All right, we should probably introduce you. You are Yahya Bakour, the founder of Stockalarm.
Am I pronouncing that right? Yes, to both sides.
You are, you're super young. I think what's inspirational about you is the fact that you're
only 23 years old. You've been working on Stockalarm for three years now. So you started
this when you were 20 or 19 in college and you just recently quit your job. You're a
software engineer at Amazon. You're making 250 grand a year and you've taken the leap
to work full time on Stockalarm, which is making 20 grand a month. So you're killing
it there too. I think that's pretty rare to hear an indie hacker succeeding so wildly
at your age and it's pretty inspirational to see. So welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. Thank you. You know what I was doing at 20 years old?
I was going to bars with a fake ID. I was trying to seem like I actually knew how to
order. So I'd go there and there'd be some cute girl and I would stand and the bartender
wouldn't see me because I was too short and I was too timid. And yet you're 20 years old,
running a business, making grands, making business decisions. I'm happy I didn't have
friends like you who made me feel like shit. I tried to have balance, actually. I think
my idea was taken somewhere in Jersey, so not too far off, but yeah.
So let's talk about your product, Stockalarm. I'll try to describe it, Yahya, and you tell
me if I'm getting this right. So let's say that I am trading stocks. Obviously that can
be really time consuming to do, especially if I'm like a day trader or something. I might
be watching 10 or 20 different stocks and I want to buy and sell them at different prices
and so I'm just watching and clicking refresh on the page over and over and over again all
day so I know when to buy and sell. Enter Stockalarm. That process is a huge waste of
time, but if I download your app or I sign up for your website, then suddenly I can set
alerts. I can tell Stockalarm, hey, notify me when this stock hits this price. And then
I can buy or sell it and I'm no longer having to do all this manual checking myself. I'm
just getting automatic notifications via email or a phone call or a text message. And now
I can just go buy stocks and not have to do this whole sort of time consuming process.
And so that, I think, is the main benefit, as I understand it, of your app, Stockalarm.
Yep, that's pretty much it. The whole point of it was to avoid that feeling of, you know,
you're watching Tesla or whatever volatile Wall Street but stock was going on is popular
at the time. You're watching it for a while. You stop watching and your last thought for
that was maybe I should buy some. Right. And then later on, you're like, oh, spiked by,
you know, 10 percent. But if you had bought a call option, you would have made a ton.
Yeah, I get that exact feeling like maybe I should have bought some whenever, whenever
I see the price spike, but not when I see it fall. And so I have a sort of retroactive
history in my mind. Like I totally would have. I totally knew this was going to happen and
I would have bought if I, you know, I just thought about it.
And fun story, actually, I was not the original founder on this. I actually joined the party
pretty late.
OK, when did you join?
So I joined Stockalarm when there was, I think it was under 100 bucks MRR and it's only three,
four hundred monthly active users. The story of how I joined was pretty fun, as well as
the co-founders and where they are now. I think Corlin, you might have talked to one
of them a few weeks ago. Rude. He was working on a content moderation platform. The other
one, Morgan, he recently got a full time job. He had a period of one year when he was going
full time on Stockalarm. The year expired. We didn't hit the MR that he would have wanted
to stay on. So he just went back.
OK. So, yeah, give me the, give me the rundown. You started Stockalarm, I think, in 2019.
Was that when you joined or is that when the first two co-founders started it?
So I joined, I think it was a few months after. Essentially, what had happened is, you know,
I was a junior of college, applying to jobs, you know, you're trying to get in the fang,
et cetera. And I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Morgan, which had been going kind
of viral, a couple thousand likes. He had written, hey, I started this stock market
alerting app. Check it out. Been working on it for a while, et cetera. So I opened it.
And my first thought was this would be great if it worked. Right. Like it just it was broken
in a lot of ways. So like, hey, I would actually pay the five bucks a month for this if only
it had these features, because at the time I had my own kind of setup. Right. I thought
I was doing well with options. Wasn't actually. But it was fun. Right. So. Went ahead, sent
them a list of suggestions. I'm like, hey, I have a spreadsheet where I keep prices updated.
I'm actually trying to build something like stock alarm. Please add these features. Right.
One thing led to another. We hopped on a call. They're like, hey, do you want to join? It's
pretty early on. You can grow this thing. You know, we can become co-founders. So essentially
that's what happened in Grids for a period of one year. I think by the end of the year,
we were chilling at 10K MRR. I love that. It's like in a way, your story
is like the way that I ended up as one of the founding members of this product is I
noticed what was wrong with it. And I kind of like politely shat on it in certain ways.
Like here's what would make your app good. It kind of reminds me of when tech companies
like for like hackers to hack in and like show security vulnerabilities. And then they
end up bringing on those hackers to run the security team and like kind of show them how
to do it in a better way. I've never hired anybody who's complained
about my apps, but I've become good friends with people who have like Julian has been
on the podcast a few times, messaged me in the early days of indie hackers to be like,
Hey, your site's cool and all, but like, here's like 15 things that you could be doing better
that are wrong with it. And I think when you're an early stage founder, like that kind of
feedback is extremely appreciated. Like usually you're just kind of like in a bubble where
nobody's talking to you and nobody cares. So if somebody is like taking the time to
go through and pointed out all the things that could be better, you're probably thinking
like, maybe I should talk to this person or hire them.
And I think at the time they had full time jobs. They were telling Facebook, I was in
senior college, which yes, technically I have things to do, but not really. Right. So yeah,
I had a bunch of spare time to work on a lot of beer pong to play homework to do not much
else.
I mean, for you to give them suggestions on how they could make this better. I mean, it
sounds like, I mean, it sounds like you just said you were, you thought about how you would
do the app the same way. So I would assume that you were stock trading already. You had
like, what was your background with trading? Like how long, how did you even get into stocks?
I really like to read books in college. So I read a bunch of, you know, trading books
as well as stuff on derivatives. One of my favorite books actually is a random walk down
wall street. Like it's, they're, they're really simple books to read, but, you know, it interests
you to all the lingo, all of the concepts. And also it was perfect for our target market,
right. Which is mostly retail traders as well as professional traders that just want the
really easy UI to use to compliment whatever they're doing on the basis.
I'm going to have to say like in this, in this situation, I actually don't know hardly
anything about stock trading, even to this day. Right. Like you were nerding out at age
20 and I'm 35 and like, I've got like Robin hood. I think I've got some Bitcoin locked
up in one of these apps. Like I bought them because I was quote supposed to, I never looked
into it. I don't open those apps. So I'm going to kind of like use you in this interview,
at least if nothing else, like I need to figure out like books and stuff to read, but I'm
going to keep mining you for information. So I'm taking notes.
Yeah. What are your recommendations? You said random walk down wall street. What else have
you like read to like learn more about trading and what would be your advice to somebody
who's like, you know, sort of a noob like you were at some point?
I mean, I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily, you know, I think the standard advice of index
funds and don't trade applies to people. Right. There was that one study of like, it wasn't
study was this famous article about how a monkey picked out random stocks and it performed
better than, you know, a bunch of mutual fund managers and whatnot. So I think trying to
actively trade is not usually the move, but you know, if what most people tend to do especially,
you know, tech people that I was working with is they would have fun money, right? So they'd
be like, Hey, this is money I would spend going to Vegas instead. I'm just going to
spend it at home trading options, right? So they say, okay, I have this much money I'm
going to spend on trading. And then usually that's also part of who our users are, right?
Cause they're like, Hey, if I'm spent trading with a couple thousand dollars, I don't mind
spending five bucks a month on this app to actually keep me on top of everything. So
I don't go to class or go to work or et cetera. I like that point of view, basically this
is fun money, but on the flip side of that, like you have to understand like your personality
type, like are you an addictive gambler? Yeah. It's just fun money going to suddenly turn
into like your rent money and suddenly turn into like your mortgage payment. Like I think
a lot of people don't necessarily have that control, but um, if you do, I think that's
a really good way to look at it. And there's people that trade, you know, on like a monthly
basis or, or they rebalance their portfolios every six months. Right. But they have so
much money in there that, you know, it's still useful for them. I'm not supposed to talk
about like our target users. Right. What we've learned from them. A lot of them, they only
do a couple of trades a year, but the volume is so large or the amount of money they put
in is so large that they're like, okay, I need to be on top of this thing. Right. And
then in terms of what he should actually do, everybody has their own opinions I think,
but whoever's making money is probably the right one.
Yeah. I know a lot of, I got a lot of friends who are like YOLO crypto traders and they're
just putting money into every single coin, putting half the net worth into that, making
and losing millions of dollars and living that kind of lifestyle. But I think that you're
sort of right about the, uh, probably the right move is not to be an active trader.
Like I remember when I was in college, I graduated 2009 and so 2008 was sort of like the financial
crisis due to like the housing bubble bursting. And right after that I started trading stocks
and I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing. So I was just doing a lot of day
trading, you know, just like buying and selling stocks like three or four times a day for
months on end because it was fun to do. And if I had just like held any of those stocks
that I had bought and just not sold them and literally just done nothing, like the easiest,
I could have just forgotten about them. It would have been the easiest, dumbest thing
to do. And yet it would have been the smartest thing. It would have made way more money than
all the buying and selling that I did, which is kind of funny because then I probably wouldn't
have needed stock alarm. I wouldn't have needed to know any alerts. I just would have completely
forgot about it, said it and forget it and profited.
There's also like that whole like the whole HODLing thing for the crypto community.
That's essentially that mentality.
Whole no matter what.
Yeah.
Kind of is. I don't see that as much with stock traders, but I think it's for some reason
very popular in crypto.
So I mean, you knew a bit about stock trading. You knew enough to criticize and like poke
holes and like an actual new startup for it. But that startup was like new. You said they
had only been around for a couple of months and you were looking for a job. So I'm kind
of curious, like why was that like an option that seemed like it to you?
Why go work for a broke startup?
So here's the fun thing. I wasn't even trying to get into the startup space. Like for some
reason in my head to build a startup, you needed to raise money and have this grand
idea, right? Like building this thing that'll immediately help billions. I didn't understand
this concept of like indie hacking where it's like, okay, you see a niche market where there's
only the potential to make a couple of million, which is a lot of money, right? But the point
is I didn't think that you could build a small product that kind of worked in that market
and it could fund your lifestyle, right? Which is what a lot of indie hackers do.
So in my head I was like, okay, I'll give this guy suggestions. I can use this app and
then I'll keep looking for a full-time job, right? So my priority was getting into a big
company, getting to Amazon. And you know, I was working on a stock when I'm at the side
and I'm like, wow, I really like doing this thing. It's fun to work on. You get recognition,
right? People reach out, they're like, hey, surprisingly people feel very strongly about
their money and things related to their money. So if, you know, the stock alarm works the
way it's supposed to, people get an alert, they leave really positive reviews. So if
you check the app store, we have like 6,000 reviews with 4.8 stars and you know, some
people are very angry, some people are very happy, but I think the nice part is people
feel strongly about it. So I think that was cool.
And somewhere along the line, I was like, hey, what I'm doing at Amazon is fun, but
you know, it's getting old very quickly. Meanwhile, every time I work on stock alarm, I'm up till
like midnight and time just flies, right? And you know, I do Amazon during the day,
stock alarm at night. And my main goal at the time was, okay, get promoted to Amazon.
I did that in 10 months and I was like, okay, I feel nothing, right? Like I could gun for
another promotion or could gun for more money, which I tried, did the whole dive and save
thing, but I was like, okay, what do I actually want to do with my life? So stock alarm seemed
like a very good option because, you know, here it was, I had this sort of gem that,
you know, could fund a indie hacking lifestyle and I could try to grow it and expand it beyond
alerting and what it currently does. Let's go to the beginning though, because
I'm curious about the, like the, this transition that you made from early employee basically,
or maybe late co-founder to like founder, like that's one of the most ballroom movies
you could possibly make. Like, hey, you guys made this app. I'm just, you know, part of
the peanut gallery on LinkedIn telling you what you need to do till like today you're
like, I am the founder of stock alarm, quit my job running this. How does that happen?
So initially it happened by, initially you and Morgan did not really believe this thing
would grow past the UK MRR, right? They're like, Hey, if you, you know, manage to go
to this point, we'll give you all this equity. And later on they told me, they're like, we
never actually thought it would happen. Right. So, which is funny. I actually only met them
a year and a half after working. We hope we all took a trip to Tahoe or like, Hey, company
offsite. Right. So it was a full thing, but yeah, the way that happened was I joined on
initially started trying all these growth tactics, started actually building up a product
and whatnot, grid, grid, grid. And then once I got all the equity I wanted, I'm like, Hey
guys, let's keep going on this, but I'll need more until eventually I got to like co-founders
that is nobody was cool with it. And I'm out of equity that's respectable and whatnot.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, in that sense, it's worth it to them because
they own equity in the company. And if you are making the company more valuable than
like the value of their equity is going up. And I'd rather own like 40% of a company that's
like making 20 grand a month. And you know, somebody is working on it full time and own
a hundred percent of a company where I'm not even believing in the product really that
much and don't have time to work on it. And I don't have anyone else. So I think that's
like a smart move on their part too, to recognize that you had the ambition and the skills to
like sort of take it to the next level. But I also get like maybe why they didn't feel
that way in the beginning, like you said you joined and they had like a hundred MRR. It's
not exactly a huge company. I think that very first like phase where you're not, no one's
really using the app and it's not that big and it's not making that much money. It's
like, it's easy to be like, this is never going to work. Like how could this ever get
big? How do you get out of that first phase? How do you like take something that's making
a hundred MRR and like find, you know, your first real paying customers and your first
sort of growth wins and build the right features? I think what worked for us super well at the
beginning was trying to make super fans out of people. So, you know, they'd reach out,
they'd be like, Hey, can you please build me this feature? Right. And normally when
someone reaches out to support asking for something, for some reason they don't expect
it to happen. Especially for like bigger products. But for us, we're like, okay, you get a request
on Monday, it'll be built in by Wednesday, right? Especially if it's a new alert type,
like, Hey, can you create a trigger type based on RSI or something? So we would get to work,
build it by Wednesday, emails and back. And suddenly, you know, they post positive views.
They'd refer a bunch of people. So initially it just grew by word of mouth from customers
that we gave specific attention to. And we did that for months on it because like paying
customers tended to be friends with other paying customers.
That makes a ton of sense. Like you're sort of a unique case. You're a software engineer
and you have experience in growth and marketing. Most software engineers are like only software
engineers. They have no desire to do any of the growth stuff. Like they don't want to
market. They don't want to message anyone or send a cold email or like even really submit
their app to product hunt. They just want to code stuff. And so I think like the fact
that you were looking at it with the sort of growth hat on makes a lot of sense for
why you're able to break out of these early stage doldrums that it's hard for a lot of
early founders to break out of. Yeah. And then all the usual stuff like posting
product hunt, beta lists, subreddits. Right. I think we went viral on the React.js subreddit.
Which is not necessarily our target market because all the trading ones ban any spam
or self-promotion. But we did that for a while. Another thing we did, if you look at our Twitter,
like there's a bot there. I wrote like 10 lines of code three years ago and it tweets
still today. Tweets out the latest news for stocks on our platform as well as top upcoming
earnings, dividends, et cetera. So like kind of reuses our infrastructure that we've already
built up for the product to help with growth. I'm interested in like that early phase where
clearly the other co-founders weren't that confident that this thing was going to be
like a long-term success early on. What was the point where some of these tactics that
we're using to grow are working out? Like when did it legitimately become validated?
When we hit a few thousand MRR, we're like, hey, this actually has potential to grow,
right? Because we've gotten to this point, why couldn't it hit 10K MRR? Why can't it
hit 20? So I think around that point, we were all still putting in time at the beginning,
right? We're all still building and trying to figure out what to build by asking people
who were paying, hey, why are you paying? What else do you want us to build and whatnot?
But it only really got validated once more people were paying for it. And we saw that
it could actually grow because with this type of thing, especially for retail traders, they
tend to cycle in and out of trading during the year. And when they're in, they're spending
a bunch of money and when they're out, they cancel their subscription and then say, hey,
we're coming back later, right? So we needed to make sure that our churn rate would stay
low enough that the business could actually grow and the MRR would not just be flatlining
or declining over time. I think there's like two types of people or
maybe two types of approaches to starting a company and you're definitely doing the
second. So the first approach is like what I call the master plan approach. You sit down
from day one, you get your blueprints like an evil mad scientist and you're like, this
is what we're going to do. And you have it all charted out, you know, where are you going
to be in 10 years? Where are you going to be in five years? Where are you going to be
in one year? And you draw it all the way back to today and you have a master plan. And you
have the opposite, which is more of like a bottom up approach. You're like, what are
we going to do today? You know, today I'm going to send these guys a message about how
their app is buggy. You know, okay, now I'm here. Like today we're going to do some influencer
marketing because that seems good, right? Oh, now we're here. We're making some money.
Like maybe we should try to make more money, right? And you just follow the path and you
see where you are now and you see where you could get to in the next step. And I think
that second path, like that's not what I like to do because I like to be super meticulous
in planning, but I think it's honestly the better way to go because it's more motivational
and you end up seeing more realistic opportunities. Like a lot of your story at this point is
you figuring out what to do next based on like where you are right now, which means
you're always going to like have kind of a clear vision of where you can go. And like
maybe you'll hit a dead end, right? Maybe you get to some point and you follow the wrong
path and you have to backtrack a little bit. But it seems like that never really happened
with you and you've just been figuring it out one step at a time.
Yeah. I mean, in general, we tried to have a long-term plan of where this thing is going.
Like, Hey, we want to, you know, build these additional features that all tie into an overarching
theme that people are willing to pay either more for or stick around longer for. But yeah,
they, you know, week by week, month by month, we tend to be like, okay, this is the most
important thing to work on right now. And this will help us. But yeah, you have a sort
of a master plan. You're saying like there's, there's a rhyme in there. There's an idea
of where we're going there, but the day to day, what to do priorities can change pretty
fast, right? Like what do you think is like the part of your master plan that has worked
out the best, the prediction that you've made or the strategy that you guys have had that
actually you've been able to make into reality? I think one thing that's worked really well
for us is keeping the app really simple and making decisions on how to limit the app,
right? So, Hey, we're gonna, we're going to have the most common RSI as an option for
alerts, but we're not going to have like a million options and million different time
periods and whatnot. Make it really intuitive, user-friendly. And you know, one of the reviews
that really made me happy, right? Was this guy reaching out. He's like, Hey, I'm 70.
I love using your app. It's really simple, right? Cause you open it, there's a big button.
It's like, Hey, Tesla, here's the soft graph. Here's a big button that says, add alert,
right? You click on it. It says, can't really mess it up. And that's something we iterated
on a lot and something we try to keep up on a daily basis is, Hey, cut the crap. Even
if we wrote some, even if we built a feature that, you know, turns out that it isn't working,
we just remove it, right? So try not to get attached. So I think one of the things that's
kind of impressive about your idea is that, uh, I saw you posting about it on any hackers
and then one of the responses was, doesn't this already exist? You know, aren't there
already stock alerting apps and options. And I had the same thought, right? Like, yeah,
it's probably like, there probably already are alternatives to this, right? I use Robin
hood for the limited trading. I do. I've never set an alarm, but like it probably is an alarm
there. Um, or if we use like some other app or something, they probably have alarms. But
like what you're basically proving is that like the market's big just because someone
has done something doesn't mean they've done it well or doesn't mean they've done it in
the way that you're going to do it. And if you have these sort of guiding principles,
like we're going to make it super duper simple, like that's going to appeal to enough people
that you can build a business out of it despite the fact that other people have stock alerts
or stock alarms. I remember that comment actually, cause I actually took 20 minutes to write
that response. I was like looking at alternatives, but I remember I, one of the examples I used
was, Hey, Google analytics is a thing, but you know, it sucks to use, right? Like it's
just playing too many options. It's, you know, the thing you want to find is very hard to
find. So now there's plausible, right? I mean, notion's a pretty good example, but I think
there's a lot of small startups that can just take one aspect of a bigger product and do
it really well. And which is what most people want out of that bigger product anyways. Yeah.
I think that's kind of like the, the, one of the biggest misconceptions about startups
and businesses in general, um, especially for people who are doing it for the first
time is that you have to solve an unsolved problem, right? If someone has already solved,
if people are already eating at restaurants, like you can't make another restaurant. If
people are already staying in hotels and Airbnbs, like it's a solved problem. Like you can't
solve a problem that people have already solved, but like it's actually not true at all. Like
the vast majority of the biggest startups in the world, even the newest startups are
just solving a problem that has already been solved. They're just doing it in a new way.
The creativity comes not in the problem that you pick. The creativity comes in your solution
to that problem. Like with the ideas app, like the creativity comes in, like making
it super niche, super specific, and then super simple. And that allows you to solve a problem
that's already being solved, but in a different way and to reach a new group of customers.
Because I think growth is the hardest thing for indie hackers. Like the number one thing
is building your app or having an idea. But like that actually turns out to be like not
that hard. People figure out how to hack it together, even if they don't have a code.
But then once it's built, people were like, Oh shit, like I don't, no one knows about
it. No one's using it. No one's, I have no customers, we have no revenue. But it's been
pretty smooth sailing for you guys. Like getting to, I think you said you got to 10k after
a year in revenue. Like that's pretty quick for an indie hacker. And so I kind of want
to walk through like some of the things that have worked for you from a growth perspective
and just break them down so others can learn a bit about what you've learned if that's
okay. So you mentioned doing marketing on forums and websites like Reddit and stuff.
How does that work? What's your playbook for marketing on internet forums?
There's a few posts actually on indie hackers about this that say it pretty well. It's finding
you know where your customers currently hang out and then going and hang out in that area
as well. And then not necessarily shilling your app and spamming it. Right. But you know,
suggesting it every once in a while and being like, Hey, I built this full disclosure. Use
it. Right. One thing that that worked for us actually Quora really hate spam. Right.
If you're just totally upfront and honest about, you know, the fact that you worked
on this, it works pretty well. So if you look up like what stock, what's the best stock
alerting app on Quora. Right. There's like, if I remember correctly, there was like 60
questions or something I check up every month or so I just post an answer. I'm like, Hey,
try this disclosure. I built this, you know, and then I think at one point I was getting
like 10 K views on my answers per month. Right. And then it leaks straight to our app. And
there's a deep link where it's like, depending on your device, Android or iPhone or you're
on a computer, right. It just goes to the correct client, whether it's web iOS or Android.
So that worked pretty well actually. Just answering questions on Quora straight up Reddit.
Like I said what's what's the best stock alerting app Quora and the very first link on Google
links to that question. Is there any app that provides stock alerts? And then I see answer
number one, you're here before stock alarm. Sounds like it fits. And you just sort of
talk about stock alarm. And then at the very end, you're like, disclosure, I work on stock
alarm and truly think it's one of the best out there. And you're probably getting a lot
of clicks from that. So it makes sense. Yeah. You can see the number of views at the bottom.
I hope that's one of the ones that have quite a bit of views. Yeah. Yeah. So that worked
pretty well for us. SEO was huge, right? So static marketing websites, stock alarm.io.
That was literally just HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I put it together in like a day, right? A
lot of templates swapped out all of the text and the images, threw in all of the meta tags,
picked a few high, picking keywords was pretty difficult. Like one thing we did was pick
a high intent keywords, which was stock alerts, right? Has pretty low volume, but people who
click on that tend to actually download the app. So if you look up stock alerts on Google,
you're number one ahead of articles from Schwab and Fidelity and whatnot. Yeah. How do you
get to be number one? Because like you said, it's not high volume. There's not a ton of
people searching for this, but like there's a lot of other companies who are writing about
stock alerts. Yeah. I think back linking worked pretty well for us in the sense that we posted
links on this from a bunch of other websites and reached out for people to actually like,
Hey, we'll write you an article, but we'll draw us a link to back to here. And at some
point kind of took off organically, like the balance wrote a few articles about tools to
help with the stock trading and they linked to us. So we started getting links organically
from people, which is great. Another thing is, just writing content. We have a ton of
blog posts all around RSI alerts or why you should set stock alerts for something or how
income statements work or whatnot. So they're all kind of around the stock market and the
stocks financials and technicals and whatnot. Another thing is our web app has, I think
we support right now around 40,000 or 60,000 assets. I check, but it just automatically
pulls them in. So we have new web pages for those all the time. So when you look up Tesla
stock alerts on Google, the first one's from our web app, app.stockalarm.io. So that also
helps out a lot. SEO was probably the biggest thing like just focusing on that because it
took a few months for us to see any results from there. So that was nice.
Yeah. That's one of the things I think discourages a lot of indie hackers from doing SEO, especially
if they're in the ideation phase. Like if you're just starting an app and you're like,
I don't know if it's going to work. If this doesn't work, I want to abandon it and move
on to something new, you know, next month. Then SEO doesn't enter most people's minds
because it takes months to like write these blog posts and create these pages and then
get other people to link to them and then have them start rising up the ranks in Google
and like prove that they're going to do anything or generate any amount of traffic or that
that traffic is going to convert to like paying users. And I think a lot of people just don't
have the patience or the time for that strategy, but it seems like you were just committed
early on. And so you're like, why not? It just felt like something like get it out
of the way early. It's going to help eventually. It can't hurt. Right. Like, and how much
time does it take to really bang out these articles?
Ironically, the person who runs the stock, the stock alarm app thinks about investing
in SEO.
Yeah. Who would have guessed?
It seemed like a win. And I think we've ported up over our, I mean, I know we did this, like
last week I forwarded over our web app to Next.js for more SEO gains, right? Just because
we built it with Create React app first and that was not doing too hot on Google.
One thing I want to slightly dig into, just because I'm completely unfamiliar with it
and I know a lot of other people probably are too, is like, I know plenty about just
like generic SEO for a website. We've done a little bit for indie hackers, not nearly
enough. We need to invest more. But I read that a lot of your like search volume is coming
to your iOS app. So like, what's the difference? Like what learnings have you, have you come
across that like help you to rise in your search rank on app stores as opposed to just
your websites, your landing pages?
That is right. Most of us come from our iOS app, but you know how you can track where
your refers come on iOS for people who download the app? So I remember very, very clearly
when I started, there was just one page for stock.com.io. It was maybe if we use way back
to my machine, you can see it. But at the time, only 5% of our traffic was coming from
web, like web refers on the app store was 5%. And then after doing all of the SEO stuff
and waiting six months, it was 20%. Right. So now a lot of our traffic was coming from
web straight into iOS. And then also this was pretty useful because people coming from
web, you know, a lot of them were only, you know, might've had Androids or were on their
laptops. Right. So when we built our Android app and our web app, they started going there
as well. Before that we had, I think we built our web app before the Android app and on
the web app, we had a button that said download for Android. And when you clicked it, it said,
Oh, sorry, we don't have Android. Put in your email, the email you want. It's out. Right.
So we had like a waitlist thing going on. That was pretty, that was a pretty good move
actually.
What about your newsletter? You mentioned on the Andy Hacker's website that you guys
have a newsletter that you try to put all of your existing users on. Does that help
you grow in any way or is this like help you re-engage existing users? Like what's sort
of the focus of having a newsletter and how big is it, if you don't mind sharing?
I think right now it goes up to 170K people. Right. And we send it out every month and
a half or so. I mean, there is a very, yeah, it's pretty good. We don't do any like affiliations
with other startups. So it's literally just like, we don't promote anything on it other
than us. Right. So we just say, Hey, here's what we've worked on the past month and a
half. Here's all the new features. Here's where you find them. Right. We try to limit
it like four or five sections. And then the very last section is just a heart to heart,
Hey, we're a small team forward this newsletter to anybody who might find it useful. Right.
So we do get some downloads there. We do get some, some people subscribing, but mostly
because people tend to have trading sprints and then they stop trading for a while and
then come back into it. Right. Especially when they're doing it actively, you know,
someone who might've churned out, we send them that newsletter and like, Hey, you know,
it's kind of like a reminder, Hey, we're still around. Right. We also have a push notifications
that go out, wrote some code there to send it out every once in a while based off the
user's last activity and whatnot. It's a good way to get people to come back in. But for
our newsletter specifically, it's just tell people, here's what we've been working on.
I'm showing the ideas, reach out otherwise forward this newsletter. I know people who
have been doing literally nothing other than writing a newsletter every day for three years
and they don't have 170,000 people on their newsletter. How do you grow a newsletter that
big when that's not even your main focus? Or are these just like everybody who signs
up from your app is on your newsletter or is like the request to forward it really working
that well? I mean, right now I think we ask people on our iOS app to like, when they sign
up, you know, they can click on, Hey, I want to receive this newsletter by default or not
double check that we've changed quite a bit since then, but essentially we don't, we don't
send it out very often. Right? So not many people unsubscribe from it. We're very picky
about what goes on there. Right. And then every once in a while we send a survey to
people like a limited portion of that to ask them, Hey, what do you guys think we should
build with them? So eventually all of this culminated and you getting to where you were
when you quit your job last September, you made a post on indie hackers and you're basically
like, Hey, you know what? Done making excuses. I'm going to take the leap. I'm only 23. I'm
never going to have a better time in my life to just do this. I have no responsibilities.
You know, you don't have a mortgage, you're not married, you don't have kids. And you
gave up a very well paying job at Amazon, making 250 grand a year to go full time on
this app. What was that like? Cause that's not an easy decision to make. Even though
you're actually taking 20 grand a month, like that's still like, I imagine most people in
your life are like, what the hell are you doing? Like, why would you, why would you
quit? I got a bunch of mixed reactions actually. That was the part that confused me the most.
Cause it was, if I was assigned to somebody who was also in the space, or somebody who
had started coming in, they're like, what are you waiting for? Like I would have quit
ages ago. So that was one reaction I was getting, which made me feel like, okay, I should quit.
Parents were like, are you insane? So that was expected. Friends were mixed. Like some
of them knew, but were like, you know what you're doing? Others were like, dude, you're
making a ton of money. Why are you doing this? Right? I think at the end of the day, I was
just like, what will I not regret doing? And I know I won't regret taking a leap of faith
on this. And plus worst case, you can always get a job later, right? Tech companies aren't
going anywhere.
Exactly. When I think about, I mean, I'm just going to go back again to when I was a total
loser at your age or even slightly before then. Like I was, I was that kid in college
where I would like meet with my advisor. I remember meeting with my advisor and my third
year and she was like, Hey, listen, Channing, like you got to make a decision. Like you
got to choose a major or a minor. I'd been there for three years and I still hadn't chosen.
And for me, the entire thing was any career path that I began to go down or that I began
to contemplate. I'm like, this is forever. It's like, what career handcuffs do I want
to like cuff myself to? And then just have to do that all the time. And in a sense, the
thing that is most attractive to me about being an indie hacker, doing other things
that I want to do, like I want to write a novel, like I want to have all of these jobs
where I get to like, a, I get to be in control of my destiny. I get to like, you know, experiment
with a bunch of other things, et cetera. It's super intangible, but that seems like a big
thing that also kind of inspires you.
Yeah, not for sure. For me, yes, there's always, okay, if I start my own thing and it pays
off, the payout is much bigger. But flexibility is really important to me. And even though
Amazon was actually pretty flexible, like I could travel around the US, they were cool
with remote work there. I had the idea, I'm like, what if I want to go outside the US
and just go to Europe for a bit or something and work while I'm there? Like, I can't do
that at Amazon. For some reason, the idea of flexibility through, you know, starting
your own thing just seemed super attractive.
Do you think you would have had trouble quitting if you had waited until you were 25, 27, 30?
Years old to take the leap?
I don't know. I think it would have been harder to leave if I had done it. You know, I was
working on another promotion at the time to get to like a senior engineer. I knew that
was a lot more money. And I was like, maybe it would have been harder to leave that more
money. But I was most certainly going to do this at some point. And, you know, if for
some reason I end up back at a job, I'm going to do it again. So I know that for sure already,
right? Like this is, I got a taste of it. It's a ton of fun. Definitely messes up your
like working schedule because you have full flexibility, right? So that part's been interesting.
What's your working schedule looking like now? Like, are you a night owl?
Oh, it's janky. It is. So I try to wake up early, which worked for like a week. And realistically
like full transparency, I wake up at like 9.30, 10.30 to 11. I get to a WeWork, right?
Because I'm like, I was like, dude, that is so structured. Courtland's like, that's so
early. Like 9.30, you're already awake.
I'm a night owl and a morning bird. So I try to do both and it doesn't work. But I mean,
that's some structure going to a WeWork. Like you sound like disciplined. You've got some
place that is a workplace for you and it's not the same as your home.
So I hit it like three times a week and then other times I just go to a coffee shop. But
normally it's like 11 to five or six. And then for some reason, this has been development
in the past month, like midnight to 3 a.m. I've been wildly productive. Something about
so quiet out, you're like in that weird tired zone where you're not anxious about what you're
doing. So you're like, I'm going to write really calm.
I love the idea of like either being mega early, up early, working early, doing stuff
early or way late because everyone else is asleep. It's funny, Courtland is the opposite
of me. I'm sort of like the morning lark. He's always been a night owl though. I'll
point out there was some point where he crossed over and he was telling me I was right all
the time. I don't know where he's at now. But like, yeah, there's just there's like
a magic to like you're not getting notifications on your phone. Right. Like, you know, if you
open up like social media, there's like less activity. Like you're just sort of there in
the dark doing work. It works either way. Like if you are the typical
software engineer, you want to stay up late and you're working past midnight, it's like
you get that exact same experience as if you wake up super early in the morning where like
nothing is going on and you can just be Zen. And in the middle of the day, it's harder.
So I can identify with that. I was going to say there's just a lot less
services that cater to you at night. I would love to go to a coffee shop at at 1 a.m. Like
I think that's awesome. But they just won't let you in. Yeah. They just everything in
Seattle closes at like eight. It's ridiculous. Yeah. You want groceries at 830 like your
shit out of luck. Eat tomorrow. The concept of quitting early in your 20s and doing this
like a young age, I think is really fascinating, too. I think it's kind of a startup cliche
that like startups are a young person's game. You know, you just like you need less money.
And I think about myself, like if I were to quit any hackers today, like I wouldn't be
nearly as scrappy as I was in my early 20s. I live a bougie ass lifestyle. Like I need
to make a certain amount of salary. You know, like I just like I need either a ton of savings
or I would need like a lot of funding. Otherwise, I've just refused to reverse, you know, and
go back to like eating ramen noodles and living, you know, like paycheck to paycheck. Like
it's just hard to do that when you're older. And so I wonder, like, Jenny, I don't know
if you agree, like if you feel the same way. Right. Like you've got probably a decent amount
of savings. Do you feel like at 35, you're like, no, I got to keep my I mean, you've
got like this nice bookcase behind you, this nice apartment. Like, could you give a really
bad example? I mean, generally, no, I'm a weirdo. I mean, look, Coraline, you and I
talk all the time. You know that, like, I just happened to be in this phase of life.
I don't know. Going back to maybe three or four years where there was just a fire that
got sparked in me and the elasticity, like the willingness to like, you know, sort of
live way more like a way more aesthetic lifestyle that I had when I was in my early 20s and
mid 20s. Now I kind of got that back. But without that weird exception for me. Yeah.
And also I'll say there are certain things that I don't want to give up. Like I definitely
live and like a nice apartment. I wouldn't want to give that up. I buy like I spend a
weird amount of money on books. Like a good buddy of mine was like, why do you have so
many books? Like it's just the thing I want. What would you give up? Would you sell all
your books? Would you sell your expensive VR set up? Like would you do you move into
a shittier apartment and a worse? I would not sell books. I would not sell books. Get
a Kindle. I get a Kindle way cheaper. I'm so weird. What I do what I like to admit this.
When I buy books like I almost want it to be so easily accessible to me so I don't have
an excuse to not read them. That if I buy a book, I buy the physical book, I buy the
e-book and I buy the audio book. Like it's just I just do that. So there definitely are
like these weird bougie tendencies that I have. I don't think I would give up books.
In Portland, I like I'm kind of spoiled. I have to have a gym in my apartment. I'd like
in New York City if it's winter. Like in the winters, I just turn into kind of like a sissy
and I don't like walk the 38. You're just saying that you wouldn't give up anything.
Just listening to things that you wouldn't get. I don't. It's like that. But I also it's
like I don't have a car or care. It's like the things that I just named are the things
that I really care about. Like I drink Soylent. I don't care about food. I don't spend crap
on food. I don't party really. I don't go out. Right. Like I just hang out. I'm like
I work. So I like have the things that fuel the work.
How do you feel on Soylent? I feel like that stuff just sketches me out.
It should. It should sketch you out. The way that I don't know. I'm not going to defend
it. I don't really like eating as much as other people. Like that's that's really like
the baseline situation. What I do is I'll drink like a Soylent a day and then I'll have
like two other meals like real meals. For me it's like I'm such an optimizer that if
there's something that I don't really care about like I don't really care about like
I don't like making food. I hate it. I won't wait on it. Like I won't learn how to do it.
My girlfriend's an awesome cook. So that's dope. But like if I if I'm hungry right now
and I also want to be like coding or writing or doing some work like I pop I just go grab
a Soylent. And then the even sort of weirder thing is I also like I like I need caffeine
but I don't like having to make coffee all the time. So I'll just like whatever I'll
just take a caffeine pill like these tiny little weird efficiencies caffeine pills and
so yeah yeah like these these little efficiencies I just don't give a shit. I'll just like just
get the get the fuel in my body. Couldn't do it. Food is my vice. If I could have like
a shitty superpower it would be to be able to eat an infinite amount of food. I eat like
12 meals a day. They'd all be delicious. None of them would be Soylent. Plus coffee is awesome.
So yeah coffee is delicious too. I love coffee. Yeah can't do it. Yahya what are you what
are you working for? I mean you said you wanted freedom. You said you wanted flexibility.
Stock alarm is at 20 KMRR. I think it's just you and one co-founder. How far do you want
to push it and what do you want to do you know with the business that you're creating
and the money that you're generating? I feel like it would be nice to have either one or
multiple like life stylists. I think that is the dream right. You don't really answer
to anyone. You kind of work on your own thing. People recognize you for helping them out
in some aspect of their life with you know something you built. I think all that is great
for you and your psyche and whatnot. But you know at the end of the day having income to
do the things you want to do and you know if the thing you want to do is also making
you that income is the best thing ever right. I think working at a big tech job there's
always like oh I have to do this one thing I really don't want to do or you know I might
get laid off as I think Microsoft or someone just laid off 10k employees. All of the tech
companies just laid off 10k employees. Yeah I'm not even like I can pay attention but
I'm not stressed. I literally have a friend at Amazon who got laid off the day before
yesterday. Oh geez sorry. You dodged a bullet. It could have been you. Yeah I don't know.
I think something about that is really nice and I think it's a great way to live life
right. Especially because you're building things that are helping other people and making
money while doing it. And the flexibility makes it so that you know you reshape your
life however you want like move from Seattle in a few months right. So yeah. What do you
think you know in the past three years of you working on this joining as sort of a late
co-founder growing into 10k in you know a year and now up to past 20k in revenue. What
do you think is something that you've learned on this journey that you know a fledgling
indie hacker might benefit from hearing. There's a lot more money to go around than you initially
think right. Like people are willing to spend money on things that make their lives better.
I think that's that's something that I didn't realize back then because for some reason
I had this idea that to make any money with a company to build this big thing or big grand
thing or still step physical product something. But you know with SaaS like hey you know you
might have noticed my email is hey.com right. Like I paid for an email. It's ridiculous
but it's so nice. It makes life so much easier. Email is free and you pay for it. Yeah it's
ridiculous but I think that's something that really helped to reshape my view of how to
build companies and whatnot. Awesome. Well listen Yahia as a 35 year old Channing I really
love hearing your story as at your age Channing I would have been a little bit more resentful
and it's been it's been an awesome conversation. Where can people who are listening go to find
more about you and like stock alarm and other stuff that you're getting into. I'm finally
trying to get into Twitter right. Like for some reason I've resisted it for so long.
But my Twitter is my name is Yahia pretty much like that's my. Didn't I see that stock
alarm like this stock alarm Twitter account. It's like all automated. Pretty much I'm trying
to post on there as well. But it's just odd guys we post stock market updates and whatnot.
But mostly planning for stock alarm joining our newsletter or you know checking out our
I do actually post company updates on Twitter like then etc. Working on some cool stuff
we're actually launching like a business version soon. So that should be like nice for wealth
management firms they've been using us. That's the whole thing. But yeah. All right. Thanks
again for coming on Yahia. Thanks guys.