What's up everyone, this is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and today I'm excited to
be sitting down with my buddy Tyler Tringis of Storm Mapper.
How's it going Tyler?
Hey Cortland, doing well, thanks for having me.
No problem, so we already did a text interview back in August, you were one of the first
people to come on IndieHackers after the launch, and then we met at MicroConf a couple of weeks
ago in person, and I told you I think then that your Storm Mapper interview is probably
the one that I reference the most often when telling people about educational interviews
and how to get started as an IndieHacker, so to speak, and the reason for that is because
your story is full of lessons that are important for anyone wanting to start an internet business
or a project that makes money online.
So for example, and I think this is a good place to start, a lot of people starting a
business struggle for months with getting their product out the door, but you sat down
and built Storm Mapper and had paying customers in something like 36 hours, so what's the
story behind that?
Well, first of all, I think it's very high praise that you're often citing Storm Mapper
considering the sort of caliber of other entrepreneurs that you've interviewed on IndieHackers,
so that's awesome to hear again.
In terms of building Storm Mapper really quickly, there's sort of two components of that.
The first part is that it wasn't that quick in the sense of you're not counting the sort
of many other products and almost products that I kind of built and launched that just
totally failed before Storm Mapper, so the process from starting that to launching a
product was actually a little bit longer, but Storm Mapper itself, yeah, it was basically
conceived and built and launched in about 36 hours, essentially, you know, Storm Mapper
is a store locator as a service, so you've probably seen this kind of a product all over
the internet, you want to find out where to buy your favorite brand or your favorite new
juice or whatever, put in your zip code and Google Maps comes up and tells you what locations
you can buy it at.
So technically, that's basically a kind of Ruby on Rails app that can sort of handle
the uploading of all that information, where are the stores, what's their addresses, what's
their latitude and longitude, all that kind of stuff, and then an embeddable JavaScript
widget that you can put on your website and that renders the kind of store locator.
At that point in time, I had a lot of things going on in my life, but one of the things
I was doing was freelance web development for Shopify store owners, and a couple of
them asked me to build them a store locator, and I kind of did the math on what it would
take for me to build that myself at my hourly rate, and I was like, guys, this is going
to cost you a few thousand dollars, and they were like, oh sure, no problem, we need it.
So obviously, there was a pretty good willingness to pay there, so I kind of just put it down
in my little idea notebook, like hey, maybe I can productize that kind of a product, and
I kind of did a little research, didn't really see a good option, put it in the back pocket,
and then a couple weeks later, yeah, I was booking a long flight from San Francisco to
Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it was like a first class flight, so I booked it with miles,
kind of did a little travel hacking, so I had basically this like really long period
of time in like a cushy first class seat, and I just sat down and built and launched
it.
Basically, soup to nuts, you know, new Rails project at the start of the flight, landed,
launched it, sent an email to my existing freelance clients, like everyone I'd ever
worked for, and we had paying customers that day, basically.
That's awesome.
I think by comparison, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to work on something
for three months or six months or even a year, just heads down coding, not show it to anybody,
not run their ideas by anybody, and ultimately release a product that nobody wants to pay
for because it's chock full of features that don't matter to them, and as depressing as
that sounds, that's really the optimistic case, because the pessimistic case, and what
happens probably more often is that somebody works on something for six months, never releases
it, and then just gets demotivated and shuts it down, so the case for building something
quickly is not only that will you avoid adding a bunch of features that nobody wants and
wasting time building things that people won't pay for, but you also are way less susceptible
to getting burned out and demotivated.
Was the fact that you could build StormMapper in 36 hours a crucial factor in you choosing
to work on that idea over the other ideas in your idea notebook?
Yeah, well, so at the time, I was in a fairly unique overall life situation.
I was actually working on what ultimately would be a kind of angel-funded, more traditional
startup, so I was already working 60, 70, 80 hours a week trying to get that off the
ground, and I was freelancing on the side to sort of make some money, and what I really
wanted to do was to get some kind of recurring revenue into that mix so that I could start
to dial down the freelance hours and allocate more time to the startup.
So just in that life situation, it was sort of mandatory that I find products that could
be launched really quickly, but I do think that that is something that even if you had
more time, if your aim was to sort of build a product or become an indie hacker, maybe
transitioning from freelance work or a full-time job, trying to find ideas that can be built
really quickly like that is a really good component of success for a lot of reasons.
One reason is that a lot of them will fail, so it's just very good to sort of get the
product out there and start getting feedback kind of immediately.
I guess I would say that's kind of the main reason is that you just have no idea if it's
going to work, but it also just kind of tends to be the germ or the sort of seed of a good
bootstrappable idea is if you can very quickly get to a sort of thing that is creating value.
Even if you do what I did, which is like you strip away everything that people think is
important about having assessments, we didn't have a logo, I didn't have an email address,
the landing page was hilariously bad.
You had no way to cancel or change your password, there were just so many things that were not
in there, but it did what it said on the label.
You could upload a spreadsheet of stores and it could make a sort of a game.
If you find something that you can generate that value that quickly, it's probably the
good seed of an idea that's something that you could bootstrap into like a full business.
Just for context, how much revenue is StormApp are doing today?
We're doing, last month, we crossed $25,000 a month.
Cool.
I want to go back to this ideas thing because you mentioned that you have an idea notebook
and I too have an idea notebook.
How many ideas do you have in there?
At this point, I don't even know.
I have kind of stopped keeping a proper notebook now that I have operating businesses.
One thing that that process of keeping that notebook did was it allowed me to really refine
the process of coming up with an idea and then figuring out how to dismiss it really
fast.
I think that one of the biggest problems that a lot of entrepreneurs face when they're in
that phase of coming up with ideas and trying to figure out which is the one is kind of
getting hung up on a single idea that's a little bit fatally flawed in some way.
Either they don't know how to market it or it's just kind of too big of an idea that
it's going to take too much overall development time.
They don't have time to allocate to it or maybe they're not technical or they're technical
but it's got some machine learning aspect of it that they don't know how to do.
There's one little flaw that prevents them from being able to just sit down and do it
and they just kind of hang on to that and they talk to their friends about it and it
just kind of sits around there.
One of the important parts about the idea notebook is being able to write something
down as a potential idea and then run through this really fast list of could it scale?
Could I find the customers for it?
Can I build it myself, all that kind of stuff and then quickly kind of dismiss it actually
which I think is a really important part about finding a good idea.
Yeah, I totally agree and from a lot of the people that I've talked to, it can be hard
just knowing what it is that makes any particular idea bad or good.
If you're an experienced entrepreneur, you might say, okay, I need to be able to market
it.
I need to be able to actually build it.
I need to have a distribution strategy for it.
It needs to be something that I can launch quickly.
Did you have some sort of formal checklist for evaluating the ideas in your idea notebook
or let's say you were to quit Stormapper today and quit everything else that you're working
on.
How would you go about evaluating ideas and determining if one idea is better than another?
At this point, there's such just tremendous resources online of different entrepreneurs
sharing these kinds of things like indie hackers.
I would probably read through indie hackers and just refresh my knowledge on what kind
of mistakes people have made, what things they didn't think were going to be a problem
when they like plunged headlong into an idea that turned out to be like a big deal.
Something that is like a big negative for, for example, for Stormapper even though it
wasn't deal breaker is that my target customer doesn't really like congregate anywhere.
They're not listed like e-commerce store owners or like VP of marketing at random small to
medium sized brands don't hang out anywhere.
If I hadn't found like one or two inbound lead channels, there would really not be any
way for me to kind of systematically go out and do outbound sales.
I can't just find a bunch of e-commerce store owners and like pick their brain and pitch
them my product like you might be able to do with bloggers because they're super visible
and they hang out on a lot of very popular blogging forums and things like that.
I guess I sort of picked up a couple of those things from things like the lean startup and
stuff like that, but nowadays that's what drives me to sort of blog about my experience
is just sort of help people see down and around those corners a little bit at things that
might be kind of a fatal flaw for an idea, which is something that I think, for example,
you could use any hackers for and all kinds of like other transparent startups that are
really blogging about like what's actually going on in their business.
You've seen a lot, for example, this is like going a little bit far down the road, but
you've seen actually a lot of kind of like transparent bootstrapped-ish startups dealing
with like cashflow crunches, right?
Like hiring too many people, even though they're like revenue was growing strong and like hire
too fast and like buffer is blogs about it and baremetrics blogs about it and ConvertKit
blogs about it, like how they hired super fast and then we're like, oh crap, our top
line is doing well, but I might have to lay people off.
That kind of stuff, like pay attention to that and then being able to kind of see around
that corner from where you are, I think is really valuable.
It's cool that you mentioned Andy Hackers as being a source of inspiration and learning.
That's exactly why I built the website was so that ideally if we have a collection of
stories of people doing this, some easy, it's easy to find and easy to browse through that
you could just go through a piecemeal and learn from other people's mistakes and it
sort of met away.
I wrote a blog post earlier about how I came up with the idea for Andy Hackers and I had
kind of this like rudimentary checklist for how I evaluated different ideas and compared
them to each other.
I came down to Andy Hackers versus three other ideas and one of the biggest ones and I think
it applies to you, one of the biggest things I had on there was retention.
I wanted to make something where customers wouldn't churn very often and it was a direct
reaction to my previous product Task Force where I had built something and people would
come in the door and then they would churn and they might like the products.
They just didn't want to create tasks and they would just forget about it and with store
mapper you have almost the opposite problem or not even a problem really, you just don't
have to worry that much about it because you're just a store locator.
People put it on their website, it just stays there and they're a customer probably until
they shut their business down which is awesome.
Are there any other things that make store mapper particularly good as a business?
I think you definitely hit on one of the main ones which is that there's really high retention
and this is where stuff like Andy Hackers I think is so useful now to really put things
into context to see like okay once you reach some degree of scale what things matter across
a bunch of different businesses and you can see one of the problems that we don't have
at store mapper is dealing with super high churn and we also don't have to deal with
a incredibly high support load.
Because our product is more or less set it and forget it, that means that for every,
we went from let's say 500 active paying customers to nearly 2000 and basically our number of
support tickets per day did not change.
It's not at all a function of our existing customers, it's a function of just growth,
just new customers coming in because pretty much like we have some sort of onboarding
stuff with them, we help them get their data formatted, we help the kind of embedded product
look good on their website and they're pretty much good to go for more or less in perpetuity
as opposed to something like a bug tracking sass for agile dev teams where people are
using it all the time and as they grow and if you 3X your active customer base you would
at least 3X your support requirements.
That's something you might not necessarily think about when you're just, even if you're
just being really sensible and lean and you're talking to customers and you figure out what's
your pain point and all that kind of stuff, if you don't think about how are they going
to use this and what's retention going to look like and what's the support requirements
going to look like, you can sort of end up in a place where you sort of solve the pain
point but you haven't necessarily built the kind of business that you wanted to build.
That's something that I think it's really useful to sort of go through all these businesses
and look around those corners basically.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think there's something to be said for, especially if you're newer, taking some time
to read about people who've come before you so you don't end up repeating their mistakes
because a lot of these things are predictable if you have some experience or if you've read
about them but if you're just starting out you don't necessarily think that far ahead.
When I built Task Force, I really didn't think that much about retention or customer support
and I had the same problems that you mentioned.
Even when I was building Indie Hackers, I really didn't think that much about how mind-numbing
it would be to eventually end up selling ads and it's something that I would have put more
thought into if I had researched content businesses a little bit more.
But yeah, there's definitely two ways to learn and one is from your own experience and one
is from other people's experiences and I think they're both crucial.
One of the things that people struggle with a lot whenever they start a new business is
growth, especially going from zero to one, kind of getting your first customer in the
door.
Additionally, going from your first customer on to hundreds of customers like you've done
with Storm Mapper.
One of the cool things that I've seen from business to business is that the things that
get you your first few customers aren't necessarily what get you to 100 and the things that get
you 100 customers aren't necessarily what get you to 1,000 customers.
They usually ends up being different phases where your customers come in through different
channels.
Can you talk a little bit about how you got your very first customers?
Yeah, totally.
I think you're right.
I think actually, I think I want to say that Rob Walling was the first person that I saw
characterize this like this, but as kind of like a stair stepping approach to growth where
you sort of will find one or two channels that work really well to a point and there's
just diminishing returns and you have to like switch gears to hop on to a new track and
that's kind of what you end up doing is leapfrogging from kind of acquisition channel to acquisition
channel as you grow.
For me early on, I mean, I would say the most integral part to me getting my first customers
was the previous year that I spent freelancing for e-commerce brands mostly on Shopify.
That was where I got a very strong sense of the willingness to pay and the original sort
of product idea came from those clients and then the very first paying customers came
from that customer base and that's kind of one of the things that I sometimes find myself
like repeating and saying to people all the time who kind of ask the question about finding
your first customers or finding a good idea is sometimes there's like a little bit of
path dependency, right?
There's sort of things that you can't necessarily shortcut or sidestep around and one of those
may be that if you want to build some amazing new accounting software, you need to go spend
a year freelancing and consulting for accountants and that's just the main way that you get
in there, make some contacts and find your first customers and so that's how I find the
very first ones.
Of course, that's not a channel really, that was just a couple dozen existing clients.
After that, I started to get really manual so one of the things is where do your customers
congregate?
I mentioned earlier that in general, my customer base doesn't congregate places but there was
at least one small area where they were congregating which are the forums for the individual e-commerce
platforms.
For example, Shopify, BigCommerce, those kinds of things.
Those all have forums and I would just go onto the forums and some people will be explicitly
saying like, hello, I would like to build a store locator and I would just say, hey,
let's try this app but other places, I would just go and be helpful with people who seem
like they were in similar, they might be potential customers and I had a little signature in
like forum signature that just had like the pitch for a store mapper and I wouldn't really
try to be spammy about it, I would just like help people out with their like customization
problems and that got, I would say, the next few dozen customers and then another kind
of tactic that works very early on is to look for people who are actively sort of seeking
this kind of general solution, right?
So who are sort of putting their pain point out there and that usually comes in the form
of jobs boards, right?
So I would go on like Upwork or I guess back then it was ODesk and Elance and those things
and look for people who were looking to hire freelancers to build them a store locator and
I would just pitch them and say, look, you know, just use my app instead, it's a lot
cheaper but that's pretty broadly applicable like hopefully if you're at your business
idea is good, people should be somewhere looking for it and those things can be like fairly
kind of reciprocal, right?
So like if people are really fundamentally not looking for your product idea, then you
might not have a very good business idea, right?
If your customer doesn't know that they need this and they're just under no circumstances,
googling for it or searching for it or anything, it's gonna be very hard to actually find customers.
So sometimes you need to kind of iterate back and forth between the methods of finding your
first customers and whether or not that actually is a good business idea and sometimes it goes
the other direction.
Sometimes you just look for people kind of spelling out those pain points and that's
where you get your idea for a business, you know?
Yeah.
Trevor McKendrick came on IndieHackers last week, I believe, he did an interview and he
had something to say that's very related to this which is that people overlook how much
of an advantage it is to be small because what it takes to move the needle at a small
scale is usually just a little bit of manual effort, right?
If you're trying to get your business off the ground and you only have one customer
or no customers, then getting to five or 10 customers is huge and to get to five or 10
customers, you don't have to be amazingly clever, you know, you don't have to come up
with some sort of drop box referral strategy thing that blows the socks off of anything
anyone's ever done before.
You can just get on the phone or you can do what you did and browse, you know, Upwork
or you can find out where people are searching for your problem and contact them on an individual
basis and just do one-on-one sales.
And this has numerous benefits.
Not only does it land to your first customers but you end up actually having these engaged
one-on-one conversations with people who tell you why or why they won't buy your product
and that you can fix your product based on their feedback, it's something that Nathan
Barry also really talked about.
He basically said that direct sales for him were the answer to pretty much every problem
in determining how to market ConvertKit and what kind of copy resonated with people and
what kind of features resonated with people, what kind of features people wanted to buy
and pay for.
So I think the part of your interview that I talked to people the most about is how you
went on Upwork and you found these people who were searching for the problem that you
were solving and engaged them one-on-one because it's just so smart and it's so overlooked
and people trying to figure out how to get their first customers and yet never really
connecting the dots on the possibility that they could just get them one at a time is
really I think one of the things that stops a lot of businesses that might otherwise be
successful from even getting off the ground.
I totally agree and it's really good that you're highlighting that because fundamentally
it's a pretty boring answer to the question of how do I get my customers, right?
Just go find them and talk to them.
But the things that become viral posts on Medium about how to grow your customers are
things that are much, much cleverer and often involve some elaborate partnership or some
bit of coding, growth hack kind of thing and that's the sort of stuff that is out there
in the zeitgeist and really makes an impression on people and so they think that they need
to do something like that at the very beginning but the answer is pretty much just like the
very boring like just go find these customers and like pitch them one by one is often the
very best way to get your first customers I think.
It's really important there though also like just to bring it back to what we were talking
about before like how important having like high retention recurring revenue businesses
can be for this right because like if you have a one-time sale or info product kind
of thing this might not work for you it just might not be worth your time.
You might still need to do it to sort of learn you know how it works but if you genuinely
are selling a sort of one-off you know $39 product it's really not worth your time to
go and like one by one acquire customers whereas it is even if they're going to pay you you
know 10 or 20 bucks a month it's you're sort of you know building that cumulative recurring
revenue but if you've got customers that are churning out really fast or you just have
a kind of one-time sale you need to do this phase for the learning but it may not really
be as kind of economically viable as it is for kind of first process specifically yeah
you have to do the math on your business and find out exactly what kind of customer acquisition
strategy actually works for you and again like we were saying earlier it doesn't necessarily
have to be the thing that's going to make you a millionaire if that's what your goal
is what works in the beginning might not be the same strategy probably won't be the same
strategy you use in the end but yeah if you're doing one-time sales and you have a low price
point then it's not all that scalable to engage customers one-on-one but the other half of
the equation and you nodded to this is the learning aspect talking to Josh Pickford at
Bearmetrics to David Hauser who grew Grasshopper to 30 million dollars a year in revenue they
both said the same thing which is that the most valuable feedback they ever got was doing
sales and doing one-on-one calls with individual customers who when you're actually talking
to them face to face or over the phone will give you the kind of valuable feedback that
you're just not going to hear over email and you're gonna learn exactly why they won't
buy your product and what you need to do to fix it and I think oftentimes even if you're
selling a one-off info product or you're selling a SaaS product and you're in the very early
stages we're trying to figure out okay what is my product what does it do what features
do I add who is going to buy it and why having those conversations is crucial because it
will influence the direction that you go in and another thing that's very related to this
I think Clifford Orvek said this it's that sales is it's the precursor to marketing right
marketing is sales at scale marketing is what you do once you understand your message and
you know what resonates with people and you want to blast it out there and personally
too many thousands of people but sales is where you learn how to craft your message
right it's when you're talking to people you figure out what resonates and if you can't
sell your product to somebody one-on-one then you're probably not going to be able to sell
it to a thousand strangers who visit your landing page for example yeah completely agree
with that the other thing that you said that really resonated with me was that if people
aren't searching for your business online or whatever problem you're solving then you've
got a problem which is it's funny because if you go online and you search for startup
advice and you end up in a blog post written by a venture capitalist they're gonna tell
you solve an unsolved problem you know solve something that note that no one's ever solved
before zero to one and Steve jobs people don't know what they want until they see it yeah
exactly yeah exactly people get sucked into that they're like okay I want to make $10,000
a month so I what I need to do is solve an unsolved problem it's like no what you need
to do is pick a problem that you know people want a solution for right and then make your
own solution that's better yeah having zero competitors is a really big problem if you
want to be an indie hacker right like you the fact that if you have zero competitors
it means like you know it's just very unlikely that you've discovered a sort of totally unmined
vein of problems for a customer base right they should be using something to solve this
problem and acknowledge that it is a pain point for them otherwise it's just you know
without without sort of VC backing and a marketing budget and stuff like that you're just not
gonna be able to find customers if they're not looking for it exactly it's just way harder
and it's not worth pursuing that unless your goal is to become some sort of billion dollar
company and some sort of winner take all market and the only way that you can do that is by
being the first to market which if you're listening to this is probably not your goal
and bringing this back around a store mapper one of the issues that you had was that your
customers as you said don't congregate in any area online where it's easy for you to
market to them so how did you move beyond this initial phase of reaching out to customers
one on one and start you know finding your first channels that could bring in customers
in a scalable more impactful way you know one thing that was really helpful was was
the sort of the fact that many if not all the e-commerce platforms would have kind of
app stores and app directories and things like that so we just made sure that we were
getting listed in all of those kind of one by one and did whatever was necessary to sort
of integrate with those and I think that those app stores particularly kind of B2B app stores
right where you know the people searching are going to be businesses can be a really
good starting point for like a first time you know entrepreneur first time indie hacker
because you do have kind of a built-in discovery mechanism there if you can find something
that you know that whole customer type or a big subset of it will need you know you
can kind of do sort of zero marketing customer acquisition there and so I think that's a
really good channel for for a lot of opportunities and even though you know like the Shopify
app store and stuff like that are are starting to you know starting to get a little bit of
saturation there's still a ton of opportunity there there's probably a lot of opportunity
in like the slack app directory and stuff like that particularly if you can get to be
sort of the first mover in one of those marketplaces you can really find that you can get a lot
of new customers that way so I think probably the next big thing was like the Shopify app
store because Shopify was exploding at that time it may still be but you know at that
time it was pre IPO was growing super fast and we got a lot of customers through that
and then just expanding to a bunch of different app stores you know we were sort of fortunate
to be in a niche so we had pretty good just organic SEO in the sense that you know if
you like actually searched for store locator app we'd be the first one that came up and
that was pretty helpful so I'm sort of contradicting the idea that you know you should have no
competitors there were one or two products that were kind of old and crappy and were
like you know download this PHP file and host it on your own server and stuff so there were
some some things in that market but it was still niche enough that you know we were able
to sort of dominate the organic search space as well and so that was really helpful you
know once we sort of got some traction did you dedicate a lot of effort to your search
engine optimization stuff that is kind of naturally happen no I that stuff is all too
dark arts for me like I there are too many unknown unknowns for me that like I just don't
really know like what the ROI on my time is going to be or even the ROI on hiring kind
of SEO experts you know I it's just doesn't feel like a space where I can have a competitive
advantage so I tend to stay away from it but you know we basically won the SEO game just
by being the you know the only sort of viable result right like people would search store
locator app and then they would stay on our site and they would put in their credit card
and I guess Google just kind of you know assumed that that was solving their problem and put
it as number one was there anything that you did in terms of trying to grow stormapper
any strategies that you tried or channels you investigated that didn't work out yeah
well so there I would say that one thing that I tried that didn't work out and it's not
because necessarily it wouldn't work it's just that I had to kind of realize like what
I was actually good at and enjoyed doing versus things that might work but you know I was
not good at or didn't enjoy doing and so kind of half-assed it was like outbound cold calling
right so you know I would occasionally come across a sort of ideal customer right which
is in our case is very well defined it's like you see this brand they say like you know
brand.com slash where to buy us or whatever and it's just like a giant page of text right
it's just hundreds and hundreds of names of stores with addresses like oh wonderful this
is a perfect potential customer for us and I kind of tried to like hire a VA to scan
the you know top 10,000 e-commerce websites and and find them and cold pitch them and
stuff like that and I just sort of realized that I didn't really have the passion to you
know design a cold outreach email sequence and hire people and set commission structures
and all that kind of stuff so I just kind of had to acknowledge that like even if this
was going to work I wasn't going to enjoy it so I may as well just not do it because
at the end of the day like you know kind of whole point of being an entrepreneur and running
your own business and stuff is that you know you actually do with your time stuff that
you kind of enjoy so that didn't work out.
So another aspect of your entire story is that at least when you started the business
you were a digital nomad of sorts right you were on a plane basically flying across the
world when you built it and you kept traveling for I think the first year that you ran the
business.
Yeah I would say a good portion of the first four years so stormapper is about five years
old and for nearly the last year I've been stationary but most of the previous four years
with the exception of about nine months in New York I was on the road quite a bit.
Yeah you're one of the few people I've interviewed for indie actors who's been like that because
I've got like kind of a location field where every person I interview I have a country
for where they started their business in and I think yours just says like remote or something.
Was there ever a time where you thought okay traveling while running this business is not
going to work out and also you know even before that how did you make it work out?
No traveling running a product business is amazing.
I tried doing it while I was doing freelance work and that is extremely challenging because
you have to get on the phone with people and schedule stuff and time zones are a big pain
in the butt but you know the sort of one thing that I couldn't do that a lot of entrepreneurs
recommend is like having phone support and calling your customers just from the get-go
I had to do everything asynchronously but other than that I mean there was just no downside
like it can be very cheap so you can keep your costs low you can keep your runway long
and so you can you know sort of think in a long-term way it's really motivating like
you can stay super productive you know you work for you know 10 days straight every single
day and you're like oh I really need a vacation and you just kind of walk outside and you're
on vacation right like you don't have to kind of go on vacation you're like oh well I'm
in Barcelona now like I'll just you know go for a run and enjoy it I'll go scuba diving
in Thailand because I'm already here and yeah I mean it's really good there's just so many
advantages to it particularly if you're going in places that are relatively cheap you can
kind of live the kind of on-demand lifestyle of like you know never cooking never doing
your own laundry never doing any of that stuff but it's just super affordable because you
know whatever you're in Indonesia or you're in Thailand or you're in India or something
like that so yeah no it's really focusing it has affected the way that I've grown the
business I think the main thing is that even now that I have a team I have you know three
employees that work for storm mapper they're distributed all over the world we are necessarily
like incredibly asynchronous so we use slack a little bit but like for the most part you
know we're using stuff like Asana we're trading things off in a way that isn't we aren't able
to just sort of hop on the phone or you know reach over and talk to someone to sort of
solve a problem and it's the same thing with with all of our customers right customer support
tends to happen very synchronously and stuff like that so we've had to kind of build systems
and build opinions around how we do stuff that reflects the fact that we've really no
idea where anyone on the team is at any one given time but it's been great yeah absolutely
recommended how did you go from from being by yourself to being a team of what say three
people yeah three people now three other people including myself so well I mean I got the
the money for it I guess you know once the you know I think the kind of real beauty of
having recurring revenue with a low churn rate is that you know your your month-to-month
revenue ends up being very very predictable so you can really confidently kind of bring
your first employee on because you know almost certainly you'll be able to pay them you know
kind of indefinitely and so yeah the I think pretty quickly after I kind of hit what was
kind of for me like a full-time salary after it was sort of over like eighty thousand dollars
a year I decided that you know I wanted to start adding some people to the team so pretty
quickly added someone doing support and a rails developer and that was in part just
because I think you know I kind of always had the idea that a zillion different business
books have advocated is that you know ultimately you want to sort of extricate yourself from
your business so you can work on the business and not in the business and all that kind
of stuff and that's a really good kind of framework through which to build a company
is to try to eliminate your own necessity so that kind of requires people and the other
thing was I was traveling and I wanted to do you know I was doing the digital nomad
thing which means you're kind of limited to these you know these cities that have fast
internet and stuff like that but I wanted to do some more interesting stuff and you
know I want to go hike Kilimanjaro and do things that require being offline for for
a week at a time so I needed a team so I went and started hiring and I learned quite a bit
you know hiring for those two positions because I hired kind of iterated through several people
in both positions before getting to the current team which I'm super happy with and you know
kind of learned a lot there about how to do that what'd you learn specifically what are
your best hiring tips so a couple of things most of them I just stole from other people
but they're pretty good when you put them together like one of them is to which is kind
of taken from Matt Mullen like at WordPress who talks about like use the same communication
tools that you'll use in the work use those same tools to hire right so one of the kind
of classic problems is that people for whatever reason when you're hiring someone you have
this bias towards like a face-to-face conversation like let's have a video chat and let's you
know speak to each other and then like you do the work and it's like 99% of your communication
is like you know one sentence get commits and like random like gifts on slack and stuff
like that and you're like well I didn't really actually test whether or not you were a good
communicator in the medium that we're actually going to use so I kind of switched to using
slack and Asana as the tools by which I actually hire interview people and that turns out it
feels a little weird at the beginning when you know someone's like hey okay when do I
interview like let's hop on Skype and you're like no actually let's stick to text for the
interview and we'll just sit there and kind of chat it seems strange but actually it turns
out to be a much better predictor of who you're gonna be able to collaborate well with and
then another thing I learned was to really like massively document you know things like
how the work is to be done at a scale that seems like ludicrous when you're a tiny team
it's like this is crazy why did I just make like you know a sort of two thousand word
FAQ for like the first customer support person surely they can just ask you questions but
starting that process really early on of just documenting things is really important it
starts to give them a lot greater sense of autonomy right when you just kind of put down
rules and just say look the sort of rules and the structure are there make decisions
within that framework as opposed to like constantly asking you questions and things for permission
and stuff like that it's amazing how that helps grow a team's autonomy over time so
documenting and using the tools the same tools for all its purposes I think were really helpful
lessons that I just kind of learned by doing I've never heard of the the advice to conduct
interviews using the same channels that you do work over how exactly does a slack interview
go if you're interviewing let's say your rails developer I mean just the same as as you know
you would if you were co-workers you know you kind of set a time and you just sit there
and and you know kind of sit there and have a chat when you actually do it I mean there's
nothing hard about it it just feels a little weird and it goes slower right obviously you
need to allocate more time because it's a little bit slower but that's actually good
right like that's what you learn like do they get bored like you know do they end up typing
like these super long incredibly verbose things that you don't want to read like you know
but like seriously you have people who are very good communicators and then like they
send you you know emails that are like 12 paragraphs long and you're like oh this is
like a fundamental flaw in our ability to collaborate that I like didn't discover until
I got hired you so it seems weird like for a half second but then it's like so obvious
that it's the right thing to do and while we're talking about rails developers can you
talk a little bit about how you build storm mapper and the technology behind it yeah I
mean storm mapper is a fundamentally it's a it's a rails app and then it has kind of
bolted on to it like a third-party JavaScript widget right so it's like an embeddable widget
like what woofoo or the disgust commenting engine and stuff like that have you know there's
nothing super fancy about it I wrote a post it's kind of old now on medium about you know
bootstrapping sass with these services but like I bolted together just a ton of services
we still use Heroku we still use you know all kinds of add-ons and stuff like that I'm
really opposed to reinventing the wheel in general I think that you know you get so much
value from products like that it's in my opinion like very worth it to just you know pay for
existing services rather than to try to build your own custom version of it I know other
people have have strong opinions in the other in both directions but that's the approach
we've taken and it's worked pretty well were you learning a lot on the job or did you come
into this knowing exactly how to code everything that you needed to build no I learned everything
on the fly I mean I so a year prior to launching store mapper I'd never written a line of code
in my entire life I basically didn't even know like you know what HTML and CSS were
like I never as a kid I didn't I didn't write code I didn't have a you know a Geocities
website that I was learning how to make blink tags on I did none of that stuff and I taught
started teaching myself to code because I had a previous startup that I just basically
spent forever failing to find a technical co-founder who would come and work for me
for free which is you know not that surprising really I still don't understand how other
people do it but but I decided to teach myself to code and then I was teaching myself to
code and I was like well I may as well like just get paid to learn so I would go on things
like Upwork Elance and just bid on jobs that I didn't really know how to do at all and
then I would somehow win some of these jobs and then I would go learn how to do it and
that would be sort of how I would how I would you know continue learning to code and and
that was how I started to get freelance clients that ultimately were the ones that kind of
you know asked me to build store mapper so it all kind of flowed from me just trying
to learn how to code but I mean I was making everything up on the fly I think you know
maybe I did a very rough technical sketch like when I first had the idea kind of thought
it through for maybe 20 minutes like okay like do I know the technologies that that
could make this happen and I was pretty confident that I could announce that was about it really
I don't know I don't know whether to label that as an inspiring story of how anybody
can learn to code or as a cautionary tale of why you should never find dev work on Upwork
hey you know I had happy customers every time you know I had an extremely high rating on
Upwork you know when I had one but yes I agree so another cool thing about store mapper
is that obviously you're pretty transparent about about what you're doing you've written
about the behind the scenes you came in any hackers you share your revenue without flinching
is there an underlying philosophy beyond that behind that there is but it's not an underlying
business philosophy I think some people have tried to sort of argue that you know transparency
is a competitive advantage I think that is the case if your your customer base and your
target audience overlap really nicely right so if you build a product for software entrepreneurs
and you know so and then you kind of like are blogging about what it's like to be a
software entrepreneur then there's a really strong business case there in my case it's
less so because the audience for how I'm building this business is not so much like the type
of people that actually would sign up for store mapper so it's been kind of very little
overlap there but the the underlying case for me has just been like I learned an absolute
ton from you know a lot of people that are on indie hackers or should be right like you
know Patrick Kenzie and Rob Walling and the guys at buffer and the guys that I don't know
the whole keen IO you know like a lot of these companies that were kind of doing this transparency
stuff just I learned so much from that that I felt like I don't know I needed to also
contribute to that body of knowledge and that keeping all that stuff private just didn't
really you know just wasn't good karma and it kind of last component of that was you
know I started blogging with like I'm kind of more of an advice aspect to it right it
was less of just descriptive like here's what I did and more like let me try and generalize
this into what works and what doesn't and when you boil that down you're kind of telling
people like how to make money on the internet and it's just so easy to come across and to
just you know veer into like scam spammy territory and there's just so much garbage in that universe
that I feel like being transparent about your business kind of gives you like just the right
amount of credibility really not necessarily like you know people know you're not like
completely full of crap which there are many people out there who are just like learn how
I grew my business to you know like one million dollars in recurring revenue and there's just
no evidence that they did that at all like um and at the same time like you know some
people get kind of outsized credit as well it's like look you're not like a guru you
built one business and it's doing okay and you're not you know a billionaire but like
so just you know take this advice if I'm going to call it advice you know with the appropriate
kind of grain of salt and I found that very like I sort of cleansed myself of of those
concerns by just saying look take this for what it is here's what I'm doing with my actual
business right personally when I was sharing any hackers revenue stats when I actually
had revenue stats I just found it fun to share enough people don't share that kind of stuff
that if you do you will inevitably get people who comment on it and give you tips or feedback
or ask you questions and I think one of the hardest things about being a founder is just
the motivational aspect like how do you keep going with something that's potentially a
lot of work that's not always uh the most rewarding and having that community being
able to go on twitter and talk to people about what you're doing and get feedback or a community
forum or blogging and getting comments I found it's just a really fun and social and engaging
thing that has kept me motivated and in the past when I would just go heads down and code
and not talk about what I was doing it was almost the most always the loneliest most depressing
thing no I think that's probably a shorter and more accurate answer for me as well is
that I just found it fun I think I might be you know ex post facto rationalizing those
decisions but at the time it was like other people are doing it I enjoy engaging it with
them I'm doing this oh this is fun I'll keep doing it you know like I probably honestly
did it because I like wrote one blog post inspired by some of those other guys and like
you know it was on the front page of Hacker News for like a day and I was like oh that
was fun and then I did it again like honestly that's probably the whole story yeah and then
microconf a couple weeks ago it was also really cool because it was was that your first microconf
had you been before it was my first microconf yeah it was my first two and I'd never been
in a place where there were hundreds of people that you could talk to you about coming up
with an idea or finding your first customers or dealing with churn and everybody understood
what you were talking about and would listen intently and not have their eyes glazed over
and get bored instantly and I think everybody you need you need something like that it's
at least it helps to have some sort of community of people who understand what you're talking
about because I know I'd bore my girlfriend to death when I would go home and just talk
about talk talk about you know the numbers for indie hackers and the numbers for task
force and it's demotivating I think probably the number one reason that most people who
get started here die not the reason that they die but the reason that their businesses die
is because they give up you know they stop yeah and that's not to say that like their
business is on a great track before they stopped it probably wasn't doing very well if you
end up quitting but if you stick with it you learn over time the same way that you learned
how to code the same way that you learned how to find you know where the next set of
customers is going to come from after you exhausted your first channel sticking with
it over a long period of time is crucial to learning what works and what doesn't and if
you want to stick with it it helps to have some sort of community of people to lean on
to motivate you and to give you advice instead of doing it all alone no I completely agree
yeah and it's such an interesting contrast from when you know I was living in places
like Ubud Bali or or Barcelona or Budapest and you go into a co-working space and it's
just like a bunch of people working on businesses like that like now I'm living in DC and I'm
hanging out with you know normal humans and like when I go to parties and stuff like that
like they just I mean it's not their fault they just like do not care at all about like
any of the you know details of my business and you know it was nice and really refreshing
to kind of get back into an environment like that which it's even more so right because
microcomp is so kind of self self-selecting to just immediately dive in to these discussions
with with folks that you just you know you don't have to go through like any kind of
awkward you know discussion it's like oh I know this person is probably running a business
and has similar concern in this person you know you can just immediately dive into those
discussions super intensely for several days yeah it was super super useful speaking of
speaking of normal humans I was just downstairs talking to Patrick McKenzie and I asked him
oh do you know are you familiar with Tyler Tringis and he's like oh describe his business
to me because I often recognize people by their business more than by the actual name
but I mean that's it it's it's people that speak your language and you can really talk
to you about things so where can people go to find out more about stormapper and about
what you're up to nowadays so stormapper is stormapper.co hopefully it's stormapper.com
very soon fingers crossed maybe by the time this is published and but stick with co just
in case and you know I blog about about stormapper and about kind of what I'm calling kind of
micro sass bootstrap sass issues in general on my website which is just Tyler Tringis
dot com t r i n g a s dot com and that's it cool thanks for coming on the show Tyler yeah
thanks for having me if you enjoyed listening to this conversation you should join me and
a whole bunch of other nd hackers and entrepreneurs on the nd hackers dot com forum we talked
about things like how to come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers
also if you're working on a business or a product of your own it's a great place to
come and get feedback from the community on what you're working on again that's www dot
nd hackers dot com slash forum thanks and I'll see you guys next time