What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with John Doherty of Credo. Welcome
back to the show, John. Thanks for having me, Cortland. It's good
to be here, man. It's been a while. I think you were on episode number 59, which
was in 2018, so it's been a very long while. On that episode, I think you walked me through
basically the kind of creation of your company, Credo, and how you got to where you were then.
I think you were at like $20,000 a month in revenue from Credo then.
Yeah, so we have basically doubled, but to be completely frank with you, that doubling
has happened in the last year. Let me do my best attempt to describe what
Credo is, or at least what it was the last time we spoke, and you correct me where I'm
wrong. So Credo is kind of like an ideal way to find an agency to help you market your
website. So if you need someone to do writing for you or to build your website for you or
to run your Facebook or Google ads for you or to do SEO for you, but you're not sure
how to find the best people or the right people for you, you go to Credo. You guys are experts
at this. You have extremely deep connections with everybody in the industry, you know exactly
who's good, who's bad, who's right for what job. And so I kind of like go through you,
you find me the right person, and then you take a cut of that relationship. Is that an
accurate description of how Credo works? Credo helps companies find and hire the right
pre-vetted digital marketing firm. And then we're actually paid by the agencies. So agencies
pay us for consistent monthly sales pipeline. We're a two-sided business. We have the buyer
side and we have the agency side. So if I'm talking to someone that's looking for an SEO
firm, I say we help companies find and hire the right pre-vetted digital marketing and
SEO firms. If I'm talking to an agency, I say we help agencies get more qualified prospects
in their sales pipeline so they can grow their agency.
So in your situation, I think what's interesting about your story is that I've had a few people
on the podcast recently who were like, the pandemic hit and we crushed it. We're not
making $10 million a year. We just started a business last January, which is cool. And
it's nice. Some people are doing well, but the pandemic really did a number on you guys.
Describe to me what you were doing before your current iteration of Credo and why that
didn't work in the pandemic.
Yeah. So we in Batman, about the start of 2019, started building out a full marketplace.
So basically the vision here was that clients don't, buyers don't know how to run the hiring
process well and agencies are kind of all over the place when it comes to pitching and
they don't, you know, they don't often give reporting like they should. And basically
I had these like ideals of this is what a good agency does. And so, you know, there's,
you can go to one side of educating and saying, this is what a good agency should do, right?
Trying to teach the agencies to do it, trying to teach the buyers to look for it. But then
sometimes people don't follow through. I was like, we can build software that just requires
it and the agency is not getting paid until they report, right? And like, you know, they're
going to, they send through proposals. It's there within the system. The client can review
it in one place, right? Because otherwise it's all over the place. So we built out this
full, this full marketplace, launched it in September 2019. I started moving agencies
over to it. And basically we got, we had a small kind of annual fee for agencies that
we were referring work to. And then when an agency closed, we would then, the client would
then pay the agency through our system. So they pay them in escrow. Say, you know, Stripe
agreed to hire an SEO agency for $2,500 a month through Credo at the time. You would
then fund that first month. So like you hired them now, you're starting in June. You would
fund June in Credo. Agency would do the work, report to you within five days of the end
of the month, like the start of the next month. And then once that was all good and they did
what they said they were going to do, then we would pay out to the agency on your behalf.
And we took a cut of that, right? So basically in about six months time, we went from processing
no money through that system to processing six figures a month through that system paying
out to agencies. And we took, it averaged out to about 15%, one 5%. But it was really
operationally heavy, you know, clients pushing back and being like, well, why should I pay
anything now? We're not, we're like, you're not actually paying, you're putting it in escrow.
If they don't deliver, you don't end up paying anything. And we, you know, give it back to
you, that kind of thing. And it was just like, it was a lot of support. It was super operationally
heavy. And because we took a percentage of work that was being built through the system,
basically Corlin, we did not have control over our own revenue because we weren't the
ones retaining them. The agency was, and that is a terrible business to run. So, you know,
hard lesson learned. I've learned it a couple of times now, but we had this idea of arbitration
where if an agency didn't deliver, we would basically work out something, you know, in
between the two, it's like, okay, they did have to work. They get paid half client. You
go to that agency or agency basically had to take it, right? Cause they, they're the
ones that screwed it up. But then I was, I realized I was literally spending time to
make less money, which doesn't really make sense.
It's also not fun to do any sort of arbitration. Like this would happen on any hackers sometimes,
like people would have arguments. Like you publish this interview, my co-founder, but
I disagree about this thing. And then it's like, cause he said, she said, and then like,
I would go into these back in the past and like try to investigate. And every single
time I'm like, this is why we have a legal system. This is ridiculously difficult. It's
not fun. It's a huge waste of time. I'm just taking it down.
Right. And I had a process for doing it, but I mean, dude, I remember it happened. It was
like new year's Eve 2019 going into 2020. And I get this person that I could tell was
going to be a pain from the start and they were claiming this agency didn't deliver,
et cetera, et cetera. And so it's new year's Eve and I'm like, arbitrating this thing,
like spending my time to make less money. Then she just ended up like refunding them
everything telling the agency like you screwed this up. I'm sorry. It was like 6 PM on new
year's Eve. I was at our cabinet by Breckenridge and was just so annoyed and was like, why
am I doing this? It was terrible. So I did hire someone to do that sort of thing, but
it still just wasn't worth it. Right. Then I was paying someone else for us to make less
money and just overall did not make sense. So, so basically what happened, long story
short, Cortland is COVID hit. We were up, we had been dominating our numbers beginning
of 2020, like number of leads we needed to get in order to hit our numbers, et cetera.
Things were growing. It was hard, but things were growing. And basically the week that
COVID hit, we went from being 120% above our goal for the month to being at 75% of
our goal for the month. So like lead numbers just got decimated. Clients fired their agencies.
So we took about a 20% revenue haircut and we were basically operating at breakeven at
that point, right? And targeting like we were going to be like quite profitable within six,
eight months, but you know, we were basically at breakeven. And so then we went into the
red, we had a cash buffer, but we still went into the red and I was like, this is not sustainable.
So my, my business partner, CTLLE and I, we, we sat down and we're like, what do we do?
And I basically just started asking agencies like, Hey, is, is like this part of the product
offering you any value? Like basically from the intro on and they're like, not really,
I kind of hate it. And I'm like, you just call my baby ugly. And they're like, yeah,
exactly. I'm like, thank you. So I heard this five times in a row and was like, all right,
I know what we're going to do. We're going to cut the product in half. We're going to
stop requiring proposals and everything come through the system. We're not even going to
let that come through anymore. And we're basically going to charge agencies on a subscription
basis, but we're going to tell them how much this lead is potentially worth. We vetted
it out. We know how much they're spending. We know what they're looking for. We know
from our historical data, how much they're probably going to spend. And I pitched a
couple of agencies and I was like, would you pay this? And they're like, absolutely. I'm
like, okay, cool. Next one. I went a little bit higher. Would you pay this? They're like,
absolutely found the cap. And that's what we started charging people at. So we flipped
the switch on that in July. So it was April, May that we decided to trial it in 13 days.
We had made the changes to the product and got five agencies signed up and the revenue
already surpassed the monthly revenue we had been making with the marketplace. So it took
me way quicker to get to way more revenue. And then we're like, all right, we're just
going all in on this sunsetted, uh, sunsetted like the second half of the product moved
everyone over to the subscription product. Yeah. And we've doubled since last July. How
did it feel to have people, uh, as you said, call your baby ugly, maybe in the middle of
a crisis when things aren't working, I can imagine it's like, okay, I'm going to take
you seriously. But like, let's say they had done that in 2019, you know, when things did
seem to be working, would you have taken their feedback as seriously? No, I wouldn't have
it felt relieving for them to call my baby ugly because that was kind of what I thought
it was. And it's kind of what I needed to hear at the time. You know, we don't really
go, you don't really go looking for feedback like that when you're not ready to hear it.
When you are ready to hear it, you're kind of looking for the validation that it is.
So, so it actually felt really good. Cause it made it a very easy decision. If someone,
if half had been like, it's great. And half had been like, I don't like this specific
theory. Others been like, I don't like specific thing. And others were like, I hate it. Then
it's like, well, who do you listen to? But everyone was like, yeah, this part is adding
no value to my business. It's actually bifurcating things and making my life worse. Yeah. I was
like, all right, fair enough. This is clear. Like what you, I was like, what do you want?
We want qualified leads on our calendars. Okay, cool. We're going to stop requiring
all this other thing. And so we're going to bring you onto the project and we're going
to schedule them with you so that they're not, so they're much less likely to ghost
on you. And they're like, that's amazing. Right. So we're kind of an outsourced SDR
service in a way for marketing, for marketing agencies, but it works and they get a lot
of value from it. You know, we have agencies that have closed, you know, over a million
dollars in the last year, one that's closed close to $2 million of work in the last year
from Credo.
Yeah. When your business is in trouble, the best thing you could possibly do is figure
out what the problem is. And the challenge is that there's almost always like five or
10 different variables, different levels you could pull, different things you could change
that like might be the culprit. Like it might be because you're not working hard enough
on marketing. You know, it might be because it's just a temporary phase in the pandemic
and things are going to, you know, come to a ground swell. If you just wait it out a
couple of months, right? It might be because your pricing is off. It could be anything.
And if you can find consistent feedback from your customers, you were all saying, no, it's
this one thing we really don't like. It's such a weight off your shoulders from having
to do this sort of wild goose hunt and just hope that you've guessed or that you figured
out what the right thing is to fix.
And the way that I like to do it when I'm building is that I often ask myself, I paid
close attention to my own kind of reaction to the business. I'm like, why, like, why
do things feel hard or why am I just frustrated all the time right now or whatever is going
on? Right. And usually I can kind of trace it back and be like, I was feeling annoyed
at this time or a client sent us an email at this time. They were unhappy when this
happened. And if I, and I actually note it down, I put it into Trello, like kind of have
a running list of things. And if someone just tells us something once or you see something
once, put it on the list. If we see it twice, start looking for it. If we see it a third
time, then it's time to deal with it. Right. And then I kind of go through a whole rubric
of like, is this causing customers to churn? Is it hurting revenue? Like that kind of thing.
And kind of what, and, and that makes it pretty obvious what the thing is that we should work
on then. Right. We run pretty typical two week sprints. You know, we do try to focus
on specific metrics, undertakings for the quarter. Um, like this quarter has been success.
So how do we help more agencies close more work? And how do we help more buyers find
the right agency? So that is our overall theme. But you know, within that it's, is this hurting
revenue? Is it, could this grow revenue and kind of making those trade-offs there? And
we never get it completely right. But at least allows us to focus and know why we're doing
it as opposed to like, hope this thing works. Right. Which is kind of what we did with the
marketplace and we see how that worked out. Yeah. You did an AMA on indie hackers, I think
like maybe a month ago and you had some really good questions that people asked you and you
had some interesting answers. One of the questions that people asked was kind of about like finding
a business partner who's not your co-founder because you know, you're saying we, who is
Credo? Who are you working with? How big is your team? Because I think when we, I interviewed
you three years ago, like you didn't have a co-founder. You're kind of doing this by
yourself. Yeah. I still don't have a co-founder. I have a business partner. There are six of
us that actively work on the business and with contractors and such, there's like, you
know, including a couple of agencies that we work with for our own marketing, kind of
nine or 10 different entities that touch the business. I mean, full transparency, we cracked
the half million revenue mark back in February and we've grown more since then. So we're
doing okay these days. We're consistent and profitable, but I actually met my now business
partner and my CTO Ali. So I post, I had a post on LinkedIn in September, 2017. It was
a two year anniversary of me getting laid off. So I put, I did a post kind of like a,
you know, bro or tree one sentence per line post on LinkedIn and it went viral. It got
over 10 million views, almost a hundred thousand likes, like thousands of comments and a VP
of sales at Trustpilot saw it. He was in Denver, reached out. We had coffee, told him what
he was doing. He's like, you need to meet my friend Ali who I used to work with. And
so we introduced Ali and I, we met up at a local brewery for a beer, both ended up having
three or four couldn't drive home. So it was like, went really well. And then I wanted
to redo my marketing site. So I basically hired Ali to do that. We kind of partnered
up on doing that. And then when I wanted to go into building the marketplace, I kind of
pitched him on it. Yeah. So he's basically become a minority partner in the business.
You know, he's kind of my, my business soulmate in a lot of ways. Like we think very well
together. We actually have formed a parent company to launch some other businesses as
well. Some other like software businesses. So, you know, we're 50 50 partners in that.
I am the majority owner of Credo for sure. He also has his own like WordPress development
agency and platform, but like I, it was honestly fate, but we got along really well. And then
what I would tell people that are looking for this is a work on something interesting,
be network with others who may know those people, ask for those introductions and then
work on something together, right? Something lightweight, like don't bring them on as a,
you know, 50 50 co-founder or something like that. If you don't know them, ideally you're
already have something working that has revenue. You know, we were at, when I met Ali, I think
we were probably at 18 to 20 K a month, something like that. So I had some revenue to, you know,
I had some revenue. I had, I could pay him to build out the site, that kind of thing.
And we just kind of stair stepped into it. Yeah. The person who asked this question,
I think he had like a business doing three or $400,000 a year in revenue and he was trying
to figure out like, okay, how do I bring on a partner? Cause he didn't really want to
pay like San Francisco prices and spend like, you know, half of his revenue on a partner. And
I think the way that you and Ali did it, I think he's like sort of as he's working on the business,
he's sort of like getting paid more, like earning his way into the position that just makes a lot
of sense. That's exactly what we do here. And it's, it's worked out. It's worked out well. Yeah.
I mean, we pay him, he's paid as a W two, you know, he's not full time on Credo. He's like half
time. Um, so we kind of pay him, you know, half of what we pay someone full time. And then every
quarter he's vesting in, you know, it's four year, four year vesting with a one year cliff,
like pretty, pretty standard in the tech world. You also gave me the advice that you don't think
anyone should really ever give up equity in almost any situation. And you recommended this
book called how to get rich, uh, which is like literally the cheesiest title of any book, but I
added it to my reading list immediately. Uh, because you're not the first person I've heard
recommend this. My buddy Sam who runs the newsletter, the hustle has also recommended
his books. In fact, he said, it's one of the best business books he's ever read or best books he's
ever read, period. And that he treats it almost like a reference book for him. He goes back to
it and sort of relearn these lessons. And every time Sam was recommended a book, it's been good.
So to see him recommend it and you to recommend it, it was pretty cool. So I looked at it like
it looked it up. Basically when I, you did your AMA and I was like, okay, how to get rich, you
know, am I really going to buy this book called how to get rich? And like, even the cover is kind
of bad. It's like this cheesy typical business book cover, this guy you've never seen or heard
of before on the top. And it says like, you know, one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs shares
his secrets and it's got like a gold sticker on it and stuff. Oh, it's fantastic. And Sam is a way
better entrepreneur than I am, by the way. But you know, the fact that he recommended as well,
I got the recommendation from Dan Martell. Yeah, I tell people as well. I'm like, it's super cheesy
is a super cheesy title, but it's really, really actionable. So basically, long story short, Felix
Dennis started Dennis publishing in the UK. They started Maxim magazine. And so like they've done
insanely well. So this dude is like really, really well known. And it was basically just like a ton
of war stories. I would almost say it's, it's like a, it's a British version of the hard thing
about hard things by Ben Horowitz, because he talks about like, you know, starting off in this
like crappy apartment that basically didn't have a roof to like owning private islands and jets,
right? So it's like, it's a really like fascinating story. But he basically talks about how like the
way to actually get wealthy is to own things. And so he says, like, find the right people,
if you need to give them some ownership, make them earn it, right? But they also actually need to
earn it. Not just like, I've been around for a while. I would like to have some of the business,
but like they are substantially adding to it. You could even like groom them up to take over from
you, right? That's the kind of person that you should give it to. Otherwise pay them well,
give them bonus incentive structures. But most people are not motivated by that ownership nor
do they know how to properly value it. They've just like heard that maybe they should want it
when actually what they want is maybe they want to be paid more of that kind of thing. And then
you have to decide are they paid reasonably? Should they get a pay raise? Or do you just say
like, you know what, I get it, but like I can't pay you anymore for this role. So I'll help you
find the next thing and I'll find something to replace you, right? Which is like kind of cold
and calculated in a way. But it's also how business works, right? You can't pay someone more money
for the same work just because they want it just because they've asked for it. Like you need to
pay them for what they're doing. Yeah. There's a sort of a article that Derek Sivers did on this
book. He does like book notes and all the best books that he's read. And he gave this one an
eight out of 10 and he has like a section that just says ownership, ownership, ownership. And he
says to become rich, you must be an owner and you must try to own it all. You must strive with every
fiber of your being while recognizing that it is your behavior to own and retain control. I was near
to 100% of any companies you can. It's pretty extreme, pretty extreme position, but it's clear.
It is. It is. But I definitely highlighted that like on my Kindle. I definitely highlighted that.
It was just like clear as day and like I totally, I totally get it. I checked the Wikipedia article
on the guy behind it because I'd never heard of him. His name is Felix Dennis. He apparently died
six or seven years ago, but he simply sounds like a crazy guy. Like he created the publishing company
that owned Maxim magazine. He was worth like $750 million when he died. And he just donated it all
to charity. He spent like a bunch of time as a poet and has like five books of poetry. And then
a book, he talks about how he like blew through over a hundred million dollars, which he spent on
like drugs and women apparently. And it's just like, I don't, he lived a very full controversial
life to say the least. And so to hear him give me this advice, it seems like it would be entertaining
to read if not a useful one. For sure. You know, and it's interesting because we had talked about
coaches, right? And like, I have a couple of coaches. So I work with Dan Martel and SaaS Academy.
And then Chris Lemma, who's VP of product innovation at Liquid Web in Nexus, the hosting
company. And I've worked with another coach before as well. And it's funny that you mentioned that
about Felix Dennis, because one of the things that I've noticed over the years working with
coaches, I spent over six figures on coaches over the last four years. But one of the things I look
for in a coach is, A, do they have, have they been a coach before? Like I don't want to hire someone
that doesn't know how to coach someone else. Do they have the experience growing the kind of
business that I am growing, right? So like Dan started Clarity FM, right? Grown some other like
software businesses, kind of like high ticket stuff. Chris has done a lot of that stuff as well.
And then the really important one for me that a lot of people miss is, do I want to have the
kind of life that they have and that they are building for themselves? Because if someone is
just building like businesses to get obscenely rich and to have a hedonistic lifestyle and they're
twice divorced and their kids. Which is a lot of people know. Yeah, I have zero interest in that.
Chris has been married for almost 20 years, has two awesome teenagers, right? Dan, his wife,
Renee is fantastic. They have two boys, you know, who are great. And he's, you know,
they're both super driven, but they're also big about their family and love their family. Right.
Um, and so that's super important to me is that like kind of cultural alignment there.
Yeah, Dennis's stuff is really interesting. But like, I also take it with a grain of salt.
I mean, and he straight up says in that book, and I commend him for saying this is like,
he's like, if you want to get rich and in his mind, it's like 50 mil plus net worth, right?
And obviously he was worth way more than that. He was like, basically you have to sacrifice
everything else to do that. He's like, you're going to sacrifice relationships,
you're going to sacrifice marriages, you're going to sacrifice your health and your sanity and that
kind of thing. And I sat back and said, maybe I don't want to be rich. Like maybe that's not
worth it. You know, like, I don't want to be like that level of wealthy, maybe just because of what
it might require from me, you know, like I'm not willing to make those trade-offs. So yeah,
he talks about it. I found a quote from him that talks about like the, the two priorities he has
for being rich. And this is like after he like had lived a life of debauchery and, and, uh,
lots of pain and drug addiction. And he was addicted to crack. It's crazy. This guy made
as much money as he did, but he talks about being rich enough to buy the only two things apart from
health and love that are worth fussing about in life. And number one is he says time. And number
two is the option of not having to be in any particular place on any particular day, doing
any particular thing in order to pay the rent or the mortgage, which is really just freedom.
I think both of those things are just like rich enough to have freedom and like you need significantly
less than $50 million to have the freedom to do that. You know, you could, you could survive on
a hundred times less than that and be completely fine and be free and happy and basically spend
your life doing whatever it is you want to do. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I respected that
about the book as well. And I think that's a really good way to think about, you know,
kind of building, building a business, building a life is like, is this actually giving me the
freedom that I, you know, that I want, whatever that means for you, for some it's going to require,
you know, $2 million for others. It's going to require 1 million others is going to require
150,000. What is that for you? And you're working on Credo and you're working towards a goal.
What kind of life do you want to live? And are you already living that life?
Getting close, getting closer for sure. You know, I'm married, I have a two-year-old,
you know, I get to kind of choose what I work on most days. If I want to like clear my schedule
and not do any meetings that day, I can ping my assistant and she'll clear my schedule and
reschedule everything for me. I have that. I haven't worked a full Friday and probably about
two years. So I work about four to four and a half days a week. I never, I almost never worked past
really 4.30 PM. So, and I started around nine. Um, you know, I'm not burning the midnight oil.
I'm not working a lot of weekends, really many weekends. I haven't checked work email and
probably on weekends and probably three years, you know, there's still some like lifestyle things
that I would, you know, that I would like my wife and I purchased land up by Breckenridge last summer.
And we're looking at building a house up there, you know, and it would be, uh, it would be nice to
not have to, you know, make some of the trade-offs to keep it within budget. I do read a lot of like
financial independence stuff, like a financial independence subreddit and, and that sort of
thing. I saw Ramit Sethi. Um, you know, I really respect Ramit's like kind of take on, you know,
a rich life pushed me to think about what mine would be. And he said something about like,
uh, he tweeted something the other day about like, how would you,
what point have you reached where like money doesn't matter? Right. And a lot of people
talked about like, I don't look at prices on a menu anymore. They're like, that's when it,
when it felt good, I'm there. But my goal is to really be like,
plain ticket fi, right? Like I can book a ticket anywhere in the world and not think twice about
it. Um, so, you know, as travel opens back up, you traveled a ton, pretty pandemic. Yeah. I have
a bunch of trips already planned this year after getting vaccinated. So like, that's kind of my
goal. I don't think I'm ever going to be satisfied just cause like you can always have more and other
people always have more, but like, feel pretty good about it at this point. What about your,
like your business life? Cause I think about it in terms of, okay, I want my,
my personal life to be super financially secure and free. Like, you know, I don't want to have
to look at the price of, you know, a meal when I go to a restaurant, like that feels good not
having to do that. Right. But also, you know, it's more than just about like cost savings and,
you know, being able to like not feel anxiety, but also like positives you can bring to your life.
And I think a lot about with Andy hackers, how do I structure any hackers such that it
maybe not forces me, but like at the very least pushes me or nudges me in the direction to do
things that like I'm going to find very fulfilling and entertaining and worthwhile, you know, like
having this podcast is great. Cause I could just have conversations like this. In fact, I have to
have conversations like this two or three times a week, you know, and like, it's literally my job
to do a thing that I like to do, but like I might not do otherwise cause I might be a little lazy,
you know, like I want to go to the gym regularly. I don't do it, but I would love to. Like if I had
a job that forced me to go to the gym, you know, if I was a motivational speaker on personal
training, like I would have to go work out in order to look good and be able to do my job.
And so I wonder what that is for you. And do you think about how you structure Credo as a
business such that, uh, it's actually like enjoyable to run and do you have like some
sort of a dream future where it's like amazing to run and it makes your life even better than
without? That's good. It's a really good question. I would say a lot of the decisions that we've
actually made with the business, like there's a lot of, there's a lot of different directions
that we could go with it, but we've made the decision to kind of focus on agencies doing,
you know, X amount of money per year, X number of people, simply because like we, we are expressly
not a freelancer platform because people looking to hire freelancers usually have lower budgets.
They also want a lot of attention. They need a lot of advice, et cetera. And they can't pay for it.
Right. Um, I value my time very highly. As you can tell, I work nine to four every day and not,
and I never do calls on Fridays. So like, I value my time and my freedom very highly.
And so we've just made the choice to not do a lot of things that would just, just
make the business a lot more complicated. We might make more money, but we're not hurting
for money for sure. So, um, you know, we, we've made those, those trade-offs. And for me,
what gets me out of bed in the morning is, and what gets me excited is seeing agencies
winning and seeing good people winning. We've, you know, we've had some agencies on Credo before
that turned out they actually weren't a great partner, right? Like not that they were bad
people, but like they couldn't close and they were kind of needy for, you know, had questions.
They never kind of got the system and how it worked and they couldn't close work versus we
have some agencies that have been with us for years that we've added millions of dollars to
their bottom line and they're great people and become some of my closest friends in the industry.
So, you know, people like that were like, they get a close and I'm like, dang, we just like help
this agency make another, you know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, right? Which means
that they can hire more people, they can deliver more value, that kind of thing.
I've got a, my formula for starting a business that you love. And sometimes it sounds cheesy
when you're talking about making my customers happy and making them a lot of money. And that's
what feels good. And I think like to me, before I started a business, I was like, that sounds
cheesy. I'm like, what, why would that make me feel super good? But like the reality is like,
you probably spend more time thinking about your customers and talking to your customers
than you do anyone else when you're running a business. And like, if you want to start a
business that you enjoy, I think the first thing you should do is you should identify like a group
of people that you really enjoy being around, you know, people who actually bring you joy and then,
you know, learn what they pay for and make them your customers and then, you know, hire other
people like you who also love these same people and then do the rest of it. Set same habits,
guard your time, be patient because it's probably going to take a long time and try to enjoy the
journey or set things up so you do enjoy the journey. So you're not just constantly stressed
about getting to some milestone that you may or may not hit. And if you can do all those things,
I think you're probably going to start a business that you like. The interesting thing is even now,
I could work on anything I want to work on. Like I could say, you know what, today,
I'm not working on Credo. I'm working on this other thing. I could do that. I have that freedom.
And actually, Cortland, we all have that freedom, like to a point. It's like making that choice is
going to mean, you know, will mean different things for different people. But at the end of the day,
we do all have that choice, right? We're just telling ourselves that we don't. And it might not
be worth it to make the choice. If like not working on it means you can't feed your family,
you probably shouldn't make that choice. But the point is you can, anyone can say at any time,
I don't want to be doing this thing. And I think once you kind of accept that and realize that like
I am choosing today to work on this thing, then even when you're in the like the tough parts,
the slog, right, the slow slash sass ramp of death, or, you know, you're trying to get those
first 10 customers or, you know, something like that, that can keep you going. It's kept me going
on, you know, on hard days where it's like, okay, like I'm, it's a hard day, but I'm still choosing
to work on this thing. I'm still choosing to go to work, aka step into my office at home.
I think having that mindset can really help us out as we're, you know, as we're building businesses.
And then as I was saying at the start, realizing what are the things that are constantly kind of
annoying me. And for me, like what wasn't worth about the marketplace was I was spending my time,
which I value very highly to make less money. I care about my time and I care about supporting
my family and I care about doing well myself. My wife works as well. Like it's not all on me, but
those are the things that I, you know, that I care about. And so I was making trade offs that just
were not worth it to me anymore. And so I think we need to realize that. And also that it's perfectly
okay to fire customers, you know, like build for the, build for the right people, but you are going
to have customers that are not, that are not the right fit. And then it's perfectly okay to get
them, you know, get them off of your plate. I learned that from Tim Ferriss 13 years ago when
I read the four hour work week for the first time. Right. And it's just like, that's just made a world
of difference in business. So tell me about some of these side projects that you've started
and launched. Like what's your, what's your main one? Oh, man. Two main ones. One is completely
not related at all to what I do day to day. It's related to my hobbies, singlegeared.com
which is basically an outdoor gear reviews website. And I basically built it just it's
WordPress and WooCommerce. And I basically built it because I wanted to learn how to build an
e-commerce site. And so I built it purely affiliate driven, you know, does a couple grand a year in
revenue, something like that basically pays, pays, pays for the software licenses I have to use to
let it run on autopilot and buys me some new gear every year. Right. I'm a big skier, mountain biker,
et cetera. So it's fun. If I wanted to, you know, get out of tech and go into the outdoor industry,
I could just use that and be like, I'm the founder of single gear. Yeah. And it makes sense. Cause
it's actually kind of dovetails with your skillset because if you're doing like affiliate marketing,
it's like, okay, you're not spending a ton, like a ton of time building the product. The products
are basically created and sold by other people. So really what you need to figure out is just how
you're going to get people in the door and you're like a professional marketer, professional SEO,
you know, the exact same SEO for 12 years. Exactly. Right. And so it's like you're playing
to your strengths here. So there's that one. And then the one that I, I've been pushing harder on
recently is editor, ninja.com. Basically, if you know, design pickle, think design pickle for copy
editing and proofreading. Okay. So design pickles like unlimited design, no matter how many graphics
you want designed for one monthly fee. Exactly. That same sort of model. And it's, it's still
early traction where I'm cranking up the blog content, driving traffic to it, you know, reaching
out to people. Honestly, I'm still trying to find the first 10 customers, but it's a side project.
I have some ideas for, you know, other ways to, to kind of get, you know, traction on there as well.
But yeah, it's, you know, it's a subscription business. It's high ticket subscription,
which I've realized is kind of my, is kind of my jam and it's connecting up the two sides,
right? It's hard to find good editors and people and bad copy and type those kill conversions.
So if that can be cleaned up, people are going to make more money. I like two-sided businesses.
They're hard, but like two-sided productized businesses where it's like these people have a
need, these people offer the thing. How can we bring them together and make it work, you know,
for everybody? What do you think is the most important thing to do to get a two-sided
marketplace or two-sided business to work? Because it's, it's right. I mean,
you've got two different customer sets. You've got to get them both theoretically at the same
time. And even if you're like a really good at finding one set, it doesn't necessarily mean
the other people are going to be here. Even if you find like really good copy editors,
it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to find a bunch of people who need stuff to be copy edited,
who willing to pay three or $400 a month for the service. The way that I did it with Credo,
the way I'm doing it with editor Ninja, the way I've done it with others, the way I've seen other
people do it is you need to see that initial supply. So the supply side, the people kind of
delivering the service, and then you just focus on demand because it's super easy to get supply.
Even if you get like 15 people on the supply side and someone needs something specific, right?
If someone, if an author came to me and they're like, Hey, I need help finding an editor.
It wouldn't be hard to find an editor because I'm literally selling the money, right? Like,
Hey, here's a person that needs this. I need you to give me 15%. Okay. They, they mark up their
price a little bit to make the margin work. And we're good to go for the two side of business,
build out that initial supply, get them in. However you can just get them in for free,
listen for free, right? Do a little bit of vetting, make sure they're good. So either like looking at
their work, if you're qualified to look at their work or just getting someone that you trust to
kind of vouch for them, and then you just have to focus on the demand side. And that is the only
thing that you focus on. Cause if you can grow demand, if you can bring in demand, you can always
find supply and you're always going to be able to keep supply happy. Yeah. It's kind of how I feel
about any hackers sometimes where in a way we're a community. That's like a bunch of people helping
each other out. It's kind of like this nebulous amorphous blob of people. It's not so clearly
divided into like, you know, demand site and supply side, but you really do have readers and
writers. You have some people who will literally never write a single post on any hackers and you
have some people who basically make a career out of writing posts on any hackers all the time. And
like the more of those people we can bring onto the site and the more we can attract, the more
useful it is for readers. And like they're basically the supply side and then they're much
easier to find. Like pretty much everybody I have on the podcast could be a contributor to any
hackers. Or we could go out and literally just like hire writers, you know, maybe, maybe through
your site, professional writers and say, okay, help us, you know, our journalists help us tell
stories, help us write articles, and then just focus completely on the marketing to get the demand
side up completely on finding new entrepreneurs and founders to come read the forum and take part
and see what everybody's posting. And that initial traction is definitely tough. And I would just say,
you know, do it, do it for free. Like the first people I had on Credo, I listed them on the site
for free and, you know, and basically took a percentage when they closed. So, you know,
I've done that model a couple of times. I will not do it again. If I try to do it again,
someone needs to slap me because it's just a bad business. But, you know, like if you're
getting a job board off the ground, right? You have the people hiring and you have the people
looking to be hired. You're not going to be able to charge people to list their job, to list their
jobs. If you don't have anyone looking for jobs, like post it for free, let them post it for free,
do whatever you can to get them in there, right? Like posting it yourself. We actually had a job
board on a full-time job board on Credo for a while. And I would find people that were looking
to hire. I would email them asking them if I could post it on our job board as well and would do the
whole thing, you know, for them. And then we were driving in, you know, the demand side people
looking to hire. I tried at first getting people to pay because we have tens of thousands of people
a month coming to the site and they still wouldn't do it because they hadn't seen it work. So,
the model should be listed for free. People are, you know, coming through show people how
much traffic you have and then let those who want to promote their posts pay to promote their, you
know, job they're listing above everybody else. Or if you're doing something like a community,
like I did with ND hackers, you can literally be the entire supply side yourself and you can do it
for free. Like I was just on there doing a ton of interviews, sending out, you know, email newsletters
every week with new interviews and then just posting a ton on the forum. Like that was enough
to get the first like five, 10, 50 users on the website. I didn't need other people to take part.
And so it's kind of the easy part of starting your company is like, you don't have to be that
clever. You just have to sort of work hard and push through it. And then later as you get bigger,
you do need to be clever. You know, we're trying to, you know, bring in your 10,000th user,
your 100,000th user. You probably need to be an expert marketer or like be super. I mean,
like even you, like you're not only good at SEO, but like you're pretty good at doing the podcast
circuit. You know, like doing the show is going to be helpful for your business, hopefully.
Um, and you've got like other tricks up your sleeve to sort of get to the next level. Once
you're at 500 K in revenue, it's like pretty hard to get to a million or 5 million or 10 million.
I always think back to the, I heard, uh, Will Reynolds from Sierra interactive,
a marketing agency out of Philadelphia. And I remember he wrote a blog post back in like 2012
where he was quoting one of his mentors who said like, well, it was like, why is it so hard to get
from like, you know, five people to 20 people in his or something like that. And his mentor was
like, well, what got you here won't get you there. So like the things that you did to kind of like
hack initial engagement or get initial leads or whatever initial users, that's not going to scale
to get you to, you know, you might get 10, but it's not going to get you to a hundred. But if you
can, if you're smart enough and work hard enough to get to 10, you can do the same thing to get to
a hundred. Just the strategies and tactics are going to change. But if you're just getting
started, you don't really need to worry about that, you know, cause you'll get there and you'll
realize like I've hit a ceiling. Now what? That's what I like having coaches. Cause then they're
like, you need this framework. You need to do this thing. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. And then go and
do that. Very cool. Well, listen, John, it's been cool catching up with you and figuring out what's
going on with Credo. I always ask at the end of the show, uh, what's one lesson, one takeaway that
you think fledgling, you know, beginning indie hackers can take away from your journey and what
you've learned so far. This one actually comes from, I don't know who it originated with, but I
actually heard it, um, on the, the empire show where, where Bedros always says how you do anything
is how you do everything. I think about that fairly often that, and also when I walk up to my room,
I listened to a Lewis Howells podcast years ago where he talked about like one way to, to be, uh,
productive is to make sure that you make your bed every day. And so I walk up into my room and I hear
Lewis's voice in my head saying, make your bed, which is kind of weird, but Bedros is how you do
anything is how you do everything. Like, you know, if I'm whatever putting something away and I take
it halfway, right? When I could just as easily take it all the way and just put it where it should be
instead of creating myself future work. I'm like, how you do anything is how you do everything. Okay,
cool. Let's do this. Well, I love that because if you get in the habit of basically doing everything
well, your brain's always going to be in that mode or like, I am extremely hardworking or
extremely detail oriented. I finish things and I see them through to the end and you're going to
carry that with you everywhere. Whereas if you get into the habit of like being sort of lazy with
things, you can get into kind of a negative mental cycle. And then when it comes time for your work
on your business, like that's probably going to carry over. I'm like, maybe you can push through
that and change it. But like, is that a battle you want to have to fight every single day? Probably
not. You got it. Yep. All maps back to your identity and identity drives everything else.
It's been a super great time. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what
you're up to with Credo? For sure. So the website is get credo.com. G E T C R E D O dot com. Best
place to kind of connect with me personally and what I'm doing and thinking about is Twitter
at dirty J F D O H E R T Y J F. All right. Later, John.