I think maybe a good place to start is what even is a recession?
I think the median age of the Andy Hackers listeners, something like 32, means that they
weren't really functioning adults in the business world at the last time we had a recession.
And there are many people who were much younger than that, who basically only been building
businesses through these upswing times.
So what is a recession?
Are we in one?
Okay.
So we are, I think I'm not an economist, which is important to state.
I do read a lot, but I'm not going to be like one of those jackasses on Medium who says
I'm not an epidemiologist, but here's what millions of people should do.
I'm not an economist, but here's my understanding.
And I have lived through two recessions so far when I was paying attention to business
stuff.
The first one being the dot com crash of 2001.
So like I am 35, but I was doing freelancing and stuff then and paying a lot of attention
to tech media.
So I was paying attention.
And then 2008 was a, the great recession, which was caused of course, by the crash of
the real estate market.
And I think that economists are saying is that we are not necessarily in a recession
yet right now, but like something is 100% coming like a month, like three or four weeks
ago, they were like one in three chance of recession coming.
And now I think the consensus is that it's definitely coming.
It's not going to necessarily be global.
Like other countries are doing a much better job than we are in the US.
So I think that's actually pretty positive.
The real estate situation actually affected pretty much all major economies, except probably
except China, but then China, then of course, had less demand.
So like the real estate situation in the US and England and Ireland and Europe was bad
all around similar mechanism.
And the reason that happened was so much of the entire country's economic activity had
centered on real estate, and the idea that it was going to continue to go up and up and
up.
And then they made bad loans.
And then they sold parts of those loans to people pretending they were good.
And when the housing market crashed, because people couldn't afford their homes anymore,
everyone got screwed.
And what's happening now is a bit different because there's nothing fundamentally wrong
with the economy leaving out issues of inequality and wealth concentration.
But this is an external event that has a limited duration.
And it's not going to dry up consumer demand if the consumers get paid money from the federal
government, for example.
So the problem is a lot of people are losing their jobs because restaurants and things
have to close for safety reasons.
If the federal government pumps money into them so that they can all keep their salaries,
the economy situation will essentially resolve itself over time.
Whereas all of the investments going into real estate, and it was completely unsound,
there was no way to get that back.
So it's more of a pause.
And it could be worse.
I think some people are saying it definitely will be worse.
I can't say.
I think it all depends right now what the federal government does to help the bottom
of the economic period for mid-service workers.
Just passed, I think, a $2 trillion stimulus bill, basically, to do just this, to try to
help the economy out.
It's not a very good bill, unfortunately.
It directs most of the aid at large companies, and it doesn't even require them to keep people
on their payroll, from what I understand.
And the direct benefits to individuals, aside from increasing unemployment, is a one-time
check.
The other side of this equation is, even if this bill was good, even if we did help, there
are a lot of asymmetries and damage being caused in how you repair.
For example, if companies have fired people, if companies have missed payments, it takes
longer to hire someone than it does to fire someone.
It takes longer to repair your relationships than it does to go into bankruptcy, et cetera.
Very, very, very true.
Just like in the real estate, in a crash, there were industries that were not particularly
termed.
However, it spreads because if people can't buy consumer products, and the companies that
make those consumer products spend less on professional services and stuff, and it filters
out from there.
And I think we're going to probably see a very similar dynamic.
There's a lot of companies that are going to actually do well.
My company did well during the real estate recession.
And there are, of course, companies that sell software to restaurants or wherever who are
going to be screwed, at least in the short term.
So a big question is, who are your customers and who are their customers?
Let's talk about your companies during the 2008 recession, because you're actually already
a startup founder at that point.
I think you started two or three different companies.
That's kind of how you set yourself on the path to being self-employed rather than working
for others.
That's right.
What did you do to basically build businesses that survived the recession and actually made
it out through the other side, doing quite well?
Right.
I think the fact that it was more than one business is an important lesson, especially.
So in 2008, I had been doing consulting with my friend John for another year.
I had quit my regular job and gone back to consulting, and we were doing interface design
work for a wide variety of companies, but we were charging like $250 an hour, so pretty
good money back then.
And then I decided to move to Europe and told John that I was going to not work on that
anymore.
And Thomas and I instead did a bunch of consulting on interactive JavaScript experiences based
on social media.
So we had made and shipped to a story, which was a stream of Twitter emotions that people
just loved, and the ad people saw it, and they wanted to do it.
So we had a lot of consulting work for companies like Pepsi and Ford and their ad agencies.
We did a lot of work for them.
And instead of being long running, we're building software that makes your business.
It was promotional type money.
And businesses do promote in a recession because if there's fewer consumer dollars to go around,
they need to try to get more of those consumer dollars.
So it's something that went on for years.
It only stopped because we decided not to consult anymore.
It was nice, clearly defined projects that had a deliverable that weren't really long
running internal projects.
A lot of long running internal projects for designers and developers who were consultants
or freelancers are ego driven projects inside a company.
And that's why they tend to go on forever, no matter what you try to do to get people
to make decisions and ship the software.
In my experience, it just goes on and on.
And those types of projects get cut.
So you mean these are like the pet projects of some exact?
They're like pet projects.
Yeah.
They're like, well, we need to be shown to be doing something with, I don't know, e-commerce.
So we need to have this project.
And then everyone gets to try to weigh in with their ideas and it just drags on forever.
And then at some point, even though it's their own fault, they're like, well, this isn't
getting anywhere.
So we're going to cut it.
And I think everyone who's been any kind of freelancer has experienced this on some scale.
We did things that promoted our skills.
And then we got these different types of projects and we weren't the only company doing this
sort of thing.
There was another company called Stamen that was well known for their visualization projects,
but they were a much bigger company than us.
And therefore they charged a lot more.
So we were in the middle, we weren't bottom and we weren't top, we were in the middle.
So when companies cut their budgets, but still needed to get work done, they came to us because
they still wanted it to get done, but they didn't want to spend as much.
So that was a major bonus for us, for the consulting.
And the reason I didn't quit consulting and start products and then just hope the runway
would work was because I am really risk averse.
And I think that in good times, it's easy to say, take the risk, quit your job, save
up six months of money.
I would never do that.
I would never, ever recommend someone save up six months and quit their job.
Usually you would be able to get another job, but what if you can't?
And that's the situation we're in right now.
So I believe in diversifying my income.
So while we were consulting, that was when we built out Freckle, which is now called
NOCO, which is time tracking software.
And we built it out because I knew that everyone like me who was consultant, I knew so many
consultants.
We hated to track our time.
All the tools sucked.
And so we just sort of faked the hours at the end of the month or whatever.
So we could get billing and guaranteed losing money.
So I designed something that was as simple as possible to log the time as you went along.
And I launched that to my mailing list was mostly like Ruby developers.
That was what made you famous in my eyes at the time, because the Ruby stuff was Freckle.
Oh yeah.
Post about it.
I think you're blogging at unicorn free or whatever your blog was back then.
And I was reading a lot of 37signals, Jason Fried and DHH, profitable businesses.
Meanwhile I was doing the exact opposite thing, building businesses to get into Y Combinator,
not charging anybody any money, running out of funding and looking sort of jealously at
what you're doing to actually work without other investors needing to come in and sort
of prop you up while you lost money every month.
I feel like consulting for so many years and working with so many people who had these
like cool ideas that would never, that never worked sort of inoculated me against the startup
world completely, because I heard like the same stuff from those people as the clients
that I had known and worked for so many times.
It was just like deja vu.
I actually went to startup school, Y Combinator startup school in 2007 in Palo Alto, I guess
that's where Stanford is.
Right.
Now there were ukulele trees.
I talked to Paul Graham and I had pitched him an idea.
And like I had missed the deadline, he said to apply and then I was like, do I need to
move?
And he's like, yes.
I'm like, well, I'm not going to leave my job that pays good money for $3,000 and uproot
my life to go to Cambridge.
Nevermind.
Pass.
Pass.
It was probably for the best that you didn't because back then if you did anything regarding
YC, it was all sort of like how do you emulate the success of the best startups and the best
startups at that time, at least the ones that were sort of the golden children were Facebook,
Twitter, these companies had a basically no business model that you have no idea.
2007, Twitter wasn't out yet.
Facebook had just been like opened to non college students for like a year or two at
that point.
What was that?
Reddit and dig then?
I was just like, dig was huge.
This is a pretty, pretty big internet startups.
It's a long time ago.
Actually, the thing that I pitched was a product that would have like been something that
we would have charged money for even then.
So like, I don't know if we would have actually been accepted, but he told me to apply and
I was like, nevermind.
So feel pretty good about that.
What happened when I did it in 2011, even four years later, is my co-founder and I decided
to start charging money.
And everybody in YC is like, no, don't do that.
It's just constant discouragement.
How are you going to grow?
How are you going to get to millions of users?
I think it's different today.
If you look at the big startups coming out of Silicon Valley, they charge money.
They actually have some sort of revenue model, but back then it was lunacy.
And there was just no encouragement, constant discouragement from charging.
It was lunacy and it was the same reason that people were paying ridiculously high amounts
for crappy houses and random places.
It's the idea that someone will pay you more for this later.
It's like an expectation versus actually building real value.
So I'm not going to lie.
The first year of Freckle, it made $27,000, so not enough to live on.
So we were still consulting.
Thomas and I shipped a JavaScript performance ebook, and it took a year to finish.
I was actually astounded when we launched the very first version of it, the beta version,
how many sales it made.
I think it made $15,000 or $20,000 in sales in the beta version, and then I spent the
next year finishing it, which by the way, is not ideal.
I wouldn't recommend doing it that way.
We were doing JavaScript workshops at that time and that came out of the book.
They weren't about JavaScript performance, but they were like a high-end JavaScript mastering
JavaScript, the technical stuff that people weren't teaching then, like metaprogramming
and currying and all sorts of stuff like that, but still people don't quite understand in
a lot of cases, and we were doing consulting.
So that was like three, four things we had going on.
Then in December 2010, we had the project from Hell, the last project from Hell from
Ford.
It wasn't Ford's fault.
It was their ad agency.
I fucking hate ad agencies so much.
I was just like, I'm done.
I had known so many people like you, Cortland, at that time.
So in 2010, you wanted to create businesses like mine, and yet we're just doing the most
random stuff that I didn't understand, and I realized I just didn't have an understanding
of what business is, what people pay for, why people pay for things, how to come up
with things that people will actually buy, and so 30 by 500 came out of that.
It was, you're a hustle at first, it evolved over time.
So I had all these different types of income streams.
I had software to service, which is growing slowly because that's what it does.
Subscription revenue growth slowly, generally speaking, I had workshops, which were semi-monthly
for technical topics, had ongoing sales of the JavaScript book that we wrote, the recordings
of the mobile pro workshop that Thomas created, some other stuff in that vein, technical eBooks,
and then we did the 30 by 500, which was called year of hustle at the time.
This mindset of diversifying your activities, your income streams, for a lot of people it's
hard enough just to get one successful business off the ground, and they find it hard to justify
spending time on multiple other ones that might distract them.
How did you make it work and why go that route?
So I mean, that's a very valid point.
I've known people who, unlike me, focus on one thing, who, for example, Nathan Berry,
and I know that like Heaton Shaw told him to focus on one thing, and he saw his input
products and stuff down.
And of course, ConvertKit is now huge.
But for me, it was safety issue.
I did not grow up with money, I didn't even grow up in a financially comfortable household.
It was very, very stressful to me.
And then I left home very early, I left home, I was 16 years old, and so that was very stressful.
And I'd always been doing freelancing.
And I would basically take whatever work would come my way.
So I had done all kinds of HTML design stuff, interface design, and then programming, and
I did technical editing, and I did magazine article writing, technical magazine article
writing, back when you could just get those jobs online.
Like I did all this stuff.
And so that was very natural for me to be juggling like 15 balls at once.
It was nice and relaxing for a little while to have a job.
But then I had like people with a job I didn't like, and I liked, people always call me
brutally honest.
I'm not like I would be professional at the office, and I would just be like dying inside.
I wasn't working with people I didn't like, or who were stupid, or like sabotaging the
projects, or like completely undermining my work, and some of them were like getting paid
more than me.
And so like the rage just built.
And so I'd prefer to be stressful doing multiple things at once, than working with people
I hated every day and having to do it with a smile on my face.
So for me, doing all that stuff, it was stressful.
It was a lot.
However, it was less risky because I knew that I could launch this or that and make
a bunch of money, like maybe 10 grand, 5 grand, 30 grand doing a launch.
And then I would have that money to operate on, which is really useful.
And then I didn't have to work or I didn't have to do the things I hate the most.
And I also didn't have to be afraid of like being poor.
So to me, that's worth it.
I've read some studies on entrepreneurs, specifically around why people start businesses.
And one of the most common characteristics is basically a disdain for working for other
people.
And also an inherent belief that if you work for others and you get paid sort of a normal
salary doing a normal job, that you're always going to be underpaid, you're always going
to be undervalued, because you bring multiple skills to the table.
And you're a little bit less, maybe less adept at playing this political game and getting
paid more to do less.
It seems like you've hit the bell.
I've also read those and I'm like, that's definitely me.
I would rather serve in heaven or reign in hell.
I don't actually know which one of those will be there.
You prefer to reign in hell.
I think I do.
The entrepreneur.
I think I do.
I much prefer to reign in hell.
Yeah.
I would rather be my own boss of a crap ship than a cog in a well-oiled machine.
I'm not going to lie.
Sometimes I do wish someone else would make my decisions for me.
Well, the thing is that if you're good and you actually are sort of assessing your skills
and your abilities to become an entrepreneur effectively, then it won't be hell.
You'll actually create something that works as a higher upside than working for somebody
else and create your own culture that you want and make the money that you want to want
and work with the people that you want.
So it's not always hell.
No, but there are moments of hell.
So I've never worked at a really bad job.
No one ever harassed me or anything like that.
Nothing bad ever really happened to me.
It just drove me crazy.
And then some things have happened in my business that were extremely stressful.
Like right now, it's kind of stressful because I'm the one in charge and I have to make all
the decisions and someone else's salary is my responsibility.
And so there are downsides and I don't want to say that there aren't.
But I also don't think it's not hell to run your own business, but there's always downsides.
It's like, are you going to eat shit or are you going to have to shovel shit?
Maybe isn't station.
I would much rather shovel shit than eat it.
So during the recession here, you're basically juggling all these different balls and it
sounds like your goal really was to transition out of consulting and move progressively further
and further into your own businesses.
Freckle made something like $27,000 in revenue in its first year, which is not enough to
sustain you.
How did you get it to that point, despite the fact that in a recession, people are buying
less and they're saving more and they're being pickier about what they're spending and they
might seem to be less willing to take a risk on an unproven startup in a recession.
How did you grow your business?
I'm going to address your last bit first.
I don't think that in 2008, people were quote unquote worried about unproven startups because
the wave of things being shuttered was not like it has been now, but also we did from
the very beginning emphasize that we were in it to make money to create a sustainable
business and also very initially, immediately we made it so you could download all your
data.
So we did reassure people of that.
I did pitch it immediately to people who were like me in my audience and by which I mean
my cohort of people rather than people who just followed me.
When people say audience, they usually mean their mailing list and in 3,500, that means
your addressable market.
So a group of people who hang together online and talk about things and share resources
and buy on value.
So development agencies and consultants knew me.
I knew them.
A lot of them are on my mailing list, I knew them on IRC, forums, et cetera.
And so I wrote about creating the app on my blog, which is how you found out about me.
And people who already knew my blog also got to sort of go on that journey.
And then we initially got about $1,500 a month in revenue when we announced it to my mailing
list of mostly like Ruby and JavaScript developers.
Do you remember how much you were charging?
Yeah, so our plans were, I think, 12, 24, and like 48, I think.
So for solo was $12, like one person.
And then 24 was a small team, and then 48 was like a larger team, like 10 plus.
It's pretty cheap.
Pretty cheap.
We didn't have a lot of features that really focused on time entry and reporting and made
it really simple.
There weren't permissions or anything like that.
You couldn't even reset your password, we had to do it for you to email us.
So it was quite a few customers initially, like more than I expected.
Having it was a bit hard at first, because I had to figure out what kind of content marketing
would work.
But then we created some cheat sheets, targeted at people like you.
So it was about how to charge credit cards.
Back when that was really complicated, you had to learn so much to charge credit cards.
It was horrible.
And so I created a huge multi-page cheat sheet.
I did write about the business, I wrote about design stuff and marketing.
We did Thomas's story about his code, parts like some of the JavaScript was pretty edgy
at the time.
And so he would mail his mailing list about that as well.
Yeah, so these are the pre-stripe days.
It's extremely hard to basically charge for what you're building.
Part of what a lot of people didn't charge.
I'm sure that that had something to do with it.
Like, because you had to get a merchant account, you had to go to a bank, it was a whole thing.
Stripe is so much better.
We had to hand roll our own subscription services, subscription billing, I think we used a gem
and modified it or something.
It's been a long time, but I vaguely recall that.
It was a lot of work.
We also had a free account then, which we still have free users, but we don't have sign-ups
for the free account right now.
And I think that's actually something we may revisit at this time.
So we grew a lot by word of mouth.
People liked us because of the interface and they shared it with people.
We have Git integration so you can actually log time from your commit messages and things
like that that really the developers loved.
Like I cannot express you how bad time tracking software was at the time.
Like it was extremely, extremely terrible.
We grew primarily through word of mouth and reputation.
We've never been big on SEO.
Do you think that starting this business during a recession changed some of the decisions
that you made around how to grow your company?
Would you perhaps spent more money growing it or use less organic methods or would it
have been the same playbook?
Nope.
Because I lived through the banner ad crash.
Advertising on the web crashes regularly.
And I think if you haven't been watching it since like 1999, you don't know this.
It crashes.
If you invent a new advertising mechanism, it pays so much money and then it crashes
because then it becomes ineffective.
People ignore it.
Ignore it or they could add blockers, text links, those little banner ads you could get
on the side of popular blogs.
We definitely paid for those.
Some in the beginning and the conversion rate was ridiculously low.
Growing by word of mouth and reputation is the most durable way to grow because people
will recommend your product and there's nothing better and you can't buy it and they love
your product.
There's no competition.
People recommend your product before someone is searching for it, which is great too.
I'm extremely pragmatic in terms of finances, like I've said, why it was a rough way to
grow up.
I was always about saving money, earning money, not spending my money on frivolous stuff.
And so like to me, a lot of the growth mechanisms are dangerous looking.
Yeah, they require a lot of optimism, quite a ton.
And if it doesn't optimization, yeah, hope that Google won't one day just shut it off.
Like they have hurt so many businesses by changing stuff, legitimate businesses like
salt or well from examine.com has written about how Google like completely fucked their
traffic over.
I think it drops to like 25% of what it was before for new parent raising, like they're
extremely legitimate source of information.
They don't do any shady stuff and it was like a whole thing.
And they're like growing back, but can you imagine if like 75% of your revenue disappeared
overnight?
Like that would be horrible.
Yeah, pretty frightening for the same reasons.
And of course, building on the back of any other platform, Facebook, same story there,
suddenly you wake up and you can't publish posts to your followers unless you pay Facebook.
Yep, that happens.
Honestly, hundreds of businesses dead.
Yeah, I don't trust anyone, basically, in that way, like, and so that has served me
very well.
Like, I don't want anyone to get between me and my customers.
And so far, that has worked really well, like, have we had years or we like shrank a little
because I didn't work at all?
Yes.
I lost big customers because they went out of business and I didn't know they were there.
Yes.
Like, I've made mistakes.
But one mistake I have never made is like, no one can like shut my business off.
I don't trust platforms.
I don't trust Google.
I don't trust search, things like that, but change constantly.
I just don't trust them.
And people have made fun of me for this, like a lot.
It's still around.
I mean, it's called NoGo, but it still exists.
It's still making money.
It is.
And it's not been crushed by the downfall of Medium or YouTube or Google or Facebook
or any other platform.
It's totally fine.
That is correct.
Yeah.
In fact, the only big loss we've ever had was recently, we had this huge account and
I've written about this sort of vaguely on a growth stacking blog, and I'll go into it
more in detail.
It's a month later date.
We had a very large customer that I didn't know exist and this is embarrassing.
It's not related to the recessions going on.
They were paying us $5,000 a month and I didn't know that they existed because they wrote
into us once and then never again.
Typically, the larger accounts, we have several accounts in the $500 to $1,500 range.
They like to get support, they ask for discounts, they write in and talk to us.
These people did not.
I had no idea how large the account was.
And their business model was failing.
And if I had known they were there, I would have anticipated that because their business
model doesn't sound very sound at all.
And so we just lost 10% of our revenue recently.
Right.
Better to have a self-inflicted window than a window control because that's something
you can learn from and you can do better next time.
But that is a great example of why I've always said that 1,000 customers is better than one
client or one boss.
But one customer that's worth like 100 other customers is risky also.
We now have profiling.
So I can tell you how many of the other large accounts we have learned that lesson the hard
way.
So far, we've lost only a handful of accounts so far because of the actual coronavirus situation.
And I anticipate that that will continue to be the case.
So we have a question from the audience, Chris Biscardi is asking, do you think you should
have charged more from the beginning?
You're talking about NOCO's plans being basically under $50 a month, if you could go back and
do it over again, would you would you have changed that?
No.
And I think that it was really valuable for us to get those customers in the door when
we weren't living off it, and we were able to almost evolve at the second year, and had
the other stuff going on.
The thing about pricing is you can't know what works and what doesn't work until you
test it.
Now, we have much higher pricing now.
We switched to a per seat pricing model, and we have a lot more accounts that pay a lot.
But those original accounts, if they're still with us, still have their original price unless
they volunteered to pay more to get some features that were segregated for the new account levels.
I think that you can't go wrong by offering a reasonable price that is a no-brainer when
you don't have a reputation.
Once you do have any kind of reputation, that's a great time to raise your price.
However, if you were able to charge more and it's a matter of survival, then I would 100%
charge more.
It's not like you're giving...
I wouldn't charge less because it's the nice thing to do when you're dealing with businesses
because everyone's a business.
They can either choose to pay or not.
It's valuable to them or not, but we're actually looking right now at offering discounts to
all of our freelance customers of a couple bucks, which is 10%.
But if that will keep them around, then that's well worth it.
That's the sort of thing that you have to think about when economic things are going
haywire.
Obviously, economic things are going haywire translates into people are spending less money.
They haven't stopped spending money.
They still need things, but they're more judicious about what they're going to buy.
They prioritize aggressively, they cut out the cruft.
How did that shape your decision to work on time tracking software, if at all?
There's a lot of indie hackers who are basically trying to decide what kind of business they
want to build.
Should the fact that we're in a session change their ideas to change what they should work
on?
Definitely.
I think so, definitely.
But here's the thing.
I'm going to give you guys advice that I give to everyone all the time because my advice
has never changed on this.
You want to create value for your customers.
It's hard to deny.
So the best way to do that is to either save them money or make them money.
Saving money is a proxy for saving time because it can save how many people you have to hire
or how quickly you get your work done and how much more you can do, etc.
It all comes down to value, which is somehow tied to money.
The more explicitly, it can be tied to money, the better.
Time tracking, if I were to do it all over again, I wouldn't pick time tracking because
it is something that, at the heart of it, people hate to do.
No matter how nice the software is, it's like a trailing indicator, too.
So it doesn't empower people to do their work.
They use it to track their work, which, to some audiences, really makes it very dispensable.
I would just think it's more proactive.
Actually, we are working on those features for NOGO to make NOGO more proactive.
I've actually wrote about this before any of this started going down on the growth stacking
blog.
We are looking for ways to make NOGO more active rather than reactive, if that makes
sense, in terms of people's workday.
We want to get more integrated into people's workday in a positive way rather than just
taking this task that they hate and making it not hateable.
If you can go the other way and make something more impactful, easier to do, etc., rather
than removing pain, that's good.
But one of the reasons NOGO has done well, as well as it has, despite my neglect, is
that it makes money for people.
It does help people recover lost billing time.
It helps them charge more.
It helps them see how much they're spending on clients.
You can't even see my hands.
How much they're spending on clients for a time that they can't bill for, like sales,
so you can work that into your actual hourly rate.
So it's all money-related, but I would get even closer to the value of production.
That's what we're doing with features.
That's my suggestion.
My suggestion has always been to focus on making money or saving money, which is almost
the same thing, or killing serious pains that stop people from achieving their goals.
I love the fact that you said, get closer to the money and do something where you can
explicitly tie it to the money that people are making or saving.
It's all for NOGO if you're helping people save money, but they can't figure it out in
their heads how you're doing that.
They have to think too hard about it.
Then they're not going to understand the benefit you're providing.
Ultimately, they're not going to pay you because they don't see the benefit.
It's extremely true.
It has to be explicit.
You have to really spell it out.
I think that we're actually going to revise some of our sales messages on the landing
page copy to be even more explicit.
For example, a lady who had, I think, a free person consulting agency wrote in and asked
if she could pause the NOGO account.
I said, absolutely, and here's how you do it, alternatively, because of the economic
stuff that's going on.
I was like, I'm a small business too.
I would totally understand it.
If it would help, we would offer you a discount.
Here are some more features that we're working on that will be even more valuable to your
team in the future during this chaotic time.
She was sold.
Instead of losing the account, and I said specifically, it was not a very big account.
I was like, if it saves you one or two hours a month, it will continue to pay for itself.
She was like, absolutely, you sold me.
I kept her.
That's the message.
That's the message we're using to all of our customers who are concerned that we're offering
them a discount and saying, it can still pay for itself, and then you don't have to disrupt
your routine and switch to spreadsheets or all this crap.
So far, it's been working pretty well.
The example that always comes to mind for me is a good friend of mine who I've actually
had on the podcast before.
She's an eddy hacker running her own business now.
It's doing great.
She's a solo founder, but she used to work at a company.
She's a very social person.
She's kind of like...
Is it Lynn?
It's Lynn.
Exactly.
Very social person.
She's a chatterbox.
She went back and forth to everyone in the company.
She would identify problems in one area, figure out who to talk to.
And she was providing an immense amount of value to her employer, but there's no way
for them to measure that.
There's no way for them to know about it.
And so she just felt tremendously underappreciated because ultimately, she's not being rewarded
because the value she's providing, even though it exists, just wasn't explicit.
Whereas if you're a salesperson, you can point to a number and someone can say, oh, yeah,
you made this number go up.
Here's how much we'll pay you.
Or if you're a software engineer, maybe it's not as explicit as a salesperson, but people
can say, hey, people buy our software, you're the one who's creating it, you're valuable.
And I think it's the same in business as it is if you're an employee.
If you're not doing something that's super easy for people to explain how it makes them
or saves them money, then it doesn't matter how much money it makes or saves them.
And so then you have to learn how to do that and make sure that you actually are.
And I actually have an old blog post on Sacking the Bricks about...
I think it's called, do you deserve your salary or do you earn your salary?
Which is about exactly this problem, because even as an employee, you need to make that
messaging clear to your employer because a lot of times people are fucking idiots and
will fire one of the most valuable people on their team because they're actually just
doing their work and not communicating aggressively what it is that they're doing and how they're
working.
And then suddenly they have to hire other people to replace them.
So people are fucking stupid and you have to spell it out for them all the time.
Most of you I've ever worked for, you're bad at business.
It was really astonishing to me.
So I would assume that if you have a job that your boss is bad at business and that you
should work to make your value as explicitly clear as possible so they don't do something
real stupid.
Let's talk about how you do that when you're deciding what kind of company to build.
Because I talked to a lot of indie hackers who are...
They'll make some random idea.
They'll be like, oh, I've made an app so that when you start up your computer, it automatically
opens up these applications, which saves you 20 seconds a day.
And then that saves you, I don't know, 20 minutes a year.
And that's worth $15.
So here's $15 a year that I charge you.
And I'm just like, that's not going to work.
It's not a valuable problem.
It's going to be hard for you to sell to people.
They're not going to pay a lot for it, if at all.
I think a lot of people, they think, well, all the valuable ideas are taken.
It's already built a time tracker.
I have to do something completely unique, something no one's ever done and solve the
totally unsolved problem.
And they end up solving these really trivial problems that nobody cares about.
NOCO, as it is, is like a tiny, tiny little player.
Because for the past several years, I have been too sick to promote it or work on it.
And so we've maintained it and we haven't done anything else.
And it's still making over a half million dollars a year for us steadily minus that
one large account that we lost.
And anyway, we'll be able to grow again once things are going fine.
So the idea of competition is not really an issue because there are millions and millions
of people, assuming you pick the right type of audience and it's a powerful problem.
Millions of people who need this thing and no one thing is going to solve all their problems.
It doesn't matter how popular it is or how good it is.
There's always going to be areas that require changes specific to an industry or specific
to a way of working or a mindset or preferences or even requirements in the industry.
When people are used to paying for a product, it's much easier to sell them on a different
version of it than if they're not paying for a product.
It's the idea that you find people who are underserved and who don't pay anything for
anything because it doesn't exist and that you're going to go in there and change their
lives.
Don't do it because the fact that they're not paying for anything is actually an indicator
that other people have almost certainly done that and failed completely to sell them on
anything.
Whereas if you see a whole industry, like time tracking is a huge industry.
There are so many people with so many products making millions and millions of dollars.
You can probably carve out a small piece for yourself if you find a specific way to tackle
the pain that resonates with a subset of the audience that is not being served well by
their current product that they're using and already paying for.
It's much easier to commit someone to switch than it is to start paying something new that
they've never tried.
That's the competition side of things.
People are probably a bit more conservative right now, so it might be harder to get them
to switch.
However, if some companies are using super, super expensive tools, they're quite likely
looking to go to a more middle range tool.
For NOCA, we have two strategies that I'm currently working to build out and design,
changing my growth strategy, which I'd laid out on the blog because things happened.
We want to see if we can get some of these other companies that are on much more expensive
products to slow downhill our way.
We also want to offer a less expensive offering to people that I can already reach who are
not necessarily in the market for time tracking, but have time tracking related problems that
I can then sell for $9 a month rather than $19, which is what NOCA currently costs.
We're coming at it from both angles.
I haven't decided which to tackle first, thinking about it because $9 a month is easier to sell
than finding enterprise companies and getting them to switch, but of course, enterprise
companies pay more and are more stable.
I actually think that studying the market, what people buy already, what people are already
spending money on, and assuming that they may want to change because of pricing or because
of emerging needs now that everyone's working at home, etc.
Or you find out based on what they say on the internet, if they're all super conservative
and don't want to change anything.
It's funny because this is one of those areas where I think especially as a first time founder,
your intuition is 180 degrees backwards.
Your intuition might be, oh, people are already paying a lot of money for stuff.
There's no way I can get in there and compete.
I've got to do something that no one's paying money for, but it's the exact opposite.
Looking at people are paying money for is almost like having the answers to the test.
It is.
It's not a real deal that people find valuable.
What do people already find valuable?
Do that.
Don't copy your neighbor's product, but copy their neighbor's insight.
Yeah, the problem that they're solving.
Copy that.
Make a different type of product, a variant.
Don't copy their interface.
Don't copy their actual marketing text.
Yeah, you want to look at people who are succeeding, who are getting something done that works
in a large way and figure out how you can carve off a little bit of that pie for yourself.
As for the ideas that you'll come to us both with, those are good time economic ideas when
you can just stick around and have fun.
If you really want to make a business, you have to find out something that people will
pay for first before you create anything.
It's fine to make hobby projects.
I think everyone should do it if they enjoy it.
I think you shouldn't ruin your hobby project by pretending it's going to be this.
Try to make your hobby your jobby.
It's something I've been saying and hating myself for, but don't make a hobby your jobby.
The other half of this is what you're saying, which is look for problems that people are
solving that they're actually willing to pay money to solve.
But you don't want to copy your competitor's products.
And again, this is, I think, exactly the opposite of many people's intuition.
When I look at any hackers, the products people are building, very often they look like just
clones of other products.
And so they're solving these totally unique problems that no one has proven that they'll
ever pay for.
Getting too clever there, and then they're not getting clever enough with the solution.
They're building a solution that looks completely undifferentiated from everybody else's.
They say, oh, Peter Levels, put a little made by Peter Levels, Twitter link at the bottom
right of his website.
I'm going to have the same thing.
I'm like, oh, these websites are white with dark text.
I'm going to have a website that's white with dark text.
It's all identical.
And I wonder why that is.
Why do you think people feel the need to build the exact same product as everyone else but
solve these completely unique trivial problems?
I think the real root answer of that is human nature is we are built to mimic what goes
around us.
That's how children learn to talk and walk and everything.
And so we look for what feels right and what feels right is something that's really familiar.
And so we just copy stuff by default.
When I was younger and I started making websites, I was a complete mimic.
So I'm not going to rag on anyone for doing that.
I think that as an adult, you have to be like, what's going to suit my purposes, like what's
actually going to give me the results I want, and you have to override that impulse.
But I think that everyone has that impulse.
It's just some of us are better at ignoring it and saying, OK, that's a feeling.
It doesn't mean I'm going to, that's the right thing to do.
I'm going to go look for some evidence instead.
Business stuff is unknown for a lot of people.
So of course, they copy what they see and they don't necessarily even think through
whether the thing they're copying even works for the person doing it.
So a lot of people copy stuff that isn't even successful.
And I think it's just because I think they are unconsciously mimicking because they're
already in the frame.
And so they're just sort of like, this time tracking app should require you to select
the project before you track your time.
Most of them do.
No code doesn't because I was like, what's wrong with these tools?
So you have to kind of like question all your assumptions and really be deliberate about
what it is you're going to make rather than getting an inspiration, which is usually just
I think a memory in a lot of cases.
Talking about the coronavirus earlier, I feel like I see the same thing.
When I talk to friends or family or acquaintances who live in a certain place, they tend to
mostly just copy what everybody around them is doing.
So whether they're updated on like the correct response or not, a lot of my friends in Georgia
like well, no one here seems to be taking it seriously.
So I'm kind of just going to copy what everyone else here is doing.
I got some of my friends in California, like everyone here is taking it really seriously
and sheltering in place.
Like that's what I'm doing.
And whether they've read up on it or not, it just seems to be like, what is the response
to the people around me are doing?
Let's do that.
That is like a known situation in crisis response.
Like a fire alarm goes off in a building.
People they don't like see the fire.
They will look to what other people are doing to decide like how seriously they should react.
And I think we all do this to an extent and we have to over it and pulse.
Yeah.
Heard instinct.
So let's say we're looking out into the world and it's a recession and we're trying to figure
out, what do people spend money on?
What do people spend money on during a recession?
It's definitely not super trivial apps and little websites that aren't adding value.
What would you say an entrepreneur should be looking at if they're trying to decide
what to start?
So there's like two poles here.
There's the trivial stuff that you're talking about.
People do recessions, spend money on like affordable luxuries as a replacement for a
less affordable luxury.
For example, it's a known fact that people buy like fancy soaps and shit like that.
And then they like cancel their salon appointments.
So like massage therapists lose out.
Fancy soap makers actually can grow, for example, things you can make at home instead of going
out to restaurants.
Things like that.
Like that's a known thing that people definitely 100% do in a recession.
There's a consumer items though.
And I think it's extremely risky and hard to break into that.
I think that some game people like game makers will actually do very well in this recession.
Like maybe even better than before because people have other options to do with their
time.
But that doesn't mean that you can break in with something new at that time.
I wouldn't recommend it because consumers are very fickle.
So the other thing is that businesses have needs and people have needs that they cannot
get rid of.
And so they will maybe go through substitutes, but they won't stop doing the thing.
So for example, businesses absolutely still need time tracking, especially if they're
going to be invoicing clients or if they have to do internal reporting for their budgets
and stuff like that.
They might consider downgrading to a less expensive product, but they're not going to eliminate
that need entirely.
However, some freelancers, especially on the lower end, are just going to go out of business
because they've been just relying on work kind of like trickling down, not knowing how
to get work reliably and not having a value statement.
And so they might just go poof.
Other people might be spending more on things they need to work at home.
For example, Zoom is doing really well right now.
Other products like that have an opportunity to expand because it's a replacement for something
that has to get done.
And there's getting done now in a different way.
What would you say to people who are sort of looking out into the landscape now?
Because this is a pretty unique recession.
As you said earlier, it's not necessarily caused by some sort of naturally occurring
thing.
And directly it is, but it's more just caused by a response to a pandemic, in which case
we're laying off tons of people, closing businesses.
So a graph that showed sort of the spike of unemployment compared to the last few decades.
And what we've seen in just the last week is dwarfs the 2008 recession in its entirety.
It's crazy.
And as a result, there's all sorts of habits that have changed.
People are staying at home, obviously, like you said, Zoom and other video conferencing
and remote software, Slack has seen a huge uptick.
People are engaging in different behaviors.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs are seeing this and saying, well, here's an opportunity.
People's behaviors have changed as a differential that maybe I can take advantage of, like start
a business that will sort of target one of these behavioral changes.
Does that seem short sighted to you?
Does that seem at odds with perhaps just sticking to what's tried and true?
Or does that make a lot of sense to be opportunistic and look at what's changed?
All business opportunistic.
I mean, so there's different types of opportunistic, right?
There's like, I found boxes of masks at Home Depot.
I'm going to buy them and sell them on eBay.
That's evil opportunism, also illegal in most places.
And then there's like, everyone is working at home and this thing sucks and people know
it and they're spending money on software, so I'm going to get in there.
That's good opportunistic.
The chances are that once things have cleared up, however long that takes, through the fuck
knows, the new habits formed from working from home and stuff, some people will absolutely
drop.
And so like, you can't know for sure that things will continue as intensely as they
are now.
I think it will because some segment of the population actually likes going into the office,
but like tools that enable remote work are going to be probably in the most cases still
useful for in-person work for documentation or like half the teams remote, things like
that I think actually are potentially a real boon and will continue to be valuable.
You might have a dip when things suddenly change, but I would think that solid tools
that support work out of people are creating now is something that could be like a long
enduring business.
That's my perspective.
It's interesting to think about what things will endure because whenever there's any sort
of emergency, certain things endure, certain things fade away.
After 9-11, a lot of things were closed, a lot of things were canceled, but sort of life
returned to normal, but we still have a TSA.
And now airports have just always been a hassle since 9-11, but I'm sure there's going to
be things that endure here.
Maybe remote work will be something lots of people discover and decide, hey, that's something
I want to keep doing.
These remote work tools will see the so-far temporary boost end up being permanent.
A lot of other things will go back to normal.
Is there anything that you're in particular looking at?
Are there any changes for NOCO that are...
Sure.
I'll just walk you through some of the ideas that we've been kicking around over here for
our business.
Focusing really on the two businesses, the stacking the BRICS 30 Buffet 100 Entrepreneur
Education business, and then NOCO, the time tracking business, or let's call it the software
and service business.
Actually Alex and I teach a class called 30 Buffet 100, which is $1,999.
We just launched it.
Obviously, our launch did not do as well as it has historically, which we expected, fully
expected based on the situation.
And so what we plan to do, Alex and I, is offer, one, is to create a tighter community
of people who are already in 30 Buffet 100, so we can help each other out, which is why
I pasted the link to this in the chat room.
Number two, we're going to look at emphasizing and refreshing and creating more lower price
product for people who still want to get started, or who need to solve some problem in their
business, but who don't have $2,000 to spend, which is going to be a lot of people.
So because it's a recession, we're looking at things in the $9 to $99 price point, maybe
a little bit more, like adding enhancing JavaScript performance and the other Jbook.
Just fucking ship is the book I'm talking about.
We're looking at refreshing that, adding some more support tools, which actually also segues
into some of the things we're doing for NOCO.
So on our roadmap that I've mentioned before, you're going to be working on a focus mode,
which is like you set an intention of what you want to work on, and you basically can
queue up a Pomodoro timer, but we've also been tracking it at the end.
And also, things I've been doing in my business recently have been setting my daily three
priorities on paper, which I've also written about.
I created a whole worksheet and everything for myself, but I really want that to be software.
And I want that to be software that's integrated with time tracking.
So you can have your three priorities, and then you can track whether you're getting
them done or not, and you can track your time with them.
And that also can communicate within teams.
So one, if you're running around crazy and you just need something to hang on to to get
anything done to help clarify the three priorities, it's a great habit for individuals.
It's been so helpful for me.
And two, if you're in a small team or whatever, that can help be a communication mechanism
so you know what's going on, rather than constantly asking them to their questions in Slack.
And so that's what we're looking at.
And I think there's actually a crossover there, which is another thing I want to emphasize
is always emphasize work with the things that you already have, the assets you already have,
people you can already reach, people you already understand, because why would you throw away
that advantage?
And you should especially should not throw that advantage away now.
So that in the gold feature for NOCA, which we've been working on for a while already,
we're about to ship it.
So you can say...
It's fascinating to hear how many different things that you're doing.
And this is something you spoke about your launch, basically, not going as well as it
previously had in earlier years, but you're aware of that, given the situation, something
that I've seen within the hackers as well, where it's, I've had momentum going in a certain
direction.
I had plans, you know, this is what's going to happen in March.
This is what's going to happen in April.
And suddenly, you know, well, the global conversation is completely different than I expected it
would be.
Certain things that I thought were important a month ago, now just seem completely trivial.
Like I recorded, for example, a podcast episode with DHH and Natalie Nagel about work-life
balance, because they just had two completely different approaches to it when they both
started their companies.
And I thought that'd be something useful to have and sort of a discussion debate around
that.
And I was really excited to release that this week.
And this week, all three of us said, like, you know what, it's not the time.
It's not the time to release it, you know, it's arguably evergreen, but you've got to
be nimble and as a founder and realize that a lot of your plans and your momentum don't
work anymore.
And things are changing rapidly.
That is so true.
I hate it.
It's a pain.
Just in case everyone's like, God, Amy really has her shit together.
It's like, if you think I wasn't going behind the scenes for a little bit first, of course
I was.
Just so you know, like, I don't like it either.
This is the result of two or three weeks worth of thinking that I'm sharing with you right
now.
I didn't just instantly come up with that.
Just so you know.
It makes me feel slow, number one, listening to you, but also just looking back to like,
for example, a time before indie hackers really had much of anything going on.
And I could be as nimble as I wanted to be, react to anything instantaneously.
I didn't have backlogs of things built up.
I didn't have long-term plans, whereas now I'm realizing, you know, when you're a little
bit more established and a little bit further ahead, it's harder just to react to things.
And as a brand new founder, just getting started, you've got, you know, maybe fewer advantages
that you can rely on that already exist, but you also have more ability to basically do
whatever you want at any point in time without any sort of cruft or anchor dragging behind
that you have to sort of figure out.
That is absolutely true.
And I was just thinking about this yesterday, myself, because I said, we're launching this
goals feature we've been working on for a while.
Well, some of the things we kind of have to figure out when we launch is like, do we do
permissions for goals now and our new features, like everything gets more complicated.
The older it is, the longer you've worked on it.
And that's undoubtedly true.
It really is sometimes a blessing to be starting out because exactly what you said.
I would actually be curious to hear, has IndieHackers traffic changed over this situation?
It has.
And so this is like one of the things that we've been worried about because IndieHackers
traditionally is almost entirely about people discussing their problems and their issues
and their challenges with their startups.
So it's very educational.
The forum isn't, it's not like Hacker News, it's not sharing links about what's the latest
happening in the world.
And if you analyze the sort of problems that drive people to go visit a forum or go read
a website, they all correspond to different frequencies, different tension curves.
So for example, if your website is primarily educational, like IndieHackers has been, it's
very prone to people graduating, which is just a nice way of saying churning.
Hey, I figured out what I needed to learn.
I've seen 20 examples of people starting companies.
I've decided I don't want to do this.
So I'm gone.
Or I've decided I'm going to do it.
I'll see you in a couple of years.
And so basically in the beginning of the whole coronavirus pandemic sort of blowing up basically
two weeks ago and becoming a little bit more serious for people.
We saw our traffic started going down regularly, almost every day it was lower than the day
before.
We've since sort of switched into becoming a little bit more newsy, a little bit more
focused on current events.
It just feels incredibly tone deaf.
I think just to just publish the same content into this conversation of people talking about
economy crashing and lives being lost and doctors making these life and death decisions.
And we're just like, here's three tips to grow your startup faster.
So we've been more about, okay, well, how does the news apply to ND hackers?
I'm not an epidemiologist.
I can't tell you a country how they should prepare, but I can't tell other ND hackers
and founders, what's going on with other founders in this space, which they're worried about.
What are other people doing?
What decisions are they making?
And that's the kind of stuff that people want to read regularly.
So in the last literally like a week or so, we've seen those numbers sort of turn around.
And this is going to be the first recession or a coronavirus related podcast episode
that comes out as well.
I mean, so you have that distinction.
And it's a lot of it just comes down to like I was saying, reacting, figuring out what's
going on and actually changing because it's not the same times as normal.
And so you can't just run business as normal as a founder.
It's very true.
And that makes a lot of sense to me.
It also makes a lot of sense to me that things are like turning around a bit now, because
initially everyone was probably just reloading CNN or whatever all Twitter all the time.
And that starts to wear off.
And so then we're like, we have to have some semblance of normalcy.
And also like problems are starting to appear in my life, in my business that I have to
figure out.
And so we have to go back.
And I think like one thing that we all really need to do is like, this is not me telling
you how do you do your job?
This is advice I told myself as well, like Alex and I've been talking about this is
like we just need to figure out how to help each other hang together.
And that's why, you know, I'm quite tired.
I have like doubling up.
I'm a very dark girl.
It is.
I'm very tired.
I think it's just really bad allergies because I haven't gone anywhere, I've seen anyone
in weeks that we just have to help each other stay sane and like realize this is happening
to all of us.
And like, there's no one who's not going to be touched by this some way.
And that like, we have to sort of let go of all those ideas that we had about how our
future was going to play out, at least for the next six to 12 months.
It's like, it's gone.
It's not going to happen though.
Everything.
It's just, that's just it.
And, you know, we have to kind of admit that that's happening.
And that's exactly what it feels like is we're grieving things and that we have to figure
out how to like, change what we were doing in a way that will work.
And it's not easy for anyone, including for me, even though you said, I quite talk so
fast.
Unquote.
One of the interesting things is it feels like, you know, I was, I was pretty young and not
involved in the business world during the last recession.
I was still in college, but it feels like this, this recession and this pandemic are
just playing out so much faster than in the past.
We know what's going on, we're predicting what's going to happen like months before
it's happening.
Or as last recession, I felt like there was such a long period of uncertainty, you know,
what's going to happen?
And we're going to be able to dig ourselves out of it.
And it just unfolded in slow motion over the course of almost a whole year, whereas now
it's like, first months, we're closing down businesses and we're instantaneously, like
it's going to be a recession before the recession even hits.
We're battering down the hashes, we're patching stimulus bills.
Do you think that catching things early gives entrepreneurs a special chance to sort of
take advantage of this earlier or, you know, implement measures that would help them survive
earlier?
And also what would this be?
That's a really good question.
This is going to sound like I'm just humble bragging or just maybe just bragging, but
in 2006, my now ex-boyfriend's mother was like, Oh yeah, you guys should buy a house.
I'm like, no, I'm going to wait until all these people buying these houses go broke.
And then I'll buy one cheap.
Like I didn't 100% foresee the, I didn't foresee the whole cascade of the recession because
I knew that I didn't know about like credit default swaps or whatever that shit was.
I didn't know about that at all, but I was like, this can't sustain itself.
And so I sort of, it just played into my general, I don't trust when things are going so great
because if they're an overinflated, they will come down and this is like not the case of
what's happening right now.
So it's like a different, completely different situation.
It's not like the restaurant business was overinflated.
The restaurant business was tugging along normally, like nothing weird was going on
with restaurants and now they have to shut down for public safety.
And so like in that way, we didn't see it coming.
Like I did not see that coming, but like having a sense that you have to change now, I think
is, is going to be a benefit.
Yeah.
You could start saving money earlier.
I read a post about, um, from a founder today back to himself in 2008.
And then one of his top points was basically, Hey, you have all that money in the bank that
you think is not enough.
It actually is enough.
You idiot.
Don't spend all your time trying to raise money.
Just be frugal.
Learn how to be frugal with the money and spend less.
And obviously like back in 2008, he didn't really understand that he spent all of his
money way too fast.
He didn't adapt fast enough, but I guess we can see this coming.
We know that like, Hey, it might be time to cut some of those unnecessary expenses.
And also realize that if our customers are doing the same thing, you know, are we one
of those unnecessary expenses and how do we change that?
That is exactly true.
I have always advocated people like keep as few staff as possible.
Don't, don't hire a bunch of people on the anticipation that you'll have more income
and so on.
So for us, if you've already done that, no, it's cold comfort, I think, because now you
have to make hard decisions and that's not great.
I do think that any business that can survive and, or even grow or start during this time
will be much better position to like, go, just go even better in the future because
being frugal, making the most of what you have, selling on value, really understanding
and serving your customers to make a sale when times are tough really hardens you to
be successful forever.
And actually, I mean forever, but you know, like for the known future, there are papers
that show that businesses that are started in recessions tend to do better over time
because of these built in like frugality and practicality and like skills that you need
to make a sale when things are hard also work really well when things are good.
Yeah.
I feel like the advice to build a successful business during a recession is basically the
same as the advice to build a successful business out of a recession.
But it's like with an asterisk, take this advice more seriously.
Do it harder.
Yeah.
Do it harder.
It's always good to be frugal.
It's always good to be careful about your spending.
But now it's like an issue of life or death that you will not survive if you're not frugal.
Yeah.
I think that that is really true unless you're in one of those companies and suddenly booming.
Like, I don't think Slack is going to have any issues right now or for the foreseeable
future for example.
Rand Fishkin made a good post on his blog, I think yesterday, the day before, just about
how difficult it is to basically engage in marketing now.
You have to be very careful because there's a fine line that is easier for some people
to spot than others between exploiting a human tragedy and building a growing business and
communicating with the customer as well.
How do you see that line with NoGo?
For example, if you were to offer some sort of promotion that's somehow in line with
what people are going through during the times of a pandemic, how might you phrase that?
What would you keep in mind to make sure that you don't come off the wrong way?
Did you see that post?
But I 100% agree with that.
Also animals with a Z put out, they do content marketing stuff.
I'm not sure where that name came from, you hear animals with a Z and it sounds like something
very different.
They do content marketing like strategy.
And they did a really great recent post about that people need voices in leadership.
And then they had specific advice in there.
I have 100% always been about understanding the customer's needs and being respectful
of them as people and showing how we will help them as like, sort of servant leadership
is the idea.
Everything in the 3500 world, all my business advice is always about respecting your customers
as people, which means understanding their needs and serving their needs and being honest
and helping people through those techniques.
And so I feel like that I've got that pretty much on lock.
However, I have not written a COVID-19 announcement email to no customers, because I don't want
to be like all the random people I'm going to email about that stuff like gotten so many
of those emails.
I don't want to write anything until it's like, here's how I can help you.
I don't honestly think that anyone cares that we're a remote company.
Like I'm not gonna be like, here's how things are working at the slash seven offices.
No, it's like, here's how we can help you is the only thing we're saying right now,
I think.
And so I want to put together some resources for freelancers, how they can weather the
business.
It's like the same type of advice I'm giving you, but like tailored because I was consulting
at that time as well.
I've been a freelancer.
I've been a freelancer who made like 10 bucks an hour and like couldn't eat anything but
ramen noodles.
And then I got was a freelancer who made $500 an hour and like chose to quit.
So like I've been there and I want to offer support and possibly it's like some programs
to help people with the no-co bill.
If we can keep them, if we can both give up something and stay in business and they can
keep using our product to run their business.
Like I feel like that's a win-win, but I have to come up with what exactly that is.
So like, that's my advice is don't go telling people what you want to say.
Tell them something that they will benefit from hearing one way or another.
I think be real.
Alex paused our, it's a newsletter that's pre-programmed with weeks of content from
that we've written before, like new people don't see this.
So people see new stuff every week and he paused it because it's just like tone deaf
right now, like that's what we've been doing.
We don't send out like a normal no-co newsletter, which is like one of the problems I want to
fix.
And now is not a time to start with generic freelancing content.
So I think being respectful, I think not being denial, I think focusing on people as humans
who have concerns is really the way to go, but I think it's always the way to go.
I mean, I think it's perfect because you're talking about being customer first and basically
helping people, which also requires you to understand your customers and the problems
they're getting through, which is a step a lot of people skip.
And if you're only thinking, okay, business owner, what do I need?
I need to keep the lights on and do this, I need that, like no one cares what you need.
They really don't.
I think to a small degree, if your customers enjoy your product that they want you to keep
your lights on, but they don't want to like just read about that understandably.
And I think that focusing on the recipient is always the way to go.
I read how to win friends and influence people when I was like a young teenager, and there's
a whole chapter where he rips up a letter that he received from someone and he just
destroys it.
And he's, it's all about like what the radio company wants him to pay for a subscription
or something like that.
Like really old timey, yet weirdly topical at the same time.
And he says, you want, you want, you know, like, I don't give two things for what you
want.
You unmitigated ass.
I only care about what I want and what I want is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I like that like hit me so hard and I've been trying to live my corporate life that
way.
Yeah.
Like the customers don't care what you want, except where it aligns with what they want.
Exactly.
And even if it's the same thing, you should talk about their needs first.
And I think that's just a good rule all the time, but especially in this time, because
who wants to be like dealing with a bunch of crap and then hearing some tone deaf corporate
email?
One of my favorite emails that I've gotten so far, honestly, it wasn't particularly caring
it wasn't particularly empathetic and in sort of like the stereotypical ways, but it was
empathetic in terms of how much the people who wrote that knew what I actually cared
about.
And it was from this burger company in San Francisco called creator and they have a whole
like robot created burger assembly line and their whole email is like, here's how we've
outfitted our line to minimize human contact.
It's all like, they even have like a picture of like their burger coming out of like a
slot and a window with like, it was like completely wrapped in plastic and a delivery driver grabbing
it so they wouldn't even have any contact with it.
And I'm like, this is someone who gets it because they understand what I'm concerned
about.
It's like, I just don't want to get infected with the virus.
And so they're telling me like how their product is going to help me stay safe.
And they're appealing to that emotion.
That is such a great example because as you said, they're like empathetic, but not people
say empathetic.
Oh, I know how you're feeling type empathetic, they're empathetic in like a functional way.
Yeah, like you wouldn't want like a heartfelt letter about suffering from your burger company
like context.
No, but they're empathizing with your actual desires and just going straight to it rather
than like touchy feely empathizing.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great example.
Yeah.
I've gotten lots of emails where it's like, Oh, I hope you're staying safe and here's
how we're staying safe.
And then it's like, they're doing nothing whatsoever to help.
Yeah, like our office will remain open GM financial, we have a truck and GM financial
is the worst.
Like we fucking hate them.
Like they're so bad that when we've tried to refinancing it, they didn't send the paperwork.
So we couldn't refinance it.
Like that's how bad they are.
We can't escape them literally.
And basically their COVID-19 email was like, you can pay your bill online.
And the thing is we already did like we've never paid the bill over the phone or whatever.
And so they're just like reminding us there's no fee.
That's one way to reduce churn.
It's just prevent people from leaving.
It's the comp.
Yeah.
They're like the bank of Comcast.
I don't know.
On the West Coast.
If you know Comcast, they're famous for like refusing to cancel you.
They'll say that they will.
And then they don't do it.
One of the most hated companies of all time.
It's true.
And for good reason.
Yeah.
So like a lot of tone deaf emails, I would rather see nothing than send a tone deaf email.
Honestly, much better off not doing that so much better off.
You know, this is, it's been an informative discussion and obviously you and I are both
going through this, you with the real business and you with the project that doesn't make
any money whatsoever, but what would you say to people who are considering starting their
very first business?
I talked to a lot of indie hackers who've been making plans for months to start their
business and I'm trying to figure something out and now the entire landscape has changed.
What do you think they should take away from your experience here?
So I think the first advice that I have actually is to like minimize your risk.
So if you have a job that pays okay and you're like not dying there, keep it.
If you are freelancing or consulting, I would say you definitely want to invest in that
right now to make sure that you have as much financial continuity as you can.
Like this is oxygen mask situation.
It's really important to protect yourself because the worst thing is to think my business
has to make money tomorrow and it doesn't.
That's such a horrible situation.
If you have any better way to make money that is more reliable or safer right now, I say
do that first.
Secure your oxygen mask first before you try anything.
Second, I think it's time to let go of the idea of passion projects as businesses, not
for fun.
Like you should do whatever things that make you happy for fun.
All you want.
It's very important.
That is the best time to get real about what do people actually pay money for and to actually
research your customers like I teach with the Sales Safari workshop and 3500 and all
the things I've written.
If you study what people actually do and what companies are making money and continue to
make money and figure out how you can carve out a little bit of that pie for yourself,
that is honestly the safest thing you can do.
There's always good advice, which is why I've been giving this advice since 2010, to just
understand that when things are good, people will spend on a lot of frivolous stuff that
couldn't survive during a bad time and you don't want to be one of those.
You definitely don't want to start one of those.
If you already have one, now's the time to figure out how to pivot to people who will
get measurable value from it and charge them money instead.
If you haven't started anything, you haven't dug a hole for yourself, so stop digging.
Great advice.
Thanks for taking the time to have this chat with me.
Hopefully, we'll have some more productive chats over the course of the year.
Can you tell people where they can go to find out more about what you're up to with 3500
and NOCO and anything else you've got going on?
The website you should go to is stackingthebricks.com.
That's like building a wall little piece by piece, which is the way that I suggest people
build their businesses.
We have a mailing list there, and I will be updating some of this discussion, like recession
advice and links to our best articles and stuff on the newsletter soon, so now's a good
time to join the newsletter.
I recommend it, listeners.
Some of my favorite guests, we built some big businesses and have come on to the Indie
Echoes podcast, learned everything they know from Amy, so business stacking the bricks
and check her out.
So many of them have paid more money than me, which is like half embarrassing.
But also really, I'm proud of it at the same time, so I'll take a small amount of credit.
Quite a few Indie hackers as well who've made a lot more money than I ever had.
Thanks so much, Amy.
Thank you so much for having me, everybody, hang in there.