
has an idea to try to build it on their own. Most I would, you know, I don't know how what the
percentage is, but you know, my guess is like maybe 30% of ideas are probably possible to be
executed without necessarily having to, you know, go out and find something or someone that we can
do it for you. But yeah, it's kind of a golden era to build things online. And there's almost
more information than you can consume. It's not, it's not exactly a problem if you don't come into
this knowing exactly what to do, because you can learn it all on the job as you're doing it. And
there's a ton of resources that can help you. I want to get a sense of where you're at today
with one second every day in terms of just numbers, like how many people are working at your
company? How many users do you have? How much revenue are you doing?
Yeah, so, as I mentioned earlier, we've kind of been like, you know, we've kind of been like
doubling year to year, like, to some degree, I guess. So we, New Year's is our biggest time of
the year by far, a week at, you know, the amount of so like, people tend to start once every day
when it's a birthday, when they just got married, when they just had a baby, like, like milestones
in their life. And New Year's is the one thing that like, it's every like, just like everyone has
every it's New Year's for everyone, not, you know, not just like, people getting married and whatnot.
So we get so many people sharing their one second every day video of their, you know, year in review,
essentially, on social media every year that every year has been gargantuanally bigger than the last.
So, you know, a couple of years ago, we were like, you know, we topped out at like, number 17 on the
App Store. The year after that, we hit number three. The year after that, we were the number one paid
up on the App Store is like, like, 2000 2018. We were the number one paid up on the App Store the
entire first week of 2018. And then at the time, we were still a paid app. And then we made it free
at the beginning, at the end of last year, about exactly a year ago, today, probably, we made the
app free, finally, because we build a subscription tier that allows us to monetize now with, you know,
power users and extra features, as opposed to just putting the entire app behind a paywall,
which was a, it was a great way to for us to like, bootstrap, but it was never like a long term
strategy, obviously, to just like, you know, we wanted to be able to give a have a version of the
app that allowed anybody to use to do at least the basic version of one second every day.
And then, you know, this year, by making the app free at the beginning of this year, on January 1,
like, it was like, literally, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, one second every day, at the end of
New Year's Day. And I think this year, we'll knock on wood, I'm pretty sure we'll, we'll crush them.
And then I feel like TikTok, we might not be, but we'll see, because TikTok is still relatively new,
getting a lot of new users all the time. So that's, you know, we've been on this like, year to year,
the, you know, a lot of our growth is also coming from the fact that it's, it's because of native
sharing on video sharing on Facebook and Instagram, and, you know, and other places like, like Twitter,
people are sharing their monthly kind of videos. Now, at the first of every month, they'll share
like, Oh, this was my November 2019, and 30 to 60 seconds. And so that people see that people
downloaded every we get a spike every month, you know, on the app store, and that's been going on
for like, almost two years now. That's where a lot of like, our consistent growth has been happening.
Before that, it was like, kind of almost like New Year's was like the exclusive giant spike,
you know, like in 2018, we made 2 million in revenue, the year before that we made a million
in revenue, the year before that we made 500,000 in revenue, or the year before that we made like
250,000 in revenue. And so it's literally been like, just a steady, you know, like, 2x per year
growth. And then because this year, we're, we got a couple of million downloads, because now we were
free. Like, we have no idea what's about to happen with, you know, nears in a couple of weeks. It's,
in the first two years of the history of the app as a paid app, on iOS, we had 2 million downloads.
So like in six years from like launch, to making the app free, we have 2 million downloads. And now
this year is a free app we've had over 2 million. Crazy. So the power of going free, huge. And we're
doing well as subscribers, like we're, you know, we're picking up enough subscribers to subsidize
the free customers. And obviously, we'll be adding more features next year for pro so that,
you know, hopefully, we can continue to build value for our customers. And, and for us, like,
you know, we really want to, we never want to have advertising in the app, we never want to,
we never want to screw with anybody's private information, and we want to,
we want to build a social media kind of experience that like, we wish existed, you know, there's so
many incentives that are misaligned with current social media models. And we want to realign those
incentives as best as we can, we've started to build our, our social kind of our version of social
that we think is really good has the potential to really, you know, have us, you know, really grow
in a far greater way than we've ever grown before. We been for that, we finally decided to raise
money for the first time this year. But we did it without venture capital, we we are lead investor
was Bryce Roberts of NDBC, who I know has been on your show. Yeah, you know, that seemed like
that when, you know, I was paying attention to that for a couple of years. And when we finally
decided, Oh, okay, like, this social thing we're about to take a bite on, is going to require way
more, you know, engineering power than we have right now. And so we grew, you know, we were 13
at like, in September, and like, within two weeks, we were 20, we hired seven humans, we had a company
we do, we were entirely remote company from all over the world, we went to a company, we did a
company retreat, like within a month of every of the new hires in Mexico, we spent the week together
just like, like just syncing up. And that was amazing. We do this twice, twice a year, we do
every six months, we do a company wide retreat, where we fly everyone in from all over the world
and somewhere. And then yeah, so now we're focused on, we have this, you know, huge new years coming
up that we don't know what what's going to happen. But, you know, 2020 is really about finally,
using these resources that we've gained with from the from the non venture raise within DBC to
really scale up the social part of the app. I think about social media a lot. Any hackers is
not a social media app, it's a community. But it's pretty similar. And because it's owned by Stripe,
and because I don't have any real mission to generate revenue or anything like that,
any hackers will never be stuffed with ads. You're kind of in the same boat, because you're
profitable, you're actually charging your users to use your app. And that allows you to take a
more thoughtful approach to social media, if you decide to make your app social. But right now,
it's not. When I make my videos in one second every day, it's basically just for me or for
friends, I don't want to post it to YouTube or something. But there's no kind of social feed
that's part of the app. What's your vision for how you can do that in a better way? What's your
vision for a better form of social media? Yeah, we we raised in DBC was our lead investor. And then
we we brought in a whole bunch of other investors as well who are aligned with the NDBC model that
isn't forcing us into just raising another round in the 18 months. And that was the thing we were
really looking to avoid, because it may not make sense. There's a whole spectrum of potential
things that could happen to us. If we're all of a sudden, we're getting crazy downloads,
everything, whatever, like, all right, like, yeah, okay, maybe this is huge. And we have to raise
more capital, in which case, the note converts from the NDBC note just converts, which is great.
But if that doesn't come to pass, we can we can still give all the investors a really great return
higher than the average return of an angel investor. You know, we brought in earnest capital
that you know, Tyler, it was been an amazing, amazing, you know, partner for us and us too,
which has a venture arm, they, you know, created money in the valley on the app store famously,
but you know, they have all sorts of other, you know, apps and companies that out of the UK. And
we brought in a bunch of people that we were really happy that they really aligned with us
and what we were trying to do. And specifically, we also set out to bring in people who
we've long looked like envied and looked up to, you know, buffer, Joel from buffers,
one of our investors, you know, buffers been a company that we've been, you know, very, you know,
we've always been, you know, to some degree, wanting to emulate and as you know, they're at 90,
I think, employees or something like that now. And you know, we're at 20. And so there's just so
much that we can take away from how transparent they are and how much they write about how they
scale to that, to that that we, we try to do. So we, you know, we painted a picture
to all these investors on how we were looking to approach, you know, social media. And for us,
it starts with the incentives, right? Like, if our incentive, like, if social media, if the way
that a social media company is making money is because they're basically trying to get you to
scroll as much as possible every day, like, because the more you scroll, the more ads they
can show you, like that, that seems like that, I don't like I'd be happy paying to not be,
you know, bamboozled into that, that way of consuming media, you know, like engagement,
engagement, engagement, engagement, yeah. And, you know, what we want to do is like, how,
how can we give you like, for us, it's just about bringing you the maximum amount of value
in the least amount of time possible? Like, how do we give you, like, you know, what I, you know,
how do we give you like exactly what you wish was what you wanted to consume per day? And if we,
let's just say we could do it in five minutes, like, instead of 45 minutes, right, where you're just
like, just mindlessly scrolling, right? Like, okay, I mean, I get a lot of value out of Twitter,
I get a lot of value out of Facebook, but I'm also like hyper aware of like the, you know, vortex
that I can fall on there where, you know, we, we end up scrolling, you know, an hour and she's like,
oh my God, what happened? And, you know, didn't really get any value out of like the 55 minutes
on the other end of the first five minutes, right? And so for us, like, it starts out with
really making sure that our incentives are aligned with what's best for people and not what's best for
advertisers. So I think that that that's one of our core things. The other core thing is,
you know, by actually charging people or at least a subset of people for hopefully for something
valuable, then that also makes it so that we're never thinking about selling people's, I mean,
we get emails from, you know, people who want to say, oh, like, just plug us into your app,
and we'll get this data, and we'll pay you. It's like, no, we never want to do that. We also are
very interested in, we're not really interested in being like, being acquired, it's not like a goal.
And frankly, like, it's, we feel like a sense of stewardship to making sure that, you know,
people have been logging private moments of their life for seven years, in some cases,
no, I don't know if I could sleep at night if I just like handed that off to like Facebook tomorrow,
right? Like, and so, you know, for us, it's like, how do we make sure that the business model is
there so that we can always have the best intentions for the customer's money? Everything
kind of starts from there. And a lot of what we're thinking about with terms of social media is
obviously, a lot of the things that the social media companies are already starting to do, right,
like the likes and the metrics that like kind of skew things in directions that, you know,
aren't necessarily healthy for mental health and, and stuff like that. And so, yeah, the initial
idea for for what we were building, we call this social media zero. And the idea was essentially,
how do we give you a social media feed that is finite, that allows you to, like, get the value
that you were looking to get? And then it's like, goodbye, you're done. Go live your life. Enjoy
your day. How do we not give you the itch to come back and check your feed all day, every day,
not stop? Like, because that is, in my opinion, at least for me, that, like, thing that really
consumes me. And like, I don't like how I feel like I need to check my Instagram to see if I
somebody reply to the thing, whatever, you know, it's like, it's stuff like that. That just,
it's not healthy. I don't like it. Like, I don't feel good about it. Like, I, I wish I could just
like, imagine if you could finish your Instagram feed, right? Just like, Oh, like, imagine there's
no ads. So you finish it faster. Imagine if like, you know, you read the, you get, you know, one
thing that we're adamant about with with our feed is a batch notifications. So like, I don't need a
note of like, feels like every day, you know, in every way, shape or form Instagram tries to get
me to like, turn on notifications. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, why do I need to know that
somebody liked my photo instantly? Like, most things don't require an instant notification.
Like, I don't need to like, that's something that I can just get late. Like, so a lot of what we're
some of the stuff that some of the rules are playing around with. It's like, yeah, like all
notifications, you should just get one notification per day that gives you all your notifications,
you get them, you see them, you're done with them, go back to living your life, you know, so,
so we're coming at social media from all these. There's a lot more to it than that. But you know,
we're and we're still experimenting with some of these models. And we may change our mind about
some of them. And we're, you know, our alpha is designed to be a little bit loose and nimble so
that we can we can test out a couple of different ways to do things. But the approach is realign
things between what's best for our company and what's best for people and remove all middlemen
and all other exterior forces. And let's make sure that, you know, what we're building is
something that brings value to people without all the baggage that can come on the other side,
you're optimizing for the wrong metrics, essentially, right. And you're kind of perfectly
situated to do that. Because already, you created a habit and people to come back once per day,
record your one second video every day. That's kind of a great place to get your to get your
fix to figure out what your friends and family are doing. And then that's it.
Yeah, you know, I think one of the ways we're looking we feel that we're well suited for this
is that we've been a private experience, first and foremost, you know, since we launched,
sharing is optional. A gargantuan amount of our customers never share. And that's our superpower
superpower is that like, this is where you can log moments of your life that you never want on the
internet. You know, the thing that I got over and over again from our customers is that we fill in
the gaps to the things you would never share on social media. So like, Instagram is like, Oh,
I went on this trip and look at me with the highlights. But like, you know, our lives are
made up of way more than just like the best things we ever did. Like, my one second every
day video is filled with my worst days, it's filled with like moments that like, to you,
like if you were to watch them, like you're like, I guess Caesar just sat on his desk
working. And it's like, you know, like, which is a lot often, but, you know, I'm very mindful about
like picking specific things about that day on that workday. So, you know, it's like, you know,
it's a, it's getting that email from Apple that we're going to be part of the best of 2019. You
know, like the other day, like, it's like, Oh, like, boom, like, that's my second of the day,
because I didn't do anything, but just sit here all day and work. But here's the notable thing
of my day that I, you know, I'm gonna, it's just an email. It's just me recording the screen on my
monitor. But like, in six years, or two years, I'm gonna look back on that and be like, Oh, like,
it means nothing to anybody but me. And that's a really important part that's missing right now
from the problem with people journaling using Instagram and Facebook as a means to like,
like keep a journal or diary is that you're only posting the things you're willing to have other
people look at. And like, our lives are made up of things that are only meaningful to us
that don't mean squat to other people, you know, and so we give people a space to log moments of
their life that they know are meaningful to them and no one else necessarily. And I think that
that's if we can start if we can build some we can build a social media experience where there's
essentially a venn diagram of moments of that, that you are willing to share with us with a with not
1000 people, but like a closer group of people that are really important to you, then I feel
like that that's going to be our sweet spot with what we're trying to build is what is the stuff
that you that you meant to be private, that you are willing to share with people that you trust.
And so that that's kind of where how we're beginning our approach with with some of the
social stuff. It's interesting, if you take kind of a bird's eye view of how things have progressed,
feeling like the 50s, for example, everybody was all about fast food, McDonald's was new. And that
was just a huge thing. And then, you know, our generation has been a little bit more intelligent
with what we consume, there's a backlash, we don't want unhealthy food that's killing us.
And I assume the same thing is going to happen with with social media, we've got kind of like
the phase one, where it's all about engagement, it's all about addiction. And then we start to
become more conscious about the fact that hey, this isn't exactly healthy, and how do we keep
the good stuff and get over, you know, get rid of the bad stuff. So it's interesting to see
the role that you and others will play in kind of this phase two of more thoughtful social media.
And it's also, I think, fascinating to see your own personal transition as a founder,
a lot of times people wonder, you know, what's my mission supposed to be if I start a company?
And I think the answer is that it changes. Usually you get started for yourself,
you want to build something for yourself, something that's useful, you want to change
your life in some way. And then if things are successful, and they work out, your goals kind
of evolve. And so you've gone from, hey, I want to be able to, you know, remember, remember my trips
in a way that's easy and helpful for me to hey, other people should do this to hey, you know,
eventually, how do I improve social media for an entire generation of people? What has that
transition been like for you as a founder? And what do you look forward to doing in the future?
Honestly, like I really come from it from an angle of like, I really have some convictions on how I
think what I think might would be a really good version of social media that, you know, maybe
maybe it's like the perfect version of social media for, you know, 50 million people and not
a couple of billion, right? Like maybe there's not one size fits all for social media. Like,
I have a vision in my head for what I think a lot of in the same way that I thought, hey,
this one second every day thing is really helping me. And I think there's enough other people out
there who would agree. I'm coming at the social media angle that we're working on in a very
similar fashion. Like I is it for three billion for some ability, maybe not. But if like we make
something that is like what 50 million people out there want, and we're profitable, and we can,
you know, we can always ensure that we're, you know, you know, innovating and doing what's best
for our customers. Like, I feel like that's a huge win. And that's one of the reasons that we
thought NDBC was all aligned for us to like not continue to force ourselves into things that
didn't really necessarily make sense. If like, you know, I want it to exist doesn't have to be us,
you know, like I have my convictions, we're going to build it and we're going to hopefully it works.
But, you know, if like in 10 years, 20 other companies tackle this better version of social
media, and some of them win. And luckily for us, like we're not, we're relatively in a position
right now where like if we even if we don't succeed, we're still probably going to be a
growing profitable business, not maybe not growing as fast as we would prefer. I think
it is really important for humanity for some of these better options to exist. And if they exist,
it doesn't have to be me. Like, I'm, I'm not driven by ego, I just, I just think that there's,
there's a lot of I want as many people to take a crack at, at building a building a better version
of social media. And that, you know, that drives me more than men having to be me, you know,
it's just something that I think even just the market forces are just going to make it happen.
Because I think, you know, the more and more these publicly traded companies are
optimizing for things that are in this, I mean, my Instagram is basically like ads at this point,
I mean, I just scroll more ads than every three posters and ads, it's just it is just ads. And,
and they're, you know, frankly, really good at targeting me. Like I am afraid to like just Google
things. I'm like, I got to go into incognito mode, because then I'm just going to get targeted for
this, like non stop for the next three weeks. Like, yeah, I don't, I don't think that's a,
how do we get here is just like not how I want to live my life, man, thinking about like, I shouldn't
got to go into cognitive mode to like Google is because otherwise, it's just like my all my feet,
everything every ad I'm going to see is going to be about this, you know, who do I got? Who do I
have to pay a subscription fee to like not be targeted for ads, you know, everywhere, you know,
it's just, I think everything's evolving, everything's maturing. And hopefully, one way or
another, we're going to be in a better place, you know, in a decade with how people consume and how
people are aware of, you know, the pros and cons of social media, essentially.
Well, listen, Caesar, you've, you've been through a lot, you had a successful Kickstarter and broke
records there, you gave a TED talk, you've been featured in movies, you're competing with Instagram
and TikTok on the app store. But you came from pretty humble beginnings. And that's basically
where most listeners are at right now. What's your advice for somebody who's just considering
starting a business and, you know, might not have any successes under their belt quite yet?
I've always been somebody who had side projects. I got an idea, somehow, I become really passionate
about an idea. And I start just thinking about how do I make that idea happen. Some things are
just obviously too big or to this or to that. But you try to, you know, you try to find that
been diagram of like what I am actually capable, I have control over. And it always leads to
something, you know, you never know, you never know what what's going to come of it. And so
I would say that if there's anything that's been lingering in your head for like, you can't stop
thinking about it, right? Like, that's basically me. It's just like, if I can't stop thinking about
it, I have to start doing something about it, then there really is just no, like no limit of
resources online to start figuring out what's the next step? What's the next step? There's that
famous, you know, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? I used to I gave a I gave a TEDx
talk like a couple of like two years after I gave my main stage talk, I called it um, I forgot what
it was called. But basically, it was just like at a local one and near where I grew up. And they just
asked me to speak. I was like, Yeah, sure, I'll go black for 10 minutes. And I basically I gave a
talk called it was about as called divide, divide, divide. And the idea was, I didn't know how to
ride a bike. I grew up ashamed that I did not know how to ride a bike. And didn't tell anybody it was
kept a secret. If somebody was like, Oh, let's grab these bikes. I'd be like, Oh, I can't my
knee hurts. Like I'd lie just because I was too embarrassed to say, I don't know how to ride a
bike. And it was eating eating at me for a long time. And eventually, like I gotta do something
about this. I can't I'm so jealous of all these people who can meet around New York on bicycles.
And this is like, you know, 2007. And I thought, how do I do? Where do I start? Where do I start?
I need a bike. So I googled folding bikes. And I bought a folding bike through the internet got
really cheap one that I could put it through in the back of my car. And I could drive to the middle
of nowhere out in the boonies where no one could just practice in private. And I would just yeah,
I would just fall and fall and fall all on my own. Because I was too embarrassed to even ask someone
to like teach me how to ride a bike. I was just like, I'm just gonna buy a folding bike that I
could put in the back of my car. I'm going to drive out to where no one could see me. Like a
giant parking lot empty parking lot. And I would just do I did that like three nights.
Until I was like going in a straight line. And I'm like, Oh, my God, I can't believe it. Like,
this is amazing. Unbelievable. And eventually I got I worked at the courage to just go pick
up bike lane in New York and just go in a straight line. Brakes straight line. That's it. Brakes
straight line. Eventually made a turn. Eventually made another turn. And within a year, I was that
prick going through cars in New York, you know, just like going as fast as I can going through
red lights, because I was just like became, I just fell in love with biking. And I just couldn't stop
doing it right. And, and like, and the reason I say that story is like, I had to be it was a goal
for me to bike around New York City and like love and like bike, but I didn't know what to do. And
I had to divide the problem until the what was left was so easy, I couldn't not do it.
And what I got left with was I have to buy a bike. Like I that's easy. That's not about riding
bikes. It goes not anything. It's just like, I gotta buy a bike. Once it just got to that, then
all right, now there was a bike sitting at my place was like, all right, what's the next tiny
little thing I need to do? It was like, all right, I need to throw in the back of my car.
The next tiny little thing I need to do is drive to the middle of nowhere. Like I just needed to
take it. I needed to divide the steps until they were too tiny to not do them. That's gotten me
through a lot of big picture things that I didn't know were like, I literally started by googling,
how do I make an app? Like I just didn't know. And so I was like, where do I start? What's the
first thing I need to do? I need to Google some answers. Google, you know, and then
adventures like I need devs. What do I do? What's the tiny little thing I can do today to get them
all bought the ball to move? It's like, all right, I'm gonna email three dev shops, and I'm gonna
see if I can get a meeting, right? Like tiny. I that's a 15 minute thing, right? Three dev shops,
three info at that dev shop. That's basically everything. It's just divide, divide, divide,
until it's too easy not to do it. There's almost no number of baby steps you can't take to get to
someplace meaningful. Correct, that you can always keep dividing until something is just too easy.
Listen, see, that's, that's, that's great advice. It's inspirational. I need to remember that
myself. Thanks so much for taking the time doing this monster episode with me. I, as I mentioned
earlier, am already addicted to one second every day. I love it. Hopefully some listeners will find
some value in the app as well. Can you tell everybody where they can go to learn more about
what you're up to how they can reach out to you for open to that? Yeah, the website is 1sc.co.
But once again, every day at everything, the app is called what it is. And I'm Caesar Kuriyama at
all the things. I'm pretty easy to to poke and prod. So if anyone ever has any, anything that
they want to, I don't necessarily reply right away. But I do eventually get to it. And I do try my
best to be helpful. A lot of people, you know, helped me get to this point. And I'm always trying
to pay forward even if even if it takes me a while to get to it. You know, I just I just wrote
someone on Instagram, like a Bible, based on a message of something they were working on that
they didn't know how to move forward. And I don't know how I that was one of the perfect example I
meant to just I was like, I'm just gonna get started on this. And I took the tiny baby stuff,
like, I'm just gonna bullet point this and I just ended up writing the whole thing. And I just,
you know, spend 30 minutes just like, Oh, you know what, I'm just on the stream of thought now.
That's what happens most of the time is like you divide, divide, divide into something so easy.
But once you get started, you just like get excited and keep going. My full name,
Caesar Kuriyama. Once I can every day, we're at all the things.
All right. Thanks again, Caesar.
Courtland, thank you so much.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to Caesar and let him
know he is at Caesar Kuriyama on Twitter. And also if you're interested in hearing my thoughts
on the episode, subscribe to the indie hackers podcast newsletter, you can find that at
indiehackers.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and I will see you next time.