All right, what's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to a crossover episode between
the IndieHackers podcast and the Acquired podcast with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.
On Acquired Ben and David, deep dive into the stories behind companies that you've heard
of and might use every day to try to figure out the strategies and the events that got
them to where they are.
It's an excellent show.
I listen to it all the time and I can't recommend it enough.
So do me a favor.
Go check out their show.
It's called Acquired.
In this episode, unlike most other episodes of the IndieHackers podcast, Ben and David
flip the script on me and asked me about my story, starting IndieHackers.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Cortland Allen, welcome to Acquired.
Ben, David, thanks for having me.
Yeah.
So great to have you here.
Our pleasure.
For anyone who has not listened to your voice for the many hours that I have on the IndieHackers
podcast, obviously we're going to reference it lots and lots throughout the show, but
go check it out.
I'm very excited to be doing a crossover episode with you.
Yeah, I'm excited to do this.
People have been asking for a while for me to do an episode on myself because obviously
IndieHackers is kind of an interview show.
I just tell other people's stories and I've always been like as weird as it sounds like
shy to do an episode on my own podcast.
So congratulations on being the first people to convince me.
Well, look, we are the Acquired podcast and you did that mega deal exit to Stripe.
So how could we not, you know, cover the acquisition of the century?
This is great.
It's got like all the hallmarks of both of our episodes.
Well, David, who is Cortland for listeners who don't listen to IndieHackers or haven't
participated in the community?
Yeah.
So Cortland is a former YC founder, MIT alum, and founder of a company that has been acquired
by Stripe, all of which, you know, seems like it would fit very much into the acquired theme.
But there's a twist, which is unlike the, you know, big go for broke, you know, we were
jamming before we, uh, before we hit record here about like the typical startup path that
we cover all the time on this show is like trying to build the new version of standard
oil out there, except, you know, 10, a hundred, a thousand times bigger than the Rockefellers
and the Carnegie's could ever imagined.
And is all about a different philosophy out there, the indie philosophy.
And of course the company that he started and what he runs within Stripe and the website
and the community and the podcast is IndieHackers.
And IndieHackers, I think is really cool.
We're going to get into in this episode.
It's kind of like if big tech and startups are the Rockefellers, this is the small business
entrepreneurship of the 21st century.
And I think it's really, really cool.
So we're pumped to do this.
Yeah.
Which is not a big splashy go for broke story, David.
I don't know.
You're going to tell us.
No, it's really not.
I like to think of it as the underdogs, you know, like the internet's been around for
for decades and I think the world is still kind of slowly waking up to how much it's
kind of changed the game for just like regular people.
Everybody's connected to everybody.
You can reach literally millions of people if you're clever enough for pretty much zero
dollars.
And so people are creating these very tiny niche businesses that could never have existed
20 or 30 years ago.
And in some cases, not even five or 10 years ago.
And I think it's becoming possible to sit down in your living room wearing your underwear
or whatever you're wearing and just create something that's super valuable to your community
and your customers.
And that's really kind of fun and fulfilling and challenging for you to work on as a person.
And that makes you rich in the process.
And I think that's pretty crazy to check all three of those boxes.
So thousands of people are doing this today.
And the question that I'm asking myself constantly is like, what happens when millions of people
are doing this five or 10 years from now?
I think that's what's so cool is small business entrepreneurship in the past was a great way
to build wealth and do well for your family and for yourself.
But with the same or honestly less amount of effort now on the internet, this path exists
that the wealth you can build, even by taking this path, is still so much bigger than you
could build, you know, building a dry cleaning business in the past or running a restaurant
or like a lot bigger.
A lot bigger.
Yeah, not to foreshadow our sort of playbook too much, but it does remind me that, you
know, in a pre-internet era, the local small business owner was geographically constrained
and you could have a general store that sold everything, but it could only sell everything
to the people in your town.
And obviously, the sort of like large scale version of that is Walmart.
But that is a very different type of business to run.
With the internet, you can just do one thing in one niche, but you have a nationally if
not globally addressable market.
And so I continue like Cortland from listening to your show.
Every time I listen to an episode, I get smacked in the face with, wait, that niche is that
big.
And people find these crazy opportunities.
I just listened to the patio 11 episode and he was talking about bingo card creator.
And I'm like, a bingo card creator could be a business, but like these niches are so deep
or so wide or however you want to describe them, that there really are.
If your TAM is the 3 billion people with the internet, then every niche within that TAM
can be on its own big.
Hey man, Starlink is coming soon.
It's going to be 7 billion.
Yeah, exactly.
If you have like a business that only appeals to like, you know, one in a thousand or one
in a million people, you need to live in like a very big city to create a brick and mortar
business that's going to survive.
But on the internet, like that turns out to be millions of people who can use like your
underwater bingo card creation, whatever it is that you're making, which means that like
pretty much everybody can figure out something really specific that no one else is doing and
kind of stake their claim on the internet, which I think is super cool.
I hear the real estate is cheap too.
All right, so let's get into your story.
So let's, okay, let's start way back before MIT, your family and your mom specifically
was an entrepreneur when you were growing up, right?
Yeah.
So I had, I was just talking to Jason Kallikhanis about this on his podcast where he was talking
about kind of opportunity, you know, can anybody start a company, does everybody have an equal
chance to do this?
I think in a way, like nobody's quite equal, everybody's got kind of a different starting
line. And when I look at my childhood, like I had a very good starting line, I had two
loving parents, they're very attentive, they're very devoted, we were sort of lower middle
class, but very comfortable.
And like you mentioned, my mom was an entrepreneur, she was always doing her own kind of crazy
hygiene startup selling computers and stuff in the 90s. And my dad was part of like, like
this elite team of like furniture makers, there's like nine of them. And they each had
a different role. And they would make like crazy furniture for like celebrities. So he
wasn't making like a ton of money, but he was doing something that he found really fun.
He was like the furniture finisher. So you take like an ugly piece of wood and make it
look like amazing. And I grew up like these two people in my lives, you kind of showed
me that you can do pretty much whatever you want and like scratch out a living.
Yeah, you can do this. And like, it'll be fine. You can have like a good life.
Yeah, exactly. You can have a good life. You know, like we were eating, we weren't missing
meals, had a bunch of other advantages too. You know, like I was an American, I was born
in the late 20th century, because of my mom's computer business that she ran for like a
year or two before it crashed. Like we had a computer in the internet when I was in the
third grade, like right after the web came out. And so of course, like I was addicted
to video games and like whatever I could play. But from the adult's perspective around me,
they're like, Oh, this is a computer with you know, whenever I've got a computer issue,
Courtland spend so much time in his computer, you can just like swoop in and fix it. So
I was like doing all this it work on the side. And of course, nobody ever paid me made $0
like a nine year old fixing people's computers, but I got a lot of positive encouragement
because from my perspective, I was just like, you know, playing games and fixing bugs and
stuff. But from like the average adult's perspective in the mid 90s, they're looking at like the
tech boom, and they're looking at Microsoft stock price. And the fact that Bill Gates
was like, you know, mega rich. And so they would sort of pay me an encouragement like,
Oh, yeah, you're gonna be like the next Bill Gates, like keep it up. And what was cool
about that was, you know, I got to be like a little computer nerd, and also see that
like this really like old computer nerd was universally respected by like every single
person that I ever met. And everybody told me that it would be a cool thing to aspire
to kind of be that. So by the time I was like 10 or 11, I was like, Okay, I want to be Bill
Gates, you know, I want to start my own company. I want to go to a good college. Like how do
I how do I get on that path?
It's funny that in some ways, it's like echoes of the Tim Sweeney story and an epic games,
you know, at him starting out first with Gary was his older brother, right, right, Ben that
had a computer hardware business. And so he like went out to visit his brother, got hooked
up with computers, got obsessed, then started like an IT consulting business after the lawn
mowing business.
Nolan Bushnell, too. I remember when we asked Nolan about starting Atari, he was fixing
TVs, like it's a it's not at all to put myself in the same category. I was fixing teachers
computers in middle school as my I think I was making like seven bucks an hour Portland.
So sorry, I was dwarfing you there. But yeah, that's so many people's entree before they
actually get into programming is basically just fixing stuff.
Yeah, and I think it's important. Like I've taught people how to code in subsequent years.
And there's this kind of base layer that gets ignored of just like computer literacy, where
the people who learn the fastest are people who just like they're just very comfortable
if their computer crashes or has an error, like they know all the keyboard shortcuts,
they're good at googling stuff. And if you have that kind of base layer of skills, it
makes everything else much easier.
Yep, totally. So did you see your 11 or 12? At that point, you know that you want to go
into a, you know, technical field or programming or computer science. Did that ever deviate?
Or was that pretty much like, nope, laser focus from that point forward, man, I had
this like real embarrassing phase where like, I was trying to choose between like, do I
want to be Bill Gates? Or do I want to be Kenny G? And so saxophone, I was playing like
a lot of like just corny contemporary jazz music. And luckily, luckily, the computer
stuff won out at some point. And after that, like I didn't deviate like that was 100% what
I wanted to do. I had a ton of like just a ton of fun just like doing stuff in the 90s
on my computer, like a lot of support around, you know, in one way, I think I had kind of
like the world heavyweight champion of childhoods, you know, it was like really, really good,
like really advantageous. But I also had some hardship. Like my dad died when I was pretty
young, I was in high school. And like for me, that was just like a huge wake up call
like, Oh, shit, sometimes things get real. And like, no one's gonna kind of swoop in
to save you, you have to kind of learn how to survive and make it through tough things
on your own. And so I got like almost like kind of the perfect mix of like hardship and
like encouragement and like privilege in a way. And so yeah, by the time I left to go
to college, I felt like pretty ready to take whatever the role is going to throw at me
and also like pretty far ahead of the curve in terms of like knowing what I wanted to
do. Like there's never a question like, what major do I want to have, you know, what do
I want to do after I graduate, like I was always 100% certain what I wanted. And I'm
sure that, you know, tragic, you know, death in the family also forces a lot of early maturity
that you have to take on sort of more responsibility, or at least think about the broader context
around your life than just yourself earlier than you otherwise would have. Totally. And
like, I think for me, the biggest impact was just like, you kind of get like a floor, you
establish like, okay, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And like, I survived
it, you know, like it was terrible, like all sorts of bad side effects you wouldn't even
think about. But like, once you establish a floor, then like a lot of other things just
don't look that scary. Like they don't look like the epic of a deal. Like, okay, what
if I start a company and fails like, Oh, no, you know, I'll go get a job, I'll go get a
job, I wouldn't died, you know, so I think that's kind of what I got out of it.
I assume that the computer, the love of computers and knowing what you wanted to do, getting
out of the Kenny G phase, that's what brought you to MIT.
Yeah, the Kenny G phase was a good one to escape. Yeah, so I remember like, really wanting
to go to MIT, I somehow figured out that that was like, kind of the best school you could
go to if you wanted to be a computer scientist. I had no idea that Stanford even existed.
Like if I had known that, and that it was in the heart of Silicon Valley, I probably
would have tried to go there. And I also didn't know that like, it was even feasible to just
not go to college. Like, if I'd known that I could do that, like, I probably would have
just done that and tried to start some stuff. But I remember talking to my mom and asking,
okay, like, you know, how do you get into MIT? She's like, well, good, good grades and
study and apply and like, hopefully, we'll let you in. I'm like, well, what if they don't?
And she's like, you just go somewhere else. And I remember thinking, like, how, how frightening
that was, like, I got like one shot to do the thing that I wanted to do. And if I got
rejected, that I would just be done. And a lot of ways, like, that was a much scarier
thing than I think starting companies that like have the risk of failure. Because like,
you can start a company a million times. Like, if it fails, like, there's no like, all right,
you know, that's it, you know, somewhere else now, like, you can just keep doing it over
and over again.
Well, how many companies have you started now?
Seven.
Yeah, this is my seventh attempt to do something that worked. And the only one that really,
that really worked.
So, yeah, I was gonna say, so when you get to MIT, you, I think if I understand the history,
you start applying to YC, like, regularly.
Yeah, yeah, I played a lot.
So is this like a, like every quarter thing, it's like register for classes, put in the
YC app?
Well, I was like a pretty bad student. I just didn't really want to learn. And I thought
all the stuff I was learning in my CS classes was boring. And so I spent a lot of time working
on my own side projects. And at some point, I discovered that there's this magical entity
out there that would like give you a bunch of money to take your projects and try to
make like a company out of it. So I got really hooked. And I would spend a lot of time applying,
I got rejected at least like two or three times.
Had Dropbox already gone through YC at this point and come in at MIT?
At some point during like when I was in college, Dropbox like went through. And Dropbox was
also an MIT startup. So everybody on campus had like a bunch of free Dropbox codes. And
we had like a ton of free space and everybody knew their story. So there's a lot of like
positive encouragement there as well. Like, oh, you want to apply to YC? Like everybody
knows what that is and thinks it's cool to just apply, even if you get rejected. Like
I got rejected once and I got an email from Paul Grammer. He was like, Oh, I think now
you could have done like this better. I remember just like showing that email to my friends
and I was like, so proud. Like, look, PG responded to me, right? This is just as good as it is.
Basically.
What were some of the ideas you were applying with?
So the very first one was this company called Fmail, which stood for like, get this Gmail
for Facebook. We, uh, Facebook released like their platform sometime when I was I think
a junior. And at that point, like I'd never really built like a web app, but a buddy of
mine was just like super encouraging. He was like, Oh, this is so easy. And just go learn
PHP. And I'm like, PHP, like, what is that? So I went online and started learning it.
And he's like, okay. Like, well, how do I extort user information?
Because Facebook was all PHP.
Yeah. Yeah. It was all PHP. And like, I just kept asking like, Oh, how do I do this? He's
like, Oh, just go learn like, like sequel. And I, after a semester, I learned all this
different stuff and I'd been able to build this app from scratch. And I thought it was
amazing. Like, Oh, I didn't know anything about this stuff. And now I can like make
my own web app and I applied for YC and like, of course got rejected. But a really cool thing
happened where because there weren't that many Facebook apps and because I think people
were just like looking for stuff to write about a bunch of like these small tech publications
just like wrote about it. Like, Oh, crazy MIT genius figures out a way to put a Gmail
inside of Facebook. We'd scanned it to like look like Facebook and it barely even worked.
It was like super crappy. But I was like, wow, it's like really easy to get like the press
to write about you. And like, you can do a really simple thing that takes you a semester
even if you're a total beginner. And if it's kind of creative and kind of unique and people
haven't seen it before, like you'll get attention. So that was like a kind of a good experience,
even though I got rejected.
That's so true. And that was an era too where there were so few web products where when
you did one and you made a new website, it could kind of stand out because there just
wasn't a lot of noise. I remember you flood back so many memories there. When I was in
college, it's funny yours was F mail. Mine was called hacker follow and it was Twitter
for Hacker News. Like I wanted to be able to follow people on Hacker News and have a
timeline view of when they updated. So my buddy and I built Hacker Follow. And similarly,
I learned PHP and MySQL to be able to store the stuff in a database. And that's what everybody
did then. And that's even what Facebook was written in, David, as you mentioned. And the
web was like, it felt like a small place.
Yeah, it really did. And I think to some degree, it always kind of feels like that in hindsight.
I think like 10 years from now, people will look back and be like, oh, like the quaint
times of 2020 when you could do anything and it would get attention. And to some degree
like that's true. If you spend very few people have the time to sit down and just think creatively
about ideas. And like one of the easiest ways you want to come up with any creative idea
is just to take like two or three things and combine them. Because like once you do these
combinations, like you instantly start getting to ranges where like no one has ever done
that before. Like if you type like the dog into Google, you're going to get like 10 billion
results. But if you talk like the dog left, you're going to get like a million results.
And if you like talk type like the dog left the store with a bone, there's gonna be like
no results. It'll be like a sentence that no one has ever said before in the history
of like the world. And the same thing is true with ideas. So I think there's always kind
of like this sort of framework you can use to come up with interesting ideas. And like
we both found kind of the same one, you know, like, Oh, let's take this one thing and put
it inside this other. And like that was enough to stand out. And I think that's still true
today.
Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned Hacker News, which I assume is going to continue to play
a big role in this story here. Yeah. What were you hanging out on Hacker News while
you're at MIT? Yeah, doing all these YC applications. So back in the day, like Paul Graham used
to write on his blog all the time about startups and like all sorts of like different stories.
And he was like, he was very motivational, inspirational and positive. And then he had
this website he created, which like, again, he just like seemed like it was very haphazard.
He's like, what if I had like a little Reddit clone? And of course, it's like now like millions
and millions of visitors or whatever. But if you wanted to apply to YC, like you had
to be on Hacker News.
It exists because he was dissatisfied with our programming and was asking Alexis to make
that better. Like Alexis and Steve, I think it was either to make it better or maybe to
quit it at all because that subreddit didn't exist yet and got frustrated with their slowness
and started Hacker News on his own.
Yeah, that's hilarious. So he's like, yeah, this is not good enough. Even though he's
an investor and Reddit and just like made his own competitor. I'm pretty sure that's
against some sort of code of ethics. But you kind of had to have a Hacker News account
to apply to be in YC. And like not only did you want to have a Hacker News account, but
you wanted to have like a history of like smart, like intelligent, thoughtful comments
because you know Paul Graham and the partners are going to look at what you had posted.
So if I look at like my HN account right now, I think it's yeah, created October 8th, 2008.
So I was on HN like way back in the day, reading everything, digesting everything and then
trying to leave smart comments that like I would be probably embarrassed to go back and
look at right now.
It's so funny to think about now like, God, how many companies there were like 300 companies
that go through YC ish about every year and like, but it was this little corner and community
of the internet. I mean, it still is a community, a very large community now in a certain sense.
But yeah, I remember being a YC fan first and foremost, and using the products like
I was proud to be a Dropbox user and abandoned my flash drive because it was a YC company.
I suppose that that is even actually a bigger effect today. But it felt at some point like
a club. I remember I think it was like senior year in my high school, I felt like I was
in some sort of club for even knowing what it was.
Yeah, I kind of had that feeling. And then like I eventually ended up doing YC. And I
remember like distinctly that there are like maybe 35 companies in my batch or something.
And all of us felt like, oh, man, like YC is like it's jumped the shark. It used to
be so intimate and like so small back in the day, you go to PG's house. And now like it's
just this huge and personal thing. You only get to see like Paul Graham like once or twice
a week. Like what even is this? And of course now it's like 10 times bigger than it was
back then.
So catch us up there. So what idea did you end up going through YC with?
In college, I ended up meeting up with like these two grad students who had this like
cool idea for this new version of email. And we tried working on it. And like it was pretty
cool, actually, like we got a lot of press, we got a lot of attention, but we didn't charge
any money for it. And so after like a year of working on that, like we ran out of money,
we'd won some business plan competition, like it was like 25k. So I kind of just like lived
frugally on that for a year in downtown Boston, ran out of money. And I decided like I was
going to move to SF and somehow like get into YC. So I worked, I got like maybe enough money
for like four months of rent, moved out to SF. And I just started reading like Paul Graham's
like RFS, his request for startups that he would publish. And one of the ideas on there
was like kind of related to what I'd already been doing. You know, this whole thesis that
like, you know, the email inbox is this like unexploited, you know, domain, you could have
a Trojan horse where you get in there with like some sort of productivity app or something.
And then once you get all of the email users off Gmail, like you convert them to your own
thing. And so like, that was his obsession, like these like clever tricks, you could use
to like get a ton of people on your apps. And so I was like, okay, let's just do that.
So I met another guy again on Hacker News, who had kind of posted like, hey, I'm looking
for a co-founder.
I read that like, yeah, your co-founder on Hacker News, right?
Yeah, he was like one of my previous competitors to my earlier email thing. And his app like
also wasn't doing that well. So we're like, why don't we join forces? You met in the coffee
shop in San Francisco. And I had like maybe like a month of like money in my bank account.
I don't know what I would have done. I would have just like had to somehow find money or
like get a job immediately. But we applied together and like the process is super quick.
We got in, PG asked us a few questions, we had like the YC partner interview. And they're
like, yeah, cool. And I was just like, okay, well, like, when did we get the money? So
I could pay my rent this month.
Was this what, was this what, 2011 ish?
This was like, we did winter 2011 for YC. So this was like in the fall of 2010, like
November.
So this was November we were applying.
Before the Yuri Milner, SB Angel deal where you got 150.
That happened during our batch. That was like, we had the very first batch for that. I remember
the previous YC batch was super jealous because they only got like, you know, like a 17K or
whatever. And so that's what we got at first. It was like 17K divided by two, me and my
co-founder, like, you know, we had like enough for the two of us. We ended up moving into
this rent control department and SF and just eating like a lot of like oatmeal and crackers
and stuff.
And then I remember like one day during YC, they kind of called us down like on a, like
a Friday or like some off day, like, hey, it's very important. Everybody come down.
And we went down to the YC headquarters and they had like those telepresence robots kind
of like walking around like sort of like a camera, like in a screen on wheels. And there's
like Yuri Milliner's face on it, like this Russian oligarch billionaire like walking around
talking to everybody and like, we've got an announcement. And I was like, yeah, we're
going to give everybody like $140,000 of additional money, sort of no strings attached as an investment.
So that was like one of the best days of my life. I was like, okay, well, I'm going to
start eating like I'm going to upgrade to ramen now. And not to worry about where my
rent's going to come from.
And so we structurally understand that. Was that a convertible note that they invested
on with that?
Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I can't really remember. I think it probably was a convertible
note. And this is before they had like, I mean, this is before they had the safe thing.
The same camera, but it wasn't like literally free money. No, it wasn't literally free money.
Like there were strings attached.
I think it was uncapped though. If I remember, it was a really good deal and none of us questioned
it. Like we just signed the papers. So at this point you're getting like probably feels
like a huge amount of money in funding, right? Like you don't have any customers, right?
Nobody's paying you anything.
We had literally nothing. We had like a bunch of janky code that I was writing. And my co-founder
was going around like, you know, like doing some marketing stuff and trying to generate
like press and like hike for like a thing we hadn't built yet. So the idea we were working
on was, it was called task force. The idea was you get all these tasks in your inbox,
you know, like I've got Ben and David from acquired, like saying, Hey, Cortland, if you
prep for the podcast yet, right? And no, you didn't really send me that email. But like,
if you had, I could have used task force to convert it into like a little to do and it
would add it to a to do list in your inbox. And so then when I worked on that to do, if
I added a due date or I checked it off, you would get an email that said like, Hey, Cortland
is this far along in the to do or Cortland just completed it. So it was supposed to be
like this viral thing that would like take over the inbox and everybody would have it.
And eventually we did launch NYC. And like, we got a decent number of users. By the end
of I see, I think we had like 100,000 users. But back in the day, like that was nothing.
The social network had just come out a few months earlier, you know, a million dollars
isn't cool. A billion dollars is cool. That was kind of the mantra. And like, no one cared
that your app had 100,000 users. Like that was meaningless. I'm also dying over here
because after hacker follow my first app was a task list that I launched for iOS three,
which is like right around the same time period. And if I remember right, like Gmail tasks
was still this like really terrible UI that like could have had, I mean, you built the
missing sort of connectivity for Gmail tasks that would eventually become, I think they
turned it into its own thing, but it was like constrained within Gmail forever tasks. Yeah,
I think it's still there. Like if you know the right combination of keyboard shortcuts,
like you get a little task view to pop up in Gmail, but yeah, it's not the most inspired
idea like a to do list, right? Every entrepreneur, every programmer has like a bunch of stuff
they want to do. When you think about solving your own problem, you're like, if only I could
organize my tasks into like a little list of checkboxes. So we did that. And like it
kind of sort of worked, you know, but it wasn't like the home run, but we'll do it in email.
Yeah, we'll do it in email. There it was like the combination. And like, that's exactly
what the press wrote about. Like, okay, you've seen a task list. You may have seen a task
list in email, but if you've seen one in Gmail, people were like, no, I haven't. Maybe I should
sign up. So we kind of combine those things. And we got to demo day NYC, like the very
end of YC. And we like presented and investors just like they weren't interested. Like, yeah,
you know, you've had like, okay growth, but like, where's this really going? And we've
invested in email startups in the past. And they're all dead. Like, what's, what's going
to make yours different? And we didn't have a good answer to that. So we went to the summer
after YC with like probably still like 120, 130 K of this money in the bank, trying to
figure out like, you know, what are we going to do with this startup? It's like not growing
fast enough for us to raise money.
Hmm.
Well, and then one of the talks, maybe like, was it like a Tuesday dinner talk while you're
on my seat was Kevin Hale from Mufu.
Yeah. So Kevin Hale was this, uh, I thought it was like the coolest guy on planet earth.
We had these, you know, YC dinners every week and people would come in and we had like the
Heroku founders came in and they just sold for like $300 million and they just bought
us, they bought us all like the nicest steaks and you know, they were just super suave and
like that was so cool and flashy up in the lambos. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think PG brought
in like the CEO of a Yahoo at the time who was like the super extroverted guy who like
said a lot and it sounded really good, but you can never quite like tell what he said
afterwards, you know, and he was like, this is an example of a stereotypical CEO. Uh, and,
uh, then, uh, Kevin Hale came in from Wufu and he was like cool, calm and collected character.
And he was just like, yeah, like we're not raising any money. You know, like we, uh,
packed our bags. We moved to Florida, like we're making forms, but we're making forms
sexy and we do profit sharing with our team. You know, we go to the beach all the time.
People work remote. Like I don't even know when they're working really. And we get like
10 calls a week from VCs who want to invest and we're like, no, we're making millions
of dollars. We're cool. And no one else had said that. Like no one was making money. Like
I didn't even know you how you could make money because like Stripe wasn't even in beta
at the time. It wasn't so like in your cohort, nobody was like talking about like, no, like
no one, it was just about raising. There was like a few companies that like had some sort
of revenue model, but like all the companies that were celebrated were the ones that had
just like raised the most money. Now who raised from a 16 Z, uh, the earliest, you know, like
there's one, one founder on our batch who will not name who raised from a 16 Z, like
the very first week of YC and they raised millions and they are like putting up kind
of like Facebook growth numbers and everybody like worshiped the ground like that. These
founders walked on like the whole, it was obnoxious to the point where it was like,
I didn't want to see them. Uh, but like you're kind of jealous too. Cause like, you know,
I kind of want that level of success, you know, but at the end of the day, like nobody
was making money. Nobody wanted to make money. No one, like it was all about growth. And
so when I heard Kevin Hale talk about like how Wufu was just kind of crushing it, I
remember running up to PG and like, Hey, like, you know, we're not growing that much. Like
what if we just did this? Like what if we charged money? And he was like, that's cool.
Like whatever it takes to stay alive, you know, he was very much like be the cockroach,
you know, don't die. If you need to make money to survive until you pivot to a better idea,
that's what you should do. But like that sort of asterisk was always there. Like what you
then do is pivot to a better idea that, you know, can make you a billion dollar unicorn
because like, well, who wants to just make a few million dollars a year? And it's so
funny. David always reminds me that incentives drive behavior. And if you think about sort
of why C's incentive here, do you think back on it and say, well, gosh, they, they sort
of for their portfolio construction, they needed us to be a billion dollar company. Or
at that point, would yc have been happy with a bunch of Cortland's building profitable
businesses?
When you interview, they really want to know that you have a shot at becoming a billion
dollar business because that's how the mechanics is like the physics of the situation work
that they need people to go for the gold. What ends up happening is just a lot of yc
companies died. Like even before our batteries over, it was kind of clear that like a few
people have given up and they weren't really going to make it. And like, especially in
the summer after a batch was over, like just a lot of companies fell off the radar. I remember
like talking to PG over the summer, we signed up for office hours and went in. And he was
just like, happy we were like alive and still working. He was like, Oh yeah, we don't even
know what happens to a lot of these companies after a certain amount of time. So like, we're
happy that you're here. And I think after that, it's less, they're less like adamant
that okay, you got to go for billing, you got to go for a bone, you got to be a unicorn.
They're like, do whatever it takes to survive and get to the next stage. I think in a lot
of respects, like that's kind of like the hallmark of being a good entrepreneur. Like
how can you take like one small success and parlay that into something bigger? And eventually
maybe you get another shot at going for the unicorn company. So I think in the beginning
they're very focused on us being big. There's all sorts of questions about how this gets
big, which are easy to answer because it was like PG's idea that we were working on. But
later on, I was like, how do you not die?
Yeah, it reminds me, he's got that one essay, I think it might be in startups equals growth
about the hill climbing algorithm. And you basically always try and find the next highest
hill and you would think that you could accidentally find a local maximum and not the global maximum
that way. But in practice, whenever you're on a higher hill, that's a better way to get
to the next hill. And you can sort of always use that way to find your way to the absolute
maximum. It's a little ethereal, but do you sort of agree with that?
No, I completely agree. I think if you're creative enough and you think about it enough,
you could figure out a way to your next hill. Like Indie Hackers today is to my knowledge
the biggest online community of startup founders. Indie Hackers in its first month was like
a blog. There's a lot of blogs out there. You started off with a very tiny hill and
I made the blog as big as I think I wanted to and maybe it could have been bigger, but
it was pretty big. But there's always some way where you can say, hey, now I have this
advantage that I didn't have last week or last month or last year. What ways can I use
this advantage to parachute over to that slightly bigger hill? And maybe you lose a little altitude
on your way there, but then you're on this bigger hill and it's much easier. The analogy
I like to use maybe not hills is like a staircase. A lot of people want to jump to the top of
a staircase. And it's very hard to jump to the top of a staircase. Very few people are
capable of that feat, but it's pretty easy to walk up a staircase one step at a time.
And so I think a lot of being a founder is just figuring out how you can go one step
at a time, even if you have some grand ambition, how you can start super small and then kind
of work your way there.
I love that. And without jumping too far ahead to Indie Hackers, it just reminds me, the
threads of your ability to be a community builder and a participant in online communities
sort of starts with meeting your co-founders on Hacker News and being an obsessed participant
with that. And like you said, today you run, how do you describe it? The largest online
community of startup founders.
Startup founders. That's cool.
I mean, they're Indie Hackers. They don't mostly have billion dollar ambitions. They're
the underdogs. But a lot of them, I think once they get started, realize like, oh wow,
I'm making some side income. And then a few months later, like, oh wow, I can quit my
job. And then at some point, you're making a lot of money and you're thinking, okay,
well, what do I want to do? Do I want to retire to a beach somewhere? Or maybe what I want
to do is build something even bigger. So a lot of Indie Hackers I talk to are no longer
even Indie Hackers. They've raised money. They're building bigger companies. And that's
where their life path took them.
Well, that's what I think is so cool about this. Unless you would disagree, you're the
authority. But I don't think being an Indie Hacker means you don't want to raise money
or you don't want to build something big. It's like you want to build something that
people want and the customers will pay you for and go from there. And sometimes those
become notion. Sometimes they become Indie Hackers and sometimes they become just a business
that makes you a couple hundred thousand a year.
Yeah, exactly. I don't like to juxtapose Indie Hackers as a counter argument to raising money
so much as a counter argument to having a boss and working a desk job and wondering
what if for the rest of your life. Being an Indie Hacker is really about the idea that
you can achieve your own sort of freedom, whatever that means to you. Maybe that's financial
freedom. Maybe that's creative freedom. So you can work on whatever you want. Maybe that's
like time freedom. So you can work whatever hours and schedule you want. And so being
an Indie Hacker is really just like this confidence in yourself that like, hey, you can create
something that'll make your life better, really, and make other people's lives better in the
process and give you that freedom. And maybe that looks like raising a ton of money in
the future.
But as I mentioned, it is the ultimate option value preserving activity where if you start
by saying growth at all costs don't make any money, we're going to raise venture dollars,
you're on a path. You're on a very specific path. If you say, I'm going to build something
profitable that funds itself, you got all the option value in the world to continue
to take it whatever sort of trajectory you want to.
Yeah, exactly. And the kinds of companies that I've seen people build, like you think
about business, like I almost feel like we need a new word because you think about business
that has all these connotations. Like you imagine like a bunch of men and like suits
and like a boardroom or something, you know, reading like graphs. And then like the word
startup is like not quite right. It's closer because you think about tech and technology
and it's like they're wearing t-shirts instead of suits. Yeah. Yeah. Like they're doing the
same thing. Yeah, exactly. Like there needs to be like some like, I don't know what it
would be like some third word where I'm just like looking at people. Like I interviewed
this founder Sam Eaton on the podcast earlier this this year and like his sister at some
point was like, I want to sell cookies. And he's like this software engineer. He's working
like growth roles at Airbnb. And he just got a job offer at Google. And he's like, no,
we're not just going to sell cookies. We're going to have like a cookie company. And we're
going to like be tech enabled. And we're going to have an app and like all sorts like our
own fleet of delivery drivers. And like he's just in heaven sitting around like coding
his own apps. Like they don't use Uber Eats or DoorDash. Like they have their own delivery
drivers, their own sort of internal mechanism. His sister's like the head of cookie R&D.
And they're making like 100 grand a month selling cookies to their local town. And he's
doing all this cool tech stuff. And they have like 50% margins too. So like they live in
a really good life. And it's like, it's not just like your traditional idea of a business,
you know, he's like trying to like make his community better, trying to make his life
better. And he's not stressing over like how fast can we grow and how much bigger can we
make this he's thinking about, you know, what do I like to spend my time doing? Well, at
the same time, he's like kind of getting rich and making everybody feel great.
That's so cool. That's what like, that's why I think it's just so cool about this and why
this is like, uh, is I think this is like such a big movement alongside the traditional
startup raise venture capital, like be something big right off the bat, because like the economic
generation activity generated by this class of entrepreneurs is probably in aggregate going to be
equal, if not larger, like the Rockefellers of the world. Have you ever, did you guys watch
that series? Chair Noble was on HBO last year. Great. I heard about it. It was good. They like
timed it. So like right after Game of Thrones went off the air, they're like, boom, here's
another series. Don't, don't unsubscribe from HBO. But, uh, they kind of boiled down the entire
story. Like the work of like this one scientist and it was like an amazing story. It was great,
but like, obviously in real life, it was probably dozens or hundreds of scientists and engineers
working together to try to figure out how to contain this nuclear disaster. And like the
reason why they did that is because it's just easier to tell a story about like one person.
And it's the same in business. Like it's easier to tell the story of like one company. We're all
fascinated by like how big Apple is and the impact that Apple has. Or like, you know,
McDonald's is crazy. Like they have 20,000 restaurants in the United States,
because that's like the easy story to like to understand and to tell. But I think
like the much more impactful story is like there are 600,000 individuals who have restaurants
in the United States. And like that's way more impactful than like McDonald's having 20,000
restaurants, but it's a harder story to wrangle. It's like a harder story to tell
and to connect the dots. And I think the way I look at what I'm doing with indie hackers is like,
I'm trying to like connect the dots of all these really tiny tech businesses that are never going
to make the news. You know, they're not, you know, Amazon, they don't have a $2 trillion market cap.
But like what happens when like a million people are building businesses and make millions of
dollars online? You know, what does that look like? Not to mention like, you know, we're,
when this comes out, we will likely have just done the DoorDash and the Airbnb IPO episodes.
There is a narrow set of practitioners, whether you're a founder or an employee who can learn
from the tactics and the playbooks accomplished with DoorDash and Airbnb. But based on all the
media coverage, that those are the stories that get told because that's the simplest and most
interesting narrative. But if you're looking to actually learn, let's say indie hackers
continues to grow and expand and you figure out more ways to parallelize it. And at some point,
there's, you know, 100,000 stories of businesses and the playbooks that they ran on your website.
Like someone can find an incredibly narrowly applicable business that's just three years
ahead of them and run their playbook on their own business in a way that is far more useful than,
you know, the one story that everyone focuses attention on.
Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the goal of like a lot of the things that I'm building on
indie hackers are like, oh, how do you see like these companies like very early days? And then how do you like
filter down to like a very specific niche so you find the company that most matches the profile
of what you're trying to build. And so we have like this directory that I kind of half-hazardly
built like two and a half years ago. And I was like, oh, we should have a directory of products.
And I haven't touched the code in like two and a half years. But like when I built it,
it was like, okay, we had like 50 people on it. And I checked the other day and it was like 12,000
products on there. And they all have like a little timeline where they're like saying, okay, here's
where I launched. And here's what I thought about my launch. I thought I was being ridiculous,
saying a hundred thousand, but it shouldn't be long. No, it shouldn't be long. You know,
and I think it's just the resource that needs to exist. Like you need to be able to go out and see
how other people are doing it because that gives you, I think the confidence to go do it yourself
when you see that someone who's like not that different from you, like kind of put their
playbook online. I love that. Take us from the light bulb of task force should be making money
to the founder of the founding of indie hackers. How did that period of time happen?
Yeah, I'll give you the whirlwind story. So at some point during the summer after YC,
Stripe entered the beta phase. So this is like 2011 and Stripe's like, hey,
you want to make money with your product? Go for it.
They were before you, right?
They were before I was like maybe by a year or two. They took a while before they got their
product to the point where it was ready, understandably, because there's like a lot
of regulation dealing with banks and stuff. But they kind of launched into beta. And we got like
a good first look because we were kind of on the YC mailing list. So like we threw up kind of a
Stripe subscription and like maybe like a day or two, just like over a weekend. And the next weekend,
I think we made like $3,000 in payments, charging people like five bucks a month, like this crappy
to-do list Chrome extension. Like I thought we were going to make like $100 or something.
And I was like, holy shit, like we can like kind of pay our rent. You know,
like we can pay for stuff with this. And so of course we went to the YC partners were like,
hey, look at this, this is cool. Like we're making a few thousand dollars. And they're like,
yeah, but what if you were making like way more and you had a different idea that wasn't a tiny
Chrome extension, which in some ways is good and bad. You know, like I, in hindsight, if we had
stuck with what we were doing, we could have probably grown it to a much more substantial
size and iterated. Instead, what we did was we like did what you should never do. We just completely
started over from scratch with an idea that we thought was like bigger and better. And we sort
of violated that principle of like taking it one step at a time. And so probably over like the next
six or seven years, I started five or six different companies. Each one, you know, got to a point where
it made like a few thousand dollars in revenue, but it was never really a big deal. It was never
like the success that I really wanted. And I think this is kind of an important thing that I realized
like the first couple of years, I was just like, pedal to the metal on my computer every day coding
as much as I possibly could like this is going to be it, you know, like I'm going to succeed like
this is going to be like it has to work. And like it never did. And not only did I not succeed, but
I also just like wasted a bunch of time like not living a very fun and productive life. Like I don't
even remember like one or two of those years in my lives because I was like literally just doing the
same thing every single day. And now my model that I have for it kind of framework in the way I think
of it. And the way I wish I thought of it then was that everybody's kind of got like a certain
number of companies that you need to start before you succeed. For some people who are exceptionally
talented or lucky or both, like that's just one, they're going to succeed right out of the gate.
Some people maybe it's like 35. For me, it was like seven. And really all you need to do is just
to make sure that you like you don't quit before you get to that number. Like that's really the
entire name of the game. Like just don't quit before you get to the number where you succeed.
And so you should just structure your life to make it so it's easy for you not to quit.
And to make it so that like the journey itself is like actually pretty fun. And you're learning a
lot along the way because like you're not just building a startup in a vacuum. Like you're
meeting people and you're picking up new skills and you're learning new things. And like,
like the startup is kind of like the journey is as important as like the destination at the end of
the day. And so nowadays and like eventually I kind of figured it out. Like, oh, I'm like learning
so much stuff. Like I should make sure that like I'm really enjoying my life while I'm building
stuff. So the last few years there before I ended up starting Indie Hackers are actually really
pleasant. And I feel like I kind of leveled up as a person while I was building my startups instead
of just sort of like, you know, worrying every step of the way like, am I there yet? You know,
is it going to work? Is this going to be the one? That's such a great lesson. And just like a couple
points of clarification, were these all inside the same like entity or was it different co-founders
or how did that sort of technically play out? Yeah, like the first one or two were kind of
inside the same entity. And then my girlfriend and I split up and we kind of just declared our
YC startup dead. Like this is, you know, this is the end. I think I quit and he kind of like bought
me out for my shares. And then I just kind of did my own thing. And like, by that point, I realized
like, okay, what I need to do is figure out how to like make this last. Like I want to spend the
rest of my life just working for myself on whatever I like. Like, I don't want to go get a job.
Part of it was like, I just didn't like the idea of having a boss. Like me working at Stripe today
is the first full time job that I've ever had. Like, I just don't like to be told what to do,
I guess. And part of it was like this, like, I don't know, this pride of like, I don't want to
have to interview you somewhere. Like I don't want somebody to be able to reject me. Like I want to
be unrejectable. Like I don't want to ever put myself in a position where somebody could say,
no. And so like, okay, I just want to keep doing this myself. So I would just like survive off of
kind of like income from some of these apps, because I would keep them running and they would
make like a few hundred dollars a month or a few thousand dollars a month. And then when I got low
on income, I would just go get a contract job and then like work on the side, et cetera, et cetera,
and just kind of like make it so I never had to quit. You know, and I think there's a lot said
about startup failure, like, okay, maybe your ideas fail because like the market was too small
or because, you know, your product took too long to develop or you ran out of money.
But my take on it is kind of that none of those things actually kill your company. You know,
like those are just obstacles, right? Like, so your market wasn't big enough and then what,
right? Like you quit, like you didn't have to quit, right? You could have like, that's kind of like,
if you imagine like a startup journey, like being like you walking from like you being an early
pioneer walking from the East coast to California, right? Like those are just like obstacles. There's
like rivers and mountains and like, you can kind of like step over those or go around them. Or you
can just be like, fuck it. I'm just going to like stop here and just live in Kansas, you know? And
like, you don't want to stop and just live in Kansas. Like you want to keep going and find a
way to keep going. And so for me, that was just living super frugally and figuring out a way to
like start the next thing, which meant taking on contract work and building up my savings whenever
I needed to. Yeah, default alive. Or I think at one point I ran a startup weekend in Seattle and
Bo Lu who actually, I think went on to YC with this company, Future Advisor, and Sequoia funded
it. He gave this great talk called, you're alive as long as you're not dead. And he was like, yeah,
lots of things, bad things can happen at your company. But as long as you don't shut it down,
you have not failed. Like your company is still in the act of succeeding. You're not successful
yet, but you run the act of succeeding until you call it quits. That's always stuck with me.
Yeah. And even if you do quit a particular company, like I've quit lots of different companies, but
like, as long as you don't quit your overall journey, like you're still on that path, you know,
you're still headed to California and you're like, you're going to eventually get there. Who knows
how many startups it's going to take, but you'll get there as long as you're sort of learning and
you persist. So I think the most important thing you can do is figure out how to keep going.
All right. So the genesis of Indie Hackers, how did that happen?
So I just rolled off a contract job and I had about a year of runway in the bank. So I was like,
okay, here we go. Like take four. I'm going to figure out like something to work on that's going
to work this time. And you know, worst case scenario, it's going to all fail. And I'm going
to go back to working contract jobs. And so I started working on this one app that I called
Knox. And it was kind of like this meant clone for your phone that would like buzz you with
your finances. And like maybe like two or three months into it, I was like, this is an endless
slog of coding. This is going to take me forever. I don't see like the end of the rainbow. Like I
need to just call it quits right now. Like in the time where I was working on that, I saw a couple
stories in Hacker News of people who would come up with new ideas. And we're already making like
five or 10 grand a month. And like I hadn't even launched my thing yet. So I was like, okay, this
is like a dud. I should scrap this and go back to sort of the drawing board and figure out what
are all the different lessons that I've learned after years of doing this. Let me make sure like
I'm systematic in how I approach this. So I'm not just kind of making the same mistakes again,
because I had repeatedly made this mistake that a lot of software engineers make, where we just
spend way too much time coding. And like I think the biggest lesson at the top of the list was like,
only work on things that you can build in like a few weeks. You know, like I went from idea
to basically launch with any hackers in exactly three weeks. And it didn't require very much code
at all didn't require like a lot of marketing or anything. It was just like super, super easy. I
think this is one of the levers that a lot of founders like don't realize that they can pool
like everybody's trying to figure out like, how do I get enough money to work on my idea? Like,
do I need to fundraise? Do I need to, you know, borrow money and go into credit card debt? And
like the other lever people pool is like, Oh, how do I get more time? You know, maybe I'm gonna work
nights and weekends and all this stuff. And like you want to work a three day work week instead of
five day work week. But I think like the third lever, that's probably the best is like, how do
you just start smaller? Like, how do you figure out like, what's an easy, even easier thing to do?
And for me, my idea was kind of like, okay, I want to build kind of an empty hacker business. So I
can sort of, you know, pay my rent, pay my bills and then figure out what I want to do next. A ton
of other people clearly want to do this. Like I see them on Hacker News every day asking all these
questions to people who've done it and sharing their stories. Maybe what I can do in a very
meta sort of way is build a better version of these Hacker News discussions. People are always
talking about this, but their stories kind of suck, you know, they're like leaving out important
details. And like everybody in the comments is asking them like, well, how'd you go up with your
idea? Or how much money are you making? And like, that's not necessarily in their stories.
If I can compile all of the stories that I found and tell them in like a really compelling way,
I make sure I always ask for revenue numbers. I always ask for how they come up with their idea.
I always ask about technical details. And I can put that in one place. And I'm making life easier
for like both me and a bunch of people who are like me, who are trying to figure out how to be
indie hackers themselves. So that was kind of my idea, kind of phase one. Like I didn't have a
revenue model. I didn't know where I was going to go from there. But I was like, that's a really
easy place to start. All I have to do is email some people and you know, get their information,
put it on a blog and launch it. And like, I'm 100% sure people in Hacker News are going to eat it up
because they've already been eating up stories like this before. And is the idea that this is
going to become a business for you at this point? Or is the idea really like, this is a project I
envisioned in my head. I know the scope. I know how to build it. I think people are going to love
it, but it's a project. 100% is going to be a business. I don't know how I'm going to make
money yet. But it's 100%. Like at some point, like I'm going to start in this really small pool,
you know, I'm going to build, I'm going to take the first step on the staircase and do something
that works. And then from there, I'll have some advantage that I don't have today. Like maybe I'll
have an audience, maybe I'll have a lot of traffic, maybe I'll have a big mailing list. And then from
there, it should be easier for me to figure out how to make an actual business. The revenue aspect,
maybe revenue and profit aspect of the stories you were telling was that like, was that super
key? Like, cause I can imagine like, you know, and you're trying to find like, oh yeah, you're
talking all this game about like how great it is, all the stuff you did, but like, is it actually
working? Like, you know, give me the, like, like that feels like almost like the, like the zestimate
before Zillow, right? Like, you know, it's like, Hey, this house looks good, but like, what's it
worth? Like, you know, how important was that? It was extremely important. Like if I could write
a startup book, I would call it problems first, where like the first thing you want to do is you
want to figure out like, what are the problems that your potential customers have? So you don't
build like some random product that like doesn't solve their pain points. And when I was like
reading all these comments on Hacker News, like I was trying to find a business idea and I didn't
want to read comments from people who like didn't have proof that their business idea worked. You
know, somebody said like, Oh, I've got this great company. I'm working on it. It's really great. You
know, it does this and this and this. And like, they don't share their revenue numbers. Like for
all I know, they're making like $5 a month, you know, and it's not that great. And I could tell
everybody else in the comments, like had kind of the same problem. They're like, Hey, we only want
to upvote the stories that share their revenue numbers. We only want to upvote the stories that
have like some sort of proof or some sort of like inspirational thing that we can like grasp onto to
know this person is legit. And to have a closed cycle that like this advice worked, like this
advice is crustable. Right. Yeah. Anybody can give you advice and tell you what to do. But if
there's no like outcome, right? That's a result of that advice. You don't know if it's going to
train your model on garbage data. Exactly. And so like, that's a thing where like there were a lot
of other interview sites on the web that talk to entrepreneurs. There are pretty much none at the
time that realized how important it was like you needed to be transparent, like you needed to
include revenue numbers. And so when I went out and I started emailing people and saying like,
Hey, my name is Courtland. I'm starting this website. It's going to be called Andy hackers.
Like, will you tell me your company story? And oh, by the way, like, I need like all your revenue
numbers. Half of them were just like, fuck off. Like, why? You're nobody. Like, why would I give
you my revenue numbers? And then like half of them never didn't respond. And like a tiny percentage
were like, Hey, you know what? I think this is super cool. I'm happy to pay it forward. Somebody
did the same for me in the past. And so by the time I launched, I think I had, I'd gotten like
10 people to agree to share their entire story and their revenue numbers. That's awesome. And so how
did you, when you launched, you built the site, right? So like, you didn't, you didn't go to
Squarespace and go to Webflow. What was the thinking behind that? Yeah. So I had a couple
sort of reasons for that. Part of it was I had a bunch of other ideas that I had come up with
and my brainstorming and any hackers kind of scored the highest on my rubric
because it was so quick to build. But I felt really bad because like, here I am the software
developer, like from building all these other startups. Like I learned so much stuff from
building startups over the years and like failing time and time again. Like I learned how to design,
I learned how to do front end development and backend and like server admin stuff.
And here I was like going to sort of blog. So I was like, wow, this is such a waste. Like I want
like to throw myself some kind of bone to make this fun. Because starting a company should be
fun. Like you should enjoy the journey, not just the destination. And so I said, okay, well,
I'll do a blog, but I'll allow myself to just build like my custom blog from scratch,
even though that's going to add like another week and a half to my launch time or whatever,
like I'll allow myself just that little bit of fun. And then part of it was kind of a branding
and strategy play. So you weren't yet thinking like Stripe Revenue Connect, like building a
community. I was like kind of in the back of my mind, the community stuff, definitely not like
the product directory and Stripe revenue stats or like a lot of the stuff that exists today.
But like I did have kind of a strategic sort of session with myself. So I spent like one day just
thinking strategy, because in the beginning of your company, there's a bunch of decisions
that you make that are much harder to undo later on. Like you'll tell yourself like, oh,
use a crappy design now and redesign it later. But like, really, that's a lot of work. And you
have a lot of more urgent things. And you say, Oh, I'll have a crappy name now and have a better
name later. But like really, like, it's hard to change your name later on. So I've been bitten
by like all these issues. And so I said, Okay, I'm gonna take one day and make all of these like
semi permanent decisions. Like what do I want the color scheme to be? How do I want the site to
work? What I want it to be called? And kind of the three decisions that I came to were,
number one, I want the site to be named after kind of a new class of people. Because I was like,
well, there's no name for like these people and these, and these discussions, it's like really
hard for them to find each other even because like, there's like, what do you even search for,
like story of person who bootstrapped startup and makes 5000. Like, there's nothing to search for.
So hard to find. So it's like, I'm gonna call it any hackers. I had a bunch of like worst names.
But any actors are the best one I came up with. I decided I wanted to make the site like blue. So
it's like this very dark blue color that's like probably not very accessible and kind of hard to
read. But every other site in existence was just like white with black text. Everybody was writing
on, you know, medium and all look the same. And so I wanted mine to stand out. So if you ever read
two Andy hacker stories, you would instantly remember that you'd been to this website before.
And then I wanted to do it custom, because I just didn't want to build on somebody else's platform.
Like I didn't like the platform risk. I've been kind of burned by that before building on Gmail.
And, you know, they would change their API all the time and like kind of break our apps. And so I
didn't want to deal with like, you know, putting up a blog on medium and having it look like every
other medium blog and then medium changes or business model or something. And now I'm screwed.
So those are kind of like the three decisions I made back then. And
all of them, I think turned out to be pretty good in the long run.
And the etymology of the name, it's interesting thinking about when you started this,
the notion of an indie developer was already a thing. I mean, I remember
considering myself an indie developer in 2008, when I started working on my first iPhone app.
And I think Craig Hawkenberry and a bunch of the icon factory people, they were saying,
oh, I'm an indie developer, indie iPhone or Apple developer. And obviously,
Hacker News was sort of like a thing, but those communities were basically non-overlapping.
Like hackers were what people who were technical and wanted to start high-growth technology
startups refer to themselves as, but indies were what the lifestyle developer community,
primarily centered around Apple platforms, kind of called themselves.
Yeah. And I wasn't thinking about honestly any of that. I wasn't even aware that they
were like indie developers. I was just like, okay, well, I want the idea of an independent
programmer. Because again, it wasn't so much a rebellion against raising money.
It was a rebellion against going to work for the man and making Google $10 million a year
from your code, but you're only getting like 200k of that. Why don't you start your own thing
and be your own indie developer? And Hacker News was so-called, because hackers are just another
word for programmers. So the idea is like, okay, you're a programmer, but you're independent.
There's no cap on your salary. There's really no limits. You can do whatever you want.
Yeah. And before we move on from this point, talk to me about platform risk. Because in my mind,
we think about this for Acquired too. We're always trying to get the most direct relationship
possible with our listeners, with our LPs, with everybody. And there's always some platform risk.
We've collected email addresses from one out of, I don't know, six or seven listeners,
from all the various reasons that people join our Slack or they sign up for the emails,
which now have the playbook. So there's even a further incentive to sign up for the emails.
But at the end of the day, even if you have someone's email, you could go to their promotions
tab. It's not like you can call that person. It's not like there's always some amount of
indirection between you and your own customer. So I guess how far, how do you think about how
far you should go on eliminating platform risk? Yeah, I think everything in business is basically
a trade-off. And what you really want to do is just be aware of the trade-offs that you're making.
There are no hard and fast rules. Never build on a platform. If you build on a platform,
maybe it can give you additional distribution, but then you get the risk that they might shut
you down or change things. Or you might lose out on the branding or the ability to differentiate
yourself, etc. Maybe you can charge a high amount of revenue per user, but that means you're going
to get maybe fewer users in the door, fewer customers, but then also you can spend more
to require your customers. It's all trade-offs. And so for my particular situation, when I looked
at that trade-off, really the only contender was like, okay, I can maybe try to build a big
Twitter account where I share these stories. I can repeatedly post on Reddit or Hacker News,
or I could have a medium blog. Those are the big platforms that I considered.
And every one of them I thought would give me either very limited distribution,
like how much did medium really help with distribution? It was kind of hit and miss.
And they would also just completely destroy my ability to have any sort of branding.
And I knew that kind of step two in this playbook might be to build a mailing list or a community.
I wasn't sure, but I knew that if I was going to name it in the hackers and go for something
where the brand actually mattered, which I think is important if you're going to have
something where it's kind of free and I was just getting lots of users in the door,
but I didn't have a business model, then I wanted to own my brand.
And so it wasn't worth it for me to use any of these platforms, even though they would help
with distribution if I could instead just do my own. And I also had my own distribution strategy.
I already knew that people were going to be eating this kind of stuff up on Hacker News
because they already were. And I already knew that Hacker News had a lot of traffic.
So it's like, okay, I don't need medium. I can do it on my own. So I get no real benefit from
medium and I get all this additional risk. The trade off just wasn't worth it.
Yeah. It's kind of fun. I mean, in some ways you maybe ran the Airbnb playbook of
exfiltrate Craigslist did for this segment of Hacker News.
Yeah. My buddy Greg Eisenberg has this whole idea of like, you know,
unbundling Craigslist, unbundling Reddit, unbundling Hacker News. It's a huge community.
There's all sorts of sub discussions happening in there that happen regularly.
It's a pretty big tent.
Exactly.
Okay. So you launch, you build the site, launch the blog on your site. As I understand it,
pretty quickly you figured out that email was a pretty big unlock kind of on both like for
the interviews you were doing, call it the supply side of these stories and for readers
for the demand side too.
Totally. You can almost imagine the web is like a collection of like feeds or like destinations.
And some of them are places where people go like habitually. Like I habitually check my email.
I habitually check the notifications on my phone. I habitually check Twitter. I'm just like addicted.
Like I'll sit down and just like press T on my keyboard and like black out for a second.
Black out for a second like I'm on Twitter. And then there's other places where like people
just don't have a habit. Like I made Indie Hackers, no one on earth had a habit of regularly
visiting Indie Hackers. And they weren't going to have that habit anytime soon because I was
publishing like once or twice a week, you know, like Twitter's got new content every single minute.
So for me, it was like, okay, well, how do I hook into like one of these feeds that everybody
already habitually looks at? And it was a combination of both Twitter and email.
So I made like the Twitter Indie Hackers account. I tried to tweet every story that I had,
so that you would sort of incidentally run into them when you check your Twitter and be like,
Oh yeah, I remember any hackers, let me go back there. And then email was a huge one,
because like actually own the email addresses when people sign up. Like I can take that with
me anywhere. Like you can't shut down my email list. And so from day one, like I had kind of a
email collection box at the very top. And like at the bottom of every interview,
just trying to get people's emails. And I think in the first week, we got like 1000 or 1500 emails.
And it was like kind of continued on that pace for a while, like 1000 emails a week from people
from Hacker News and all over the web who just like loved these success stories, like they would
come and read them. And they would be like, so inspired to hear that like, you know, so and so
is making a 10 grand a month from like their travel startup. And like, I'm a developer,
I could do that too. And so they would immediately get on an email because like they want more of
these like stories, you know, they want more glances like what's possible so that like,
when the day comes that they're ready to start their startup, like they haven't forgotten where
to go to see those examples. You got to have some reason that like, you're going to show up
for people. Like totally. Well, one of the things, you know, I kind of joke about it. I don't know,
there's no way to scientifically know, but like, and we didn't plan it this way. But the fact that,
you know, this podcast, our podcast name is ACQ, like in almost everybody's podcast feed,
we are at the very top because for whatever reason, podcast feeds are organized alphabetically.
And like, how much benefit have we gotten from that? Like, I don't know, but I'm pretty
sure we've got a lot at the top of an accidental feed, which is the podcast player.
Yeah, like if we were if we were farther down below, like, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's a hard one lesson for a lot of people who are starting startups. Like if you're
an indie hacker, you don't have like a bunch of investors and mentors, like you probably just kind
of by default believe like, you know, if I build it, they will come, you know, just build some cool
stuff and get a bunch of people like in the door. But it turns out that like, building stuff is kind
of easy. Even like, even if you're not a developer today, like you can stitch tough. Like I talked to
a guy yesterday who built like a whole slack bot without using code at all. He doesn't even know
how to code. And the hard part is like getting people to actually care about what you're building
and actually find it. So that means like, you have to actually, it's like, and you run into it.
Yeah. Yes. And run into it. And it's not just run into it once. It's like run into it like
several times repeatedly. And like, that's very hard to do. But if you think about it,
like really carefully before you start, then often like you can come up with something.
Like what I found is helpful is like, you just go to one of the places where people find things.
And you just look at what they're sharing. You know, that's kind of accidentally what I did with
indie hackers. Like I was already in Hacker News. And it took like days of me reading these threads
before it clicked like, wow, everybody is here sharing this thing. Like why don't I just like
make my thing better than what they're sharing here and then share it in the exact same place.
Okay. So we've talked about like this insight that you had that enabled growth. So you know,
we sound like circa 2011 YC, you know, like tell me about your growth rates. Like now let's shift
to the indie hacker conversation. How did you start making money? Yeah. So actually what
happened is like my very first sort of hit of revenue was completely unexpected. It was like
maybe two weeks after I launched and some company was like, Hey, can we sponsor you? And I was like,
sure. How much do you want to pay? And they're like, how much traffic do you have? And I told
them like, sure. We'll give you like 750 bucks a month. And that to me was insane because everything
that I had ever built was like some like rinky dink consumer app where I was like begging people to
pay me like five bucks a month. Yeah. Pennies. And people were like, well, no, it doesn't have
this feature. I can't possibly afford $5 a month and then we'll go like buy like a bad coffee and
like dump it out, you know? So like this company like offering me hundreds of dollars like was like
a wake up call like, Oh, I can like make money from sponsors. But I was also like super focused on
growth because I was thinking, okay, well, I've got like maybe six months of runway and I've got
six months of savings in my bank account. I've got time. Like, why don't I just grow the site
even bigger? Because it's only wanted me like I don't have that much time to try to sell ads
and build a site and do all these interviews I'm doing every single week. I'm just going to grow
it, not worry about money. And I'll worry about it later. So I did that for like three months.
I just kept trying to grow the site. I didn't figure out how to grow the site at all. I did
like, yeah, never found something that was bigger and better than getting on the front page of
Hacker News. Go figure. And so by December, I launched in August by December, I was like,
okay, screw this. I'm going to start trying to make money. And so I started like basically
emailing my list, which at that point had probably been grown to like 10 or 15,000 people
and saying, Hey, like, you know, here's the email with the new, like this week's interviews,
but also by the way, here's an empty ad slot. Like your company could be here.
And I was very lucky that it's the billboard that you see with the like your ad could be here.
It was exactly that, but an email form. And I put that on the website too. And like,
it turns out when you have a company that targets people who are starting companies,
you have a lot of potential advertisers on your mailing list. You all want to basically
advertise with you. And it also turned out, which I didn't realize at the time that any
hackers were like some of the worst possible customers to buy ads, because like these are
very fledgling startups. Like these are people who decided to start something because they read
about it on any hackers like two months ago. And if they were going to spend like $500,000 on an ad,
like that ad better work. Like that's not, that's like their whole yearly ad budget.
And so it's almost like you would want a company that is selling tools to people.
Almost like that.
So I went through like a lot of these awkward conversations where I run ads where people like,
I just wanted to do right by them, but like the ads didn't always get enough clicks. And sometimes
like I would refund people. And it was just like very stressful. I didn't like doing it. And so I
created kind of like a dream list of companies like, okay, which companies actually have a lot
of money that would be good sponsors? Like I've no experience doing sales, but like,
I'm going to have to figure out how to do this. And I had at the very bottom of my list, like my
number one dream company who should be sponsoring any hackers was Stripe. I'm like, okay, I'll
eventually get to them. But like, I want to like figure my, I'm like, I want my shit to get some
warmups in first. Yeah, I need some warmups, you know? And so I don't warm up on Broadway.
Exactly. You don't want to like embarrass yourself in front of everybody.
So I got some warmups. I sent a lot of cold emails. I found like the heads of marketing on
LinkedIn. My buddy, Jeff, who ran a podcast that was on gave me kind of his list of leads for who
was advertising on his podcast. And like, to my surprise, it was like way more pleasant selling
to big companies than it was selling to small ones. Like I would get someone whose entire job
it was to spend a marketing budget. And they would just want to talk about their kids,
talk about their vacations, and then be like, Oh, yeah, you're cool. Like here's a check for five
grand. And I'd be like, holy shit, a thousand times easier than selling to people who are broke.
Yeah, not to mention, like, you know, it's a one of my key startup lessons learned over the years
has been sell the things that have budgets, like don't try and create budget fit into a budget. And
sure, there's emerging markets where like the budget line item is not going to exist for your
thing. But you're so right that if there's somebody whose job it is, and they have a budget to spend,
like your life is just going to be so much easier.
And I think that applies to even coming up with startup ideas and trying to figure out a business
model. Like it's kind of counterintuitive, because people keep like people repeat this mantra, like,
you know, solve an unsolved problem. And it's almost like you want to do the opposite. Like you
want to look at problems that people are already paying a lot of money to have solved. And kind of
like, insert yourself there. Like my friend started a company called key values. She's like been one of
my best friends for years name is Lynn. And like her company helps startups hire engineers. And you
know what, like startups are hiring engineers just fine, like well before her company came
came along. But like, we kind of picked that idea, because we looked at like, where are companies
spending money, you know, like where they spend a lot of their money. And it turned out like hiring
engineers, hiring recruiters was like a huge, huge cost center for companies. And like, they
were just willing to spend a lot of money on it. And within like a year of starting her company,
she grew her revenue into like 100 grand a quarter. She was living like a great life.
She made it look easy her first time out of the gate. And part because like she picked a problem
where like people had budgets, right? And I think the insight here is like, if you really want to
overly simplify the sales process, there's educate, and then when like educate people that their need
is real. And then once they're convinced that they want to solve this problem, then go win and be the
way that you solve that problem for them. And if you're selling into people with budgets, you don't
really need to educate because they're totally bought in on solving that problem already.
Yeah, an education is hard. And it's risky because you might educate somebody and then lose
because someone else comes along and wins. Yeah. Or more frequently, you educate somebody and they're
like, eh, don't get it. Right? Yeah. These are the things that like I need to solve.
All right. So Broadway comes and then you get a particular email. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm
selling ads for like a few months. I'm just happy to be honest, because I got to the point,
I think in February 2016, where like any hackers are going to pay all my bills. And I was like,
wow, like in less than a year, I've gone from like, you know, nothing to finally like one of
the ideas I've done works. You know, so I'm like, no, none of the other companies you'd worked on,
you'd gotten to this point where it's like, no, revenue is covering my personal expenses.
No. And it was better in like literally every single way. Like I eventually like I had added
a community and so people were sort of talking to each other. So I began to see kind of a path
where like, Oh, I can do less work. Like maybe people can interview each other and like, I don't
have to do anything. Uh, and like people really liked it. You know, it was like a very, like,
I wasn't making to-do list software. We're like, all I got were like angry customer emails.
Cause I don't have the right feature. Like every email I got was something positive.
People talking about how inspired they were by an interview that they heard. Like it was just like
a hundred percent good for my life in every single way. So I was just like blown away and
super happy and just high on life. And then to make things even better, I get this email out of
the blue. And so like, I hadn't gotten to Stripe yet on my, on my sort of like list of sponsors to
reach out to. And you weren't in the same batch. Like you didn't know them. No, like I think during
the Stripe beta, I like maybe like gone in there, like a little Stripe chat room and like, you know,
pointed out some bugs and asked some questions, but like, I never really talked to the founders
outside of that. And the email, like I just stepped off a plane. Actually, I was going to a buddy's
bachelor party in Mexico. And so I stepped off the plane. I was checking my emails and like the very
top of the inbox was like a choir and the hackers question mark from like Patrick at Stripe. And I
was just like, holy shit. There's like, there's no way this email is really completely. You're
getting trolled. Yeah, I'm definitely getting trolled, but I read it and it was real. And he
was just kind of like, Hey, Cortland, like really like admiring what you're doing at indie hackers.
You know, is there any way you'd be open to Stripe, you know, potentially
acquiring it. And so the first thing I did was like, I forwarded to my mom sent to my brother,
sent to my friends. It's the polygraph email over again. Yeah. Yeah. It was like the coolest thing
ever. And we ended up meeting and talking and kind of filling each other out at brunch the next
Saturday. And, uh, over the course of a month, like worked out kind of a deal. And I joined
Stripe in April, 2017. All right. So lots, lots to unpack here. Uh, before we get too far into it,
I want to understand let's, let's relate it to our previous conversation on educating and then
winning had Stripe or and or Patrick decided that they wanted to own an asset that was sort of a
community of people talking about building stuff on the internet that very likely would need Stripe
to monetize. And then you were the pick or was it like, Hey, wow, that guy's really got something
cool. Uh, I think it's a combination of both. It's been funny, like looking at, uh, just
acquisitions over the years, talking to friends and also seeing like a little bit of stuff
internally at Stripe where like, it's just like so like idiosyncratic and like almost random
how these acquisitions happen in many cases where it was like, just like depending on how
a particular person feels like this seems like the thing to buy. And I think in my case, uh,
Stripe has this kind of cool project internally called like the crazy ideas list. And it's like,
Hey, everybody write down like the craziest ideas. Like if it's a reasonable idea, it's not allowed
on this list. Like you need to write down like just crazy things that we could potentially do
that might win big. And I think like some version of indie hackers have been on the list for many
years. You know, like what if we have like a community for early stage startup founders
just because we're a company like Stripe that wins like a lot of business from early startups.
Like these startups grow and they might be making a thousand dollars a month now, but like
five years from now they could be lift. And so like winning like the hearts and minds of early
stage startups matters a lot. And so that idea was on there and they just like never did it.
Right. Cause there's like maybe a thousand ideas on that list. And then I started in indie hackers.
It just worked. It worked really well. And it just like happened to very luckily perfectly align
with what they wanted to do. Or it's like, okay, well it's like empowering people to get started
and inspiring them. And Stripe is a company that cares like a lot about its reputation. It's not
an accident like that. Stripe hasn't had, you know, any sort of major scandals like almost every other
huge unicorn company. It's because the founders care a lot. And we like have a lot of good,
like well among founders and developers and like make a lot of decisions at the company that like
are, you know, have that in mind. It's like to do best by people. And so indie hackers was like
also a huge check in that direction where like people just really liked indie hackers. Like they
liked the positivity, like the optimism. It was all about like how you can do it. You know, how
you can kind of stick it to the man and like start your own business was very empowering.
And I think crucially it did two things. It inspired people to start businesses who previously
might not have had the confidence to do it. And it also helped people with businesses succeed.
And like both of those things are very good for a company like Stripe that clearly wants more
businesses to exist and more businesses to succeed. And what were some of your concerns
once you started, after you got out of the initial wave of, oh my God, then you're like, wow,
would I sell this? Should I sell this? Like how did you think about some of the trade-offs and
tensions there? One of the things that was weighing heaviest on my mind was like, I just
really didn't like selling ads. I was really not having a great time. I mean, I was making money.
It was like fun, fun to get checks, but like I wanted to make indie hackers bigger and better.
I wanted to spend a lot more time coding the community. Like at that time, the community
only had like maybe like 40, 50 conversations a week. Now it's got like tens of thousands. And I
just wanted the time to do that. And so I was thinking, okay, well, if I go to Stripe, what are
they going to have me working on? How much say are they going to have and what I'm doing and
how much does their vision align with what my vision is for the company? And if it's off by even
like a small amount, maybe that's not a big deal today, but like four or five years from now,
that could be a huge deal. Like a small gap can turn into a really big gap. And so I really wanted
to know like, okay, are we going to be aligned? I wanted to know, because that's kind of like for
the betterment of the community, like the people at indie hackers, like is this going to be good
for them? You know, if you have a community and you have something where like all your users are
quite vocal, especially if they come from Hacker News, which most of the actors did, these are
opinionated people, these are opinionated people and they don't like tend to look kindly on
acquisitions that go wrong and watching their favorite products die. So I wanted to know, okay,
like is indie hack is going to be better off for this? I wanted to know if I was going to be better
off from this, you know, how much money is this acquisition going to like make me right? Like how
does it compare? The whole point of indie hackers, right, is like, yeah, this has got to like...
Yeah, if I'm going to no longer be sort of like technically indie, you know, like what is the
trade off I'm making and like how indie will I be? I have this whole point that I make to friends
and like they, it always gets like mixed reception, but like I think everybody's kind of a business,
even if you're an employee, you should think of yourself as a business. Anytime you change
their hands, you should think of yourself as a business. If you want to learn how to improve
your career, like read a business book and think about yourself as a business. And so,
you know, as an employee, like, yeah, you might seem like you have no power. But like I learned
from contracting, like you have a lot of power, if you can make like the value or the service or
product you provide to your employer really unique, like it's harder to fire you. And it's
like you're more valuable, you can get paid more, you can get paid what you're worth rather than
being paid like very little because you have so many competitors have the exact same job title as
you. And like, you know, so many other parts of like the employee experience relate to being a
business, you know, like everybody has marketing experience, if you've ever made a resume, like
that's basically an ad. And when you've like shipped it out to, you know, potential employers, like,
that's like basically marketing. And if you've done an interview, like you've done sales,
because you're trying to sell yourself. So I thought about myself in that light, like,
okay, well, how much freedom and independence am I going to have as an employee of Stripe,
like who am I going to report to? You know, what are they going to be telling me to do if anything?
And I think the kind of imagine even though this idea was on the Stripe crazy ideas list for a
long time, probably the reason nobody ever did it is like, you got to focus on like, do it,
you can't be like pulled in like, oh, yeah, like, I know you're doing this thing, right? But like,
hey, we've got this bug, like, can you just like jump in and like fix it? Or like, totally, you
know, we got to do this thing, like, you know, you can get back to doing that thing, but you got to
do this thing, like, you know, that was probably on your mind, right? And it's also like a completely
different type thing, like the average sort of engineer, like a bigger startup is not like
someone with a lot of startup experience, you know, there isn't like a roadmap for like, here's how
you start a large community of founders, you know, there's no like step by step process,
like it hasn't really been done before. For some reason, like there just aren't large communities
of founders that have like really thrived online. And so it's kind of easier to wait for somebody
else to do it, then it is like pick a random employee and be like, good luck, you know, you're
gonna go make you a star. I mean, some people can do it, but like, that's not why people typically
apply to jobs, because that's, you know, if they wanted to do that, they would go start their own
thing. So I was kind of worried, you know, like, okay, what is my responsibility gonna be like,
am I gonna be like a normal Stripe employee or not? And then like, sort of the third box,
besides just like me and the community was like, what is Stripe want to get out of this? I really
wanted to know like what Stripe wanted to get out of it, because it's hard to predict, you know,
if we're gonna align, if I don't know, like why you're even doing this. And like to Patrick and
the leadership teams, like credit, like, they're just very open minded folks, you know, like they
don't necessarily need a ton of proof that something's gonna work, right? If something's
like directionally pointing in the right direction, and it can work, like they're more than happy to
take a chance. And with like any hackers in Stripe, it's kind of like, any hackers doesn't
really capture a lot of the value that it creates, you know, if people start companies and their
company succeed, because of any hackers, because of a story they heard, because somebody helped
them on the community, like, how do I make money from that? Like, it turned out like I didn't,
but like other companies do this that can capture that value, including Stripe, because if Stripe
is the best product on the market, like what are they going to use for their new companies,
they're going to use Stripe. And so Patrick, like really just trusted like, hey, we think that you
can make any hackers really big, really meaningful, you've done a great job so far. It's hard to even
measure, like even if you do make it big, like we'll never really know exactly how much has contributed
and sort of added when to our sales, but like that's fine. And so a couple of questions here,
and I'll ask them together. So, you know, both are coming. The first one, you don't have to give me
numbers or clauses, but I'm looking for broad strokes. What do you need to put into a legal
contract in order to allay those concerns? And what, what do you just leave to trust? Because
ultimately these things really are come down to, do you trust me? Do I trust you? And are we aligned?
So that's the first one. The second one is how on earth do you go about figuring out what a fair
deal looks like based on what your business was before it was acquired? Yeah, these are tricky
questions. And I never feel like the most qualified to answer acquisition questions. Like people,
even though this is acquired, people call me all the time, like, Hey, I'm going through an
acquisition. You went through one. Like what happened with you? I'm like, it's so specific to
my situation. I had no employees. Yeah, it was like a solo founder with no employees,
like hadn't even incorporated. But like, there's some like little tricks and things that helped
me. So the first thing that happened was that Patrick suggested that we communicate over text.
So we like got on WhatsApp, which instantly, like I was like, Oh, this is so smart. Because like,
I had been sitting there, like, I think it was a Sunday, like typing out an email, like this like
sort of acquisition numbers negotiation. And it was like such a high pressure thing. Like,
what am I going to say in this email? Like versus texts, just like so casual, just kind of firing
off like messages. And like, it just like lowers sort of the stress and like almost the adversarial
nature of it. And along in a strong way. So that was kind of like the first tip. But then I thought
about, okay, well, how do I value, you know, what indie hackers is worth? Like, what am I going to
be happy with here? And I think your first question was also like, how much does trust come into it?
So like, the first thing I started doing was trying to answer both of these questions, actually,
through kind of back channeling. So I just emailed as many people as I knew, who either worked at
Stitch Stripe, had dealings with Stripe, or had dealings with Patrick in the past. I'm like, hey,
what kind of person am I dealing with? And I got like, a lot of really positive stories. Like this
is a person who cares deeply about like, what's good for people, etc, very ethical, etc. And like,
I think you need that level of trust. Because like in a contract, as I soon found out, like,
there's just so many random like loopholes, and like edge cases that you haven't considered. And
just like really easy ways to get kind of screwed over. Like at some point, I was talking to Patrick
and we were hammering things out. And at like one point, I got an email that wasn't from Patrick,
it was from like, Stripe General Counsel. And I'm like, Oh, shit, like, maybe I should have a lawyer,
because I don't know what this guy's talking about. So then I went and hired a lawyer and like,
her name was Mattal, she was great. But she was just like the most paranoid person ever. She was
like, here are all the ways that they're gonna screw you up. They're gonna do this, they're gonna
do that, they're gonna do this. And like every single contract that like came, she like found
some way to tighten up the language or just like go to bat for me in ways where like, because I had
a lot of trust, perhaps naively, like I just would have been like, that's fine. Like they have like
the best intentions here. And so it's kind of like, you know, trust, but verify like I had a lot of
trust. And I don't think I would have done the deal if I didn't trust that like, everybody involved
was being sincere with what they said that they're like sort of thoughts aligned with their actions
and their words. But also having someone in my corner to like make sure that these things
wouldn't happen was I think important and gave me a lot of security.
Oh, well, the thing about these situations like this is like
the documents and the clauses and all that, they exist for when things go sour, you know, like
anytime you are looking at those documents, like things are on a bad path. You don't ever want to
look at them. Yeah. But if you have to look at them, you know, what is written in those documents
is what is going to happen. Exactly. So they're important and they matter. And I think in my
situation, like what kind of happened is that we like agreed on numbers, but at like in a very like
high level, nonspecific, like this is what would make us all happy way. And that happened like
pretty quickly. It didn't take that long. And like part of that was also doing research, like how
much the engineers at Stripe get paid. Like, can I, you know, by that point I was pretty good at
getting people to reveal like numbers to me from working on any hackers. So I got a lot of numbers
and I was like, okay, like this is what I want. And I was like, try to be a firm negotiator,
but like you kind of agree on these numbers. And then you go to like, draw up a document. And it
turns out there's like just a million little edge cases, you know, like, okay, like, for example,
if you're talking about stock, like, what kind of stock do you want? Like, what class? Like,
when does it fast? What period is it fast? Like how long I had a refreshes work, like all sorts of
different things that I think if you're kind of like a typical employee, you might not consider.
But if we're coming in through an acquisition, like the sky's the limit, like you can ask for
our demand, like literally whatever you want and put it in a contract, it's going to be your special
contract that no one else at the company has anything that's even like that. So for me, like,
it wasn't just like kind of worst case scenario. It was like, okay, well, like now it's this whole
like phase two of negotiations where like, you know, talking about all these little details that
we hadn't even considered, you know? Yeah. And what I'm curious, what mechanics did you put in
place? Obviously it wasn't like, okay, here's a bunch of cash. Welcome to Stripe. Like it's
either stock or it's vesting, or it's tied to incentive based targets for indie hackers,
or it's tied to Stripe as a company rather than indie hackers. Like what types of,
how did you sort of structure the way that there would be incentives over time for both sides?
I don't know how much I'm legally allowed to say.
And don't even get close. Like I think that what we're interested is like,
how should people, if they're going into a situation like this, think about that.
Yeah. So I think the first thing to be aware of is just like all the different options that you
have. I think it's very easy when you think about an acquisition to just think like number, you know,
this company sold for X amount, right? But like, that's like, from my, in my experience,
rarely how it happens. It's rarely that simple. And like some of the other options are just much
more advantageous. Like often companies will like give you more equity than they will give you cash.
And if you can sort of like evaluate the company, like if it's Stripe, like the love of God, like
take the equity. Yeah, take the stock. You know, if it's like, if it's Groupon and like,
I don't know, you know, maybe you want the cash and like, this is like an exercise.
This is the difference I think between, you know, like, like Salesforce by Slack,
it's about the number, right? Like that's because it's a company buying, it's an entity
buying a corporate entity, buying corporate entity with an indie hacker business. Like,
no, it's you, you know, like, I don't know what like Elon Musk situation is, but he has like all
these like weird like earn out bonuses where he gets like more money if like the stock price goes
up. So even like those big company situations, like there's all sorts of ways to sort of like
figure things out. Like, you know, if Salesforce buys Slack, like what does that mean for Stuart
Butterfield? Like perhaps he could say like, I want more money if we get these extra targets,
et cetera. And perhaps Mark Benioff would be like, sure, that's fine. And so I think if you can like
think about kind of these creative ways to sort of like align your incentives, it can, you know,
result in like a happier process. And maybe on both sides, like maybe your acquirer wants to pay
you more if you hit performance targets, because like the risk for them isn't the initial cash
outlay, it's that it's not going to pay off in the future. And so if they know you're incentivized
like to actually do a good job, then I think that that can be kind of a win-win, even though like,
you know, they're sort of on the hook for more money in the future. In my particular case, like
it's funny, because IndieHackers is very much an IndieHacker business, you know, I was just like
making money from advertisers, I had like some affiliate links on the site, I think I was making
like seven and a half, $8,000 a month by the time Stripe acquired the company. Whereas like today,
I feel much more like a high growth startup, where like Stripe owns IndieHackers, but they're like
almost kind of like an investor. And like my goal is to like grow as much as possible. And like I
don't make any money, like IndieHackers doesn't like have any sort of revenue we bring in, we have
kind of a budget, which is almost like funding to help us grow. And so it was like represented
kind of like a complete change in how I viewed growing my own business. And I kind of went to
this, almost to this, like the exact opposite of what like the stereotypical IndieHacker company
is trying to do. It's an interesting, you know, the comp at that point is more to intrapreneurship,
which is such a funny word, because it's like they took a French word and then, you know,
changed the change to sound like an English word to get the point across. Anyway,
what differences do you notice between IndieHackers, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe,
and I'm sure that that may not exactly be technically correct, but it's sort of its own
brand, it just has a buy Stripe thing on it's run by you versus the things that start within Stripe,
but are their own self contained thing like Stripe Press, or like Stripe Atlas.
Yeah, I mean, I think branding is the by far the biggest difference, because it's pretty obvious
to most, most people who are aware of IndieHackers know that IndieHackers started before Stripe. And
they know that it's kind of like my thing, I'm very transparent, like they're gonna listen to
this podcast and be like clearly Portland is running this on its own, you know, this is not
like a super heavy handed Stripe initiative. Plus, like a lot of people don't even know IndieHackers
is owned by Stripe, like there's like a very small like little logo that says like etched like
Stripe at the very bottom of the website that you kind of have to search to find, which is freeing
in a way because it gives me the ability to make my own decisions that don't necessarily reflect
on the Stripe brand. Like I remember a buddy of mine at Stripe who kind of ran like the Stripe
Atlas community, like got an email from IndieHackers, he's like, oh my god, you said fucking an email,
like a Stripe email. And I'm like, I said fucking like a thousand in these emails.
There's no other stripers that kind of monitoring that, you know, there's a lot of trust that goes
both ways, like I trust Stripe and they trust me. And like, it doesn't, you know, it's weird in a
way, like, like a lot of the positive things and feelings people have about IndieHackers,
sort of get a crew to Stripe. But like some of the riskier decisions like don't weigh on Stripe
at all. So it's almost best of both worlds. Whereas I think if like I, you know, started some
Stripe product internally, like Stripe Press, like that's Stripe's name, like literally in the name,
which means it's a certain like level of quality that has to rise to, there's a certain standard
that has to rise to, it's harder to get things off the ground when you do that, like you need
to match like certain accessibility standards and have like a certain reach of people in different
countries and have all these different languages. I think it's just harder to iterate on any sort
of like startup type initiative that's trying to find product market fit if you have all of these
expectations on you. This is why I think it's smart for like Google when they're doing their
innovations to like try to like spend things out of the Google brand and just have them be like
dissociated. So like people don't have these expectations because you just kind of need to
start with something embarrassing and rough. Well, YouTube's a great example, right? Like
Google bought YouTube, there was still like the Viacom lawsuit was going on. Like there was all
sorts of, you know, people were up in arms. There's crazy stuff happening. You can maybe say there's
still this crazy stuff happening on YouTube. Although now it's like Google video was a failing
product. Like it was trying to be the exact same thing, but it was going through Google.
Yeah, they weren't gonna just, you know, put movies up on there that were filmed with a,
you know, camcorder in a theater. Like you can take bigger risks through an acquisition,
especially of an established brand on its own. That's really cool. Totally. All right. So tell
us now, why has it made sense for Stripe? And, um, I mean, this is a little bit of a softball
question, but like, how's it going? How's it gone? Was it a good idea for Stripe to buy any hackers?
What have you built to do any integrations? If, uh, um, if you have, yeah, so, uh, I mean,
it's worth like noting sort of my working style at Stripe is that I've reported to Patrick since
I got here. We don't meet all that often, you know, there have been years where we met like
twice, years where I've sent him like weekly updates, not on his request, but on my request,
because I just wanted him to know what's going on. Um, everything I've added to indie hackers,
literally everything that I've done has been 100% my choice. There's not been a single request
from Stripe saying, Hey, can you do this? That's happened. So a couple of things have happened
since we joined Stripe. I remember like meeting Patrick maybe nine months after the acquisition
and he was like, Oh, this looks really good. Like I was kind of worried that for you to grow,
you would sort of have to just kind of run faster and faster. Because when Stripe acquired indie
hackers, it was still primarily just kind of a media company. Like we were doing nothing but
putting out these interviews and we had this like very fledgling community forum, but like it was
like, you had to like click a link to get to it. And it was only like a small number of people.
Whereas today, the bulk of what happens on any hackers is sort of user powered. It's more of
like an actual platform where like, I'm not doing like the vast majority of the value that
indie hackers creates the world is like, does not come from me. You did it. You shifted from media
company to software product. Exactly. Which I always wanted to do, but it took Jesus. Did it
take a long time? So probably I would say like the biggest accomplishment since joining Stripe was
just the growth of the community forum, which is now on the homepage. If you go to indiehackers.com,
you just see dozens of conversations where hundreds of people are sort of helping each
other out, asking questions, and like helping each other start companies meeting co-founders
without me really doing anything. And company profile, like the company profiles you create
through interviews, and that people create themselves, they're all mixed together.
Yeah, yeah, kind of. And I've been trying to like consolidate things and not quite
consolidated yet. So there's kind of a separate section on the website where you can go and you
can read. And then we've done about 500 interviews now, all the different interviews from indie
hackers who've kind of shared their stories. And like you can kind of sort and filter those.
You can also go to sort of the product directory, which I mentioned earlier,
where it's just more like self serve, like anybody can add a product there, you can share how much
money you're making, share your milestones along the way. And everybody sort of there competes to
have like the best milestone every day. So we have this leaderboard that kind of resets
and overposts like the best update for that day in terms of upvotes gets to the top of the leaderboard
and they get more traffic, etc. And so it's kind of a mechanism to incentivize people to fill out
these little timelines, which has a side effect that everybody else can go read the timelines and
learn how to build a company from these examples. So that's grown to like 12,000 products, we've got
500 interviews, we have a podcast that, you know, went from, I think just maybe like 1000 downloads
total when Stripe acquired any hackers to now millions of downloads. And the community forum
has gone from just a few dozen conversations a week to the point where there's like 1000 comments
a day, over 250 posts every single day in the community forum, and just like 10s of thousands
of people helping each other out. So you know, based on the numbers, any hackers has grown like
tremendously since we've joined Stripe. And one of the things like we like to measure is kind of
like a rough estimate of like how many people have started companies as a result of any hackers. So
we kind of send out like a survey to people, maybe six months or so after they join. And, you know,
we ask them to say like true or false or different questions. And one of them is, you know, you know,
would you have started your company if not for any hackers? And most people are like, Oh, yeah,
I would have started it anyway, or I haven't started yet. But a good 15 to 20% of people,
depending on the month, say they would not have started their company if they didn't encounter
some story or some person on any hackers. And if you multiply that by like 140,000, you know,
different people who've joined the community forum, like that's, that's a very substantial
number of companies. Yeah, it's a lot of tiny companies. And some of them have like gotten
bigger, gotten acquired. A lot of them are on Stripe. And sort of the way that Patrick explained
to me earlier when I first joined Stripe was like, Hey, it's your job to, you know, get people to
start companies. It's our job to have a product that's good enough to win them over. You know,
I'm not like sitting here trying to like Hawk Stripe and convert people to Stripe. Like,
that's something that Stripe does on its own. I'm also curious, approximately what percent of
indie hackers use Stripe as their, for their company. We don't really have like a process. Like,
we don't measure, right? You know, like there's like, it's a lot of just trust, right? Okay. Like,
we know that Stripe is pretty damn good as a product comes up on the community forum all the
time. I think it was the most referenced company and all the interviews that I did even before
joining Stripe. I mean, honestly, I don't even know what else you would use. If you want to take
payments on the internet, you could use a ton of other stuff, but they're just like custom services
that are white labeling Stripe underneath. Like that's what glow is like. Yeah. Like I don't
even know if there is another alternative. It's a really good product. Yes, David,
there are alternatives. It was also a very, very, very good product.
So alternatives worth using. Let's put it that way.
And what was that 140,000 user number when you were acquired?
We had exactly 1,403 users on the day that we got acquired by Stripe. So we're 100x bigger today.
Almost exactly 100x bigger.
Yeah, almost exactly 100x. Wow.
Just pretty cool. It's cool to see how that's cool.
Yeah. There's a lot of stuff to look into too. It's like, okay, well, how much bigger is the
podcast? Like how many more conversations are people having? Because it's not just about having
more people, but it's about engaging them more. How many return visits do people have? And we track
a lot of random stuff, but number of users straightforwardly 100x bigger in three years.
If Stripe hadn't acquired indie hackers, it's not like all the companies that have been created
wouldn't have used Stripe. I don't think you'd influence any of their decision on who to use for
payments. So what they were really doing is saying like, man, this thing is really good for our
business that it exists. Let's make sure it can thrive as much as possible. But it's interesting
to me trying to think through the scenario where Stripe didn't acquire indie hackers and the exact
same outcome happened for Stripe. Again, I don't measure would you have used Stripe. It's not even
my goal really to make people use Stripe. It's my goal to make people start companies. I want
people who would never have started a company because they didn't think it was possible. They
hadn't seen anyone like them start a company. They didn't see a path. When they hear a story
on the indie hackers podcast, when they go on the forum and they see somebody who's like,
like I met a YC founder at this Stripe event a couple years ago. And I was just kind of talking
to him and he's like, yeah, I love indie hackers. I'm like, you know, what's your experience with
it? He's like, Oh, I read the story you did with this guy who started this like review site. And
I'm like, I'm way smarter than this guy could start a company. So I did then I got into YC.
And now I don't go to any hackers anymore. That's, that's pretty, it's pretty common. Like,
I meet a lot of people like that. He was just like inspired and like they literally started
because he just read that it was possible. And when I think about like me, like I started my
career because like people told me it was possible, you know, and I think spreading those stories helps
people get started. And like, that's literally all I care about. Like I don't care how many of
these people end up using Stripe. Like that's the job of Stripe engineers and product managers,
like make Stripe the best product. It's a bet on the internet being able to enable people to create
far more companies than they otherwise could have. Did you see these these stats that came out last
quarter about like new business creation? Or it's like, yes, yeah, like 600 people or 600,000 people
a quarter in the United States are creating businesses like 10 years ago. And then last year
was like 800,000 people a quarter. And this year it's like one in 1.6 million people created a
business or filed to start a business in like Q3 2020, which is insane. So cool. It's doubled.
What does that say for like, aren't there more and more winner take all opportunities? Like,
are we seeing now we're well into playbook, but are we seeing basically like a barbellification
where the big startups consolidate to only a few big winners in each market, but then there's like
massive, massive opportunity to go after long tail. Yeah, I think number one, there's a lot of these
winner take all startups, but almost all of them create niche business opportunities for other
founders. And so it's not like this exclusive thing like, Oh, they took the Facebook took the
social networking market. Now there's no business opportunities. Well, it's like turns out a ton
of media companies get started off the back of that and a ton of like app companies get started
off the back of that. And like, there's companies that like teach you how to build a Facebook page
to get started off the back of that. So like, I think as an indie hacker, you don't have to worry
too much about the winner take all companies. And then we have all these like platforms, you know,
YouTube, sub stack only fans, arguably, you know, Twitter, where people are just like building
audiences and businesses off the back of all those things. And so what's kind of cool is,
it's kind of like never going to be, you know, all the niches are taken, there's no ideas left.
And also, I think what people underestimate is just the number of people adopting technology for
the first time, because just because like zoom exists, doesn't mean everybody uses it. Like we've
seen very clearly this year, way more people are using zoom, because they've been forced to adopt
this thing that they've been kind of ignoring in the past, because they just like didn't want to.
And so as more and more people get on the internet and create businesses,
and like use these products, it's more opportunities. And then like most successful
indie hacker businesses sell to other businesses. So it's kind of like this self fulfilling
sort of chain reaction, where the more businesses there are, the more like products they need.
And so it's kind of cool to see it accelerating. And I wouldn't be surprised if that number,
you know, in a few years is like 5 million Americans a month are creating an online business.
Hmm. Yeah, that's what I was thinking on that is like, you know, you've got the platforms,
like say, let's look at Stripe or Shopify, like, and then you've got people that like start
Shopify stores or start businesses on the internet and use Stripe. But then there's
this whole other category that I think is like perfect for any hackers of like,
oh, well, there's actually stuff that you can build to help the people that are using Shopify
that are using Stripe that like, you know, there's so many businesses that have been started around
Shopify that are like and Stripe 2 that are like, not a business on Shopify, they're a business
that provides us a custom set of tools for a certain set of users that need like, like hobby
businesses, like your hobby game store, and you are both buying and selling from your customers,
like your customers come and they trade and stuff like, you can run on Shopify, great.
But like, you also need some custom functionality to buy stuff from your customers, right? Boom,
businesses. Exactly. And I think like a lot of the smarter like founders are figuring out ways to
kind of escape the competition because it's like, okay, you can build like a Shopify plugin, but
there's like a lot of other Shopify plugins. So it's a cool opportunity. But then you get kind
of crowded out. Like I'm talking to a guy tomorrow, his name is Jordan O'Connor. And he's got like a
really cool story where he's like, you know, a father, a husband, he had a full time job,
and he would like eke out time every morning to kind of work on his business because he knew that
like, after like 8am, Sam was going to be awake, he's gonna have no time at all to do anything.
And so what he ended up doing was kind of escaping the competition. And he built a bot
for this app called Poshmark, which is huge. Yeah, a lot of people buy and sell like they're
used clothing on Poshmark, but they don't have a marketplace like they have no like they don't even
have an official API. So we just sort of like reverse engineered things. He's like, there's
not gonna be any competition here. But it's kind of the same playbook like build, you know, for
this an ancillary tool for this bigger platform. And he built like kind of a bot that helps you
like do well on Poshmark. And I think he got to like 20 grand a month. And now he's just kind of
like put his job, he's just kind of set. And he's just like doing other fun projects now that like,
you know, interest him from year to year. Well, that bot just kind of makes money for him in the
background. Magic software. Pretty crazy. All right, well, I'm gonna start bringing us
bringing us home here. Cortland answer this question. However, you see fit, but how would
you grade the indie hackers acquisition by stripe in terms of was that a good use of capital and
resources for stripe? Oh, a plus, I think it's I'm slightly biased. Like stripe is a company,
as you may know, that has lots and lots of money. And the India actors acquisition did not cost
billions of dollars. I think it's generated only goodwill towards stripe, more customers,
more users for stripe. And I think it's done well for literally everybody involved. I think
stripes happy to have it. I'm happy to be a part of stripe. And I think for the people who use
any hackers, they're very concerned early on, you know, they're very worried. And I don't think I've
met a single person who said that they aren't happy that it happened. So it's hard to imagine it
having gone better. Yeah. Should more people do this? Like basically bet on I mean, the way that
I'm sort of categorizing this in my head is they made an investment to ensure the continuity of
this thing that was creating new customers for them. Do other companies do that? Should more
companies do that? I think they should be a lot more creative and imaginative. I think like there's
like as humans, we have this impulse to just like, to just like mess with things. It's really hard to
buy something and then not touch it. Yeah, you know, it's really hard to do that. And I think
when people think about like, okay, if I buy this, like what am I going to do with it? I think, oh,
it's gonna be like so much work have to do this have to do that. And they don't like make these
acquisitions. Whereas I think it's striped very very much like no, Portland's doing a good job.
And we have to do anything. And like if we can just ensure that it keeps going, like you said,
like that's a huge win by itself. But this other wins too, you know, I think one of the trends
we're going to see going forward is like tech companies basically owning like some kind of
media company, which I think is super powerful because like media companies are what connects
with actual people on the ground. And in a way, like any hackers are still very much a media
company, like I still spend a lot of time in the podcast, we spend a lot of time on our newsletter,
but out a ton of content. And we're sort of like becoming a platform almost like sub stack ask,
where we're enabling other people to sort of build newsletters and grow their audiences on
any hackers. So I think like even without just like having any hackers continue to exist,
and even without it like driving excess additional customers to Stripe, it's just a good way for
Stripe to be able to communicate in the future if it wants to, you know, we're launching this thing
or like, you know, we're, we think this about the world. And like now they have a place that's not
just Hacker News or Twitter to do that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Has Stripe done any,
anything else like this since you've been bought? Or yeah, Stripe has a magazine called increment
magazine, increment.com. It's kind of like the best sort of magazine for all sorts of basically
work that gets done. So they've done like issues on like software engineering and APIs and the cloud
and being on call. And like people love this magazine. It's really well produced. It was created
by kind of initially Susan Fowler, who was the engineer who kind of blew the whistle on Uber
back in the day. And actually works, I think at the New York Times. So that's like a really cool
like Stripe project that I don't think gets enough press and attention. There's also like Stripe
press, which is kind of like an in house thing. It wasn't like exactly acquired. But all these sort
of initiatives, I think, you know, involve often people who are like come in from outside the
company and help. And they're all like kind of moonshots. You know, I put it in a very similar
category to Andy hackers, even though it's like, you know, different. But it's something that most
companies like wouldn't do, but like Stripe kind of trust like, okay, well, what if we put out like
these books that like help people become better founders make better decisions to start more
companies? Like we don't, it's hard to measure like how many people actually read this book and
made a decision because of it. But like we can kind of trust that like they will do that because
like we know that's how inspiration works. And like it'll increase stripes bottom line.
Yeah, makes total sense. All right. Well, for acquired listeners, because I know we're releasing
this in both feeds, where, where can people find you? What should they check out first of the
various indie hackers and Cortland properties? Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to really get into
indie hackers is the podcast. So if you just go to your podcast player and search for indie hackers,
it will come right up top for you. Check out any of the episodes, they're all pretty good,
they're all different stories of founders and how they succeeded. And so I just recommend
listening to a few of them. And really absorbing like, you know, what is this path like? You know,
how can you start off maybe as an anti hacker, and then eventually grow to start a much bigger
company of interviewed like lots of founders of like YC funded companies and VC funded companies,
but also tiny indie hackers, you don't want to grow anymore. So check out the podcast.
And you can find me on Twitter at CS Allen. Awesome. Love it.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, and you want an easy way to support the podcast,
you should leave a review for us on iTunes or Apple podcasts. Probably the fastest way to get
there if you're on a Mac is to visit indiehackers.com slash reviews. I really appreciate your support
and I read pretty much all the reviews you leave over there. Thank you so much for listening. And
as always, I will see you next time.