What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with Nadav Keeson, the founder of Riverside, a tool that allows you to record
podcast episodes like we're doing right now. So you just create a room, you send people
the invite link, and they join, and you click record. And that's pretty much it. At the
end of it, you've got a high-quality audio files and video files that are locally recorded
for everybody, and I love it. I've been using it for IndieHackers for the last year. Nadav,
welcome to the show.
Thanks, Nadav.
So, a year ago, actually, I was just pulling up our chats. You were messaging me pretty
much every single day, like, hey, Cortland, when are you going to try Riverside? I'm an
IndieHacker, I've been building this cool thing. And at the time, I think the way you
described it was, it's a podcast recording tool. Wow, it's even longer than a year ago.
So October 2019, you said, hi, Cortland, love your podcasts. I built a podcast recording
tool where listeners can call in live and ask their questions to the host. Would you
give it a try? And then I didn't respond to that first message, but you were relentless.
So the way, if I go all the way back, indeed, at the time when we were still experimenting
what are we really building, probably what's not even the right way, but I reached out
to everyone who is inspiring me. Although, actually, even if you think it's cool, that
doesn't mean anything. The market at the end depends whether it's going to work or not.
Right. But you were super focused on trying to make me think it was cool. How much revenue
were you doing back then, back in March 2020, do you remember?
Maybe we had one kind of paying customer who scammed us. We didn't have a payment system
set up. So we had just someone, we send the invoice to that person. It was an influencer
on Instagram. She attacked 500,000 followers. My girlfriend thought she could be interested
in using our tomb. So we got her to use Riverside, but she never actually paid us. So we had
her and then we launched on Product Hunt, I think around 14th March. And then we had
potentially two paying customers. The payment system apparently wasn't working well. So
we figured out a week later, so maybe we had a bit more, but we had two paying customers
when we launched on Product Hunt. So that says a lot, even Product Hunt. It's cool for
yourself, but it doesn't really do much for certain products.
I didn't know that. I didn't know you got scammed by your very first. Should have been
paying customer. She kept signing up for the free trial. We didn't really have a limitation
at the point. And how much money are you making now, I guess what, like a year and 10 days
later than your launch?
Yeah, it doesn't really make sense for us to share our revenue numbers now. We raised
money from Alex Sohanian, like a series A round. So definitely a lot more than two paying
customers.
Would it be okay if I say it's a lot? It's extreme.
I think it's a lot. It always depends like who you compare it with. So for me at this
point, maybe it doesn't even feel that much, but that's me being spoiled. But it's definitely
something that would have never in my wildest dream, I've imagined the point where we're
at right now.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Because I talked to a lot of indie hackers who, you know, they're
working on stuff for years just to get to the point of like ramen profitable, you know,
or just to get to the point where like, you know, they can like survive. And you guys
as you and your brother were the founders of Riverside have just in like a year gotten
blown that out of the water and gone to the point where you're like a pretty major company.
And you were just growth trajectory is insane. I know we haven't gotten into like exactly
how much money that is. But like, how would you say doing that has changed your life?
Like do you feel do you feel rich? Do you feel like, you know, you're eating caviar
and stuff? Like what's what's the money going to?
There's only one thing which I feel okay about doing, which is I order a lot of food. So
like twice a day, I order food, which is ridiculous. But that's other than that, like, nothing
really has changed. It is also not the case, right? Okay, the company is making great money,
but it's not like I'm personally having a huge salary or anything like that. So in that
sense, nothing has changed. Even more so it's not like once you're there, you're not going
to be like, ah, now I this is the end goal. No, the end goal hasn't reached.
Yeah, I was talking to Saha Lavingia from Gumroad and he's like very public about his
revenue numbers. They like tweet out the revenue numbers all the time on Twitter. They have
kind of a model like they help creators make money and then they take a cut. And I think
I don't know exactly how much they're making, but it might be in the millions. I'm pretty
sure maybe even a month or something. It's just interesting to talk to him about it because
like Gumroad is making so much money, but he doesn't pay himself like a huge salary.
And like it's a valuable company, but like for him to really see most of that like he
would have to sell the company which he's like not really ready to do.
Yeah, I feel the same for you, right? Actually, yeah, kind of the same for me. Like, okay,
well, any hackers was never making anything like what you're you're making or what Gumroad
is making. You know, I think when I sold a stripe, we were making like $7,000 a month.
And it was just me. But I think there's like a there's a misconception sometimes that if
you have a really big company and you're doing however many millions or whatever in revenue,
then like you're probably just set for life. And the reality is like, well, you're probably
reinvesting in your company. You're paying for employees, you're paying for growth, you're
paying for servers, you're paying to get bigger. And you might just be living the same type
of life that everybody else is living. Kind of nervous that like, hey, it all might go
to zero, like it might not work out, right? And you might not have some huge financial
success, despite the fact that your company itself had really great revenue numbers. Initially,
when I started, I was even more like optimistic than I'm now in a way, because now I have
got a lot to lose, right? When I had nothing, I was just like, all right, let's get to $2,000
per month per person, per founders of me, my brother, if we have debt, holy shit, right?
Then I can live off Riverside. And so any any paying customer would be would be amazing.
And now I've got, of course, more paying customers. So it's in a way if you're less rich.
Let's talk about how you got here. Because you and your brother have been working on
stuff for a long time. You're both pretty young. I think you're you're 26. 26. Yeah.
And your brother's 22. And you guys have been working on projects for like five years or
something. Like he was a teenager. And you're like a 21 year old. And you guys are like
putting together some sort of like debate platform. So walk me through like how you
guys got started being indie hackers.
Yeah, so me and my brother, we're always building a lot of stuff. For example, we had this
SAT, SAT course in high school, where we didn't even do our own SATs. So we hired teachers,
stuff like that, that never really took off. The previous like biggest project that we
did together was a debating platform, where politicians could debate live video. So the
idea there was we bring different minded people together. And often it's just politicians
and then people could watch these debates and interact with these politicians as a question
directly to politicians.
We got some pretty cool politicians to debate on our platform, which I would that was my
responsibility to get. So that's why you know, I've been relentless with you. I mastered
that skill being relentless. And my brother built a whole tech around that whole debating
platform. That was going quite well, in the sense that we had some big politicians, but
never really. Let's say when we stopped the debating platform, no one ever asked us, hey,
where is it? So there was kind of a wake up call. And then we decided, wouldn't it be
cool to have like a podcast situation where people can also call in during the podcast?
So a bit similar to clubhouse. I wouldn't I wouldn't definitely not say we've got clubhouse
because otherwise it would have been clubhouse. But the idea was similar. Execution was not.
And then we launched that with zero validation on like many of your podcasts suggest you
should do. We just thought it was cool. And we reached out to a bunch of people. And then
it all things started from there. Basically, it's funny you had this debating platform
because when I was a kid, I read this sci fi book. Have you ever read Ender's game? It's
a cool sci fi book. They made a movie that was pretty good, but not as good. But it's
about like these child geniuses who end up like being groomed to like fight these aliens
or whatever. But like, the main kid goes off and does that. And his brother and his sister
are also these child geniuses. And they kind of start this online debating platform called
the nets or something. And like they're like constantly like, you know, debating politics
and philosophy and they become like super celebrities and eventually like end up like,
I'm just ruining the whole book for anyone who's listening. If you want to read Ender's
game, don't listen. But they end up like ruling the world basically because of this debating
platform. And I remember being like 12 years old and reading this is like, this is awesome.
I got to start my own like online debating platform is going to be super huge. So it's
cool to see that you actually did that. And you actually got real politicians on there
like talking about meaningful issues.
No, that was definitely cool. Like that was the only like validation we had that we got.
We probably didn't have any viewers, but we had to put this debate to each other.
It's one of the like if with podcasting, for example, like I want to do more debate episodes
because there's just something really interesting about hearing people go at it, you know, like
it's, it's, it's fine. People like, you know, constantly agreeing and it's like you can
learn some stuff. It's the same effect on Hacker News, actually, like the culture in
Hacker News is that if you ever leave a comment, what you're supposed to do is disagree with
the person who you're applying to. And so like, anytime there's a story on Hacker News,
you use the story, the first comment disagrees with that, the next comment disagrees with
that comment, and so on and so forth. And it's actually super interesting to read, because
you always get to see both sides and learn like the most. And so I'm surprised that more
people didn't tune in to hear what was going on with these politicians debating because
it's just naturally captivating.
No, I completely agree. Our generation, maybe doesn't care as much about politics anymore.
But I think personally, debate is super interesting. Although I don't really agree with someone
like Ben Shapiro, but even just hear him out, see what he has to say to sharpen my own process.
I think it's super interesting. And though so actually, the idea was also what makes
Twitter often fun is I think also people are like kind of fighting with each other as well,
other than just agreeing. But so the idea was like bringing Twitter fights to like the
baby platform. That was also kind of the idea.
I like that the perspective of you make yourself mentally sharper by hearing the other side,
because there's also like a lot of people who feel the exact opposite, like that what
you should do is you should tune out the other side and any situation and not listen to what
they have to say. But I'm very much like you. I always want to hear what the other side
has to say. Because how do I know that my own opinions on my own thinking are sharp
if I'm not listening to someone like attack them and then go at them and it's not for
everybody. But I also enjoy the occasional Twitter fight. So you eventually pivot to
this, this idea where you're gonna do podcasting, I guess podcast recording, but it was like
very live. So it's like, Come on, and your fans can like watch you record the thing live.
And they can ask questions. And when you were pitching it to me a year ago, like that was
the entire pitch. It was all about like doing a live podcast. And that actually was what
kind of turned me off because I was like, I don't care about live, I just want to record
my podcast. Like that's all I care about. Like I just want to record it and then put
it out. And the reason why I thought that was because every time I'd ever done anything
live in the past, it never got more than like three or four or 5% of the viewers or listeners
as the actual recording did. So I might put out an episode of indie hackers and it might
get like 30,000 downloads in six weeks. But if I do it live, then I'm like tweeting and
I'm trying to get people to it. And the room's got like eight people in it. And I'm like
embarrassed. I'm like, show is much bigger. And so I was like pretty hesitant to do it.
And then I think you and I ended up doing like a Q&A or something that actually went
pretty well. And people did join and ask questions. And it was like people that I recognized like
Justin Jackson joined and was asking questions. And I think Peter levels might have asked
you as well. Yeah, yeah. So I wasn't here. So it was actually really cool because you
were able to get like really interesting people to come to come watch.
I still think it's cool, but never really got validated by the market other than the
clubhouse kind of nailed it. But so I feel it's good that interactive elements like that's
the cool thing about life. If you're just have life and you're not really interacting
having people that are people that watching there's no point of doing it live. And I agree
like life is hard. It's all about synchronous, right? So you need the right time and right
moment people need to be tuning in. So it's definitely more difficult. And it's also what
we saw and why we moved away from that whole life element positioning on our on our platform
and more like technology platform where people just come to record really high quality audio
and video.
Like you had a vision, right? You're like, I think live is cool. This is gonna work.
And then you had a reality, which was like people don't necessarily think this is cool.
How do you even recognize that they don't think it's cool? And how did you make the
decision to change?
So how did we start was we had so the idea was actually it came from the debating platform.
What was possible, people could interact live with these politicians. Like I said, it was
pretty cool. Like I could ask a question directly to a high level politician. And hey, what
about this? And that was that concept we thought, okay, we need to bring it to to a podcast.
So we did that. I started reaching out to a bunch of people, including you, some other
people. And people literally just told me like, I don't I don't give a shit about about
this live element. I care more about the recording. And it could have been that I didn't reach
the right people as well. But that definitely I kept hearing the feedback coming back to
me. That's what made us realize we should change the whole positioning on our on our
website, more as the recording. Because in my mind, I was like, yeah, well, you can also
record and go live. What do you care? But the people felt, oh, no, Riverside. Oh, no,
that's a live stream platform. Meanwhile, we had this great recording as well. So that's
why we like moved away from this whole live live element as well. Although I think it's
still undervalued, because imagine the two of us are recording right now. And you just
have backstage some loyal listeners listening while we're recording. And afterwards, we
can still repurpose this recording in the same way you're doing right now. But that's
personal. It doesn't not really validate it.
I think the same thing, honestly, like Telegram came out with so Telegram is like a chat app
similar to WhatsApp or like Facebook Messenger or something you and I talk on Telegram all
the time. And they just came out with a sort of audio chat. So you can have like a group
chat and Telegram, start an audio chat at the top of it. And then anyone in that group
can just pop into the audio chat, start talking, etc. I talked to my brother, and we do any
hackers planning like every day on this thing. And we have a chat room with my mom in it.
So she'll pop in and just listen. And then you and I are part of like the work in progress
chat group. So a couple weeks ago, we were in this like audio chat thing. And when I
saw this, I started getting really excited about live chat because I was like, well,
what if I recorded my podcasts for Andy hackers and Telegram. And then I had this group that
was just like all the coolest Andy hackers. So they were always in the group. So they
would instantly be notified whenever I'm recording any podcast episode, and they could pop in
and listen and maybe ask questions. And I thought that would be super cool. And so maybe
like the hard part for it is just that notification where on other platforms, like if I released
something live, what I would have to do is like tweet about it and try to advertise it
and like push it so that the live room isn't dead. Whereas if I have like the sort of captive
chat group that's already like already active and people are chatting, and they just get
a notification on their phone and it says, okay, there's a podcast going on or a call
like maybe that would like relieve me of the burden of having to sort of promote it.
No, I definitely agree. I think there's something there. It's like a hybrid model. You're not
only doing this whole life element, and you're still engaging with people you like to engage
with. And then afterwards, you still repurpose it. So I definitely think Telegram, Twitter
Spaces, Clubhouse, these are definitely interesting concepts.
So at some point, you're like, all right, screw this live stuff. No one likes it. You
know, at least the way it's implemented right now, it's not growing the way we want. It's
pretty easy that point, you just give up. I mean, a lot of people will be like, okay,
well, this is our vision. It's not working. Why did you decide to go into what you're
doing now, which is just to be a podcast recording tool?
There was one big difference with our previous projects. And so what we had one paying customer
who didn't really pay us, but we had that paying customer that's like, holy shit, someone
on the internet paid us to do something. I also really, really, really believed about
like what we were doing. So I thought there was something there. So that was a huge difference
this time. Having that validation from this one paying customer order was only one. And
my internal really conviction that this is really cool. And it was also the newest thing
we were working on. And then we got really lucky when the way it's bad, the COVID hit.
So then we really realized, wow, this remote recording might be really huge.
There's a whole line of online podcast recording tools that at least I've used. So when I started
in Indiehackers, like the podcast, maybe four years ago now, I was using a tool called Zencaster.
And Zencaster was super cool because it was browser based, just like Riverside. So it's
the same thing. Invite people to the room, they join, they don't have to have like Zoom
installed on their computer or anything like that. And then they will record local audio
files, which means that like, typically when you record something over Zoom or something,
you're getting the audio that's coming over the internet. So if the person's internet
connection is slow, or really just the audio just gets degraded over the internet, no matter
what, it's crappy quality. Whereas with Zencaster, it will record it on their computer, their
audio, it will record your audio on your computer, and it would upload both tracks automatically.
And it was like magic. So I was super happy about using Zencaster. I thought it was the
coolest thing ever. And then maybe a couple years ago, another tool came out called Squadcast.
And Squadcast was identical to Zencaster, but it had video. And so you could actually
look at the person you're talking to, which makes it like much less awkward, much cooler
when you're having the conversations. So I was like, okay, well, I'm going to hop ship
and go to Squadcast because it's the same thing, but I can see who I'm talking to. And
I use that. And then you are sort of the third iteration where you're like, we're not only
going to let you see the video, but you can also record video with Riverside. And it's
the same way. And so I was like, Oh, this is super cool. Because like, what if I want
to put my podcast on YouTube, et cetera? And so you convinced me to jump ship from Squadcast.
And like, that's where I've been for the last year, basically.
Yeah. I hope there's not going to be a fourth player. You gotta be your own fourth player.
You gotta like disrupt yourself and be the next stage.
So actually it's really interesting how this went. We were the first to record video on
the entire internet, up to 4k video. And the way we got to this, to this local video thought
is record the video over the internet and local audio. So the audio is really good,
but the video is not really good. But then actually you, you were having problems with
the internet video we were having. It was out of sync. It was not great. Then we thought,
ah, shit, we need to fix this. Like we need to make sure he coordinates getting good video.
So that made us think, okay, we need to get the same concept for audio for video as well,
because it made no sense for us. Why not repurpose the content you're already recording in all
areas, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you can put it out there. And that's what really made
us think, okay, we need to go all in on video.
Yeah. It's interesting. I think about how competitive the space is. Cause it's like,
you were just like two indie hackers at the time, right? It's like you and your brother,
I don't think you had, and you're like pioneering like the first online platform to let you
record like, you know, high quality video for like podcasts and stuff. And no one else
is doing it. Like literally no one else had like either thought of it. Like you're just
on the bleeding edge of technology. How was it that you two got there first? You know,
why aren't big companies already doing this stuff?
I think it's a matter of focus and it's also, it's also quite difficult. It's my brother
who figured it out to do it because essentially what you're doing is you're recording really
big files in the browser and uploading at the same time. And a company like zoom has
a focus on having a great call and not a great recording. So it's a different focus angle.
And a company like Google meet, uh, is also a different focus. They are like making sure
that it's reliable for a hundred people in the call. And we have a different focus. We
have the focus. Okay. It's all about the recording. Actually right now, the car we're having
now with cordland, I can see him as a bit fuzzy. It's not amazing. But after I look
at the recording, that's where I really stand out. So it's, I think it's a matter of focus.
And it's also, truthfully, it's difficult to do this whole local recording and making
it reliable. I think that's difficult part about it, making it also reliable.
That's so smart that you just, cause you do like sacrifice some things. Like when I pop
in a riverside, it says, Hey, the video quality might be a little fuzzy. And it's because
like you don't care. Like that's not the purpose isn't for like the live video to be amazing.
It's for the recording to be amazing. And the purpose isn't to, you know, sometimes work.
The purpose is like people are recording this, which means it needs to be a hundred percent
reliable. Like I can't quit riverside and say the call is done and then realize I lost
all my recordings because then I'm never going to use it again. I'm going to say bad things.
And so your ability to basically not focus on other things and only do this kind of gave you,
uh, I don't know, I guess superpowers in a way where too many hackers could do something
that no one else was doing. Yeah, for sure. So I think that's also like a lesson to any hackers.
Like if you, if you find that focus points, go double double down on the focus, even though
there might be competitors in the market, you just need to have some kind of edge over competitors.
There's also, there's this concept of moats, you know, how do you build a business where
no one's going to catch up to you or the competition can't really eat your lunch or something.
And there's all these different things that go into building a moat. Like it's,
it's really difficult to do, especially as a 90 hacker. And it usually doesn't even matter.
Like if you're super small, you might as well just like not even care about the competition,
but you're getting to the point where like your size is pretty big and the competition does matter
in some respect. And I think, you know, some of the normal moats, like if you look at any hackers,
there's network effects, where if somebody wanted to build a clone of any hackers,
it would be very hard for them to do because we have this community forum where the more people
who join the more valuable it gets. And so if someone else starts from scratch, like their
community forum is not going to be as good as ours because it's just too small. And then you
have things like economies of scale or like the more money you make, you know, the cheaper you can
buy parts for something because you're buying more parts and then you can make things cheaper
than your competition and compete on price. So that's an economy of scale. And there's also like
technological leaps where you just have some sort of technology that other people don't.
And for whatever reason, either can't build what you're doing or they just don't build it.
And like, that's the one I always tell people, like, don't worry about that. You're an any hacker,
you're like, you're not going to have that. Like, it doesn't make any sense. And like,
you're probably the only example of an any hacker I know, who just had that. And you had that at
the right moment in time, the beginning of the pandemic, where lots and lots of people decided
they wanted to start podcasts, they want to upload their videos to YouTube or whatever.
And like, you're literally the only tool in the market that could do it. Is that what you would
say led to most of like the rapid growth that you've had since then?
Yeah, 100%. So our most was definitely our technological modes. And we double down on that.
And that's what the hell this was brought us here. And now, now, of course, competitors trying to
catch up, but then you already captured a big chunk of the markets in your head.
And then you have to keep running, because competitors are always going to be trying to
catch up. It never ends, right? But I think growth in itself is also a mode, luckily. So if you are
like a productivity tool, I don't know, there's so many productivity tools out there. And if you're
just growing so fast, I think growing in itself is a big mode.
Yeah. And that's kind of like, you know, one of the most amazing things about your company,
just growing at an insane rate, like we didn't say your revenue numbers, but they were quite
substantial. And it's only been a year. At what point did you realize that like your growth was
abnormal?
It sounds maybe strange, I still don't really realize because I don't have a benchmark.
To tell the story like my brother and I, we were doing quite well, like making some money. And then
we got this investor who invested in us. And I also asked him at some point, I was actually quite
shy, but like, is this going well? It's like, what's the benchmark? So I don't really have a way
of like, of course, I have indie hackers as I can check out any hackers, like how much are they
making? But I don't know that I had no idea how fast do people come to one to certain numbers.
So that definitely made me realize, okay, we are growing very fast. But I think it's cliche,
but it's true, you never, you always want more. Yeah, there's kind of this dichotomy between like
your hopes and your expectations. And so your hopes, like probably you want them to be as high
as possible. Like you hope Riverside is going to be making a billion dollars a year at some point,
right? Something crazy. And then your expectations are like, what do you think is realistic? And I
think that's kind of the most, the more internal thing, like your hopes are like, what are you
striving for? And your expectations are like, what makes you happy? And I think if you fall short of
your hopes, but you meet your expectations, like you can still be pretty happy. But if you fall
short of your expectations, you probably won't feel that good. And so an example might be like
with Andy hackers, when I started it, my hopes were that like, I can basically build something
that could be huge and like potentially world changing, right? But like my expectations were
that I just want to build something that makes me enough money to survive as an Andy hacker,
like I want to pay my rent, I want to be able to buy food, I want to not have to get a job.
And I got to that point, like I was super happy, even though I hadn't come anywhere near like what
I hoped and dreamed that I could eventually do. And I still haven't gotten to the point where like,
I'm quite there yet. But I think what's cool about you is that your hopes seem pretty high,
like the fact that you decided to raise money means that you were like, you saw a lot of potential.
And what I see with a lot of other Andy hackers often is like, they're like,
I'm just trying to get to $100 in recurring revenue by this time next year.
That's like, well, if you set the bar that low, yeah, like you'll probably hit it. But also,
you probably won't get much more than that, because you're not going to be doing the things
that allow you to get really big, like you're not going to be taking those swings,
because you're not really thinking about it. I don't know, because I think it goes both ways.
If you don't set the goal too high, it's also attainable and not discouraging.
So my goal was having, for example, $2,000 per month in recurring revenue.
So I think if you have an attainable goal, it can also be like, okay, if I'm there,
holy shit, then it's amazing, I can go full time on it. Whereas when you have a huge goal,
it's like, oh, I'm never going to get there. So I actually think it's better to just
first try to set the realistic goal, and then take it from there. And once you hit it,
of course, it's evolving. So now I have a different goal and different expectations.
But I wouldn't initially when you start off, set that huge goal for yourself and huge expectations.
Yeah, I like the stair-step sort of approach where it's like you start small,
and then you keep hitting these goals, you keep getting bigger.
Like what are your goals right now for Riverside? What do you want to do?
Yeah, I want to make another company. We really have impact in this whole
market that we're in. So otherwise, we really thought about this carefully when we raise money.
Like, okay, what do we really want? Even for me, saying this is quite like it feels
a little bit uncomfortable. But it's also good when I say it, I also need to start believing it.
But at this point, it doesn't really matter. Of course, I want to have the salary. But for
me, it's really about, for us, it's really about impact. Having a big brand, having a name,
having impact in the whole content creation is something we are striving for right now.
Oh, there's a really good Paul Graham essay the other day. And he was writing about what he
learned. And one of the like the chief lessons that he learned was that the way he put it,
he was basically saying, like, you don't really want to chase prestige, you want to chase kind of
being the entry level option that everybody can use. And I've talked to a bunch of people about
this since then. And so like, Andy hackers is kind of the entry level option, lots and lots of
different people who are brand new to entrepreneurship, come to Andy hackers. And they
hear like you talking about how crazy your journey has been, etc. And they're like, okay,
okay, maybe I should do this. And so like, how many people can Andy hackers inspire to do that
is kind of like my North Star. And it mostly just comes down to like the fact that like,
I don't like being on the beaten path, and nor do you, right? Like you could have just gone and
gotten a job. And I'm sure your brother is like a more than good enough developer to get a job
somewhere. But like you probably something like deep inside you made you say like, I don't want to
be on the beaten path. Like I think I can do it better myself. You know, I think I can do more
if I blaze my own trail. And I would like to see a world where much many more people feel that way.
And I think we're headed to that world, like the internet's been pretty crazy, lots and lots of
people are making lots of money doing things that don't even require them to code, you know,
maybe they have a clubhouse room, and they're funneling people to like a paid community,
or maybe they're like tweeting, and then they're like writing a paid newsletter or something.
And people are just getting more and more confidence about the fact that they can make
a living on their own, and they can chart their own course, and they can create their own business
that's like shaped in a way that lets them live a really good life. And so if I can accelerate
that to a significant degree, I'd love to you. And like, maybe that means putting out 100 times
as many podcast episodes and having a whole podcast network and having a much bigger community.
Who knows, but that's kind of my goal with Indie Hackers. And I've been at it for five years now,
and I don't expect to stop anytime soon. And do you have like a concrete goal in terms of
like audience size, or how many people you want to reach? How do you define that goal?
Yeah, we just look at like basically the number of conversations happening in the community and
the number of listeners to like the podcast, right? And so it's like, when we joined Stripe,
for example, our community was super tiny, we had like a few hundred conversations a month.
And now we're up to like 35,000 conversations a month. And our hope is like, okay, a couple
years from now, it'll be 10 times bigger than that, right? And that will just be massive impact,
you know, be massive reach. And it's kind of stressful, because it's like, well, the things
that got you from like, you know, zero to 100 aren't going to get you from 100 to 1000. Like,
it's never guaranteed that you're going to be able to reach that next level. And it just gets
harder and harder to figure out like what you can do to get there. Even though sometimes from the
outside looking in, it seems inevitable. Like looking at Riverside, I'm like, Oh,
the dog's growing so much, like it's inevitable that he would have grown this much. But like,
on the inside, you're probably like sweating bullets, like figuring out, what are we going
to do? There's so many different options? Like, how do I get there?
Yeah, exactly. That is something we discuss sometimes. From the outside,
everything looks like a clear line to a certain goal. But it's a bumpy ride.
We were talking earlier, actually, about like how I keep popping from podcast recording tool and a
podcast recording tool. What is what are your thoughts? You know, like, what's what's next?
You know, who's going to be number four in line? Or how do you be number four in line?
Yeah. So our future vision is really to it sounds maybe fake. But obviously,
when you share your vision becomes more, more scary. But our future vision is really to empower
creators to very easily create content. That means, for example, it can be creating a podcast,
it can be creating videos, there's so much content being created. And we want to be
the company that's empowering these people creating all of that content.
And that means presumably more than just recording, because there's a whole bunch that goes into it.
Exactly. So so right now, we also built a magic editor on Riverside. So when you have those files
on Riverside, they can record it, you can also very easily merge the files and actually go ahead
and edit the files on Riverside itself. So it becomes almost like a full fledged platform to
create content already. There's so much around like this whole space. I mean, the sort of phrase
that's been popular in the last six months or so, but much longer than that, really, it's just like
you're building you're building picks and shovels. You know, people are trying really hard to do stuff
online. They're trying really hard to accomplish goals to build a hit podcast to build a hit YouTube
show to get big on social media. And when people have a dream that's spurring them to action,
if you can just be a tool that helps them accomplish that dream, and helps just make
it a little bit easier, then you're like in a really good spot. You know, and everything about
like all the work I do for this podcast, it's like it's not just this recording, right? There
has to be like an editing pass that gets done over this. And someone's got to spice in the
intro music and the outro music. And someone's got to like, write the show notes in the description
and upload it to Transistor or podcast host. And like someone's got to plan guests, like a million
different things. And like pretty much not like no one helps me with any of this, like you help me
with recording. And then literally all the rest of it, it's like I have to like try to find someone to
like hire to do it. And it's like, I'm not the only one doing this. It's like a million people
who have podcasts. So it just feels like a kind of like a golden age where there's just like,
so much opportunity and so little out there to help. There's also, I think, the curious like lack
of enterprise customers. So like one of the first things you told me when I, when I was going to use
Riverside, you were like, we just got the NFL as a customer. They're going to use us for their
podcast. And this is like in March of last year, like you've just gotten started. And I was like,
thinking about it at the time, like most companies like can't sign the NFL as a client, especially
like indie hackers, right? Because like, there's probably some other bigger SaaS company out there
with an enterprise sales team that's got like taking them out to like drinks and lunch and stuff.
What is it about the podcast space where that's not the case? You know, why is it why is it that
you're able to land such big clients? Like you got Hillary Clinton on your homepage,
with this cool testimonial about Riverside, like how are you landing these huge customers?
I think it's because there's such a strong, strong need for our product. Like they cannot use zoom,
and they cannot use Google meet. So they need they need the platform. Actually, NFL was what we got
NFL for product hunt, some some producers out for launch. So we did get some customer from product
hunt, which is NFL, which is pretty cool. They turned one week later, less cool.
You caught me in the one week they were using us using it.
But definitely, like, I mean, Hillary Clinton is a really happy client. And our third client was a
Dutch news website, which I read every day. So having them as a client was also like, holy shit,
the fact that I can get them as a client, because I can really relate to that to that platform,
like it's something I read every day. It's not some American companies, a Dutch company,
who I read the news on every day. And we got them as a customer. And not because of some strong
connection we have in that company. But just because they saw our product, and they were really
surprised by the quality we are able to give them.
And explain like how you're actually getting a lot of these customers. Because we've talked about
the fact that you've had like this cool technological breakthrough. But were you like,
just hustling and recruiting people one on one the way you did with me? Or were you doing like
social media or SEO? Like how are people even finding out about Riverside?
Yeah, it's mostly a word of mouth, actually, which is boring for the listeners. But because we are
here in an interview, so you so all of your guests also see Riverside. So that's like the main
growth drive for us. Initially, it was also me reaching out personally to people. But that was
never really so effective. I think it's more, more effective to validate that there's something
there. If you have like direct feedback, people say people, most people ignore you, which is also
like sell you something about products. And you have some people actually giving you feedback
and saying, what don't they like? What do they like? It's funny, like, for example,
a guy we both know, I won't say his name, but like, I reached out to him.
He blocked me because I reached out to him. And later on, he unblocked me,
he unblocked me because now I know I'm like, okay, he's not the spammer. He's just he's like,
you're legit part of part of us. Yeah, in the beginning, you're nobody. It's super hard,
you know, like you don't have any credibility. And it's like I got a ton of messages from lots
of people who like, who knows, like they could, they could be super successful, super smart,
amazing people, unlike six months from now. But right now, it's like, I don't know who you are,
right? And you have to kind of push yourself through that, like, the point at which it's
the hardest for anyone to take you seriously is the point at which it's probably the most important
for you to constantly be reaching out to people.
Yeah, that's actually very true. Because now it's not as important that I reach out to people. But
I agree initially, when you're starting off, you need to push through that. And
that came very natural to me, because also with the politicians, like I was saying,
I literally would call the politicians and would say for the debating platform,
hey, you're speaking to the office of our debater.tv, that was the name of our website.
So they already thought, oh, this is a big company, the office, like, head of head of the
debater. So I was always trying to like, wing it until we do by getting these politicians on board.
So that's what that really taught me, like, I literally could get the foreign minister of the
Netherlands on our platform without any connections, me just calling him like saying,
hey, do you want to debate against other politicians? And then they often would say yes,
surprisingly. Yeah, it's kind of crazy when she realized like how easy it is to get
certain people on the phone who previously seemed completely inaccessible. It doesn't always work.
But if you hustle and you contact enough people, like you'll get some yeses, and then
you can sort of parlay those yeses into more yeses. And then suddenly you've got,
you know, the NFL or you've got Hillary Clinton. What's the story behind Hillary Clinton, by the
way, because her testimonial on your your homepage, it almost seems like, like she did you a personal
favor, because she's like, a big thanks to Riverside FM. Just imagine, we needed a recording
platform that can help us make a podcast during a pandemic. And boy, did they step up. Like,
that's the kind of testimonial that someone writes, because you're like, hey, Hillary,
give me a good testimonial. How did you get it to do this?
Yeah, that's insane, right? Even when I when I think about it now, that's the fact that she did
that. So her producer found out about Riverside, and I gave her a pretty good service, like help
her with the setup. I even met Hillary Clinton on the call, which I was, and I helped her for
mic setup, stuff like that. And afterwards, I heard her one episode of her, I heard her thinking,
a bunch of people I heard thinking, and thanks to the producer, listen, switch, switch, switch,
and switch. And then I said, Fuck, why did she not? If only she would have thanked me, you know.
So so I thought, okay, fuck it, I'll just go for it and ask the producer, Hey, do you mind,
would it be possible if she would give us also thank us in a podcast? And yeah, sure enough,
she thanked us and I couldn't believe it as well.
That's crazy. Super nuts. Yeah. It's this whole word of mouth thing is interesting, because most
companies, like most founders want to grow the word of mouth, like wouldn't it be a dream if you
could just build an app and put it out there and then people will just start using it and spreading
it virally. But that's like 1% of the time, like literally never happens. I want to talk about like
the physics behind your word of mouth growth, though, like you said something interesting,
which is that when people use Riverside, you kind of don't use it by yourself. It's almost
like gift cards. Like if I give somebody like a hallmark card, it's a product that's meant to be
shared just in the normal usage of it. Like I buy a card, I read a note in it, and then I give it to
someone else. And if they didn't know anything about hallmark cards, now they do. And it's like,
I'm as a customer advertising the product and not in some like cheesy, hokey, like weird way,
or like, Oh, we'll give you $5 if you send this to somebody, but like a very natural usage of the
product itself makes me advertise it. And it's exactly the same with podcasting and Riverside.
Because if podcasters love to do anything, it's to have other podcasters on their shows
and go on each other's shows and try to grow their audience. And so if you're using Zoom or
Zencaster or something, and then you like join someone else's show and they're hosting you on
Riverside and you're like, what is this? And they tell you all about it, then like suddenly you're
going to do it. That to me seems like probably the strongest force for why you're able to grow
so rapidly through word of mouth. Absolutely. It's exactly what you're saying. A lot of podcasters
love coming on each other's podcast and are often the guests are podcasters themselves.
So we saw a perfect growth role basically. Yeah. Like I'm starting another podcast with my buddy
Julian. It's not out yet. But we do like these round table things. They're almost like a clubhouse
call and it'll always be four of us. So we did one on podcasting. The whole topic of the episode
is podcasting. And it was me, Julian. And then we got Sean Purie from the My First Million podcast.
And then we got Jason Calacanis who runs this weekend startups and all in. And I was like,
okay, we're going to do it in Riverside. And like, of course, the first thing we start talking about
when we sit down and record the podcast is Riverside itself. We're like, Oh, what do you
think about Riverside? Blah, blah, blah. Jason was talking about potentially like investing in
Riverside and Sean was talking about what he uses. And then everyone's just kind of assessing
the tool. And it's so much harder for almost every other product to have that kind of natural
virality, I guess. Another cool thing about what you're doing is you're basically smack dab in the
middle of this remote work trend. Obviously, we had a pandemic. Everyone had to work remote.
But you and your brother, you're not situated in Silicon Valley raising from investors and the
heart of the tech industry. I think you were in Amsterdam and now you're in Israel. And you've
always been remote. You're raising all this money from investors who basically have never
met you in person. And then you're building a tool that's helping people collaborate remotely.
So even when when when Gidon, who's my brother, we were always working, I am still in Amsterdam,
please don't leave where we're always using our own platform as well as a way of communicating
and the way of testing our own system. His internet is horrible. Well, perfect. We can
try our own stuff. What do you think about the future of like building a remote teams and then
remote communication? Like, because I assume your whole team at this point, you've got employees,
you have people working with you. They're also remote as well. Yeah, I think remote is fine.
And we'll probably keep on doing that. But I do think having some kind of core team with engineers
in the same office, there's still something for it. And what we have noticed is that time zone,
which is like, I'm all only learning probably everyone knew it already. But time zone is
definitely issue. Like if someone in the US only starts working when it's like,
6pm our time, it's just never ending, you're always working. So time zone is I think the only
really barrier with remote work. Yeah, what time was that that work in progress chat that we were
in telegram the other day? And I think it was Oh, my God, man, it was 5am for you.
Yeah, it was like 5am for me. I hadn't even gone to sleep. And it was like the middle of the day
for you. Corlenda speaking about mental health. Meanwhile, he was awake at the 5am.
Well, yeah, you're, you're always a fun person to talk to about that kind of stuff. Because
you're very open about the fact that like, it's not all sunshine and rainbows to be a founder,
like it's stressful. There's a lot of pressure. Like even before you were raising a lot of money
from investors, you were just like, I think you telegram me once like how to deal with the pressure
of like, hoping the growth continues and knowing you have to do all this kind of stuff. And like,
I didn't have a lot of good answers. I was like, uh, you know, make sure you're around people who
who you like who you can talk to try to make some friends outside of tech. But beyond that,
it's kind of just a thing that you deal with. How has your environment evolved in that way? And you
still feel a lot of the pressure that used to? Yeah, I still feel the same pressure, if not more.
But I do really have this really strong feeling of gratitude. Like I said, I'm doing this together
with my brother. We have this amazing business going. We raised money from Alex and I mean,
the founder of Reddit, who would have thought in a while it's written that we will be able to speak
to a guy like that. So that feeling of gratitude is always overpowering and makes me be able to
deal with the pressure. And also it's a lot of fun. Like oftentimes me and my brother are just
online on Riverside working together and having fun while we're doing it. Like it's not all as
serious as it looks from the outside. It's of course. Yeah, I think having a brother also,
I mean, obviously I work with my brother. We're talking every day basically. And it's like,
we're not only talking about work, we're talking about our personal lives and dating and then like
just childhood, like we both just turned 34 on Monday. And so our moms sent us like cards and
stuff. So like she's on the call with us talking about stuff. And like, I think as I've been
working on indie hackers, it's just become much more, I've been much more like grateful that like,
oh, this is a cool time in my life where I get to be this close with my brother and work with him
on something meaningful. And like, yeah, maybe the numbers aren't going the way we want them to this
month or something, or maybe something else happens or something stressful. But like if you have
somebody that you actually want to endure that journey with, then the hard parts are much easier,
I think. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And I'm even doing with our older brother as well. So we're
three brothers running the company. That makes a lot of fun. Like sometimes we have this team
meetings and then, okay, I think I start speaking to my other brother and my other brother and then,
okay, now it's over to the team members. It's like, it's a bit strange.
But that's cool. So your third brothers, was he a co-founder or did he join later?
No, he was not a co-founder. He's always been involved also with the debating platform. He
was the moderator. He was the more mature guy who knew how to get the processes right. And he was
still working for this really cool startup. And then I finally got to convince him to join
Riverside. So yeah. Very cool. Well, listen, Adav, I think what you're doing is pretty amazing.
And I'm inspired to see... I mean, you kind of made the transition from indie hacker,
we hope this works. We hope it makes a couple thousand dollars a month to full blown,
fully funded founder. We're trying to build a unicorn company. What would you say is the
biggest lesson that you've learned that's helped you get through all of this that people who are
maybe where you were a year ago could take away? Don't let all these big companies discourage you
to go all the way know what you want to do. Because oftentimes it just starts with a very
small project and then it gets some traction. And having that initial traction, that really
gives so much motivation to keep going. At least for me, having even one paying customer, it
doesn't even really matter what you're doing. But having just a paying customer, I think that gives
so much external motivation to keep going. And you don't know where you're going to end.
I love it. Start small. And it's almost like a positive flywheel where like whenever you get
any sort of win, one paying customer, you know, a little bit of traction, you can use that to
increase your confidence and use that to push harder and increase your motivation and push
harder and get the next thing. And before you know it, you're a completely different person.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to
with Riverside and anything else you got going on?
Yeah, they can follow me on Twitter. I'm Ed Nadaaf-Keeson, N-A-D-A-V-K-E-Y-S-O-N.
Nadaaf-Keeson, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Yeah, pleasure.