What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always,
is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
internet businesses.
Joining me today is Natalie Nagel, the CEO of a company called Wildbit. A lot of people
talk about building a sustainable business nowadays, but Natalie is one of the few who
has already done it. Wildbit is an 18-year-old software company. It's been around for a
long time. It shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. They have 30 employees. They're
very profitable. They're generating many millions of dollars per year in revenue. And the best
part is that it is completely bootstrapped.
Natalie has never raised a dime from investors, which means that she and her co-founder slash
husband Chris control everything. They get to run their company however they want. Nobody
can tell them not to do something. And as a result, they made a lot of very interesting
choices that I'm excited to talk about. So Natalie, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks, Courtland. I'm so excited to be here.
I'm excited to have you here. There's so much to talk about with Wildbit. You guys have
transitioned from being a consulting company to a product company. You've released multiple
products, not just one. Some of your products have grown to millions of dollars in revenue.
Some of your products have failed and you pulled the plug on them and shut them down.
You've even spun off a product and sold it to another company. You've hired. I'm sure
you've fired. The list just goes on. You're running this company as a husband and wife
team, which is fascinating to me. You're doing the whole remote work thing. And you've been
doing it since 2000, way before it was cool. You have a 32-hour work week. You guys have
done pretty much everything.
You make it sound so good.
It is good. It's great. This is all great stuff. It's so hard for me to even know where
to start. What's something that you guys haven't done as a company these past 18 years that
you'd be excited to do at some point in the future?
There's so much, man. One of the things that I'm super excited to... You're a small company
and we are really limited in resources to some degree. And one thing I think we can
get much better at is providing opportunities for individual growth inside the organization
and not necessarily encouraging to some degree people to find jobs elsewhere because we don't
have those opportunities inside.
We have this crazy idea of what I'm calling Wildbit 3.0, which is to re-envision the purpose
of our profits to really be focused on how can Wildbit's profits help grow every individual
in the organization, whether that's in their current careers or why do we have to only
build software? Why can't we build something else?
So we have crazy ideas, but that's really... I really want to figure out a way. And this
is where we're moving towards is becoming a little bit bigger just so that we have more
opportunities for people to grow and having leadership opportunities and that kind of
thing. That's a big one on the radar right now that I'm super excited about.
That's so cool. I love hearing about founders and companies like you who are doing this
wild experimentation with your businesses. Because I think we haven't reached any sort
of peak in terms of what a company can look like and how it functions. There's still a
lot of discovery left to go and people like you are blazing this trail that I think others
are afraid to do because it just seems risky. And that's not a dig on them. I think it's
because you've built something that's truly self-sustaining. And so you've created almost
a safe space for you guys to do this kind of experimentation.
Yeah, I think there should be as many unique businesses as there are unique people who
run them. Because in all honesty, entrepreneurs are doing it or should be doing it for themselves
because they have some crazy itch.
Chris and I have always looked at it and said, like, how do we want to run this business?
I don't think there should be rules. We're not in medicine or accounting where there
are real rules to follow. There are no rules here.
And so we get to invent them however we want, starting from how big do we want to grow and
how fast do we want to grow and reaching all the way into what does that mean in terms
of what we build and for how long and all that stuff.
I think that's the whole point of being an entrepreneur is getting to be really thoughtful
around the whys, around everything, not just the products and how they grow, but how you
build an organization.
So let's take this to an extreme. Imagine you're in some sort of dream world, Natalie,
where pretty much everything you try works out okay. You can just go to town making changes
to your company and its culture and process is totally risk-free. What are some of the
unconventional changes that you would make?
I really want to be able to create a space inside of Wildbit where people can play in
areas that aren't necessarily just around their craft, like software development, design,
that kind of thing. I would love to make Wildbit a home where our team gets to spend that time
that they're working and getting paid, pushing themselves past their comfort zones in various
ways. I know that that's not for everyone, but there's a lot of people, especially they
get attracted to Wildbit as a company who are creatives. They're deep thinkers. They're
interested in a lot of things, interested in exploring a lot of things. Maybe it's because
the older I get, the more I realize our time is limited and valuable. A lot of times, if
you're working all the time on one thing, by the time you get home, your free time doesn't
really support some of those hobbies and creative things.
I'd love to be able to experiment and also see what can I do for Wildbit? Maybe Wildbit.
What if we made soap? Why not? I don't know. I don't know. Why not? What I told the team
is, Chris and I always dreamed of running a hotel one day. Why can't it be a Wildbit
hotel? I don't know. Some of this stuff is probably batshit crazy. I don't know.
I would love for us to be so profitable and have created the systems in place to support
our customers so well that we have the extra space. Because that's what it comes down to.
Our customers are first. That's our job is to support them to make sure that they are
provided the service that they have come to love from us and that we're delivering on
our promises. But how can I grow that in a way that we can be overly profitable, so to
speak? Is that a thing? But have enough fat in the profits so that we can experiment and
play.
I mean, I think for Chris and I is that Wildbit is just a creative space for people. We have
to be profitable for that to happen because you got to pay with it somehow. But I want
it to be a creative space. I want to be able to give people opportunities to explore themselves
and what they're capable of and how big they can make themselves. I really push people.
I think that would be really great.
This is so cool. It's like you've created your own playground, really, slash...
Yeah, man, that's it.
Utopian society.
No, it's not utopia. Come on. It's not utopia. You know what? I'm much better at this stuff
than I am as a business person, which is a problem. I've been mulling on this thing where
the difference between an entrepreneur and a business person. I'm not the only first
person to call that out, obviously, but it's just been weighing on me because the entrepreneur
stuff comes easy to me. Being crazy and doing whatever the hell I want and really pushing
ourselves to think why. Some of the business person stuff, there's some brilliant business
people out there that I know or that we all know that I'm just like, wow, you totally
get it. And I wish I was better at that.
You've built a company that is, by all definitions, super successful. The vast majority of entrepreneurs
and business people on Earth will look up to what you've done and see you as an example
that they want to follow. Do you feel like an expert?
There are certain things I think I'm definitely an expert on. I think I feel pretty confident
with what we've learned and what we've discovered and how we build team and build culture. Really
just intentionally supporting human beings who work in an organization. I think I'm really
confident in that.
If you came and asked me, hey, help me figure out how to grow another business from scratch,
I would not. I still look at that stuff as a series of really fortunate events that kind
of got pieced together. Truthfully, no. I'm surrounded by brilliant people who support
me and Chris in building something great. We provide as much as we can of ourselves
to them and in return, we build brilliant products. That I can replicate. But if you
ask me for marketing tactics or how to best monetize or any of that stuff, it is so over
my head.
I'm trying to get better at it. I hired my first director of finance and she's brilliant.
I don't know how I lived without her and she's helping me learn that stuff. But I just think
that our skill set... I mean, we build great product. Chris is an incredibly smart technologist
who really understands product and all that stuff. But me personally, I'm just not a business
person from that perspective.
I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that we're definitely going to
talk about a lot of the culture, people, that realm that you're comfortable in. The bad
news is I'm still going to ask you marketing and growth and early stage strategy questions.
I know. I know. You should make me think about it. You should. No, actually, I think about
that all the time because that's my soft spot or my weak spot, right?
You can divide up Wildbit as a company in the kind of two phases, the consulting phase
of your business. And then about 10 years ago, you transitioned into being a product
focused business. Is that accurate?
Yes.
I don't know very much about the first phase of Wildbit. What's the story there? How did
you guys get started and eventually become a product business?
Yeah, I mean, so Chris and I run the business together. It's an 18 year old company that
he started when he was like 19, 20 years old. And we've been doing it together for 15 years.
And so he started it as brochure, wear, nightlife, clubs, bars, restaurants kind of business,
lots of flash. I don't know if people still know what flash is. I don't know. Young listeners
who don't know that anymore.
They might not.
But I know. Look it up. It's brilliant. And so doing a lot of that kind of work that slowly
transitioned and then we started working. So the first couple of years he was doing
that, we met, started dating very quickly. I started to kind of run whatever part of
the business I could to help him. So QuickBooks, invoicing, looking through our RFPs, that
kind of thing. I was in college.
And then we started transitioning into more robust client services work. We actually ended
up doing a lot of social networks. And we're pretty big on that and kind of had a reputation
for designing really great social networks with our customers. In that time, we built
our actually very first product, which was called Newsberry. It was an email marketing
service. And the idea was this was 2004 where there really wasn't anything. And our customers
at the time needed to send emails. And Chris had this great idea. He's like, well, we can
build something that they can use. So he went to a couple of customers and said, could you
invest, quote unquote, in this product? I forget what the amount. I don't want to lie.
It was a few thousand bucks, I think. And you can use it for free forever. And we'll
build it, but we'll be able to sell it for other customers. And that was how Newsberry
was born. I still think that was so smart. And so he had this idea. So we built Newsberry.
And it was always a side project. All our money came from client services. And so we
ran Newsberry on the side. It actually made money. When we shut it down, it was profitable
and making a few hundred thousand dollars a year, I think. It wasn't insignificant.
And then we just continued to do client service work. So we got into these bigger projects.
And at that time, Chris was managing our subversion servers, subversion as pre-git. And so he's
managing our subversion servers. And they were all self-hosted and all this stuff. And
he was like, well, why can't we build something that'll run this instead? That can host it
that we can run so that we can manage a lot of things like user permissions and just collaboration
and all that kind of stuff.
So he had the idea for Beanstalk. And he went to a bunch of our friends. And he was like,
did you guys let me store your source code? And you can get this great UI. And they were
like, you're crazy. I would never give you my source code. That's ridiculous.
And he didn't listen to them. And so he built it anyway. And we built it in a way where
it was we had a small team doing client services work. And we said, let's throw a couple weeks
at it. So we were billing in weekly iterations.
So every time we didn't bill and worked on Beanstalk, or every time we worked on Beanstalk,
we weren't billing. So these were significant amounts of money for us.
So eventually, we built Beanstalk. It picked up. People really loved it, launched it in
beta and committed a full-time person to it. And that's the only way we actually got out
of consulting.
And that's my only one recommendation every time somebody asked how you make the transition.
It was commit the resource because once it costs you money, you're going to push yourself
to really make it a success.
So we committed a full-time person. And it picked up. And this was 2007, 2008. The world
was a very different place back then. Apps were launching weekly, monthly, maybe not
hourly. By the minute, we had no product hunt back then. It got picked up. There was a lot
of traction on it.
And so we got really addicted to the product life and committed to being a product company.
But to do that, we knew we didn't want to fire anybody. So we said, all right, well,
we had some recurring revenue. So we had a kind of a view of where we were going to get
at a certain point. And we said, all right, we are not going to stop client services until
we can cover everybody's salary.
And so we waited about a year, maybe a little bit less than that, until Beanstalk was making
enough money to cover all the salaries of the rest of the team who was doing consulting
work.
And we shut it down. I borrowed 40 grand from Chris's dad. I think it was 40. Basically,
to just sit in a bank account for my worst case scenario, something happens and I have
to pay salary. And I paid him back very quickly on that. And then we closed off our biggest
project and that was it.
And then fast forward, we shut down Newsbury. And we can talk about that if you want. But
we shut down Newsbury because we wanted to focus and we realized that we were not good
marketers. So we didn't really understand the audience. And it was just a huge distraction.
So we shut it down. And then it became kind of a product company from there. And that's
never since kind of been doing the same thing.
You mentioned that you got addicted to the product life. What are some of the biggest
day-to-day differences in your life as a founder between running a product company and running
a consulting company? And did you anticipate those differences? And is that what drove
you to make the transition?
Yeah, I think there's a lot. We were extremely lucky with clients who we adored and work
that was very challenging and very interesting. But yet, it's not your work. And so when you
do client work, it's tricky when you fall in love with something and then it gets kind
of taken away from you.
Or on the flip side, you see it differently. You might not be right or we've been wrong,
but you see it differently. And you really want to push for that change, but you can't
because it's not really your risk. It's somebody else's risk. And so I think in running Beanstalk
in parallel with doing client work, we really just got addicted to being able to take those
risks to experiment on our own and to fail because they were our decisions.
I think that was a really big one. And the other obvious one is control over our time,
our revenue to some degree, because we weren't chasing RFPs in the next project or the next
project.
I'll always say that early on, there were days when I was like, I really want more money.
I got to grow faster and there's no way to do it. When it was client work, I could be
like, all right, let's go drum up some work. Let's go find a project.
And it's stressful, but you can almost always find a project. You can't really be like,
hey, this month in SAS, I'd like to grow an extra $30,000. So thanks. It's just not how
it works.
You mentioned that you shut down Newsberry in part because you wanted to focus, but in
part because you guys had this realization that marketing is not your strong suit. Yet
at the same time, you were running Beanstalk and it seems that that was successful from
the early days.
What's your story behind how you launched Beanstalk and got your first users with it?
So 2008 was a very different time to launch product. And it was all word of mouth. And
to this day, I'm telling you that the only good marketing that we do is word of mouth.
It's just built great product. And we're always trying to get better at it. But it's not in
our DNA, Chris and I.
We launched Beanstalk to a bunch of friends who Twitter was new, who could tweet and people
would hear. And we did integrations with other apps. We did an integration with Basecamp
and they blogged about it because it was valuable to their customers. And there was a nice reciprocal
relationship there.
That Basecamp blog post was a huge driver of traffic for us for years to come. It's just
a very different ecosystem. I could never replicate ever again. The timing was different.
There was nothing else out there to even compete with. They're a CVS dude, which was for CVS,
which is even older than subversion.
So it was just a really natural, hey, have you seen this thing? I'm using this thing
called Beanstalk. And people just kept talking about it and sharing and talking and sharing.
And actually, in hindsight, it grew really fast. For what it was and our price point,
it grew super fast.
What is Beanstalk exactly? And who are these people using it and talking about it?
Beanstalk is a collaboration platform for software developer teams. It's hosted Git
with deployments and project management built in. It was what today is mostly GitHub, right?
We were doing that in 2008. But it was subversion, which was the earlier version control system
of choice.
And those first customers were software developers, people building for the web in 2008. So it's
like early web apps, lots of Rails, lots of Rails projects. Some of the most beloved projects
back then were all using Beanstalk because it was a hosted, elegant way of collaborating
on code together and working together. And you didn't really have a lot of options back
then.
It's funny, you're talking about Rails, you're talking about Beanstalk being featured on
Basecamp's blog back in 2007, 2008. I don't exactly remember that post, but I guarantee
you I read it because back then I was reading everything on Basecamp's blog. Those guys
were so inspirational to me. Were they inspirational to you? They sort of had the same model you
had of going from a consulting company to a product company.
Oh, absolutely. That's the dream, right? I mean, everything that they, everything that
Jason Fried and DHH wrote about back then was gospel.
They showed a way for introverted engineers to build a successful business. I'm not saying
they are, but I'm saying as an alternative to build a business that required no sales,
no marketing, theoretically. You don't really have to talk to your customers. You can build
great software. You could kind of run the show and do it in a way that was meaningful.
Today, a lot of us take it for granted. Back then, we would tell people what we were doing
and they thought that was insane. You get people to put their credit cards in and they
pay you every month and you don't even know who they are. You've never talked to them.
They're like, yep. You've no sales team? None. Do you even know who they are? I said, I have
no idea. We have all these huge brands using us. I mean, huge. There's a point where we
had some of the most beloved brands using us and we didn't even have a lawyer to sign
a separate agreement. There was a terms of service called Checkbox. It was tremendous
what 37signals at the time showed the way. To grab on to that and really run with it
was we owe them everything. We would not have built a business had it not been for them.
To some degree, we probably followed them for too long because Jason Fried is an incredible
marketer and we aren't that. Had we known that sooner, we would have had to adjust our
strategy a little bit and be like, oh, there's this other piece of it too. It's not just
happening by accident. You have to do some other work and we only picked up on the parts
that we wanted to, not the other parts.
You talk about not really talking to your customers, not being good at the marketing
stuff and your product spreading via word of mouth, which really is the dream. People
are just talking about your product and spreading it for you.
Is that still the case with Beanstalk today? No. We're building a new product. If you build
it, they will come as a very tricky strategy nowadays. We got to a point with Beanstalk
where we were starting to compete on features or with marketing dollars because we got to
a point where GitHub was huge, Bitbucket and GitLab. It's the four of us and we're the
tiniest of the tiny.
There's all faults of our own. We didn't innovate. We didn't pay attention to the market. There's
all kinds of things. About four years ago, we actually sat down and said, what do we
want to do because we have thousands and thousands and thousands of users and it's very profitable
and it makes us a lot of money, but we want to do something different. How do we want
to compete? What do we want to do? Do we want to compete on adding new features? Do we want
to compete on marketing dollars? Should we get a loan and just try to get the brand out
there more? What do we want to do?
We decided that we wanted to have a chance to rethink the problem we were solving. At
that point, we had been running Beanstalk for, I guess, eight years. We really just
sat down and said, if we started over knowing what we know today, what would we build? Because
the value proposition changed drastically from what we built. We had this existing product
used by so many people, we couldn't really just rip the rug right onto them. We really
wanted to rethink the problem. We decided to build something completely from scratch.
That's Conveyor, which we launched actually to the public two weeks ago, I guess, which
is crazy.
Congratulations.
Thanks. Four years to minimally viable product. It's pretty great. It's been an incredibly
humbling journey to launch another product. But Beanstalk is supported and maintained,
but we are not doing active development on it because everybody's focused on that team
on Conveyor. It's totally reimagined. It's actually a desktop client with the hosting.
Lots of project management built-in. I think it's a really special product. We have a ton
of work to do. The feedback has been like, this is great. Please do all of these 35 things.
So we're really focused on which is what we wanted. We wanted that feedback so we can
really just figure out which direction we need to go in with actual humans, not ourselves
in a vacuum. This got a lot of work to do, but I think it's going to be really special.
And that's what we hope will be the next version of Beanstalk.
So between Beanstalk and your new product, Conveyor, you also launched a couple other
products which did very well.
Do you feel like having multiple successes under your belt made you more nervous or worried
about building a totally new thing?
Like, you know what? I've been writing for the last three days. Yeah, I mean, it took
us four years to launch Conveyor. So we have Postmark, which is hugely successful, growing
really fast. Most of our team is on that. And when you have this kind of mature, you've
been running mature products for so long, you really lose the sense of scrappiness.
And we pushed for it so hard, but we're just not used to being scrappy anymore. We're still
scrappy in a lot of ways, but our polish, our fine detail, our QA process, all of that
is just really geared towards sophisticated products with customers.
And when you're building something new, you kind of need to be a little rougher around
the edges. I'm not saying minimally viable. I'm not saying that the thing barely works,
but we wanted something that was fast and we had definitely had some non-starters. But
I think it took us a while because we really nitpicked probably the wrong things just because
of what we're used to. And I say, God, that's so hard. It's so, so hard to look at something
and say, are we overthinking this? Should we have scaled back three revisions ago? Should
we have focused, do we need to be that fast? Do we need to be that available? Do we need
to fix all of these bugs? Really narrowing in on what a true first version of something
is was really hard for us.
I see a lot of this difference between being small and scrappy and being a little bit more
refined and mature with my job because I run any hackers. It's a two person, quote unquote
company, which is me and my brother inside of Stripe, which is this behemoth with 1600
people. And the differences are just astounding. Is there a certain inflection point with all
of these products with postmark and Beanstalk, where you lose the scrappiness and become
more refined? Is it a revenue milestone? Is it the number of team members? What causes
that transition?
Yeah, I think for us, I don't know, it's definitely not revenue. I think for us, well, everybody
defines that differently in terms of the scrappy means we've always felt that our promise
to the customer was that they will not test our code. So that was always a very big kind
of once you have paying customers, you deliver on the promise. That's always been our thing.
And so we've always had QA as part of our process. We don't ship anything without QA.
We have new people starting on the team and support and stuff like that. And they're always
shocked by how few bugs we have. We have plenty of bugs, but how few bugs we have compared
to other apps because we overtest everything. But that's definitely a philosophical thing
where I want our customers to feel like we've done all the due diligence. And by the time
it's in their hands, it's pretty polished.
The part where I wish we had done it differently, and what we did with Deploybot and other things
was, we really had a better sense of what the core thing was. The core value proposition
was, and because web apps are just so much easier to build than desktop apps, especially
for an inexperienced team who's never built a desktop app, it was hard to really figure
out how to stop that process, how to really say, this is the thing that we're building.
And this is all we need to be building for now. Let's get some feedback in.
I think the other part truly, Cortland, if I'm honest, is we had too big of a team on
conveyor for a while. Some of these things, most of the time, you start one or two people,
three people hacking away on stuff. I think that's a big one. I think once your team probably
gets bigger, you have more experts, so to speak, and less generalists and all these
things, you start to refine the process as you go.
Conveyor has always had a large team. It started with two people, but it kept ballooning and
then shrinking and then ballooning again. And so the more people you have, the more
overhead you have, the more opinions. And they're all good opinions and who picks and
how do you make decisions and all that kind of stuff.
So I think there's probably some combination of both. I don't know if I answered that in
a distinct enough way, but I don't know that I have a specific... You hit a million dollars,
you stop being scrappy milestone there.
Yeah, I don't know if there is a distinctive answer, a distinctive point between being
scrappy and not being scrappy anymore. I just get to ask bullshit questions like that as
a podcaster.
No, I mean, I think about it all the time because it took us four years to get here.
And I'm telling you here, I keep telling the team, we literally just got to the starting
line. We have so much work to do, which is okay. I'm excited. And we're thankfully profitable
and I don't have anybody to answer to. But I definitely struggle with that should we
have shifted a year ago.
Well, you guys have never really struck me as a company that's been in any sort of extreme
rush. For example, you have a 32-hour workweek at Wildbit. That's crazy. What's the story
behind making that decision? You've been doing it for almost two years now, I think.
Yeah. May of 2017, we started this experiment with a four-day, 32-hour workweek, actually
based on a book on deep work by Cal Newport in which Cal Newport talks about the brain's
capacity for meaningful work, like your unique ability work, right? The thing that we all
get paid to do. And the capacity that they're saying when they study the brain is four hours
a day. And so we all said, well, okay, well, then what are we doing for 40 hours a week?
If it's four times five is 20, what's the rest of the time being taken up with?
And Wildbit's always been a place that's obsessed with understanding how to maximize focus work,
because we just truly believe that in order to achieve fulfillment in your career, you
need to be able to actually do the thing that you're supposed to do. And so we've always
had closed offices, private offices. We have all these rules around Slack and how you use
asynchronous communication, all these things just focused on focus.
And so it was just an opportunity to experiment a little more and say, okay, well, if we can
do four hours a day, then we could probably cut that down to four days a week. And let's
see what we can get rid of. What's going to fall apart? And we do that a lot. We'll kind
of go deep into something and just see what falls. What falls down? What are we missing?
And so we experimented as a summer experiment. And we just said, let's figure out what are
we wasting time on? What are we not doing? And it turned out to be this super awesome
opportunity to explore our own productivity as individuals, how we work collaboratively
on the team. What communication needs to be asynchronous? Which communication needs to
be in person? Where are we wasting time? Why are we having these meetings? My favorite
thing is to cut out meetings. And I love meetings, but I hate useless meetings, right? So I love
cutting out meetings and really starting to dissect why. Why are we building this thing
that we're doing? Why are we working on this feature? Why are we having this meeting? Why
are we doing this thing? Why are these people in the same project together? Really, really
pushing on ourselves to be more thoughtful. And it's been super successful. I don't know
that I'm convinced that a four-day workweek is the way to go. I don't know that you can
pull off four-eights, four eight-hour days successfully. We're going to go on retreat
in May, and I want to experiment with some other ways. I still believe in the 32-hour
workweek. I just don't quite know what the next iteration of the experiment is, and whether
it's shorter days and there's a short part of Friday, and whether it's seasonal, like
in the summers versus the winters. But we're completely committed to shorter workdays.
The quality of work has gone up. The ability to think has gone up. The satisfaction in
your personal life has gone up, right? People are able to do things that they can't do on
the weekends. Everybody's a weekend warrior, especially if you have kids, and this gives
you an extra day. It's been pretty spectacular for the team. But I will say that the conveyor
team frequently shies away from that because they're so committed to shipping conveyor,
and I didn't yell at them for that. And there's times when we work longer hours, when they're
pushing a deadline or we're dealing with some things. Our customers still come first, so
we have to make sure that we're supporting them. But as a whole, the push is very much
towards this 32-hour work week. And how can we do more with less?
This is something that I struggle with personally. I work a lot. And it's not that I feel a ton
of external pressure to work. A lot of it is I just really get out of bed in the morning
and enjoy going to work on any hackers because there's so many cool things to do. And I end
up, I don't want to say burning out, but definitely pushing myself to the limit. Way more than
four hours of work a day. Did you find when you made this change that you're really becoming
more effective? Do you think that you could have done something like this from the early
days? Or is this something that you have to do as a mature company and it's more of like
a lifestyle decision?
Your drive to work on indie hackers is the drive of an entrepreneur. And I don't think
that that's ever... We worked really hard when we were starting out. Christmas is one
of my best friend's weddings because we were working on stuff. I am fully transparent on
the fact that I think entrepreneurs wake up thinking about their business and go to sleep
thinking about their project. And there's just no in between. But at a certain point,
you grow where you realize that you're not as effective when you're working this hard.
Your brain isn't as clear, but also your responsibility shifts so dramatically. My job is no longer
doing support after I've talked to product. My job is not to think for the most part.
I can't think clearly if I'm overworked or my brain's tired. We all know that the brain's
a muscle. It has capacity, finite capacity. You need to recharge it and you need to do
all these things.
I just think the role has shifted dramatically. When we worked crazy hours, weekends, nights,
I used to remember we'd go out to dinner, have a glass of wine, I'd come home and do
support. There's some customers who've gotten some really interesting support responses
from me back in the day. All positive. It's just very lovey-dovey for an app that hosts
your source code. We did that because I spent the whole rest of the day doing all the other
parts of the business. Quickbooks in the morning, customer support, talking to the developers,
all these things.
There's just more and more work. Today, I have an incredible team who does all of that.
Of course, I have now the capacity to think more because that's my job to think more.
I think it changes. I also have two kids and I don't really want to work all day. I want
to be with them too. I think that changes. I do think it's the responsibility of the
employer to preserve a sane work environment. I think there's a big difference between the
hours that entrepreneur works and I would never tell a founder to work less. I don't
think that's fair.
But I would absolutely tell a founder that it is not okay to push your team to work the
same hours that you do. I don't think that's fair.
That makes perfect sense.
I think those are two very different. I think they get conflated on the internet a lot. My
job is to protect my team at all costs. But I'm thinking about my business all day long.
All weekend, all night, before I go to sleep, when I wake up in the shower, when I'm working
out, always. And there's nothing wrong with that.
So I'm just now getting started hiring and managing my own team. And I will be the first
to admit that I'm new to this. I'm strangely kind of resistant to it. I like working alone.
I suck at hiring and I'm probably a terrible manager. There's a ton of advice out there
about hiring and managing people. And when you're new to it, like I am, I think it's
a little tough to discern which advice is sort of tried and true and universal. And
you should resist the urge to buck the trends. And which of it is totally up in the air.
And it depends on you and how to run your business. You can really do whatever you want.
What are your thoughts on this, Natalie, having grown a team to 30 plus people?
Just this morning, I was having a call with Chris when I said we really need to get better
at hiring. I don't know. Honestly, Cortland, I think the most important thing I've learned
is to have empathy and to really just try to understand people. And I think all the
sage advice, hire slow, fire fast is probably accurate. I definitely think hire slow would
have served me well in previous situations. I think fire fast will never be on my agenda
because I don't believe in leaving people out to dry. So that's just not me.
I think one of the things that I really learned, and this was hard for me to understand, is
we used to get a lot of referrals, internal referrals, when we had an open position. And
I always thought that was incredible because I didn't have to go out and hire anybody.
I didn't have to use a recruiter. And if somebody I really loved and respected said, hey, I
have a friend, he'd be great. Awesome. And I turned around one day and realized that
I hired a bunch of the same exact people. And I had somebody who told me once, if you
keep only hiring friends of people who work for you, you're going to end up with a very
homogenous team. That was really hard for me to realize. And that's still something
we're trying to get out of. But I definitely think that there's much smarter people with
more experience in hiring who have talked a lot about how to really make sure you're
thoughtful about the way you hire, the types of folks you hire, and to make sure you create
a diverse environment. But I've always seen tremendous success when we've hired people
who came from different backgrounds. And I want as much of that as possible.
And so we really stopped pushing the internal referrals. We still really love when our team
refers people, but they go through the same process as all other applicants. And we do
applicants blind for the most part. We try not to see anything until after the test project
and identifying information so that we can really kind of put our biases aside. That's
been really tricky on a small team to be really intentional.
So I've got another one for you. Experience. Hiring somebody who's got a lot of experience,
knows what they're doing, and they've proven that they're good at the job versus hiring
somebody who's potentially not as experienced, but they're hungry and driven and smart and
eager to learn. What's been your experience here with how that works out either way?
I think that depends on you and how much time you have. I've seen it both ways. I've realized
that I can hire people who are hungry with less experience, and you still have to provide
them some support. You have to give them something. They're not going to learn everything you
want them to learn just by osmosis. They need to experience certain things. They need your
time and mentorship. They need feedback. They need to know they're on the right track. And
if you can't provide that, then that's a problem.
I also think Jason Cohen from WP Engine said something to me a long time. I think he said
at a conference too, he's this whole thing, A players hire A players, B players hire C,
without a whole thing.
But one of the things that I thought was so interesting was I felt this way, and I know
a lot of people do, that you want to really understand the skill before you hire somebody
for it. And Jason will say, but you're only going to be able to hire somebody as good
as you are in the three months you took to study the skill. Take sales, for example.
If I tried to hire somebody based on what I believe sales to be, that's probably a problem.
So if you're going to hire a salesperson, hire the best salesperson you can afford,
an experienced, thoughtful person, so that they can teach you. And it's not going to
be, I think, a really great experience to find somebody who's just hungry, because who's
going to mentor them to get better at that skill if you don't have that skill yourself.
So either commit to finding people to help that person, to creating the space for them,
to creating the feedback loop internally. But if you're not going to do that, you're
just setting them up for failure, because they need that. Even if you had the most smartest
person who's so motivated and so driven, they can go find mentors on their own. Fine. I
know there will be some argument that people have to do it on their own. We can talk about
that separately. But let's say they found all the greatest mentors in the world. It
still has to be your way. To some degree, your personality and your acceptance, your
approval is really important for them to know they're on the right track. If you don't have
the time to give them for that, they're going to fail. They're not going to meet your expectations.
So in some roles, I think it's great. In others, I think it's best to follow Jason's advice
and hire the best person you can afford so that they can teach you. And there's roles
like that right now that we're hiring, where we're like, you know what? I don't know nothing
about this. And I really want to hire somebody who come in. And during the interview process,
I'm like, did I learn something? Like, what did I learn from this person that I didn't
know before?
Yeah, one second. I'm just over here taking notes, Natalie. I didn't tell you before you
came on here, because podcast is just a secret way for me to get advice personalized from
all my guests. Let's talk about postmark. All right. Talk a little bit about Beanstalk.
We've talked about conveyor. In between those two, you launched a different product called
postmark. What's the story there?
Well, we were sending a lot of transactional email and Beanstalk. User invites, our product,
Beanstalk was used by teams who were inviting their customers or their colleagues. And so
there was a lot of email commit notifications, a lot of emails flying around, and we'd get
support requests saying, hey, I invited my client, and they haven't accepted the invitation.
Any idea what's up? And we were like, well, we have no idea, because it's just going through
an internal mail server, and we'd have to like kind of look through the logs and see
if we can dig up. Did it bounce? Did it go to spam? We have no idea.
And so Chris once again had an idea, and he was like, well, why don't we just build an
app where you can have visibility? And actually, the original tagline for postmark was because
you're blind. Because back then, again, maybe this is a trend for us, right? Back then,
there wasn't really a lot of services out there like this. We launched, it's an API-based
service for web apps to send their transactional email.
And we're focused on the importance of that communication with your customers. So we don't
really focus on marketing for marketing sake. Right now, we're transactional only even to
the degree where we don't let you send any marketing emails. But really, the focus has
been those communications with your customer are critical, and they need to get there quickly.
And they're much more important than any other email you send. And so we focus all our attention
on making sure that that communication with the end user is as effective as possible.
So we have the best deliverability rates in the industry, which is fine. That's not even
that exciting. What's much more exciting to me is that we're the fastest. So people switch
to us, and they see noticeable improvement in the engagement with their customer.
And that transactional email engagement actually matters because if you're waiting for your
GAAP newsletter, and it doesn't show up before, it shows up at 4.30, you're not emailing GAAP
and saying, hey, where's my newsletter? But if you go to reset your password, as you're
about to buy a product, and that password email doesn't come in from the first time
you refresh Gmail, the second time you refresh Gmail, the third time you're like, forget
it, you move on to the next thing, you didn't buy the product, that business lost the sale,
those emails have to get there very quickly, not just to the inbox, but fast.
And so that's what we focus on. We focus on optimizing to make sure that your emails get
there really fast. And that's what we do. We're the fastest to the inbox, the most consistent.
And it's growing because people realize the importance of that. And like the brand and
like us and all that stuff. And so that's been a really fun project. And most of my
team is focused on that product because it's growing. And a lot of our future rides on
Postmark being super successful. And it's a lot of fun. It's such a great product. We
have so much fun on it.
One thing that's interesting to me about Postmark is that it's not in, you know, the most innovative
newest area. There are other companies doing something similar to Postmark. And you guys,
like you just said right now, you're competing with them. You're describing how you're faster
or you're better, you're more reliable. How do you grow when you build a product that
has so many competitors?
Big 500 pound gorillas. I did a talk once a bunch of years ago that somehow Chris and
I just only get into like competing with these massive companies with way more money than
we do.
It's back to product. I think we just really try to focus on who do we build this for?
Are we authentic? I really think honesty and authenticity truly matter. And we are an extremely
authentic company. One of our values for the entire company is transparent communication.
We will never say something like, we apologize for the inconvenience if we were down. What
a horrible thing to say. You're down. Of course, you're inconvenienced. Don't say that. Or we'll
be honest when we have issues. We are honest in directions we take.
We're just a very transparent company because we look at our customers as partners, as equals.
We're all software developers. We're all in this together. And so I think that's really
made a difference.
And we just really focus the product on being great. And we're stubborn. Stubborn as shit.
The transaction-only thing, for the whole time we've been running it, we're still the
only one to do it.
I think eventually we're going to probably expand the definition of that, but we have
focused on it for so long because we truly believe that this is what's in the best interest
of the customer. And it's making us a lot less money than the competitors because all
the money is in marketing in bulk. For every 10,000 transactional emails and app sends,
they probably send half a million marketing emails.
But we've just really committed to being the best for our customer. And that's just been
the most exciting part about it. And there's nothing more rewarding than somebody switching
and saying, wow, why did I do this sooner? Why did I fight it? Oh my goodness, my open
rates are up and my customers are happier. And my support goes down.
And I think that's one of the most interesting pieces. That's what I get most excited about.
It's like, wait, you're actually saving me money because my support's going down? I'm
like, yeah, because your emails are getting there and people actually send support requests
for these emails. They're looking for them. They're not just waiting around for them.
They need them right now. And if they don't get them, they will email your support and
ask them.
And so I think it's fun solving real problems and really improving the experience. And so
we just get excited about that. And that's where we focus our time. We don't do enterprise
sales. We don't have a sales team. We don't do any of that stuff and it makes it feel
good.
So when you talk about being authentic and sort of baking that into your product, how
do you communicate that to customers, especially as an early entrepreneur? Let's say you're
building your first product. Should you be writing authentic blog posts? Or should it
be the copy on your landing page? Or should it be an obsessive focus on making your product
expertly crafted? How do you actually get customers to feel this authenticity?
I think being vulnerable and transparent is really, really everything. There's some great
examples of companies that became wildly successful from their transparent. I mean, Buffer, right?
Joel would write all the time. It still does. Cheryl, his numbers. Nathan with ConvertKit
shares all his ups and downs. And we weren't actually ever even that transparent. I think
just because Chris and I don't write as much as other people do. But those are great examples
of just being honest. This is who we are. This is how much money we make. And our competitor
probably makes more. But who cares? Come join our team and fight for us. You're not going
to win every customer. But if you're super focused on what you have to be, when you're
small, super focused on just need this one type of customer, then it'll work.
And I really believe that it all just eventually balloons. If enough people trust you and believe
in you, the bigger companies will come. They always do. And they'll come in the funniest
ways where you'll see all of a sudden enough people are using your product on their own
side projects or on smaller teams and talking about it. All of a sudden, the big guys come.
And they're like, hey, can we sign a separate agreement? And I'm like, nope. Don't have
lawyers. Don't have the money. Your contract is not going to be nearly expensive enough
for me to do this. And they come back two weeks later and say, we figured it out. We
still want to use the product. And we'll just deal with your standard terms.
I mean, that's amazing, right? And I'm not being stubborn. For stubborn's sake, it really
is way too expensive and complicated for me to run separate agreements. But it's amazing
because enough people, you build enough traction, you build enough support, build enough trust
by being your authentic, honest self. And I think it just kind of balloons from there.
So you guys have built a ton of products. We talked a little bit about Newsberry, Beanstalk,
Conveyor, Postmark. I don't think we even have time to go into the deploy bot. But I don't
know very many people who've built this many products, especially under the umbrella of
a single company. So I want to ask you some questions about it, sort of tease out things
that you've learned. They're all going to be false dichotomies. But you got to pick
one over the other one anyway. So here goes. First one is idea versus execution. Is it
more important to choose the right idea for a product to work on? Or is it more important
to subsequently execute really well on whatever it is that you chose?
Oh, I want to say execution. I'll say execution because that's the right thing to say although
there's some terribly executed apps who just had a good idea and have been successful.
But for us, it's execution. Yeah, for us, it's definitely execution.
What about automation versus hiring? You guys have built a ton of stuff. You have to maintain
it, upgrade it, keep it up to date. How do you manage all of that? Do you automate or
do you prefer to hire more people?
Because we're small and profitable and we can't hire a million people. But I will say
process more than anything else. We're just super focused on how do we solve problems
together so that they're most effective. So we're working in small teams as an example.
You hire more people, and then all of a sudden you're wasting all this time in meetings or
worse, I think just trying to get consensus. And so we cut things down to where people
work in really siloed, tiny teams. We strategize together, but then people go down and work
in really tiny siloed teams. Their output triples. We might make a few mistakes along
the way. It might not be perfect like everybody wants it, but we do much better work.
Last one, building something totally innovative that solves a brand new problem versus building
something in an already proven but maybe crowded industry.
Building something unique in a crowded industry, sure. For sure. I think conveyor is a great
example. We're basically saying, hey, you don't need GitHub. You don't need Jira. Come
hang out with us. But we're hoping that we're solving making it the process 10,000 times
better so that it's worth the switch for a small group of people. So that's definitely
a different process. It's hopefully valuable for others, but it's definitely in a crowded
space.
I like that answer because the crowded spaces have already proven that there's a business
model. You're not rediscovering what people find valuable here. And then the unique product
is how you differentiate and it makes it relevant that it's crowded because you're different
than the other solutions.
Yeah. Some of the most admirable things are like when people go into what I say, what
was the Steve Jobs quote? I don't know the exact quote, but it was like, find the audience
that has a horrible experience and make it better. Sometimes you focus and that's probably
one of the biggest risks of conveyors. There's some pretty solid processes out there already.
I'm hoping that we can solve it for a unique group of people. But people who go into fintech
or medical or industries that are just so archaic and nothing moves and those people
are miserable playing in software that sucks for work and make it better. And then that's
like people who have the money want to pay and they're miserable, but there's a crowded
market big 500 pound gorillas who feel real comfortable where they are, feel no competition,
no pressure. And then you slowly start chipping away at it. I think those are the companies
you look at and you're like, wow, you know, so smart when you can solve and you're solving
real pain for people, right? People who are struggling with wasted time or energy or just
ugly software. I hate ugly software. I think there's some real opportunity there to go
into like a market that's proven itself and just do something radically different, make
it better 10,000 times better. And it will be really successful.
You guys build gorgeous apps and software, which is not easy to do. It's very time consuming.
And so it's not hard to believe that you hate ugly software.
I hope so. I really do. And I hate using ugly software. We had this whole discussion on
retreats and the team will want to use something. I'm not going to name names. I'm going to
be like, I'm not logging in there. So you better find a better way for me. I'm so stubborn
sometimes, but I'm like, I'm not. And like, we'll have these like philosophical moments
where I'm like, this has to be a value. Like we should not, we should not use ugly software.
And they're like, Natalie, this is really like, this is going to make us work faster,
better, you know, whatever. And I'm like, I don't care. I hate it. I don't want to use
it.
And they actually, they appease me sometimes. And they'll basically say, fine, we'll just
send you reports. You don't have to log in. It's fine.
We spent a lot of time focused on building a great culture and setting these values to
your company, building a company that I think really exists to improve your employees lives
and their experiences in this world. What are some of the keys to building a good culture
that you've learned over time, and setting these values that some of us who have never
done this can learn from?
I think really coming back to understanding why a business exists. And we really lose
sight of that. I refer to it as like the beast, where like you kind of build an insatiable
beast, the business is like this insatiable beast. And what happens is like, you used
to understand the why, but the beast is just so hungry all the time and just wants to get
bigger and fatter and bigger and fatter.
And so as you've gone walking this path with it, you start to forget the why it existed.
And so for us, it was a lot of soul searching, like, why are we here? Why are we, you know,
why are we pushing growth? And what's the point of it? Why do we want to grow? And why
do we want to be bigger? And why all these things? And when you start to understand the
why, well, for us, we started to understand the why, which is like, well, actually, the
only reason a business exists is for the people. You know, it's not it doesn't exist in and
of itself, like it shouldn't exist for itself. That doesn't make sense. We've invented it.
It's not real, right? It just it's a thing that we've invented to survey purpose for
the human beings around it. And you get to then decide who are the human beings and how
do you want it to be? You know, how do you want it to react to those human beings? And
so for us, it's this concept, you know, the difference between stakeholders and shareholders.
We look at it and say, like, okay, why will it exist for humans? And those humans are
Chris and I as founders, my team, our customers in the community. And how are we impacting
all four of those? And an ideal world, the goal is that we're impacting, like we're spending
an equal amount of time looking at all of those. So it's not mostly focused on me and
Chris, it's not completely focused on the customer. It's really trying to aim towards
this idea that can we build a culture where we are equally balanced to say how does the
business feed all four of these constituents, right? All four of these stakeholders.
Does something happen to trigger you guys beginning to ask why? Or is this something
you guys have always asked from the early days?
We hit like a really rough spot. No, definitely not from the early days. The early days were
like, just run. You don't know why you're running, you just just run. Now we hit a plateau
in beanstalk growth somewhere in 2010, 2012, I don't remember. And it was just a pretty
dark time because at that point in our business life, Chris and I really couldn't have told
you how we got to where we got. We really thought growth happened to us. And so when
we hit this plateau, we had no idea what to do. And we started to really follow what other
people did, which is not, here's a lesson. Don't do what they tell you to do on the internet
because every industry is different. And it doesn't matter if we all run software companies.
If you sell to marketers and I sell to developers, I can't do what you do. It doesn't matter.
But we didn't realize that at the time and we just went hardcore and all the knob turning
we could think of. They say charge more. Okay, charge more. 30-day trial, 30-day trial. We
just did all kinds of shit. Unsurprising, it is not a fun way to run a business when
you're an entrepreneur and just want to play and be creative.
Chris was pretty unhappy. He took a month off and went to hike Bhutan with his dad.
Yeah, we were not in a great place. And so the way out of that was a lot of deep soul
searching and a lot of like, all right, what are we chasing and why? And then that conversation
and it still happens. This conversation still come up, but why are we doing this personally?
Why are we doing this as entrepreneurs, as parents, as individuals, right? That was really
important to understand. And then once that kind of got solidified, all the other pieces
fell in place. Then it was like, well, we like to play and be creative. Well, then let's
focus on product. Let's not focus on the knobs. Let's focus on getting the right mentors.
Let's focus on getting the right advisors. Let's think about things with a clear head.
A foggy head is not a very useful tool. So when you're in this place where you're like,
the sky is falling and I don't know how to stop it. And now I have to solve really complicated
difficult problems. It's like those solutions are not good at all. I think really just clarifying
the why saved us genuinely. And we did a lot of stuff. We got a really great advisor. We
started going on retreats with some other folks who run really successful SaaS products
and doing these founder retreats and getting the mentorship and the guidance that Chris
and I needed to hear and see to start kind of shaping what we think wild it needed to
be at the time. And that's investing. We spent a couple of years investing ahead of growth
in postmark. Never done that before, but it was important because we knew the trajectory
of where we wanted to go.
That's the kind of thing, but it's really had to start. Simon Sinek, it started with
why and it kind of really, really set the direction of where we are currently taking
the business. And it's like an exercise we do frequently. Chris and I at least once a
year go away, just the two of us on a founder's retreat and map out why we want to do this
and for how long. What the goal is for all these different projects that are going on.
And can we map out 10 years from now? What should that look like for us to still be excited
and engaged for the team to be healthy and fulfilled? And we go through these exercises
pretty frequently.
You mentioned that in the beginning of the company, you guys weren't really thinking
about why you're just running as fast as you can. Most of the people listening to the show
are at that phase of their company or maybe they haven't even started yet.
Let's say I was to take everything away from you, Natalie, while but disappears and you
are now a brand new founder again and you've got to start a new business. Are you going
to just run as fast as you can? Are you going to start thinking about why from the get-go
and if the latter, what does that process look like?
Well, I'd have to start with why because I know better than not to start with why. And
so I think for me, it would be a lot of soul searching around what do I want the business
to enable me in my life and in the life of the team. And so it would be, if we had to
start over, I don't know that I would start a software company. I have no idea. I'm definitely
not a serial entrepreneur that way, so I don't have another idea brewing, another idea brewing.
And it would be a lot of like, well, what is the lifestyle that that type of business
will provide both financially and a time consideration and all those things? And how fast can we
get there? And what kind of business does that mean to grow? Is it going to be a sales
heavy organization just because of the market it's in or can I innovate? There are a lot
of those questions, but I would have to start with why because I have two kids.
And life is very different than it was 15 years ago and it was just the two of us. And
I was waitressing and we were using that money to live off of while all the money was going
back into the business and all those things. We can't really pull that off anymore. I don't
think my kids would like that. So it would absolutely have to start with why.
But I think in hindsight, everybody should start somewhere around there because I think
it creates the choices become much clearer. If you really want to start a business where
you're in control and you can keep it small and what you want us to be able to travel
and all these things and you can map that out. All of a sudden you have a number to
chase, right? You know exactly how much that costs. You also understand what the time requirement
will be on you. So let's say you want to be able to travel the world and only work a couple
days a week and all these things. And you probably aren't going to also chase a billion
dollar business. You want to start in that space that you could say, here's the lifestyle
I want to build. And if you want to build a billion dollar business, then you better
know that's early so that you don't go into a market that's capped at 100 million bucks
or 50 million bucks. I think those things are really important.
Let's talk about some of these levers because for a lot of people who are new to this, it's
not obvious at all what their early decisions result in in terms of their lifestyle later
on. They're not sure what will cause them to have a sales driven business or what will
cause them to have to work 80 hour weeks later on. How do you look at that? What are some
of the decisions you made early on in WildBith that have shaped how your life is now?
Yes, I think early on Chris and I knew we didn't want a big company. So we never chased
the billion. It's not in our DNA to be honest with you. And so that was a really nice realization
because knowing that meant that we could focus on a business built mostly on customers that
aren't a lot of small customers. We didn't have to go enterprise. We didn't have to go
up market. We didn't have to have custom software. Oh, that was the other one. And the other
one was we didn't want to ever build custom software for a bunch of different customers.
So knowing all of that defined the market we were chasing and also helped us stay level.
I'm not chasing my biggest competitors at all because that's not where I want to be.
And so it's instead this clarity around, okay, well, how big do I want to get? What does
that look like? How big of the market is that? And what can I get there with my rules? We
also always wanted to be profitable because we didn't want to raise money mostly because
I wanted to be able to do things like a 32 hour work without having to answer to anybody.
It's not that I think VC is evil. I just don't think it was necessary for us. And so knowing
that also sets the stage for like, okay, well, if I don't raise money, then I'm kind of on
my own in a lot of ways. A lot of my competitors, well, all of my competitors have raised money.
And so they have a lot of the connections and the bigger clients that are all in the fund
that now use their services. So you kind of scratch them off your list. I'm not going
to do that. So then I'm going to target a lot of the smaller accounts. And what does
that mean? What attracts them? And same, I think, with lifestyle. There's a lot of people
who make a fantastic living as solopreneurs, like a spectacular living. And that's really
admirable. So if that's a thing for you, you got to target that. But me personally and
Chris and I, together, really enjoy working with other people. And I've always wanted
to have a team that I can help develop. That's been a big part of who I was. So we knew we
weren't going to be solopreneurs, so we knew we were going to have a business. And how
big it becomes is a factor of what do we like to do.
Christa likes to dabble in product. He does not want to get so big that he's no longer
necessary for product development. That's a thing. We know that. And we're making sure
we don't shy away from that or chase too big of a growth spurt that he would no longer
be touching the product. I think those are the decisions for us. But I'll say, genuinely,
some of those you develop as you get older and as you experience more. Maybe older isn't
even the word. I'm 33 years old. So it's not like I'm that old. But I think as you experience
more and you start to really develop your own self, now I know that I'm terrible at
project management. And so I shouldn't be running a project.
But I can be involved on a project. And I can provide a lot of input and say, I really
need enough time to do other things in a while. But I do a lot of volunteer work and I'm on
the board of a preschool and do all these things. And I know that I needed to grow a
business that would enable me to have that time and that flexibility. And so those are
the kind of things that I couldn't have told you that five years ago or 10 years ago that
I would want to do that. They kind of evolved as I moved through life.
Well, I think what you guys have built with Wildbit is amazing. I really appreciate you
coming on the show, Natalie. Before I let you get out of here, I'll ask you one more
question. And you've already given so much advice to listeners. But for the last time,
I'll ask you to give a little bit more advice. The people here are trying to start a company.
There's a minefield of mistakes that they might make. And there's also a huge array
of really good decisions that they might make. What's your advice to someone who's considering
starting a company? What can they take away from the lessons that you've learned?
I wish that I had made connections earlier on. Chris and I had made connections earlier
on with people that we admired who were experiencing a lot of the things that we had experienced.
And I think we really stayed underground and introverted for a really long time and lost
opportunities to collaborate and just learn from other people.
And I will say that the internet is full of really terrible advice. And it's not until
you get really inside these businesses that you realize that they all have terrible problems.
The stuff they write about is best case scenario. They're one thing that's going really well
right now while everything else is exploding. And this is even in large companies.
And so it's really when you get down into the nuance and the experience share that you
can find valuable, I think, perspective. Not advice. I don't really look for advice. I
look for experiences that then I can apply in my own way to how they fit my experiences.
That was a big transformation for us. And it happened late in the game when we really
made really personal connections with folks who were in businesses and got really intimate
with their experience, things that they would not write about on the internet.
If I started over in any industry, I would seek out as much as possible to build those
connections early on because it really makes a difference. It kills me when I read things
on the internet like 15 ways I got to X. And it's like, I love that you got to X, but those
15 ways literally only apply to you. Because all of it is so nuanced. There's a lot of
time wasted and a lot of heartbreak following in other people's footsteps instead of looking
at it and saying, Alright, that's cool. How does it apply to me now my market, my customer,
my specific experience, how I run the business, how my products built, what resources I have,
right? Like all those things that matter. You should read those experiences as experience
share not as advice. I think that really, really made an impact on us.
Ironically, that is great advice, Natalie. Thank you so much for coming on the MD Echos
and sharing your story with listeners. Can you tell people where they can go to find
out more about what you're up to and what you're doing with Wildbit?
Yeah, I mean, I'm Natalie Nagel on Twitter. We write about stuff on the Wildbit blog wildbit.com
slash blog. The products that are all linked there as well. Sometimes we write a lot. Sometimes
we stop writing. I think this year we're going to write some more. So you know, there's more
stuff but there's a lot of great stuff out there. Just about our experience share not
advice just our experiences that maybe will help others.
Thanks so much, Natalie.
Of course. Thanks for having me.
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In addition, if you are running your own internet business or if that's something you hope to
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a handful of some of the guests that I found in the podcast. If you're looking for inspiration,
you've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products built by other indie hackers,
every one of which includes revenue numbers and some of the behind the scenes strategies
for how they grew their products from nothing. As always, thanks so much for listening and
I'll see you next time.