Welcome to the Indie Hackers Podcast. I'm Courtland Allen from IndieHackers.com and on
this show I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses to try to get a sense of how
they got to where they are today so that the rest of us can learn from their lessons and experiences.
Today I'm talking to Wes Boss. He is a bit hard to describe because he's so good at so many
different things. And I'm sure a lot of you listening are rabid Wes Boss fans just based on
the number of questions and suggestions I got for this interview. There are very few introductions
that I could give that would really do Wes justice or even this episode justice. I think it's one of
my favorite conversations that I've had on the podcast. So why don't we just jump right into it?
I'm here today with Wes Boss. How's it going Wes?
Boom, pretty good. How about you?
Doing excellent. Thanks a ton for coming on the podcast. People have been requesting you for
months now basically since I started this thing. So it's awesome to have you on.
Awesome. Cool. I'm glad to join and I don't know share any little wisdom that I do have.
Well, you are a bit difficult to describe and to introduce because you've excelled at so many
things. Your website you describe yourself as a designer, a developer, an entrepreneur,
a speaker and a teacher. And I think usually people who use this many words to describe
themselves are exaggerating, but you're actually at the top of your field in like every single one
of these areas, which is super cool. Let me start by asking a tough question. If you had to pick
just one of these to be good at and all of the other areas you had to give up for good,
they're just completely gone. What would you pick?
A developer at the core of absolutely everything that I do is web development. So I wouldn't have
those other things or if I didn't have a development and I had all the other things,
it wouldn't be much. So it's very important that I have that very solid foundation of being a web
developer. You answered that much faster than I thought you would. Well, you could take all
those other things away and maybe with the exception of being entrepreneur, I would still
be very happy in what I'm doing. But if you took away the web development, I know that I wouldn't
be as happy as I am. So can you give us the abridged two-minute story behind West boss as
a web developer, your origins as a developer and how you got to where you are today? And then the
middle of the story, which is like where you are today and what you're up to. And then the end of
the story would be where do you hope to be as a developer in a few decades? All right. Well,
I got cut my teeth pretty early in the MySpace days back when maybe I think it was about 17 years
ago. I just did a whole podcast myself on my origin story. So I'm pretty fresh with it. So about 17
years ago, I got into building my own websites. I moved into building MySpace designs. And that's
where I really learned coding for different bands. And then from there, I just started doing sort of
freelance consulting all the way through high school and through university. And by the time
I got out of university, I was running my own business doing consulting. Right around that time,
I got into teaching something called Ladies Learning Code here in Toronto that we did like
weekend workshops, learning how to use WordPress. And that sort of just compounded into me
understanding that I love to teach. And one thing, lots of blog posts, YouTube videos,
lots of other teaching led to another. And that's sort of where I became, I don't know,
the blog posts and the videos sort of led itself to lots of traffic, which I decided I wanted to
write a book about. We can talk about that more if you like. But I wrote this book on Sublime Text,
and that was like my first product and I was hooked since then. So that's my beginning story
and sort of where I'm at right now. I'm curious about the future. Where do you see yourself as
a developer 20, 30 years from now? Where do you hope to be? Are you already? Where do you hope to
be as a developer? That's a great question. I don't know. People always ask me a lot about
the future of web development and the future of me. And I really have no idea about the future of
web development. I'm much more of a reactionary person than a visionary. So I just sort of watch
what's going on around me and then you react to that, which is funny because part of my success
was a React series. I'm a dad, by the way, so I have dad jokes. Well, I'm happy to report that dad
jokes are more than welcome on the Indie Actors podcast. Oh, good. So yeah, I just I don't really
know where it's going. I definitely like to stay on the cutting edge of things, but I'm definitely
not the sort of person that's paving the way in terms of what the next 5, 10, 20 years is going
to look like. So I think in 10, 20 years, I think that I don't know where it will be. I might be
still doing web development and software stuff like that. I might have a goat farm because I'll
be frustrated with coding so much at that point where I'll go off and start farming goats or
something crazy like that. I'm curious to hear how much impact that you would say you've had
across all of your roles so far. First, what metrics do you look at? Do you measure your
progress in terms of the people that you've reached or the money that you've made or the
clients that you've landed? And second, if you don't mind sharing, what are some of those numbers
look like? There's two main things that I use to measure my success and how things are going.
The first one is mostly sign up numbers and sales numbers. How many people are signing up
for free courses? How many people are signing up for or paying for the paid courses? But really,
the thing that sort of keeps me going is those small little emails that I get where people have
got a new job or they've broken into the industry, taken a couple of my courses and actually landed
themselves a new job or someone got a $15,000 raise just a couple of weeks ago. And it's pretty
crazy to think that like, oh, wow, they've just learned a skill that you've taught them. And
they've then taken that and turned it into some sort of betterment of their life. So that's the
sort of cheesy aspect of it. But the heart of fast numbers part of it is, I don't know,
what do we have here? My paid courses altogether probably have somewhere around
probably almost 30,000 paid users between my four big paid courses, which is Sublime Text Power User,
React for Beginners, Learn Node, and ES6 for Everyone. My most popular one is React for Beginners.
That one has 14,000 paid people who have taken it and then they sort of trickle down from there.
So that's been my main driver there. And then I also have my free courses, which is how a lot
of people hear about me. And those go from, I don't know, I think my lowest one probably has
about 10,000 signups. And then my highest one is JavaScript 30, which currently has 108,201
people who have signed up for that course. Those numbers are huge. That's awesome.
Yeah. I really like that you mentioned the impact that getting positive feedback from your customers
and the people that you've helped has on you as a founder. And you're right, it's a little bit
cheesy, but I think it's underestimated as a factor that keeps you going as an entrepreneur.
I mean, just looking at the people that I've talked to and the people that I interact with
on a regular basis, I think one of the top reasons that people end up failing when they try to start
a business is simply that they quit early. And that could be for a whole number of reasons,
right? They lose motivation, they run out of money, things aren't working. But getting
positive messages in your inbox from people that you're actually affecting, there's nothing
that's more of a shot on the arm than that. Absolutely. Those are the main things that
keep me going. And on the flip side, if you're someone who has appreciated something that
someone's putting out, whether it's a podcast or a course, or just a little blog post, it's great
to just drop someone a little note and say thank you so much, because that's what keeps it going.
And this is the perfect moment for me to shamelessly request that if you're listening in
and enjoying the episode, that you go on iTunes and leave a review. It really helps people
discover the podcast, and I would personally appreciate it. In fact, I can guarantee you that
I will read your review because I read every review. So if you do end up leaving one, you can
rest easy knowing that it will make me feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy inside. Anyway,
Wes, you mentioned that you've got four paid courses. You've also got free courses.
Yep.
Your business really consists of a whole bunch of different moving parts. Can you give us a high
level outline of how it all comes together and what makes it tick?
Behind everything is an email list, which has... I think I've got about 165,000 people on my
email list right now, and pretty high open rates on that as well. It goes from anywhere from 30%
up to 60%, 70% on a good one. So that's pretty huge for me. I've been growing that over
probably four or five years. And then I've been on Twitter for about 11 years now,
and I've got 100,000 people following me on there. And that's been pretty important with
establishing credibility and meeting people and just having great conversations in terms of what
people are looking for in courses. So those are sort of my big outreach points. And I guess what
makes it tick behind the scenes? I guess what makes it tick behind the scenes is also me just
building the stuff as well.
Right. Is it just you by yourself?
Yeah. Yeah. Sort of my goal for 20 or for this fall is being able to learn how to delegate
because it is a bit much. It's a lot of work to do support and all kinds of stuff like that,
as well as be able to create courses and as well as be an internet marketer at the same time and
all this stuff. So I am dabbling with asking for help and hiring people on different things,
whether it's graphic design or Facebook ads or things like that. I am looking at hiring
out people, but I'm definitely struggling with that not having control over absolutely everything.
It's hard. I mean, I tell people all the time the importance of delegating. And meanwhile,
I'm horrible at it and I basically never do it. But just listening to all of your numbers,
I mean, over 100,000 followers on Twitter or an email list of 160, 170,000 developers that
you've really only been building for five years. So it's safe to say that you've traveled a
considerable distance down the path of success as an entrepreneur. A lot of people listening in
want to build an online business like you, but they're still in the early phases. They're trying
to decide what to work on. They're trying to figure out how to get their product out the door
or find the very first customers. So it'd be great to hear about your early phases.
What's the story behind the first dollar that you ever made online, either from a course
or your book or some software or any other scalable business?
Yeah. So you can look back at my YouTube and look at some of my early screencasts.
I think it all stemmed from me not wanting to create a course. I didn't even know that was a
thing. It was just me blogging and creating YouTube videos about things that I had learned
or questions that people have asked me. And then I went and wrote a blog post about it or
I went up and created a YouTube video. And from helping people, from writing all these blog posts,
some of them got really, really popular. Some of them didn't. People really appreciated it.
And I was also very, very in the IRC back before we had Slack. We had IRC, which if people had
questions about JavaScript, I would help them. And I was just all about spending a good chunk of my day
helping people out in terms of how they can get through their coding. Because when I had first
started learning how to code, even still today, if I have a question about something, it's amazing
when someone can take a little bit of time out of their day and explain something to you or
find the issue with what's going on. So that's really what I spent a lot of my time on. And
that's really how I got a lot of my substantial boost before I even thought about making a course.
And then how did I get the first dollar? Well, I had written all these blog posts about Sublime
Text, and they were getting lots of traffic. And when you write a popular tech blog post,
every single publisher out there comes knocking on your door, asking if you'll write a book for them.
And at the time, I was thrilled, but I soon learned that writing a book with a tech publisher
is a bum deal, and you don't make much money on it at all. You do it more for speaking engagements
and client services and stuff like that, which both of those I already had. So I wasn't really
all that interested in it. So I decided to write the book myself, and I recorded some screencasts
as well as wrote the entire book, and I self-published it. And I just put it out there.
And from the email sign up that I had on my Sublime Text blog posts, I had about 2,000 people,
and of that, about 300 people bought it within the first day or two. So that was sort of my first
like, whoa, this actually works. Yeah, that's crazy. Just like a giant lump sum payment
basically from a whole bunch of people signing up at once. Probably feels a lot better than
the money slowly trickling in a dollar at a time.
Yeah, I should also say though that I was very vocal about writing this thing for a year and a
half. And along the way, I had lots of doubter moments being like, huh, I don't know if anyone
would want this. Is it any good? Who am I to write a book? How would I market it? Would anybody
actually buy it? Is it worth me spending like these hundreds and hundreds of hours on something
that might just flop? And by being vocal about it, people kept asking like, when's it coming out?
I really need that myself. And it sort of kept me along. And it took a long time to get it out.
But finishing it was definitely what I needed in order to show me that this thing worked.
So I'm willing to bet that you've learned a lot of lessons about entrepreneurship since then.
What are the biggest misconceptions that you had in those early days where you can now confidently
say that you've learned better? Yeah, the absolute biggest one was that if somebody else has already
done it, then there's no point in actually doing it. And that's because when I had written my
Sublime Book, or even when I tried to write a blog post, I would always be like, oh, there's
already a blog post about this out there. Maybe it's not worth it. But I sort of pushed past that
and put it out anyway. And I realized like, sometimes people don't jive well with what's
already out there. Sometimes people really like the way that you explain something, or maybe they
like it because yours is up to date, or whatever reason somebody likes yours better is all the
reason you need in order to try to put something out yourself. And of all of my courses out there,
there's equivalent courses. There's tons of equivalent courses. There's way cheaper
courses that are out there. But that doesn't stop me anymore. Because I know that there's a lot of
people out there that like, there's a lot of people that don't like my stuff. And that's totally fine
with me. But I know that there's also a crew of people who also like my stuff and are chomping
down the doors saying they're beating down the door to get the whatever it is that I release next.
Chomping down the doors goes something like that.
Chomping at the bit and beating at the door. Those are the sayings that I wanted.
Yeah, I think you're speaking my language right now. And people who've listened to more than a few
podcast episodes are probably sick of hearing me say this. But you shouldn't worry about the
competition. You shouldn't shy away from tackling a problem just because somebody else is already
addressing it. Because you can always bring your own unique solution to any given problem. And on
top of that, if you end up bending over backwards to find an unsolved problem that has never been
addressed before, then you're doing yourself a huge disservice because you don't have any proof
that anybody cares about this problem enough to pay for a solution to it. In fact, you've got a lot
of evidence to the contrary. Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that I often tell people, and I'm
glad I have you on here today because you're the perfect person to tell me whether or not this is
good advice. I tell people who are trying to get started that one of the best things that they can
do is start by teaching. And it doesn't have to be teaching in the most traditional sense. I mean,
sure, you can start courses or video tutorials, but you can also start an interview site like
IndieHackers or a podcast, or you could even just aggregate raw data on a topic to help people who
are doing research. A good example of that is NomadList, which started off as a Google spreadsheet
full of information on cities that digital nomads like to travel to. Regardless of the format, I
think helping people learn something is one of the best ways to get your start as an entrepreneur.
I've got four or five different reasons why I think this is the case. And I'm curious what your
thoughts are on each one of them. The first one is a perfect segue from what we were just talking
about. And it's this almost no matter what you teach, you're not going to have to worry about the
competition. And nobody's really going to have the market completely cornered. And the reason for
that is that people have different learning styles. Some people like learning and classroom
settings. Some people like reading blog posts. Some people like audio. Some people like hands on
exercises. Some people prefer textbooks, etc. So teaching is almost never a winner take all market
just because there's so many different solutions to the problem of people wanting to know something
and you can always add your own solution to that list. Reason number two is pretty closely related
and that's that it's relatively easy to come up with an idea for teaching. You have to start with
something that you know very well or that you're willing to learn yourself so that you can actually
teach it. And then you just need to get a little bit creative with building a product or service
that helps people learn. So as a teacher yourself, what do you think about this so far? And is this
a good place for entrepreneurs to start? I think so. I think the first point in that the market
isn't cornered. Sometimes I see people come out with stuff that is very up to so they don't
necessarily know if there's a market there or not. And that's where I'd encourage people to write
blog posts or make YouTube videos on maybe three or four different topics. And then you will clearly
see which ones there's interest are by the number of views that that thing has. And if people aren't
sharing it, if people aren't watching it, maybe it's not something that people are all that
interested in or it's not a problem that they actually have to be solved. Yeah, that's exactly
right. And that's literally my third point is that you can get your minimum viable product out in
very little time. You don't actually have to build an entire course to get started. You can
just start with one or two blog posts or YouTube video, just like you said, and measure the results
and actually get practice in marketing it and figuring out how people react to it. So that's
another great reason to start teaching. Number four, and this is a big one, especially for
developers, well, only for developers, but there's not that much code involved in teaching. You're
generally just writing. And so you can get a blog post or a video out the door and a day
and start trying to sell it immediately or start trying to market it immediately. And you don't
fall into this black hole that a lot of people do of spending six months basically just building a
product without any idea whether or not people are going to like it. Yeah, I'm on that as well.
I think that there is sometimes a bit of in this whole internet marketing space. I think that
there's a lot of people that don't focus on quality content all that much. They're more focused on
building their email list or all these marketing techniques. And what happens is that they just
crank out some PDF or some crappy course or something like that. And then they go nuts with
all the tactics. They listen to 300 Mixergy interviews or something like that and start
going to town with the different tactics when at the core of what I do is very good content.
And then the marketing and all the techniques are just on top of that to expose the very good
content. So yes, go quick with your stuff and crank out a blog post in a day, but also make
sure that it's good as well. Yeah, totally agree. I think that's the other end of the spectrum.
It's either spending way too much time on what you're building to the point where it actually
isn't good. You spend so much time without talking to anybody that you are investing in
something that's not good or the other extreme is spending way too little time and focusing
too much on the tactics. So that's great advice. Yeah, exactly. The fifth point is I think that
if you know something well enough to teach it, you're probably a lot more likely to be passionate
about it. And a lot of people end up starting these businesses that seem very opportunistic.
They see a gap in the market and they're like, I'm going to do that. And it turns out they're
selling bibs to babies in Taiwan or something they don't care about. After a month or two,
they're like, oh, this is exhausting. I'm tired. If you're teaching something that you know very
well, you're a lot more likely to enjoy it and stick with it when things get tough. And you're
actually reaching people who are interested in the same topic that you're interested in.
So I can't overstate how important it is to be motivated about what you're working on.
Oh, yeah, I totally agree with that. Often, I'll get approached by companies who have like a
we convert Microsoft Excel documents to nice looking tables or something and they want me
to do a tutorial on it or something like that, or like a whole series and or even something
that is like tangentially related to what I do. It might be still web development and whatnot,
but it's just like I'm just not excited about that. And that's not going to make a very good
course. And there's no way that I'm going to be in that for the long haul. So I only pick up stuff
that I'm super excited about. Even if I don't know it as like 100%, I'll definitely be excited about
it and know quite a bit about it. I know that I'm in a good spot to start teaching it.
And then the last point, which I think will be a good segue into what I want to talk to you about
next. Teaching is a great way to build an audience. There are just so many people in the market to
learn something people are always learning. And if you can teach them successfully and help them
actually learn what they're trying to learn, then that's a very personal experience, especially if
you're doing something like video or audio, the people that you teach will trust you, they will
follow you, they want to hear more about what you have to say. And building that kind of engaged
audience is really the secret to serial entrepreneurship and launching products in the
future that succeed. Oh, absolutely totally agree. You in particular have done an excellent job
building an audience. As you mentioned earlier, you've got hundreds of thousands of subscribers
across multiple channels. Is building an audience something that you knew would be important from
the very beginning? Yes. How did you know that? Because back when Myspace was a thing, the way
that Myspace worked is that you would add friends and whoever had the most friends, you would get
put in people's top aid and whatnot. At the time, I was designing t-shirts for bands and
I was designing CD art and I was doing Myspace designs. And how do you reach people? Well,
you build up a large following on Myspace. So I spent years on Myspace. I think I had about 20,000
friends on Myspace, which is hilarious to think about. As cringy as that was, it clearly showed
me that I was dealing with bands from all over the world and they were sending checks to my
house when I was just in high school. So I definitely realized the benefits of growing
an audience. And then when Twitter came along, I was like, this is the same thing,
but just a different platform. And how do you build a huge following? And on Myspace,
you just had to click the add friend button 20,000 times. But on Twitter, it's a one-way
relationship. So you actually have to offer something of value in order for people to want
to follow you. So I had started just by talking a lot about web development. The thing that I do is
it's called Hot Tips, where if I have a little tip about coding, I'll take a screenshot of it and
I'll explain how it works. And it's just enough for someone to read it over a minute and be going,
huh, didn't know that or huh, that's a neat way to approach it. And it's just a little bite in
your day. And that's what people come to the Twitter about. And I think that a lot of people
think that Twitter is all about pushing content or about pushing their thing. But it's really
about helping people and being part of a conversation. Especially to developers,
because developers have very high bullshit detectors. So if you're just queuing up your
buffer or Edgar with 20,000 articles on web development, no one's going to follow you.
No one's going to get any value from that. But if you're actually creating... If you go,
if you meet people where they're at on Twitter with good quality content and not try to push
them off Twitter every single tweet, then it's going to work for you.
Yeah, I think one of the difficult things about building a following through Twitter and
publishing that amount of content is just trying to be that prolific. How many times would you say
you tweet per day? I don't know, maybe 10 times a day. And then I post a hot tip maybe
two times a week. And sometimes they'll get really popular. And sometimes they'll fall flat.
And then most of my tweets are just people asking questions or being involved in a back
and forth conversation about how to best approach something or different tools that
are in there. And I've been at it so long that it's second nature. Whereas something like Facebook,
I haven't logged in in a week and a half. And I have to make sure that I go to Facebook and
think of things to post where Twitter is just second nature.
Yeah, I'm the same way with Facebook. I forget about it all the time. I'm like,
Oh, yeah, that exists.
Is there any other advice that you'd give to a new entrepreneur who's maybe just launched
their business or thinking about launching something? How do they get in the habit of
using Twitter as politically as you have? And what do they tweet about? Who do they follow?
If you're just starting out, it's all about getting on there, finding people that are
sort of in your little industry and having conversations with them. Most of your tweets
should be replies to other people. And you should be joining in on conversations about
different tools and your thoughts on things and whatnot.
You can also, what I used to do is I would just have these different queries. I have
tweet deck open and you can search for different things like need help or I forget what the query
was that I was looking for. But people would ask for help and you can just jump in and provide
some help on what it is that they're looking. There's a lot of people asking questions on
Twitter. And if you can jump in and help somebody, they're definitely going to respect you for that
and most likely give you a follow.
I know a lot of people are probably asking themselves, well, why does it even matter
to build? Why does building a Twitter audience even matter? Isn't it just people tweeting about
what they ate for lunch? What would you say is the biggest thing that you get out of your
Twitter audience?
I think that it's sort of just like you have your finger on the pulse of what's going on.
And I think that there's some industries where Twitter doesn't make sense at all,
because there's just no industry there. But I think for web developers, for marketers,
for things like that, that's where people hang out. And if you are on Twitter every day,
you can get an idea of what's new, what's going on, what are people struggling with,
what are the questions that people have. And you can just get a feel for
where those pain points are and what the hot technologies are.
And you can turn that into the ability to build a course or whatever.
Oh, that's cool. So you're doing it like using it almost for market research, basically.
Yeah, it's not like I sit down and go like, oh, what are the tweet people saying today?
But it's the water cooler for web developers and web developers don't really hang out anywhere else.
I guess there's Slack rooms, there's Facebook groups, there's Instagrams becoming really
popular for web developers right now. There are a lot of those as well, and I'm definitely on those.
But in terms of where do the heads of industry chat, it's on Twitter.
What about your email list, which is similar to Twitter,
and that you built up a huge list of subscribers, but what would you say are the different
advantages that you get over email that you don't get or that you don't see with Twitter?
Well, email is good because you can get a lot more. I have 100,000 followers on Twitter,
but if I tweet something out, eight people see it. I don't know. Not eight, but it's very low,
the amount of people that actually see your tweet versus how many followers you have.
Whereas you send an email out, and half your list is actually going to see it versus probably
one or two percent of your following on Twitter. So you have a much higher ability.
So when I have something very important to send out, I'll send that out on my email list,
and then my Twitter is more like pumping things up, talking about it.
Whereas your email list is, I've got something to say, here's what you should know about it.
And then another thing I use on my email list is I'll often just send out,
it's just terrible for my inbox, but I just say, hey, what are you struggling with?
What's going on right now? And people are a lot more vulnerable when they send a one-to-one email,
especially if you write it in a tone of, I don't know, my emails are often written in a tone of,
hey, I just was on vacation, having some good time. Here's the technologies I'm playing with
right now. And by the way, what are you struggling with right now? Or what are you hoping to learn
in the next six months? And you'll get tons of, I'm like, just hit reply, and I'll get hundreds
and hundreds of replies from people. Sometimes it will be just a book about their whole career
journey and where they're stuck right now. And that is very good because you can take that and
both use the wording that they've used in the copy of your website and also know what to teach
next because you have your finger on the pulse of what people are having trouble with.
So that's almost unbelievable to me that you will do that because you have such a giant following
that. What do you do with those hundreds of emails? Do you take the time to read all of them?
Yeah, I do. I have this system called the breakout email management system. I wrote
a blog post on it, but how I manage email. And I've got lots of snippets, lots of short,
most emails that I write are a sentence or two. But most of the emails that I get where people
are just requesting quick things. Every now and then you get a little book from people and you
read it and try to respond as empathetic as you can. Yeah, that's tough. You're a better person
than I am. I dread clearing my inbox every day and I doubt it's as big as yours.
Yeah, yeah, me too. I probably get 50, 60 real emails a day.
Yeah, that sounds familiar actually. And it's a ton. Real actionable emails directed
solely at you. That's a lot. Yeah, but that's why I've been working a lot on my systematizing
the email because almost every email I have should be resolvable within two minutes or a minute or
something like that. If something takes longer than that, then there's a problem somewhere else
in your workflow that is ending up in your email inbox. So you've got a ton of responsibilities.
Somehow you're able to do all of it while managing your email and responding to hundreds
of people. A lot of people who are listening in are wondering how they themselves can make the
time to work on their businesses. And you've also got a family. You've got, I think, just one kid
or you have two kids? I've got two kids now, yeah. How do you make the time to work on your business
around all of your other time commitments in life? Yeah, that's a great question. So
I have always worked for myself. And that's a huge advantage because that allows me to
take part of my day. And right now, I work full-time on building my courses. But up until about,
I don't know, eight months ago, I was doing client work for a good chunk of the day and building my
courses in another part of the day. And I would just make sure that I section off time to work
on it because it's so easy to be like, well, this client work or my job will pay me now,
but this course might pay me someday, maybe, but probably not. I don't know. So chunking off time
and being able to risk a couple hours of day, whether that means your income is going to go
down or not, while you try out building something, that's totally fine. And I don't know, just over
the years, I've spent less time on client work and more time on my own courses. And as that boat
gets closer to the dock, there's a time that you can jump for that. For those who have a full-time
job and are looking at trying to do this, I don't know. I am very, very good about not doing work
outside of work hours. So I only work nine to five. I don't take my laptop downstairs and
stuff like that. So I don't know how I would do it if I hadn't started this before I had kids,
because there's definitely almost no time in the day when you have a young family like that.
But I don't know. I think you have to carve some time out, whether it's early in the morning or
whether on your lunch break or whether you can negotiate something with your partner
about working a couple hours in the evening on it, just because you
think that it will make a big difference in your life.
Yeah. I mean, I don't have kids, so I also don't have the answer.
It's definitely a touchy subject. And you listen to people like Gary Vanderchuk,
who shout family first, family first, but that guy is not actually home a whole lot.
He's working 16 hours a day.
Yeah. And he goes home for an hour and stuff like that. That's not something that I really
want for my life, but that's really why I've put the time and the long hours into this thing
initially so that I can build a really nice family life for myself. I don't commute. I don't have to
do any of that stuff that really adds stress to having a family life.
Do you have any sort of hacks that you've used or systems that you've implemented
besides your email management system that can help you work more efficiently?
Because I know when I talk to developers especially, I often find that they've built
some really cool internal tools for themselves or they've automated a lot of processes.
One thing that I have, I actually haven't used it in a while. When I launch a course I get,
or when I launch a free course, I'll probably get hundreds of tweets being like,
oh, this is amazing. Or people sharing it out. People doing a really great thing and sharing
it with a friend. And I really want to say thank you to absolutely everybody.
So what I built was this massive thing where I would type RT and it would type out random thanks.
And then it would go into my database of 40 or 50 different thank you messages and send them one
of those thank you messages. And when I tell people that, they go, oh, that's so skeezy and
scammy. Why would you automate saying thank you? But I want to say thank you to all of these people,
but I just don't have the time or the mental energy to figure out what to actually say thank you for.
So I created this little text expander snippet that would randomly grab a thank you that it
sort of gives them the time of day and says thank you for doing this. And often what that will do is
start or spark a real conversation with the person, which you can then go back and forth with them on
Twitter, not as a robot.
Yeah, I take it you don't have a robot, Wes Bosch, I can have a full conversation.
No, no, not yet at least.
So as an entrepreneur, being able to wear many hats, being able to write code, do your own design,
write compelling marketing copy, obviously helps you out.
How important would you say it is for a modern entrepreneur starting an internet business to be
a developer? Because a lot of people are trying to decide whether or not they should take the time
to learn to code, or they should just outsource all of that and work on launching their business today.
Well, I think I'm a bit biased because I'm a developer. But I think having the development
skills, at least enough to string things together, is super important. Because when you have ideas
for things that might make your business do well, that's the whole growth hacker thing.
Whether you like the term growth hacker or not, the whole idea behind that is you're able to get
into your product and try things. And often that requires fundamental changes to your code base or
different checks inside of your code base at some point. And if you can code those things yourself,
an example is that I recently rolled out purchasing power discounts, meaning that depending
on which country you come from, some countries around the world have very low purchasing power
in the US dollar. And my courses are a week or a month's worth of income for them.
So the course is cheaper for them. And I was able to go into my code base to
tech which country they're coming from and offer up a coupon code and then also restrict those
coupon codes by the country that they're coming from. And most people wouldn't be able to do that.
A lot of people come to me and they just have this rat's nest of Zapier put together that it's too
brittle to be able to try these things out quickly. And yeah, I'm sure you can hire a developer for
that as well, but that's expensive. Yeah, I agree. I think learning how to code is such a...
It's not absolutely necessary. And I've taught people who built businesses who don't know how
to code, but it's such a tremendous advantage that if you have the time and the motivation to do it,
you totally should do it. And you are the perfect person to talk to about doing it.
So I teach in Toronto here at a place called HackerU. And a lot of the people who we...
It's like a evening and it's a bootcamp and evening classes. And a lot of people who come
through and do these classes are in marketing. And not because they want to transition to being
a developer, but they understand the value of thinking in code and being able to talk to people
who can code is super important. So at the very least understand what that looks like.
So what level do you think of coding people really need to be at to start their own projects? And
how long would it take someone who has never coded a day in her life to be able to launch
her own online project that has a chance of making money online? At the very basic,
you should pick up WordPress because WordPress starts from a working state. And then you can
add things on and sort of keep it working along the way. Or as if you're building your own thing,
you're starting from a blank slate, which is not working at all. And being able to get to a point
where it is working and it's secure and can handle all of these different things. I've built my own
platform and it's taken years to build. So I definitely would say like, get to know WordPress,
get to know some basic JavaScript. And that will give you enough to be able to get something up
and running on your own. What if you are somebody who's got a good year or two to spend learning to
code? You're in no rush. You don't need to get something out today. What kind of paths does
somebody in that situation take to learn how to code? Do you recommend boot camps? Obviously,
you're biased. You've got courses. Which of your courses did people start with?
I actually don't have a beginner JavaScript or a beginner web development course.
So usually what I point people to is free code camp. But I think if you've got the time,
you've got the money to take a boot camp, definitely do that. I know people are a little
bit down on boot camps, but those are almost all developers who learn the hard way.
So a boot camp is a great way to spend a couple months just getting up to speed on it. And then
if you have a year or whatever after that for self-study or if you join an agency and work
along that so you can sort of get up to speed, I think that's the best and the fastest way
to do it. And while we're talking about code, I'd love to talk about the code behind your
products because you seem to have an entire platform built out that controls everything.
And as an outsider looking in, if I go to westboss.com, I see all these different courses and they
seem to live on different websites and you've got your mailing list and you've got the system you
just described where you can lower prices for people based on their country.
Is everything connected into a single platform or are these all separate apps behind the scenes?
Well, I have westboss.com. It's a WordPress blog I've had for 10 years or whatever,
but I call it the thing that powers my courses. It's called Boss Monster. And what that does is
it powers every single domain name for each course. So I do it a little bit different.
I launch a new domain name for every course and then it has an affiliate system built into it,
has country code discounts built into it. It's got a bunch of reporting, a bunch of tax reporting for
myself, the ability to... What else does it have in it? Just obviously sell the products, charge
the credit cards. It has the whole delivering of the product, being able to download the videos or
stream them online and keep track of your progress. So it's just all of these different things coming
together. I initially built it because I had released a book and videos and there was no
platform out there at the time that did both of those. And I'm sure there's really great
platforms out there now that you can launch a video course without having to write a single
line of code. But I'm really glad that I did because I have full control over both the user
experience, like how they view the course, as well as being able to try different marketing
techniques out. Yeah, if you'll indulge me for a bit, can you go into some of the technical
details about how the system works? Because it's pretty fascinating to hear about. I mean,
where are you hosting it? What kind of languages are you using, et cetera?
Yeah, it's a node stack. The whole stack is written in JavaScript. It's built on a framework
called Express. The database is MongoDB, which I host on a company called mLab. The whole boss
monster is hosted on DigitalOcean. In front of that, I use CloudFlare, which protects against
DDoS, as well as it gives you this header, which is country code based on where they're coming from.
The whole thing is templated out. Well, the front end is templated out in Jade. The back end,
the whole viewer is entirely built in React. I use Stripe and PayPal to charge the credit cards.
I use Stylus to style all the different individual pages, and I'm able to share some styles.
Styling the FAQ is shared between all of the websites.
Cool.
I think that's about it. I have a whole video on YouTube explaining the ins and outs of
the entire stack, if people are interested in diving into a little deeper.
That sounds great. I'm going to have to go watch your video.
So you've basically got just a gigantic monolithic node application.
Yeah, it's a gigantic node app. It's actually not that big, I would say. Probably, I don't know,
a couple thousand lines of code, maybe more than that. I don't know.
But it's custom built in order to handle the multiple domains because I used to have a
different app for every single website and then for each of my free courses.
And it was just a nightmare to maintain, whereas now I can launch to, I think it's about seven or
eight different domain names. I sold stickers a while ago, which had to be shipped to people.
And I could just modify my course platform a little bit to sell stickers to people.
And it's kind of cool to be able to just morph this thing into anything that I want and not have
to worry about. A lot of people ask me to open it up or to sell it to them because they will also
want to use it or to license it to them. But I love being able to just jump in.
It's my own course platform. I don't have to worry about
how other things work for other people because it's custom built for me.
Yeah, that sounds perfect. I'm super jealous. There's nothing more fun as a developer than
building tools for yourself if you have the time and the opportunity. It's really just so fun.
It's true. Yeah, I also like because I'm not doing client work anymore.
I don't want to be that teacher who just codes these like examples that are not real world and
I don't actually run into any problems. So like I want to be able to host my own stack and run into
problems with the database and hit all of these issues that real world applications will hit
because that makes me a better teacher. And I can tell people examples against my own experiences.
Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit about teaching itself because I've taught a few people
to code. I taught my brother and also another good friend of mine how to code kind of one-on-one.
But you were teaching people to code and teaching people the ins and outs of different language
features at a massive scale. Where do you get the confidence to teach people this kind of stuff?
How have you evolved as a teacher over the course of your career?
When I first got asked to do a workshop, because I had been writing blog posts,
people were like, I was like, why would they ask me? I surely don't know a whole lot about
this topic. But you come to realize like you as a developer, have you been doing this for a couple
of years? You do actually know quite a bit of stuff. And if you can master the one topic that
you're talking about, especially if as you teach things, you realize you don't know it as well as
you thought you did. And that makes you figure it out. It makes you figure it out really, really
well. So I don't know. I think that just being like, I don't know everything. I'm probably not
the best person in the world, but I am really good at explaining things. And people seem to like the
way that I explain things. And I know it well enough to build my own stuff. So here is how I
understand it. And here's how I would build something. And people seem to learn well from that.
Do you have a playbook or maybe like a list of things that you've learned about teaching that
have improved over time since you started? Or do you think you kind of started off at the same
level that you are now? Yeah, I think that when I first started, you assume that because they're
simple to you, they're simple to everybody, but that's absolutely not the case. They're very
complicated to people. So often I will simplify something or often I won't take in a third-party
dependency that really convoluted or whatever. Because a good example is a lot of times people
in a React application will create tons and tons of index.js files and put them in import and export
and string things along and create all kinds of stuff where it's very hard to understand
how can I even trace what's going on in this application. So often my courses are a lot less
files and they're often simplified so that it's very easy to understand what's going on.
So I think that's what I've learned is that developers often over-complicate things and
that's a huge reason for people being confused. So if you can really simplify it and not dumb it
down, but if you can work out how do I simplify this and how do I explain this in such a way that
regular people can understand it, people will really enjoy it. Yeah, and speaking of simplification,
one of the more popular things that you've done is a course called JavaScript 30. And I know it's
popular because my brother asked me who I had coming up for the podcast. I said,
Wes Boss, and he immediately said, hey, that's the JavaScript 30 guy. I love that.
So I think it'd be really fun to walk through one of your courses, maybe JavaScript 30,
maybe a different one, and just kind of take us from beginning to end of how you came up with
the idea for it, how you prepared the content, and how you launched it, just because I think it
would be really interesting and educational for listeners to hear what goes into creating one of
these things and promoting it and getting it out the door. Yeah, absolutely. So I had been
teaching in person for... I think also teaching in person is the best because if you just start
a course and record it and give it to people, you don't see the confused look on people's face,
and you don't see people dumping the course halfway through because they're frustrated
or whatever. So by teaching in person, you can really get a good idea of what people are
struggling with and what the common trip ups in coding are. So as I was teaching in person,
I often had people coming to me asking like, how do I get better at JavaScript?
I need help. I just need more stuff to work on. I get it. This exercise was great. How do I do it
again? What do I build? And I always have tons of ideas. So I had been keeping a list of extra
little exercises that would be good for people. And as I built that up, I thought this would be
a really great series of every day you build one thing. It's vanilla JavaScript, which is totally
against the grain right now because there's no frameworks, no compilers, no libraries,
no boilerplate. It's just JavaScript. And people are sort of overwhelmed with everything that's
going on right now. So I thought this would be great. And I think it took me about a year
and a half to build up a list of 30 different fun exercises, something that was fun and real-world
enough that you're going to learn something, but small enough that you could do it in 20 minutes
an hour, however long it takes you to watch the video and to do it yourself.
And were you passively thinking up these exercises? Or did you spend a year and a half
setting aside dedicated time to work on this?
This is just a folder on my computer for a year and a half of every time I came up with an idea,
I would open up a file on my thing, code a little exercise, and then once I had 30 or once I had
about 50 of them, I went through every single one, decided which ones would be good for videos,
pick 30 of those. And then I went through every single one and just made it slick, polished it,
made the HTML and CSS look really good, made it make sense, make sure I use the latest ES6 stuff
in it so people can get a chance to work with that. And then I had 30 things that I was building,
and I recorded all 30 of them, and as I'm doing this, I'm pumping it up on Twitter.
I always post screenshots and little GIFs of what it is, and the hype was pretty big
behind it. By the time I launched it, I launched it to my email list and on Twitter,
and people were pretty excited about it.
Yeah. Well, I'm curious about a few different points in that process. For example, when you're
recording the videos and at the same time hyping it up on Twitter, how long did that take? And what
kind of tweets were you sending? Were you sending emails as well, or did you wait until you launched
to send in emails? I sent, I think, one or two emails before it was launched explaining what it
was, and then I did it all in the open on Twitter, not the code. I didn't show the code online until
I was totally done everything and launched that one. So how long did that take? I think from the
point of having that list of 50 rough exercises to launching was about three or four months full
time. So it was huge undertaking. It seems like I just turned on my recorder and start playing,
but they're very polished. They make sure that they're following best practices. All of them
look really nice. They've all been designed. So yeah, it's about three or four months start to
finish from having the ideas and some of the code to launching it to my email list.
How did you decide what your business model would be for JavaScript 30? Because you ended up giving
away all of this for free. Was that something that you struggled with? Or was it obvious from
the get go that you're just going to give us away? It's I had like three or four free courses
before that. So I had since discovered the business model of reciprocity, just showing
people what your teaching style is like helping people for free, doing like no strings attached
where you have to upgrade or anything like that being like, just put them up, put them on YouTube,
put them on your own platform. They're totally free. If you like it, I've got some other stuff.
If you don't, totally fine. And that's really it. The business model is helping people.
And enough people that get helped will seek out your other stuff.
And what was the launch process like? Did you, you mentioned you launched on Twitter
in your email list. What did you send?
Yeah, I think people need to know that it's coming. So I often will email once or twice
in the coming month to hype it up. And then when it's time to launch, you write an email about
what the course is, what it's going to help you with. And then also what I do is I often do
what's called a hard ask where I'll say like, hey, I legit just spent four months working on this
thing. It would mean the world to me if you could tweet it out or if you could send it to a friend
or a coworker. And then when you sign it, when you sign up for the course, it also says like,
don't make this like everybody signed up for 100 courses and never taking them. Don't make this
the course that you just like shelf, commit to it publicly, post on Twitter, ask if I encourage
people to get what's called an accountability buddy, or you do it with a friend. So like you can
keep each other accountable. And that was huge as well. So people, it doesn't make you share it on
Twitter, but it asks nicely and tells you to like commit to a publicly and that has that helped a
lot. Yeah, that's really smart. It's a great way to do it. What would you say are the biggest
biggest takeaways from from launching JavaScript 30? Is there anything that you learned from
launching this particular course that you didn't know beforehand? I think that it was just don't
ask people what they want. But I guess I have asked people what they want. But nobody told me
I would like 30 days of JavaScript problems to solve. But like it was more listening to people
who were overwhelmed with frameworks and compilers who were overwhelmed with react and all these new
things where they didn't have any sort of solid foundation to build on, or they had been using
jQuery for all these years, and they didn't feel that strong with vanilla JavaScript. So from all
of those things, I thought like, well, you could get better if you just did a whole bunch of work
and did a whole bunch of exercises with it. But there was nothing out there that was like
concrete, and you just put it in your lap to work on it. So I think like listening to what people's
pain points are really helped me figure out how this went. And this this one has absolutely blown
up. It's exactly what a lot of people needed. And because I think because I had taught in person,
and because I had been listening to what pain points were, it really hit a nerve and exploded.
Yeah, I mean, it's everywhere. And I think your, your point about understanding what the actual
pain points are at their at their core is so important. Because at the end of the day,
like you said earlier, you can learn every marketing tactic in the book. But if the product
that you build isn't any good, if it doesn't actually solve a pain point that a lot of people
are looking for a solution to, it's, it's like a negative multiplier on all of your marketing
efforts and tactics. Yeah, exactly. What would you say, and I know earlier, you mentioned that,
you know, just just not being afraid of the competition and realizing that you can build
something even if someone else has already built something similar. But besides that, what would
be your biggest tip to an aspiring first time entrepreneur who's maybe, you know, just now
trying to come up with an idea or trying to get their product out the door?
I think just get content out there, just start producing stuff, start putting stuff out there.
Because if you're just sitting there sitting around thinking about what it should be,
you're not going to you're not going to get anywhere. But if you start producing,
for me, it was blog posts. I don't know if it's blog posts anymore. It's probably more YouTube
videos or free courses or whatever. Just start producing stuff and get it out there. Start
helping people. And you're going to figure out the rest along the way.
All right, that is a perfect place to end the interview. Can you tell people where they can go
online to find out more about you and all the stuff that you're doing?
Yeah, I'm wesbos.com. W-E-S-B-O-S. I'm at Wesbos on everything. So just find me,
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever it is. I'm there.
All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Wes. It was awesome talking to you.
Thanks for having me. It was fun.
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