What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same.
Today, I'm sitting here with the patron saint of the passion economy, Lee Jin. Lee, how's
it going?
Hey, oh my gosh, I love that introduction. So good. Thank you.
It's true. You've written more about the passion economy than probably literally anyone. You
know more about it. You're involved in it. You're building passion economy platforms.
You're doing pretty much everything you possibly could. Maybe to start out here, what is the
passion economy? And why should your average IndieHacker or tech founder care about this
at all?
Definitely. So I define the passion economy as the new economy in which people are able
to monetize their individuality and be able to monetize non-commonitized products and
services at scale supported by digital platforms. So there's a few ways to pick that apart.
I often talk about this in contrast with the gig economy. So over the past decade, we've
all heard a lot about the gig economy. It's kind of exploded in terms of a new model of
work.
So like Uber, Instacart, people literally working gigs.
Correct. Exactly. Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, all of those gig platforms where you're just
picking up a task, essentially. And it's a really commoditized, discreet job that you're
doing and you earn some set amount of money for that. So I often contrast the passion economy
with the gig economy. And the way that they're different is that the passion economy is much
more about monetizing some non-commonitized skill or product that you create and putting
yourself into the work where the consumer is not just completely agnostic to whether
they buy from producer A or producer B and doesn't even really care who is behind the
product or service that is being offered. In the passion economy, consumers really do
care who they're purchasing from. They care about the story behind the product or the
service. They care about that particular individual. And so people in the passion economy are essentially
entrepreneurs who are monetizing different facets of themselves.
And so to give a few examples of what this looks like, I often refer to a few examples
of passion economy platforms that are enabling people to monetize individuality. And that
includes Etsy, which we all have heard of. It's a public company, a marketplace that
allows people to sell largely homemade crafts or various handmade products that they've
created. It has a $27 billion market cap now. Shopify is another really massive company
that I would consider to be a passion economy platform. Shopify has made it so much simpler
for an aspiring e-commerce merchant to get up and running online. And every Shopify store
is completely distinct from each other. It's not like as a consumer, you don't care which
store you shop from. You go purposefully to someone's e-commerce site and you purchase
from that. So that's another example. And then on the startup side, I often refer to
platforms like Substack, Cameo, Patreon as examples of startups in the passion economy
that are all helping folks to monetize different interests and passions that they have and
create a really differentiated offering.
I've been talking a lot lately on the show about different trends that are emerging.
Why do you think people should care about this particular trend? Why does the passion
economy matter to founders and matter to the world?
Basically the genesis of this idea of the passion economy is optimism that I have about
humanity. And it's this very deep seated belief that everyone all over the world has some
unique nugget of knowledge or a skill or expertise or talent in something that someone else in
the world would benefit from accessing and they would be willing to pay for it. And I
think the more that platforms can help expose that to consumers and help match people to
facilitate these transactions, the more we can create economic value for everyone. So
in that regard, I think tech founders should care about this because it's so vast reaching
and it has the potential to really help a lot of people make money. And I think there's
hardly any problems bigger than economic empowerment in the world right now, especially during
the pandemic. There's such a large base of people in the world who care about earning
income and being able to monetize any skills that they have, especially skills that are
differentiated and that won't be commoditized or offshored. So it's not just a particular
industry. It's an entirely new economic model.
I couldn't agree more. I think it's super inspiring because for wanting to look at the
status quo, the gig economy, I think it's undeniable that a company like Uber has been
valuable for the world. It's super helpful. A lot of people pay for it. We must find it
valuable.
But there's something also a little bit dystopian about so many people basically working these
jobs that don't allow them to express their passion very much. Where you're sort of like,
you call an Uber and you don't really care who shows up. Everyone's sort of interchangeable.
And these other passion economy platforms that you're talking about, it's like people
are much more creative and they're bringing much more of themselves into the work. And
you actually do care.
I'm not going to buy a pillow from anybody on Etsy. I want to get the best pillow from
the person who knows my design sense and my style. It's probably much more fun and fulfilling
for them to make and much better for me as a consumer.
Absolutely. And I think it's also telling that all of those gig platforms are trying
to automate away the worker. They are investing in self-driving car research, like delivery
robots, anything that helps them to reduce the spend on the labor of the platform because
that's viewed as a cost. And the more that they could reduce down those costs, the higher
their margins will be. And so I think that should instill a lot of nervousness and anxiety
into these workers' minds because even though they might be making money from them today,
they're going down this path in which their labor is being increasingly commoditized.
And if the platforms had their choice between whether to hire a human driver or an automated
robot driver, they would probably prefer the latter. And so I think the gig economy, yes,
it has definitely undoubtedly created a ton of value in the world, but it's kind of this
unstable value for the worker. And I think they're really trading their time and their
labor for a declining amount of income. And they're not building anything of value that
they can leverage down the line.
It's very hard to leverage a service that you provide for someone and they get out of
the car and that's it, transaction's over. And I like what you're saying about this commoditization
thing because it's happening all the way down the line. There was a story a few weeks ago
where Albertsons, this huge grocery chain, is firing a lot of their employees and hiring
gig workers. And then you look up the chain at the gig workers and it's like Uber just
laid off 150 people from, I think, Postmates trying to replace people with automation,
etc.
And really all these jobs are becoming commoditized and none of them are really that safe. I
think the other thing that's inspiring about it is if you look at Silicon Valley as a whole.
The quote of the last 10 years is really Peter Thiel saying, we wanted flying cars and instead
we got 140 characters. And it's actually really challenging to build a business that works,
let alone a business that improves the world. But with the passion economy, I think it's
kind of like a really good signal if you want to be an entrepreneur who has a positive impact
on the world. Like you can do something that creates a lot of jobs where people basically
now have a better standard of living and they can make money easier and more creatively
than they could in the past. And now your company is not just making money and making
you successful, but it's making other people successful and making other people happy and
having a positive impact.
So I don't know if there's ever been as clear of a way for somebody who has, I don't know,
some programming chops and some startup ambitions to have a positive impact on the world.
A thousand percent. Yes. I often return back to the question of why are we even doing this?
Like why am I investing? Why are you working on indie hackers? Why does Stripe exist? Why
are we investing in technology and why are we building technology? And I think the answer
for me and for a lot of people is we actually do want to make the world a better place.
Like we are trying to advance humanity. We're trying to create productivity gains. We're
trying to increase the value and the output that we all create so that everyone's lives
can be better. But technology platforms, I mean, the progress of technology has always
been towards increasing productivity gains and increasing like per capita GDP, but that
increase in productivity has not been, has not improved everyone's lives to the same
extent.
No.
So it's up to us as builders and investors of technology to decide how do we want those
productivity gains to actually be allocated in society? Like are we trying to improve
the lives of just the consumers or of the workers too, or just of the executives who
work at these technology companies? Like I think we're here to improve the lives of everyone
in general. And I think the passion economy is the path to doing that.
Yeah. It's an interesting topic you're hitting on like this sort of problem of inequality,
which is arguably exacerbated by technology because it's so scalable. You know, if you
build a company that a product that reaches millions of people, you know, like maybe you
benefit the most, your employees benefit a decent amount if they have equity, consumers
benefit from the new technology, but by and large, more and more value is being created
and captured by successively fewer people. And you see this happen on a lot of the passion
economy platforms too, where a very small number of people are making almost all the
money on Etsy or Substack or YouTube. So you've written actually extensively about this and
we're going to get into this. But first, I'm going to give one more example
of a passion economy company that actually you turned me on to that I thought was super
inspiring. And it's called Chef. So I love the idea behind this company. The way I got
onto this was I was basically thinking, you know, I'm like a single guy. I don't have
any kids. I work a good job. Like I can save and invest my money, but like, what should
I spend money on to make my life better? And I'm just kind of thinking and talking to friends
about it. And we often have these like, you know, fun conversations to where some of my
friends are house shopping will be like, you know, if you could have one really cool luxury
room in your house or one cool like luxury thing you could spend on like, what would
it be? And mine has always been like a personal chef. Like I just want to have somebody who
can cook for me, like healthy meals at a regular pace. It's predictable. Like I don't have
to spend time cooking. It's kind of like a time saver and a nutritionist all at once.
And it's like, it's kind of a perk you automatically get if you work at a big tech company. Yeah.
Because they have these great cafeterias, but like, that's not a thing if you work remotely,
which I've always done. And now pretty much everybody's doing because of COVID. So I've
had this in the back of my mind for years, but I never actually looked into it because
I wasn't that serious. And then a few months back, it's like, I should just Google it's
like, how much does a personal chef cost? And I thought it was going to be like ridiculously
prohibitively expensive, just like absolutely like a total waste of money. And it turns
out like the median price of a personal chef in the United States is like $200 to $300
a week for five meals for a family of four. Yeah, it's how do they make a living? I don't
think chefs, personal chefs get paid very much to be honest. I mean, you have to pay
for the groceries. And so like, that's all for labor. But like, I think they just cook
in bulk. I don't know. But I do like I have like, my buddy was roommates with the chef.
And like, I don't, I don't think that guy was making a ton of money. And so I was thinking
about this like, wow, this is super cheap. Number one, I should do this for myself. But
like, number two, probably other people want this. And for whatever reason, I've never
heard of any sort of platform that's like, sort of democratizing this and like, you know,
helping people who are chefs connect to people like me who like want food. And so I got this
like, big idea in my head of a creator economy or passion economy platform that will connect
people to chefs in the same way we're connected to restaurants do something like Uber Eats.
And then I ran it by you. I was like, you know, he would know about this, Lee would
know about this. And I messaged you and you're like, this doesn't work because it's illegal.
But there is a platform called chef s h e f that's actually doing this.
Yeah, that's right. Yes, I completely agree with you. Like there's, I mean, this is a
perfect example of what I had mentioned about like, I think everyone has some talent or
skill that they can, they can leverage and turn it into economic value for themselves.
And I think so many people out there are great at cooking, they enjoy doing it, they have
the time to do it. And they should be able to monetize that for other folks who don't
have the skill or don't have the time. Unfortunately, this is a highly regulated industry. And there's
cottage food laws in place in most states, I believe that prohibit people from selling
homemade food. Most of these laws exempt like bake sales and shelf stable foods. But for
anything that is temperature controlled, prepared food from home, I think that's actually illegal
in most places. So I think chef has an interesting road ahead of it, just like Airbnb and Uber
did in terms of changing regulation. But I, I honestly think that this is this model,
I would love to see it exist, I would love to see it be more pervasive, I think so many
people could benefit from this. And honestly, I don't think home cooked food is any more
dangerous or unsanitary than stuff, like I've worked in a restaurant, and the horror stories
I can tell you.
You've probably seen some things, so have I.
Yeah, exactly. The stuff that you know, my parents, or like people's parents cook at
home is way cleaner than what you would sometimes find in a restaurant. So I think this is beneficial
all around. And in addition to chef, there's a few other companies also operating in a
space, one of them is called Cook Unity. Another one is called Hot Plate. I think they're all
operating in slightly different geographies right now. But yeah, I would love to see more
of this happen. And it's already happening a little bit on Etsy too, like Etsy, even
though it's a horizontal platform, food is actually one of the big verticals. But it's
all like baked, kind of shelf stable, cakes, cookies, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I've seen it happen on Instagram too, like a friend of mine sent me a post and it
was like this guy in his backyard and he was barbecuing and cooking food. And he's like,
you know, a tray of, you know, Matt's down home cooking for 10 bucks. And it was like
a giant barbecue hamburger and a tray with like these chili cheese fries and hot wings.
And like, this guy's definitely like in the South. And he was in Alabama, but he just
used an Instagram to like sell food from his backyard. Probably not legal. But I like what
you're saying about the fact that there's so many people with so many talents and skills
that are sort of locked away, that they could make money from like, why should I be subjected
to the taste of my own cooking when there's lots of people in my city and my community
who would absolutely love to cook and can make a living doing that for me and everybody
else who doesn't really want to. And why should I have to design my apartment when there's
people who love interior design and are way better at it than I am. And I can use the
internet to find them and look at reviews and pick the best people. Whereas before that
would have been impossible. It's almost the exact opposite of a sort of dystopian society
where everybody's a gig worker. It's like kind of a utopian society when everyone kind
of do these things they love and other people who aren't that good at it would happily pay
them to do a variety of things. And so every one of these things is probably a different
idea that a different anti-hacker could run with. Maybe create a platform, get some people
on it in your local town, and then grow from there.
Totally. Yeah, that's my vision of the future. And I really hope it comes to fruition.
Because that's why I've christened you the patron saint of the passion economy. Let's
talk about how you got here. From my vantage point, and obviously there's a lot of history
before this, but like the first thing that I ever saw involving you in the passion economy
was this blog post that you wrote a year and a half ago called The Passion Economy and
the Future of Work. And you published this on A16Z's blog. So A16Z is one of the premier
venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. How did you come to write that blog post?
I think there were a lot of factors leading up to that that led to all of these thoughts
swirling in my mind that then turned into this blog post. One is the fact that I grew
up studying art. And my parents put me in art classes from a very young age and always
really encouraged me to pursue this hobby. I had a private art teacher that I would go
to on the weekends, and I just spent so many hours of my childhood developing this passion.
Like painting and drawing? What kind of art? Painting, sculpture, sketching, oil painting,
yeah, everything. But the crazy thing was when I turned 17 and started applying to college,
they put their foot down and expressly told me, you are not allowed to go to art school.
You will throw away your entire future and you're so smart. How could you? You can't
go be an artist. You have so much to offer the world. And they just painted such a dire
picture of what my life was going to be if I pursued this passion of mine. And so the
rest is history. I went to Harvard. I'm now a venture capitalist. But I always thought,
this is so crazy that someone could love doing something so much and spend so many years
of their life devoted to this hobby and be recognized as being really good at it and
still not have a path to being able to make their financial lives work if they were to
try and pursue that full time. That's just such a shame that so many of people's passions
go to waste. So that was in my mind. I had spent like four years at Andreessen consumer
team studying marketplaces and investing in marketplace companies. So on the consumer
team there, we loved network effects businesses. So any sort of multi-sided platform was really
in our sweet spot. So I spent a ton of time meeting with marketplace startups. And marketplaces
are an example of a type of business where everyone is coming onto the platform without
any gatekeeper and able to sell a product or service and to be able to monetize that.
So over the years, I saw hundreds of these different companies who were enabling people
to get access to customers and get access to dollars and transactions across various
different industries and fields. And I saw this evolution from the gig economy to the
passion economy in front of my eyes over those four years. Like when I joined the firm in 2016,
I was still being pitched a lot of like, we're Uber for X, we're Uber for pet care,
like on demand, whatever, coming to your door. And then slowly, there was definitely this
palpable shift of we're not just completely devoted to offering the most convenient service
on demand to customers and just making sure that customers have the most amazing, like smooth
experience and like abstracting away the provider from the transaction in order to generate liquidity.
There was the shift towards platforms that were also helping the worker monetize very
differentiated skills and things that they really enjoy doing. And there was a moment where I was
meeting with the founder of OutSchool, Amir. So OutSchool is this online platform for children's
education where anyone can sign up to be a teacher, create their own curriculum for like
a completely custom class of their own choosing and offer it to be taken by students all around
the country. Yeah, so you can really brainstorm up any topic that you love and offer it for sale
to these little kids who then take your live class. And he was telling me during this meeting,
he was like, yeah, OutSchool for our demographic of teachers who are generally like stay at home
moms, OutSchool represents one of the only ways they can make extra income by leveraging their
education and their creativity. Like the other alternatives are like driving for Uber or delivering
groceries or like delivering restaurant food for someone. And so if I thought to myself,
like that is so powerful. Like if someone had these two options on the table for how they were
to monetize, I think most people would choose the one that let you express yourselves creatively and
that actually exercised your imagination. And it's not surprising to me that you were the person to
really notice this trend and start writing about it. Because I mean, obviously there's probably a
lot of analysts working at lots of VC firms who were looking at all these companies that were like
Uber for X or Lyft for Y. But you were the one who kind of saw like, well, no, it's not really like
these companies are kind of different than the gig economy companies, because you had this
childhood where you wanted to follow your passions and your parents said, you know, like that's not
a viable route to go. And suddenly you could see like, hey, like some of these marketplaces aren't
gigs. Like they actually are passion projects. Yes. Yes. I just tweeted this a couple days ago.
I wrote this tweet. I said, all the things that I love doing growing up that were dismissed as
wasting time are now activities that actually have value where platforms have been created to
help people monetize those things. And those things are writing fanfiction. So Wattpad just
got acquired for like 600 million painting and making crafts. That's Etsy. I used to spend all
day like talking to my internet friends. And now people can monetize that through paid Discord
channels and a bunch of other community software community platforms. And lastly, blogging. Like
I spent a ton of time using the early blogging platforms and just writing in public. And now
people are doing sub stack or creating paid new newsletters or monetizing that through being a
venture capitalist. But like that active writing in public also now has value.
Super cool. So tell me about Wattpad a little bit, because I don't know anything about this,
but like it got acquired for $600 million and it helps people write fanfiction.
Yeah. So I'm sure there's some listeners who are really familiar with fanfiction and probably
others that have no idea what I'm talking about. But fanfiction is this genre of writing where
people who are just really into a certain book will take that cast of characters and create their
own piece of fiction around it. So I was really into Harry Potter fanfiction, which meant that
I was part of this community of folks online writing Harry Potter fanfiction, taking all the
cast of characters from Harry Potter and like inventing our own stories and writing our own
stories and publishing them online. And all of the plots and things were things that we completely
made up just in our own minds, because we love these characters and we wanted to make them do
things that were not captured in the original books. And so there's this entire world of like
fanfiction for all of these different books. And Wattpad is a platform for people to be
able to publish fanfiction, to read it, to monetize fanfiction. I think they're also partnering with
like movie studios and TV studios to adapt some of the fanfiction that's user generated into actual
like television and movies. And so Wattpad recently was just acquired, I think by a South
Korean company for about 600 million dollars. That's huge. I'm looking at the traffic on
SimilarWeb. It's like top 150 website on earth. It's close to 200 million unique visitors a month,
which is insane. It's a lot of people reading fanfiction. Yeah. This is all super fascinating
to me. I love this. And it just reiterates like the point we were talking about earlier,
which is like people are doing things that they love to do. And apparently they're making money
and the people who are helping them do it are also making money by like building these platforms.
And you're doing like pretty much everything. Like I know very few people who have like dipped
their hands into the passion economy as much as you have. So just to give listeners sort of a
snapshot of just a few of the things you do. You've got a podcast called means of creation,
where you talk to people who are sort of making it in the passion economy. You go on a lot of other
people's podcasts too, like this one, which takes a lot of time to prep and just to show up. You've
got a sub stack newsletter that you put out. I'm not sure how many subscribers you have,
but you've got a lot of engagement, like all of your posts have lots of comments. So it seems very
popular. You write a ton and blog a ton. So you just had a guest post on the Harvard business
review, besides in addition to what you've written for a 16Z and what you've done on your
sub-stack newsletter. You've got at least two different passion economy, like platforms and
projects that you are working on yourself that we're going to get to as a sort of your Andy hacker
projects. And this is just like a tip of the iceberg of what you do. How are you so prolific?
And I invest. And you invest. So how are you so prolific? Because I know so many people who
want to get stuff done, who don't get, you know, even one of these five or six things done. What
do you know that they don't know? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, that's too kind. And I don't
think I know anything that they don't know. I think I just probably have a more imbalanced
work-life balance than they do. And so I am just working all the time. And even I know this is like
probably really mentally unhealthy. And so sometimes I force myself to take days off and
I'll like block out time on Saturday afternoon where I'm like, don't do anything. Don't open
your computer. But then I don't even know what to do with myself. Yeah, like it's really cold here.
I'm in Pittsburgh. I can't go outside. It's freezing. I can't go to a restaurant or go shopping.
Like I just don't know what to do. And so I end up just working more. And so that contributes to
a lot of the output that you see publicly. The thing is I know a lot of people who work a ton
and also aren't nearly as prolific as you. So like, I have like, I have some random theories
you tell me of like, they're accurate or not. Just from knowing you and talking to you. I think
a lot of the work that you do, it's very varied. You don't, you're not just doing like, we're not
just like banging out code all day. And like, obviously, if you were to do that, you'd be like
super burned out by now. But like, you know, before this call, you told me you've got like 15
calls what tomorrow or next week or something, which is super social. Like I don't have 15 calls
next week, but like you're going to be talking to interesting people and learning from them.
And often like meetings can feel like work if there's a lot of drudge, but if it's just like
talking to people and like learning their stories, like those meetings can actually be really
energizing. You also like are doing stuff on passion economy platforms, which means arguably
you're engaging in your passions. So hopefully, like a lot of the essays and the things that you
write like, you know, you're writing them because you love them. Like my brother is an amateur
novelist. He self published a couple novels. He loved writing his novels. You know, it didn't
feel like work to him. Like he had to pull himself away because he was addicted to it,
which is kind of the cool thing of the passion economy where like your hobbies can kind of
become your job. And the thing that you want to do all day, you can suddenly like make money from.
Yes, agree with all of that. I think I constantly have so many different projects going on.
Yes, I do have a full time job technically, and that's my investing, but I also spend time doing
a bajillion other things. And I think that's just the nature of work now. Like for most ambitious
folks who are trying to build something or make something, there's always so many different
projects going on in parallel. And all of those like switching between them gives me energy and
prevents me from getting too tired of any one like monotonous thing. So that's one thing. And
secondly, yes, I'm using these platforms. I'm doing work on a lot of the passion economy
platform. So the newsletter I write is on sub stack. The course that I'm creating is on a
new platform that I invested in. All of these things are being aided by new technology platforms.
So that like I actually don't have to do as much work as I would have had to do like 10 years ago
if these platforms didn't exist. Like if I wanted to blog online and create a newsletter
that automatically got sent out at a certain time to my email list, I think that would have
been much more challenging before. And now that's much easier. The podcast too,
like we just spin up a Zoom thing and it gets automatically recorded. Like we have the video,
the audio, so we can put it on YouTube, a podcast. So I feel like I as a person who
has a lot of projects going on, I have a lot more leverage than I would have otherwise.
And then thirdly, absolutely, it's driven by passion. Like I think it's impossible to be
this productive unless you actually love everything that you're doing and genuinely
enjoy it and feel energized by it. Like every day I feel blessed to be able to do what I do
for work. Like I kind of can't believe that I even get to do this job. And everything that I do
is related in some way to this mission of economic empowerment, increasing entrepreneurship,
like aiding people in taking charge of their own financial futures, helping grow the middle class
in America. Like everything I do ties back to that mission and that mission keeps me going.
And it's like the driving force behind all of it. I think if I didn't feel so passionately about
that mission, it would be really hard to do all of these little mini projects to push that forward.
I love that. Like I was someone who was very utilitarian when I first started starting
companies. I was like, you know what I want to do? I want to achieve this revenue goal. And that's
it. And I don't care about the mission. I'll worry about that later once I'm financially
independent. And I got super lucky that I started Indie Hackers, which happened to be a huge passion
of mine. Literally like, hey, I want to figure out how I could be financially independent.
Other people are doing it. I think they're the coolest people in the world. And like I was very
unconsidered in my approach. And I just sort of lucked into something that I love doing.
But I think people can do what you've done and just take like a minute to think about like,
what do I actually like to do? What do I care strongly about? And let me start a company where
I get to do that and work toward that mission. And often people don't do that because there's
sort of a scarcity mindset where you think, well, like it's so hard to come up with a good idea
anyway. Like how could I possibly add this additional constraint of not only having to
have a profitable business idea, but also it has to be something that aligns with my passion.
But what I found is that actually having more constraints helps you come up with ideas because
it narrows the scope of what you're searching and allows you to search deeper in that area.
And then all the ideas there are at the very least aligned with your passion.
So I like the way that you've done it. I hope more founders do it. I get very sad whenever I meet
people who've literally created their own job because they're an Indie Hacker and a founder.
They could have done anything and they created a job that they don't like.
Oh no.
Which doesn't make very much sense. So I get energized when I see people doing what you're
doing where you can work all day every day and you're actually kind of happy because
you're doing the thing you love doing.
Yeah. And I think also, I'm not sure if there's... My impression is that having money as your
finance, as your primary motivator, isn't as effective as having true passion for doing
what you're doing. I think if you are providing real value and doing something that you really
enjoy, money will be an outcome of that. And so setting out just to create a company or build a
product for the goal of making money or because you think this is like a fruitful industry and
you'll make money from it. I don't think that's motivation enough for most people.
It's not. And what I found is most people who think they're motivated by money are usually
motivated by freedom and independence. They think they want a lot of money, but you ask them what
they would do within. They're like, I would stop working for the man. What else would you do?
They're like, I don't know. It's like, okay, well, you really are motivated by freedom, right?
And like, oh yeah, that's true. I mean, obviously there are people who get to the point of financial
freedom and they still only care about making money. And I think that's not money for money's
sake. That's money for the sake of status. They're trying to sort of increase or perceive status in
others' eyes, which is probably not a smart game to play in the long-term, but there are all sorts
of other, I think, more justifiable reasons to care about making money, right? Like maybe you
want to use the money to accrue enough power in the world to change something that, you know,
you're really passionate about. Or you can use money as a resource to allow you to work on things
that you're curious about or have all sorts of interesting adventures or a bunch of other stuff.
And also, you know, one thing I've seen from just talking to so many indie hackers who often don't
live in a place like Silicon Valley where everyone's kind of already keyed into this,
is that when they tell people around them what they're doing, it's really inspirational. Other
people can see that dollar amount. Like, hey, you're making 10 grand a month from your web app?
How are you doing that? And they care because they can easily see how that money can transform
their lives in similar ways. And suddenly you have a lot more people who are interested in
being founders and starting their own stuff on the internet than before, which I think is
super good for them. It's good for the world, even though most people aren't going to succeed
right out of the gate. Which brings me to your blog post. You wrote a very interesting blog post
that's called The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class. And you basically noted that there's a
power law distribution on a lot of these passion economy platforms where a very small percentage
of the people on the platforms end up making the vast majority of the money. So some of the
examples you gave are that like on Spotify, something like the top one, one and a half
percent of artists make 90% of the money. And I know that's true on like dozens of other platforms.
Why do you think that is? And is this a problem?
Yeah. So this piece really came out of me exploring the topic of like, why is the middle
class in America shrinking overall? And what are the contributors to that? And how can we help to
mitigate that? It's a really big topic. I think that I will say for a book. So I scoped it down
to just technology platforms and how they can help enable the middle class and specifically
creator platforms. As for why I think this phenomenon holds across a lot of different
platforms, there's a few reasons. And in particular, I noted one of the papers in the blog post,
which was written by this economist at the University of Chicago like 40 years ago.
He wrote a paper, his name is Sherwin Rosen. He wrote a paper about superstar economics
and talked about how in fields with heterogeneity in providers, in other words, not all providers
are the same. They're all heterogeneous. Consumers have different preferences for different people.
In those kinds of industries, there's going to be a power law that emerges because if you have
a surgeon who's 10% better at surgery and saves 10% more lives, he's not just going to get 10%
more demand. He's going to get like 100% of the demand. Exactly. And if you're listening
between two artists and one of them is a really bad musician, another one is really good,
like listening to 10 times as much music that's bad is not going to add up to a really good song.
And so he basically talked about how this preference function is not going to be linear
across all providers. And furthermore, technology was going to exacerbate this because technology
meant that those best providers in any given field can serve a lot more consumers than they
used to be able to serve. So instead of the best opera singer only being able to perform
for a concert hall full of people, she can now perform to the entire world on Spotify and accrue
all of the consumer attention and all of the demand. So I think that's what we're seeing
play out in the content creator landscape today. There's vast differences in quality
between all of the content. I think content also does actually have some network effects
where you want to consume the same content that all of your friends are consuming
in order to participate in the discussion. You sort of get into their stories and you
feel invested in them and they're switching costs from that.
I think about that with pop culture often where you're looking at sports,
music, TV shows, movies, and to some degree, there could be a movie that you're not excited
to see, but you want to be able to talk to your friends about it. And so you just go see it,
which means that everyone is sort of incentivized to coalesce to the few most popular options,
even if they aren't necessarily higher quality, just so you have something to connect with
friends and strangers over. And so you end up with this power law where maybe the winners
aren't even all that deserving. Maybe Marvel movies aren't even that great, but it's what
everybody's talking about. So if you want to not feel less out, you just go watch it.
A hundred percent. Yeah. I think this is also related to the phenomenon of the most watched show
on Netflix being The Office. It's just familiar. You know exactly what you're going to get rather
than take a risk on something that might be bad. You just stick with the thing where you already
know all the cast of characters. You know you're going to have a pretty good experience watching
it. And so you just continue to watch The Office, even though there's so many different options.
So basically we're saying Marvel movies in The Office are bad.
No, I love The Office. I haven't seen any of the Marvel movies though.
Another aspect of this I think is the inspiration bit because I think about this a lot with Andy
Hackers. My goal is really I want more people to start companies. And what I found works the best
is just telling inspiring stories. And the inspiring stories are almost always the outliers.
If I have someone who comes on the podcast and in three months they've gone from zero to
$50,000 a month in revenue and they quit their job, that's not the average Andy Hacker case.
That's the outlier. But it's also the story that gets the most people to want to take action.
And when I look at these platforms like YouTube, like who's inspiring people to want to be YouTubers,
it's the most unrealistic popular channels possible. But that has a really huge effect.
And even in startups like YC, the best YC startups come out, you put those stories out,
everybody watches them in movies and reads blog posts about them. And then they all want to
basically become startup founders. Is that worth basically the inequality?
Do you think the inspiration?
I think so. I think it's inspiration as well as in a world with so many consumer choices
and a finite amount of time, all of these platforms do have to put their most compelling
offering in front of consumers in order to grab their attention. If you're Netflix and someone
goes to Netflix.com, you have that one chance to show something really good to the consumer,
otherwise they might turn next time and not come back. So you're not probably going to
lead them to the long tail thing just for the sake of supplier equality.
You're going to show them the blockbuster, the crown that you've invested over $100 million into
and you know there's a high chance they're going to enjoy it. And I think the same is true of
TikTok, like the YouTube homepage, they're all going to try and compete for the consumer's
attention with the best quality content and the most compelling content creator.
And that exacerbates inequality. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure
where this ends up and how to mitigate it. I think for the long tail, I think what is
going to more realistically happen and what I think is the path for them is to not expect
their whole entire income to come from just a single platform, but instead to layer and piece
it together from various different platforms. So if you're a long tail YouTuber and you only have
a thousand subscribers and you're not making that much from ad revenue, that's okay. You can have
your YouTube AdSense revenue plus set up a Patreon plus sell a course plus do consulting or coaching
or whatever in order to cobble together your full income. I don't think it's realistic to expect
these platforms to shift consumer attention to the long tail and take all of their revenue and
split it equally among everyone. I think that would kind of be platform suicide for a lot of
these companies. But instead, I think we're moving to this world in which one's income is really just
a portfolio of different revenue sources rather than earning everything from a single company,
which it used to be. Yeah, some of the most inspirational platforms to me are the ones that
are passion economy rather than gig economy, but also still very like service based. And so the
jobs don't scale that well, just because I think I suspect they'll be able to create the most jobs.
So like assuming chef gets really big, you know, there can be a lot of people who won't make a lot
of money on chef versus if sub stack is really big, like the best content creator is going to
rise to the top because their content can reach everybody. And the same with like course platforms.
If one person puts out a course, it could probably reach millions of people and that's super
inspirational. But like, probably the top 1% of course creator is going to take all the money
versus if there's like, I don't know, a mentorship platform that connects you one on one,
you can only really mentor so many people. And so even if you're the top mentor, ultimately,
your day and your week fills up and lots of other mentors can basically share some of the pie and
it'll be a little bit more equitable. Exactly. And that is historically the nature of the middle
class in America. If you look at the most common jobs in that middle income band for Americans,
historically, it has been truck drivers, nurses, you know, primary school teachers,
like all of these kinds of non scalable jobs where there's a natural ceiling to your earnings
because there's a natural ceiling to how much work you can do. So I agree, I think there's
definitely room for more platforms that facilitate people to offer services. And I think that'll
naturally create a lot more jobs than content creation platforms.
Totally. So if you're an anti hacker, you're thinking about what to make, and you want to
have an impact, do something that creates service, non scalable jobs, you probably don't want to work
those jobs. If you're an anti hacker who wants to get your start on a creator platform, you probably
want to go to the ones that are not super scalable, and this should be better than everybody else.
But if you want to create a platform, I like the service ones. Let's talk about some of the stuff
that you've done because you've actually created your own platform. So I think someone called it
a platform of platforms, which is super cool. Yes, right. There's also been called the same
thing. So you're in good company. It's called side hustle stack. Tell us about side hustle
stack. What is that? That's right. Yes. Side hustle stack is a website that I built a couple
of months ago, maybe just one month ago. And it's a platform of platforms that helps people find
platform based work. So the backdrop of this is there's so many new companies and platforms
getting started that are helping people to get access to income opportunities, whether that's
in the gig economy, or that's in the passion economy, or whether that's a platform that helps
them to start a small business. There's just so many new platforms today that help people earn
extra income. And it was getting really hard for me to keep track of these. And I would say,
the V one of side hustle stack was actually a chart that I would include in some of my past blog
posts that had basically a grid of type of work as the first column. And then all of the rows were
like platforms that were supporting that type of work. So it would be like podcaster and then all
of the different podcasting platforms that help people monetize being a podcaster and so on and
so forth. And I would publish blog posts where I would update this chart. And every time I included
this updated chart, founders would reach out to me, either expressing like, Hey, you forgot me,
can you include me? Like this is what our platform does sometimes like angry messages being like,
Hey, we just chatted. Why did you leave me off? And I would get like dozens of these every single
time I updated the chart. And I just thought like, this is not scalable. I need to just open source
this market map and like make it such that people can submit their own information and just have it
grow over time. So that was the, that was the genesis of side hustle stack. And so that's what
we did. We created a website that compiles all of these different platforms for various types of
work, ranging from content creators to podcasters to video course instructors to grocery shoppers.
And so any, anyone who's looking for a flexible income earning opportunity can go to side hustle
stack.co and browse what are all of the options that, that I can use and leverage in order to
earn some extra money. And I built this with a couple of folks have been helping me. Brandon
Handoko, Lila Shroff and Avi Schiffman have been working a lot behind the scenes to keep the
website up and running. And it's, it's been going crazy well so far. Like beyond my wildest
imaginations, we launched the website on product hunt at the beginning of December and now have
about two and a half million monthly page views. And that is driven a lot by Gen Z. Turns out that
Gen Z love side hustles and are really into how can they avoid printing out a resume and applying
to like a normal job. I was talking to a friend about TikTok the other day, and neither of us
really use it. You know, we've sort of dabbled, but we haven't made posts. We've just kind of read
it. And we're like, is TikTok useful? Is it worth investing time and effort in? Like, is it a good
marketing channel? And the way TikTok works is they've got this for you fee that's customized
to kind of like, I guess what you like or what you watch. And I'm not going to share with my
for you fee, but like, let's just say it's certainly not educational. And so I'm kind of
thinking like, you know, is anyone actually like learning anything on TikTok or sharing anything
useful? And I kept my eyes open. And I think maybe a few days after I had that conversation
with my friend, I discovered that you were crushing it on TikTok. You told me I think
that Side Hustle Stack got 2 million page views in its first month. And I was like,
how is that possible? And the answer was TikTok. Yes, exactly. So there's so many different
niche facets of TikTok. It's definitely not just dance videos and lip syncing. There's
a big niche around like personal finance, small business tips. I think there's a burgeoning
indie hacker community. Honestly, if you were to get on TikTok and create an indie hackers
account and put out content related to starting a business and being independent,
the youth would go wild. I mean, like, who doesn't like stories about how to make money
and make a living doing something that you like doing? I don't think any age group doesn't enjoy
that. Totally, totally true. Yes. But I think this next generation especially loves it,
because I think they've just lived through such a huge sea change in what work looks like.
Like when they were born, we were still under this mindset of like, I remember my parents telling
me just like, get a good job at a good company that's stable and stay there forever.
Right. Go be a doctor, be a lawyer, retire after working at this company for 50 years. And like,
that is not our generation. And certainly, it's not what Gen Z thinks about.
Totally. And that just doesn't really exist anymore. So I think they're really interested
in how to be independent, how to have financial freedom, how to make money, like they don't want
to struggle like the millennials did and not be able to afford our own house even when we're the
sage. So I think they really prioritize taking control over their own financial lives.
So there's a bunch of things I think about side hustle stack that are really smart, and that are
lessons that probably every indie hacker should take away when they're trying to build their own
business. The first you have to deal with like what motivates people to use something. It's pretty,
I don't want to say it's easy to build something, but it's much harder to find people to use the
thing that you've made than it is to make the thing in most situations. And so you want to
build something that people are extremely motivated to use. And two of the biggest motivations
are making money and marketing, finding users. And so first of all, making money, if you build
something that helps people make money, guaranteed, they're going to be very motivated to use your
thing and you're going to find it much easier to get users and customers for your app than anybody
else. So with side hustle stack, it's very obvious that people can make money like these Gen Zers
who are looking for jobs and gigs, they can come to side hustle stack to find out how to make a
living. And your website promises to help them do that like efficiently and maybe with like more of
their own individual passion than any other place. So it's no wonder that like a lot of people like
what you've built. And it's easier for you to get you know, drum up interest in what you've done
than a lot of other people because you're helping people make money. So if you're an indie hacker,
you could easily just look at what you're doing and say like, is it extremely obvious and clear
how this helps people make a living? And if not, like maybe redirect or steer yourself in that
direction. Number two, marketing and distribution. I often ask founders and companies, you know,
what are your biggest challenges? And it's almost always growth, how do I get more users? And so if
you can build something that helps companies get more users and customers, like they'll also be very
motivated to use your thing. Because indirectly, again, that helps them make money. And with side
hustle stack, it's not just the people looking for jobs or coming to your website. But it's also
a bunch of people who have these passion economy platforms who are like, Hey, we want more people
in our platform. Like, can you list us on side hustle stack? Or thank you so much for
listening is here. Like I've seen them on Twitter shouting you out, because you're driving traffic
to them. You're like an actual source of distribution. Totally. Like, you mentioned
that a lot of indie hackers are great at building products, but not so great at distribution.
And I would say I'm the opposite. I'm really great at distribution. I don't have the time right now
to build products. So if anyone is interested in working on side hustle stack with me and joining
the team and building a bit more and extending the platform, definitely reach out to me. Because
I think it has a ton of potential. And how do they get in contact with you?
They can DM me on Twitter. LJIN18 is my handle. My DMS are open. Or you can email me lee at lee dash
gen dot co. Cool. So there's a third thing that I think is super smart about the way you did side
hustle stack, which is, it doesn't matter if you're not the world's premier software engineer,
like you didn't set out to build the world's most advanced products, like hire a team of engineers,
most people in your position, who have a ton of connections in the VC industry,
they wouldn't do it the way that you did it. They would be like, I'm going to go out and raise
$20 million to build my like, AI powered, you know, social app on the blockchain, right? Like,
you're like, no, I'm going to create a database with notion. And I'm going to use I think you
use super to host it on its own domain. And that doesn't mean it's like super, super easy. But it's
like way easier than building everything from scratch. And you just got started that way. And
that allows you to get momentum to launch on product hunt to, you know, figure out that TikTok
was a great distribution channel for you. And to mass two and a half million page views in a month,
you don't need a ton of engineering chops to do any of this stuff. You don't need any. And I wish
more any hackers would start small like this. Like my advice is usually people should start one level
below where they think they should start. So if you're a software engineer, don't write code,
do something that people who like are obsessed with no code would do. Or if you're like someone
who's obsessed with all these no code tools, don't try to like hack together like some sass app using
no code tools, like do something a content creator would do, but then make it better with no code
tools. Or like if you're full time, don't like try to build some ambitious six month project, like
build a side project. Or if you're like, you know, working a job trying to work a side project,
don't do a side project, do a weekend project. And if you start like one level below, I think you
just have much more time and energy and resources to make it really, really great. Versus if you
start like about the level of skill and ability that you have, I think you end up beyond your
what's end stretch way too thin. And it's really hard to make something great because you're just
struggling to finish it. Totally. I am 100% of this mindset. Like I the v one of side hustle
stack was literally a chart that I created in Excel. And I put into my blog post. And I tweeted
that chart and that chart got like 1000 likes or something. And people kept emailing me about how
to get at it. And I just realized that there was something here. And v two is now this like notion
doc, which is no code, like took $0 to make. And I think v three can become something more. But like
every step, there was this validation of, do people care about this? And like, let me validate
it in a super lightweight way before I invest further time and resources into it. I think we
are now in a culture where it's very sexy and celebrated to amass a ton of resources really
early on in terms of financial capital and investment. But most businesses don't need
to do that in order to succeed. Like the vast majority of startups in America are not venture
backed. They're self-funded bootstrapped like SMBs. I am fully of the mindset that people should
test things out with side hustles and side projects. And then those side projects can become
a full project and those side hustles can become a full hustle. But you don't need to go all out,
like quit your job, raise VC money, $3 million, just find out something's not even, you know,
there's no customer for it. Like I think people should start small and just take it step by step
and continue validating various hypotheses before proceeding way better to start small.
You can move much faster, you're much less likely to quit. If you can finish something
in a weekend or a month, and if it takes you like a year, you don't have to ask anybody
for permission. You can just get started right now. It's more fun, I think. And you can do a
better job. And there's so many stories. I mean, like Sahel Lavingia, I'm pretty sure he built
Gumroad in like a weekend. And like that was his MVP. And he launched it on Hacker News. And like
that was good enough for him to get started. And like obviously later on, he raised a bunch of
money and built a team, etc, etc. And now he's like redefining the future of work. But he started
super, super small. And a lot of the most successful people I know have started small. And a lot of the
most frustrated people I know started really, really big because they think they have to just
kind of start there. Another recurring theme on the podcast. I love that despite your position,
like despite the fact that you probably could have started as big as you wanted to,
you started pretty small with Sahel's stack.
Yeah, I think it really takes being in VC to realize that VC is not suited for every business.
Most founders don't realize all of the repercussions of raising VC money. It means that
your destiny is not entirely your own anymore. Like you don't own 100% of that business.
There's another stakeholder whose voice you have to take into account. And the expectation is that
you build it into a unicorn or more. And if it's not that, then it's a failure. And you should go
like give up and pivot and do something else. And so I actually don't think that that model
works for the vast majority of ideas or businesses. And I'm all in favor of people
building really lightweight products with very little resources that they own completely
and that are totally independent. And they can just run as a sustainable lifestyle business.
That is the nature of these passion economy platforms. All of the participants on the passion
economy platforms are like indie hackers. They're people who are leveraging these platforms to create
a business for themselves that they can own and grow and can represent an income for themselves
sustainably over time. They're not trying to build a billion dollar business, but they have
a comfortable lifestyle from it and they own it and it's entirely theirs.
And every now and then I think, should I bring an investor on any hackers? And I'm like, no,
it's kind of the antithesis of like the indie hacker spirit. And then I bring you on and you're
like an investor who is an indie hacker who has all these cool projects and you can sort of tell
it like it is. So I'm glad you've been on. Let's do one more of your indie hacker projects. If you
have time, I guess by the time this is out, this will be announced to the world, but right now it
hasn't been. You're actually creating a course for the creator economy, which I think is super
interesting because one of your 10 points for how do we increase the sort of middle class of the
creator economy and the passion economy is kind of like, hey, we should educate and teach people
so they can be better. So tell me about the course you're going to launch or we'll have launched by
the time the show is out and why you're launching it.
Yeah. So I think this is the first time I've talked about it publicly, but I am building and
teaching and launching a course all about building for the creator economy. So it's a cohort-based
course. It's called the creator economy course and you can find it at creatoreconomycourse.com.
And in it, I've basically distilled all of my lessons from studying the space really closely,
talking to hundreds of startups and actively investing in these startups. And I'll teach
all about creator psychology, creator's needs, pain points, how they evaluate different platforms
to use. And it's really designed for operators, builders, founders, and anyone who finds the
creator economy really interesting. And so it's a very tactical builder-centric course for how
to think about and pick apart products geared towards creators.
Love it. You've executed this sort of like stair-step approach so perfectly where it's like
earlier in your career, you're just gathering a ton of knowledge and use that knowledge to write
basically viral blog posts about trends that you were seeing, the emergence of the passion economy
that no one else really saw because they didn't have the knowledge and the patterns that you saw.
And you leverage that like you created like a very specific term became associated with you.
And I think as a result of that, like you just have a lot more networking opportunities and
connections and you sort of stayed with it. You've done your own passion economy platforms,
you've invested. And now you have like so much street cred that like you're the best person to
teach people how to get started. So somebody like wants to start a passion economy platform,
like why on earth would they want to learn about the space from anybody besides you?
And how much does it cost? It's going to cost $1,200, which I think is such a steal for this
content because it's content that has never been published. I spent my Christmas break talking to
a bunch of companies and compiling information that is totally original. So this is stuff that
I've never written about before and never spoken on any podcast about before. There's like entirely
new frameworks that I'm introducing for the first time in this course. And so students are going to
be like the first people in the world to ever hear some of this content, which I think is really
magical. I think $1,200 is a steal. I mean, people are paying $40,000 to go to art school,
which your parents stopped you from doing, you know, this is $1,200. And like, I consistently
talked to founders who I asked them like, what's your secret weapon? You know, how are you able to
do what you did? I got to Jordan O'Connor, who created closet tools, which is sort of a tool
built on top of Poshmark, just another sort of passion economy platform. And he's making like
40 or 50 grand a month as a solo founder. And his answer to like his, the best thing that he did
was that he took a course on SEO. He like literally went into credit card debt and paid $2,000 to take
a course in SEO. I don't recommend people go into credit card debt. Oh my God. But he learned so
much. And like, that's how he grew his app. Like it helped him make much more money in the future.
And so like, if I was trying to make a living, like, do I want to pay for school? Do I want to
pay $10,000 for a coding bootcamp? Or do I want to pay like $1,200 for a course that's going to
tell me exactly how to do the specific thing? It seems to me like a no brainer to pay for courses
like this. Thank you. I'm really excited for it. I hope people are excited for it. We're purposely
keeping it pretty small, because it's a live course. A lot of it is going to be community based.
And so it's application based. And so I encourage people to apply soon.
What's your strategy for launching a course like this? Because I know people who tear their hair
out trying to have like the most perfectly orchestrated course launch in the world. How
are you going to launch creator economy course? Oh my gosh. Well, I'm definitely leaning on the
team behind this platform to help me do a lot of the actual like public facing marketing stuff.
So you built the course on top of a platform that's for creating courses.
That's right. That's right. Yes, it still does not even have a name. The company is
TBD unnamed. But it's, it's a new startup from Goggin Byani, who used to be the co-founder of
Udemy, Wes Cow, who was one of the co-founders of all MBA. And also Bomic Patel is helping me
a lot with this course. And he also works at that startup. So I'm leveraging them a lot for how to
help me launch. And they've all launched successful courses before. So the strategy is, I think we're
going to do a big announcement, which by the time this podcast airs, we'll be live and then talking
about it to folks. And I've already done a lot of socialization about these topics and this course
itself to folks at various companies. So I've kind of drummed up like excitement inside of various
companies already. I love the idea of a sort of a lot of any hackers just want to charge like
five or $10 or something that like took them a year to build. And of course, it's like you could
charge $1,200 or something that like, I mean, obviously, it's based on years of knowledge and
conversations. But like in terms of actually putting it together, there's only a platform
that you built this on. And if you're going to limit the number of people who can take it,
not only does that increase the quality of the course, but it also makes it way easier
for you to hit your revenue goals. So like, or somebody who's charging like $5 a month needs
to find thousands of customers to get to like profitability, like you could find 10 people who
took this course and like make 10 grand, you know, like it's just such an advantage to create
something that's super valuable and then charge what it's worth. And since you're working together
with these other people, like because you're an early adopter on their platform, and they probably
really want you to succeed, like you've got other people sort of pushing your direction to help you.
You're not doing it all by yourself. Yeah, I think the course model works really well for folks who
have very specialized knowledge. And that knowledge has really high ROI for the folks who want to
access it. And they're basically pretty much price insensitive to whatever the price is, because it's
like such valuable information that is definitely going to pay itself back. So I think courses are
the right model for a very specific subset of the creator economy. Definitely, it's like a very high
effort thing to create a course, but I think it's also very high reward, especially relative to like
some of the micro tipping and like donation based platforms. So I'm super curious like what your
master plan is like you have so many balls in the air with your podcast and all your writing and
newsletter and like a super cool course and this platform of platforms to help people find work on
the creator economy. Where do you see all of this leading? You know, are these like independent
projects? Are they working to start to some sort of bigger goal? Because I know people who just
like they love putting out tons of little projects. I also know people who are super strategic and
like know every project is one step of my master plan. Where do you want to be and you know a year
or two from now? I just want to rebuild the middle class. And I want to help people live better lives
and have more paths to economic empowerment and do work that is fulfilling and meaningful to
themselves rather than exploited up. So that's the broad mission of my life and everything that I do
tees up to that. As for the specific projects that I have in mind for the future,
all of that is I think TVG and I sort of grasp onto opportunities as they come. But I'm very much
guided by that North Star goal of how do I rebuild the middle class in America and promote
economic advancement for people? Wow, it's super ambitious. And honestly,
I wish more people had ambitious life missions like that because you can kind of break down
everything you're doing into the components along the path to that larger goal. And it's much easier
about to stay motivated when you can say, okay, I'm working on this side project right now. But
like here's how this, you know, gets me to step three out of 15 to bringing back the middle class
in America. So best of luck. I'm a fan. It's obviously a very worthwhile goal. You've been
working in tech and startups and investing and now the passion economy for quite some time.
What's something that anti hackers should take away from everything that you've learned?
I would encourage everyone to just pursue their interests and be very closely attuned to what is
giving them energy and what is something that they look forward to doing and just keep following
that. Like I never had a master plan for my life or my career. I didn't even used to know that VC
existed. Like when I was, when I graduated from college, I had no idea VC existed. I didn't know
what a PM was. I didn't know all the roles inside startups. I just took step by step, like chunks
of my career and every single step of my career, I didn't really know what was next. I just followed
my interests and I followed my gut. And so that intuitive approach has always worked pretty well
for me. And I don't think people should overthink things. Just, just follow your heart. That's what
I want to tell people. And how does somebody who's following their heart make sure that they're
making the right move so that they can actually find some success to you? Because there are so
many people who follow their heart and also end up doing something that doesn't provide any economic
value to anybody else. What would be your advice there? Yeah, well, I think, I think we're all on
this like personal goal of product market fit where we are the product and there is a market
out there. And so whatever we pursue and have a passion about, either we have to be sure that
there is a market for this, or we have to buy ourselves create the market. So maybe if there
is no market, you can first create it, which is a much bigger task, obviously, but involves like
educating people for why they should even be interested in what the thing is that you're
passionate about. Love it. So basically, if no one cares about your passion,
educate them. And maybe your passion should start off as educating people about why it's
important and valuable for them. Lijan, thanks a ton for coming on the show. Can you let listeners
know where they can go to find out more about all your different projects, how they can help
on Side Hustle Stack, and where they can go to read your writing?
Yeah, so you can find my course at creatoreconomycourse.com. The application link is
on the page. You can find Side Hustle Stack at side hustle stack.co. You can follow me on
Twitter. I'm pretty active there. Elgin18 is my handle. I also have a TikTok account. Side
Hustle Stack is the handle. We don't really know what we're doing, but we're having a lot of fun
with it. So you can follow us there. And yeah, if you want to chat about the course about Side
Hustle Stack and how you can help us on it, or if you have a startup and you no longer want to be
Indie Hacker but want to raise VC money, you can contact me. I'm lee at lee-gen.co.
That's my email. And so yeah, anyone can feel free to reach out.
All right. Thanks again, Lee.
Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much for having me.
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