Hello, hello. I am Cortland Allen from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers
podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How
did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly
makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their example and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Mabashar Iqbal. Mabs, welcome back to the IndieHackers podcast.
Oh, thanks for having me on.
I looked it up. It's been two years since the last time you're on the podcast. How crazy
is that?
Wow, it feels like it was longer than that because I think the IndieHackers spaces evolved
so fast.
I know, it's really blown up since then. That was like August 2017. Here we are in 2019.
It feels like a whole new decade. Not there yet, though.
Yeah, it's awesome, though, because it does mean that a lot more people are interested
in being IndieHackers and a lot of people are interested in bootstrapping their startups
and stuff like that, too, instead of all chasing the venture capital investment instead. So
I think that's really awesome.
Yeah, exactly. So the last time we talked, I described you as more of a maker than an
IndieHacker. You were all about the different projects that you're working on. You were
sort of jumping from project to project. You didn't really care about generating revenue.
Is that still the case for you today?
I'd say it's still about 50% of that. I still want to do cool stuff. I still want to make
cool stuff. And it's still not 100%. I got to make money from it. But I do see myself
now when I evaluate whether I want to work on something, think about like, well, actually,
can this actually make money? Do I want this to make money? And even if it's not money
per se, what's the reward? Whether it's some way to feed my network or some way to kind
of feed myself somehow. Yeah, I do think about that a little bit more.
Yeah, because in the past, it was just like building the thing with its own reward. You're
just excited to make it. And now that's not enough. You need some other benefit.
Now that I've... It's what I was talking to somebody else recently, and we were talking
about my side project. Now that I've got 80 side projects under my belt...
80.
Over 80, actually. Yeah, exactly. So now I'm like, well, maybe I should be a little bit
more selective about the things that I'm working on.
Well, one of the cool things about not being selective is that it's easy to just jump into
something. So for me, I'm very meticulous. I like to plan. A lot of the indie actors
that I talked to are the same way because they're trying to start a profitable business.
They have to connect all the dots. It has to work. They have to solve a valuable problem
that people will pay for. They have to go after a good market. They have to have their
distribution channels mapped out and all that stuff. With you, at least in the past and
your pure maker phase, you don't have to do any of this stuff. You could just start building.
I wonder how that's changed for you now that you're working on Pod Hunt. How much planning
went into that?
Well, yeah, so this is a funny thing. And one of the things I do think is really important.
One reason I'm able to jump into a lot of things is I really think founder product fit
is really important, more important often than product market fit. And so a lot of the
reasons that I've just jumped into ideas in the past was like, that's the perfect founder
product fit for me because that's the product that I want to make. That's the thing I want
to work on for as long as it takes to launch it. And I'm very excited about it.
So with Pod Hunt, it was the same kind of thing. It's actually been an idea that's been
percolating between me and some friends who talked about it for probably two years now.
The idea for Pod Hunt actually came when Product Hunt used to have a podcast category on their
site. And after a while, they shut down all of the other categories that they had. They
used to have books and video games and all those and a few other categories, as well
as the application stuff that they do. And so they shut it down. I think it's been about
two years, 18 months, two years ago now. And ever since then, the idea has been, well,
we should probably build something that's a little bit more focused on podcasting, but
has the same features of Product Hunt because that's one of the reasons that I listened
to some interviews with Ryan Hoover about why they shut down all those other categories.
And it was mainly that they had tried to shoehorn all those other categories into the way that
Product Hunt worked exclusively. And so they didn't really want to change the submission
process and all those other things. So it never really felt like those things were 700%
the way that they were supposed to.
Yeah, I think it's really easy as a founder, especially when your product is working to
think, okay, this is working. I'm just going to copy and paste what I have here that's
working for one area, and I'm going to expand into these other adjacencies. I'm going to
take Product Hunt, which works for products, but I'm also going to make it work for podcasts
and make it work for video games and other stuff. But you try it, and it turns out that
all these different areas have their own little idiosyncrasies. And if you really want to
do a good job, you can't just copy and paste what you have onto them. You have to actually
tailor your features from the ground up to work like that. And Product Hunt's podcast
features and stuff, to the best of my memory, didn't do that.
Right. Here's a link. You just submitted it, and it was kind of the same thing. But as
I built Product Hunt, it was like, well, we do want to focus on the episodes and the episodes
relate to the podcast. And so having that kind of hierarchical information flow to be
able to get from an episode back to the podcast, but see all the other episodes that were submitted
and things like that easily, those were the kind of things that I looked at and said,
how can I make sure that the experience around Product Hunt really focuses the industry that
it's in, rather than just try and make it fit into the same old submit a link and then
upvote the link kind of idea? So that was really important to me. And so yeah, Product
Hunt, so the idea existed probably about two years ago, since they shut it down. I always
felt like it was a good idea, but I'd never felt like I was in the right place to kind
of move forward with the idea. I didn't think me as a founder was in the right place to
build that. And so eventually, about six weeks ago, I was talking to some friends about it
again. And it was like, well, you know what, now feels like the right time, just in terms
of where I'm at, in terms of what I want to do, a market that I want to attack. I think
podcasting has kind of, it's been on a pretty steady climb for years and years and years,
but I think it's reached a certain level now where it actually makes it an attractive market
as well. And so yeah, so that was why it was like founder, product, market fit, all kind
of lined up. And it was like, okay, let's see what we can make happen.
Okay, I got so many questions to ask you about this. First, let's talk about founder, product
fit, which is what you're so enthusiastic about. I think a lot of people have not built
80 side projects. They don't really know what kind of product is going to fit their personality.
How do you determine what's going to fit your personality having built so many projects?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just I mean, because a lot of people are just kind of out there
kind of like finding product market fit in terms of you know, what's a hot industry,
what's a hot kind of business model, even to kind of build something in and you focus
a lot on like, is it a growing market is in a addressable market and all those kind of
things, right? But they forget about well, if I'm going to do this successfully, I need
to work on this thing for the next three, five, 10 years. So if it's in an industry
that you really don't like, are you going to be able to wake up every day at you know,
six o'clock in the morning or whatever time you want to wake up, but you know, for the
next 10 12 hours a day, are you going to be able to think about that thing? Are you going
to work on that thing for the next five years? Even if it's an awesome industry, and it's
an awesome idea, but it's something that you don't feel like you don't have the passion
for it, it's going to be a struggle. For me, I mean, I've been interested in podcasting
for, you know, I've been listening to podcasts for, you know, nine years. I've been interested
in content curation, probably my whole career, like if you if you look back at my side projects,
the first two, three, four, five, 10, even all focused on content curation. And so it
just kind of felt like it was, it was a good fit for me, because it matched my interests.
And it's something I feel like I can I quite it's, and I think it's also a problem that
I can actually, actually do it. I mean, it's, it's, it's an application I can build. And
I have the information in my head that will kind of that I can turn into code and hopefully
other people will actually like what I output as well.
Yeah, the cool thing about founder product fit is that you said it's more important than
product market fit. And I totally agree. In fact, for me, it's like, when you said that
it was kind of weird. I was like, is it I haven't thought about it, but I'm like, you
know what, it is because I don't even take that as as something that's a variable. I'm
like, the thing you should do is pick an idea that you're actually interested in. And then
with that constraint, then you look at all the other stuff. So like, that should be something
that is never, like, you should never never work on something that you're not interested
in. Because if you do, like you said, you're gonna be bored of it. And I think it's really
easy for people to slip into this mindset where they think, oh, well, it's just so hard
to come up with a good idea. I can't limit myself to only the ideas that I'm interested
in. And it's this kind of scarcity mentality, or it's like, ideas are so hard to come by.
But I think the reality is that there are probably infinitely many good ideas, no matter
what kind of constraints you have. So you might as well constrain yourself to only ideas
that you care about. Well, I think part of what's happened recently
is that a lot of people have been focused on, well, because there's such a heavy emphasis
put on, gotta be able to make revenue immediately, right? Like, there's that big heavy emphasis
put on that. And so people start to narrow down their ideas to just those things that
can make money immediately. And I think that's where they kind of fall into traffic, ignoring
the founder product fit, and like, oh, I can see how I can charge a customer for this right
now. And that's fantastic. If you can find an idea that can do that, and that maybe if
you can turn it around fast, you won't you won't reach the point where you're not interested
in it anymore. But that's a very rare exception, I think, rather than you know, what kind of
everybody experiences. I think a lot of people experience the fact that, yes, they can start
the company and yes, it can make a little bit of money and you can see the returns,
but then to get out of that prof of sorrow, because you don't like the industry, because
you don't like what you're making every day, you never actually escape out of that.
Yeah, exactly. So then there's the other side of the coin, which is actually building something
that people in the market want. Obviously, podcasting is huge now, it's just getting
bigger and bigger every year. It's well beyond what any of us would have guessed five or
10 years ago. I just had Justin Jackson on the podcast, he started Transistor, which
is no insult to Justin, a very straightforward, boring podcast hosting business. And he'd
be the first person to tell you that like, they're not, you know, innovating in some
new crazy way that you've never seen before. And they're sort of riding this podcast wave
and making money hand over fist, you're doing something slightly different, which is that
you're in the same growing market, but you're doing something that people haven't really
seen in the podcasting space before, at least not the way that you're doing it, which is
sort of this like stack ranked product, huh, leaderboard type thing. So every day, there's
a new list of the best podcast episodes, and you can go and upload the best one. And it's
like kind of a discovery platform, like which episode do I want to listen to today? How
do you think about your particular approach and how it fits into the overall overall podcast
market?
Yeah, I mean, I think I think the main the main way that a pod hunt differentiates itself
from all of the other kind of leaderboard and lists that there are out there is they
all tend to focus on the actual entire podcast. So if you, if you look at most of the, of
the leaderboards out there, they'll list, you know, sites like Aaron's podcast and Joe
Rogan's podcast, right? And all that. And it's just a normal leaderboard. And you'll
see this is the same top 100 on almost every site, because yeah, they're the celebrities,
they get the most number of downloads and all that kind of stuff. But where I saw the
main difference was like, well, even if I like Joe Rogan's podcast, he's interviewed,
you know, four or 500 people now, which ones of those episodes do I actually want to listen
because there's no way I can listen to all 500 episodes. But maybe there's some maybe
he had, you know, Perroco Pabama on that's a really awesome one. Maybe that's the one
I should listen to. But maybe I'm not into politics, maybe I'm into sports. And there's
some athlete that he's had on that I should listen to instead. So actually focusing in
on the individual episodes, I think makes a lot more sense. Yeah, there's kind of a
few podcasts that you have to listen to every episode in order. And you have to listen to
the and you have to listen to all of them for it to really be enjoyable. But that's
more like an audio book and more of the exception, I think then, you know, like, I think the
vast majority of podcasts you can kind of listen to in kind of any order and find the
episodes that really going to interest you. So that's the main thing. And then, you know,
the other thing, I think, like you said, it's a daily leaderboard that kind of changes, right?
So you're not going to come one day and see the leaderboard come back the next day. And
it's the exact same leaderboard, right? So every day you come, you're going to see something
new, something interesting. And you may not find something every day that you find interesting.
But if you come back and look at like the weekly chart, or you sign up for the newsletter,
and you kind of see what was uploaded most throughout the week, you're gonna see something
that's interesting, I think. Yeah, it's pretty meta. But I see you posting
about Podhunt on the IndieHackers milestones feature pretty regularly. And that is itself
a leaderboard. That's also pretty much inspired by Product Hunt, where every day it's a new
set of milestones that people are hitting with their products. And so you'll post things
like I started developing the MVP for Podhunt, or I switched to a weekly newsletter I had
at my two week anniversary, or I just crossed 5000 page views. And so we're doing kind of
the same thing, like looking at these leaderboard mechanics and trying to figure out how it
works, what's the right, you know, frequency, etc, etc. What attracts you to the whole leaderboard
mechanic? And what are some things you've learned about tweaking things and getting
it to work?
Yeah, like I said, I mean, I've been into content curation of some kind for a really
long time. So I think we've been through the cycle of we want the experts to curate things,
we want the users to curate things. And now we're kind of saying, well, we want experts
to curate things in terms of the ones who submit things, right. So even on Product Hunt,
not everybody can submit stuff that it's kind of limited to a certain subset who can make
stuff appear on the homepage immediately. And then you get the community matters, you
can who can put stuff on the homepage as well. So we got this kind of idea that, yeah, we
don't want everybody submitting stuff, we want some people submitting stuff. But then
ultimately, you still want to know what the entire audience thinks is interesting. And
so you've got this mix of, yeah, experts saying this stuff might be interesting to you. But
then let's find out what the crowd is actually saying is actually important to them as well.
So I think that's that's kind of the hybrid now that I think we've kind of arrived at,
which I think is really interesting. You can't rely on just experts, because experts can't
even though they're experts, they can't know everything about everything. And you can't
just rely on the crowd. Because if you rely on the crowd entirely, you just get so much
stuff that you're not really curating stuff at all anymore. And I think even though product
time itself was kind of like looking at what how it was working, and, and Y Combinator
no, sorry, so Hacker News was working into how you upload things and things like that.
I think they pioneered the Oh, let's reset things at the end of each day kind of thing.
I think that was the yeah, because my problem with with Hacker News and Reddit and those
kind of things is really unless you visit it really, really regularly, you're not really
going to see everything. And you're not going to see it's hard to know what you've already
seen and stuff like that, right? It's very easy to go to product time and say, let's
look at what's hot today and scroll down and see what what was good yesterday and scroll
down and see what was good to pay before on Reddit with it's like endless list of things.
It's very hard to kind of scan it like that.
Yeah, there's like a whole psychology of like, what, what's the ideal frequency that you
want people to come visit your website at and like once a day is pretty good. You don't
necessarily need to be coming every hour every minute like Hacker News sort of, instead of
I see you to do or Twitter or something and like if you do burn people out like that,
like perhaps they're going to stop this any every day they're going to come once a month
or maybe never so I kind of like the whole once a day reset as well.
Yeah, and I think I think for part time specifically, I think it's going to be a mixture of you're
going to get the core audience who like who listen to podcasts all the time in all their
spare time, you know, while they're working while they're playing or whatever, you know,
while they're doing chores or whatever, who are going to come back every day, I think.
And then you've got the more of the casual podcast listener and if they come back once
a week, I think that's awesome. And we can show them what was good once a week as well,
just to kind of show them the sort of overall rank and stuff and or if they sign up for
the newsletter and just receive that once a week as well. I think I think that's kind
of like the mix of, you know, hopefully the sort of ideas is that you have a large enough
audience that they don't need people to come back every day, obviously awesome if they
did. But if they come back once a week, then I think that's that's kind of enough as well.
I think I think you always want to keep in mind of, you know, who is your audience and
like, you know, I mean, I imagine even for indie hackers, there's going to be some people
who are who are just working on their side projects and things in kind of on the weekend
because they have a job during the day and they don't have much time to kind of spend
on kind of other things in the week. So even if they come back to indie hackers once a
week, that's awesome as well, right?
Yeah, exactly. Have you read, um, I was just posting about like everybody's favorite book
on indie hackers earlier this week. And mine was hooked by near y'all was actually co authored
by Ryan Hoover. And he kind of talks about this whole model for like, people taking action
on your website and then the ideal frequency and novelty for them to have when they come
back and see something that's new and then them like investing in the platform by like
following podcasts or like getting followers or like writing blog posts or something. So
they come back when you try to get them to come back again. It's like this whole like,
I don't know, algorithm for building sort of a habit forming app that people find value
and coming back to you every day. Have you read this?
Yeah, I I've definitely read that I've read it recently. It's been a little while since
I read it, but and it's definitely something I keep in mind. Like I don't, it's very hard
to, you know, obviously it's hard to understand everybody's psychology, right? Everybody's
going to be slightly different in terms of how they kind of attack those things. Plus,
I also think people are starting to get wise to some of those as well. Every marketing
trick stops working eventually. Eventually, people get used to it. Like if you go back
and watch ads from the 1950s, it's like horribly outdated. And it's like, I can't believe this
worked on anybody. But at the time, it was like crack. I couldn't resist it. Yep, absolutely.
So yes, I mean, I keep those ideas in mind. And I start, I do think about, you know, what
are the features that are going to encourage people to come back on a more agular cycle.
But ultimately, I just want to think about what's the best way to surface the best podcast,
right? Like that's, that's really all I want to do. And I think if I, if Podhunt can do
that, then I think people will come back on their own. And I don't need to do any special
tactics and things like that.
Yeah. So I'm super curious about your roadmap, because I have like selfishly all these features
that I want for Podhunt. Because I'm also like, I care more about the episode, like
there's certain shows that I definitely want to subscribe to. But very rarely do I listen
to every single episode of a particular show. I'm like, what's the best one? You know, what's
the best episode with the art of products, etc. So it's like, I really want you to build
like a podcast player. So it's simultaneously surfacing the right episodes for me, and then
I can play it right there. And then I want it to be like niche based. So I can, because
you have tags on there right now, I can click, or I can't really click, but I can see, okay,
this is a business podcast. And this is a tech podcast. But it's like, they're not scoped
to that. And so it's like, I want to skip everything that's not business or tech. So
I'm curious, what's on your future roadmap? And are you going to build the exact features
that I want?
Well, if you're my ideal customer, then absolutely. But no, absolutely. I mean, I think ultimately,
I think you have to be both the player and discovery at the same time. I think that's
the thing that will kind of make sense. I mean, the reason it's not an app right now
is I just think that to get that right is going to take a lot longer than it took me
to build a website. And to iterate on that is going to be a lot faster on the website
and to be able to see what works and what people find interesting. And I think once
once I've kind of think I've got that right, and then to kind of spin up an iOS app and
an Android app, I think will be fairly straightforward. So yeah, a player is on the roadmap. I don't
know exactly when, but it's on the roadmap. But I think on more on the immediate roadmap
is more of some of the things that you talked about in terms of how do we surface content
that you think is interesting and kind of appealing versus yes, I think the leaderboard
will stay as it is because the serendipity of just finding something that you didn't
even think you found interesting, I think is one of the things I like about product
time, like randomly, I'll just visit the homepage, and there'll be something on there that I
didn't know existed, I didn't know I wanted. But when I see it, I'm like, wow, this is
amazing. And I think to kind of some degree with podcasts, there might just be somebody
on there who's talking about a topic that you didn't know that you were really interested
in. But you know, maybe some marketing thing or you know, maybe hooked wasn't something
that you would have thought you would have found interesting. But had you seen a book
review for it at some point in the past, you might be not that this this is really awesome
book that I might not have found. So yeah, so I think the homepage will kind of stay
the way that it is. But I do want a way for you to be able to follow a category or to
follow a person even to say if this person is a test on any podcast in the future, I
want to be made aware of that or if even if it's just, you know, a person or a particular
topic, eventually things like keywords as well. But I think that was much further along
in the roadmap instead.
So one of the things you posted to your product page and any hackers is that you crossed $20
and monthly recurring revenue. You said you hadn't planned to monetize pot hunt right
away, but you wanted to test. So tell me about that. How did you make that $20? And what's
it at now?
Yeah, so the the idea behind product was I figured that it's kind of one of these community
sites that you kind of feel like has to be free. And I think ultimately, it will be free
forever in some way, there'll be there's never going to be a charge to kind of access the
core features of it. But as I said earlier, you know, I wanted I've been thinking more
about well, it's cool to work on these ideas, and it's cool to launch the ideas. But at
some point, if I want to continue work on the idea, it needs to make some money so that
I can pay myself to work. And so I thought, you know, how can I make money from from something
like this? And so I came up with the idea of what if the podcast host themselves can
actually become supporters of pod hunt, because the idea is, is that you're making podcast
discovery easier, so that listeners can find your podcast. So that I figured that was something
that podcast hosts would be interested in, they want more people to hear their podcast
not be more, more people to become subscribers, etc. And so yeah, so I just offered a very
simple, you pay 25 bucks a year as a podcast host, and your podcast becomes a supporter
on pod hunt. And honestly, you don't get a lot for it at this point, because there's
not that many features right now. But but it was more like, there was more of a way
to test the models. And that's why it's also 25 bucks a year, because that's not a lot
of money. But but also, you know, since there's 450,000 active podcasts, if I can get a couple
of percent of those to become supporters, even at 25 bucks a year, that ends up being
a pretty significant amount of money, I think. And so yeah, so I think I crossed. So it's
20 bucks MMR, because I took the amount of money that they had paid for the 25 bucks,
and then divided by 12 to get what the MMR would be. And I think I'm actually up to 25
bucks MMR now instead. So very cool. It's working out pretty good. I like that business
model a lot. It's definitely something that needs to be free for people who are just going
to discover podcasts, listen to them. Maybe if you had an app, you could charge for the
app. Like I think I paid five or 10 bucks for pocketcast because I like that better
than others. But like for the website totally agrees to be free. And that means that people
used to be charging our people like me the podcast host. And I know that if I was like,
especially just getting started with the podcast, I would definitely pay money to try to get
to the top or a sponsorship or have like some sort of badge or something that helps me stand
out on a discovery platform. Because why not? Yeah, and while even pocketcast now is free
as well. So it's it's you know, it's I think it's becoming a market where you know, it's
kind of like the Parousa market people want people want you to use their app, right? So
so to charge for it, you're kind of automatically emitting who's going to use it. And you want
the audience there so that you can then push them out to other places. So you kind of have
to make the app itself. Hurry. But then like you said, I mean, if you look at how even
even apps like overcast make money by selling advertising within the player. So when you're
listening to something, you might find something else interesting as well.
So you made another post recently on your Nd hackers product page about pod hunt. And
this milestone was getting to 500 users, you put a bunch of stats at the bottom of it.
One of them was your revenue from supporters is up to $345. Now, you've got 366 followers.
On Twitter, I believe 500 users, 32,000 page views, 8000 visitors. Let's dig into your
growth strategies here. How are you getting people to find pod hunt?
Yeah, I mean, mostly, it's just been me reaching out to folks in the industry that I know.
I think that's I mean, I'm not trying I'm not spending any money on because it's a side
project. It's a fun project at this point. I don't have money to spend on marketing or
anything like that. But I because it's a product that seems to every time I talk to hosts about
it or podcasts, they're like, this is awesome. Because because it helps them do the one thing
that they want, which is to get people to hear what they're talking about. So so really,
my strategy is just being to talk to as many hosts as I can. And then they mention it on
air even like, you know, they, you know, they they post the episode and they'll mention
the fact that they're going to post it on pod hunt. So they so people can upload it
and things like that. So, you know, it's really that kind of slow, steady, spread the word
about it. And people who are going to get value out of it are going to spread the word
about it as well. And then yeah, I think my focus has been on Twitter initially, because
I think that's going to be the the easiest growth strategy in terms of, you know, each
of the tweet, each of the episodes that gets submitted, I kind of keep a track of who's
who's the host and who's the cast of the episode. And then when I tweet out that the episode
has been submitted, I tag both the host and the cast on it as well. And this, you know,
that's led to a lot of likes and tweets and things like that.
Yeah, I think the leaderboard format is so good for just incentivizing people like me
to go on there and upload our episodes. And ideally, you know, when the traffic gets high
enough promote the episodes because we want other people to come upvote because we know
that we'll get a lot of download from it. And it's like, this is all straight out of
also the book hooked. Exactly. Aligning all these incentives and it's one of those things
it's like you just got a lot going for you because all this stuff sort of works together.
Yeah, and then ultimately, it's just like I said, at the end of the day, the one thing
that the site is aimed at doing is to get more distribution of episodes, right? Exactly.
And that's what everybody wants right now. Because I mean, it's even and even from the
listener standpoint, you would think with so many options that they would already have
so many things to listen to. But just like you said, you probably have a whole bunch
of podcasts that you're interested in. But you don't want to keep a track of what each
episode is and who's on each episode and stuff.
And every episode can be hit or miss. Like you have no idea if one episode is going to
be great. Like even with the Andy Hackers podcast, I've had some not so great episodes.
I've had some episodes that skyrocketed to like 80 or 90,000 downloads because they were
just so much better than the other ones. And it's like the person I interviewed wasn't
even famous. It was just the quality of the episode. So having a platform like yours where
people can actually say, this episode was super high quality is exactly what I want
as a listener.
And actually, one of the features that we've added recently is when somebody hunts an episode,
we actually allow them to upload a 30 second clip of what the episode is about or a special
part of the podcast that they thought was really awesome. They had some really awesome
information in it and stuff like that. So I think that's one of the sort of other things
I found when I was listening to the podcast previously was, how do I know what this podcast
is actually about? Just because it's the conversation between me and you, like, what are we talking
about? So you could try and scan the transcript and stuff to see what it's about and stuff
like that.
But if somebody is actually listening to the podcast and they say, look, this 30 second
clip will tell you exactly what it's about. Or this 30 second clip is the real highlight
part of this episode. And if you like this 30 second clip, you're going to love the rest
of it as well. And I think people have been using that a lot now to actually find out
if it's a podcast that they actually want to hear as well. So I think that's really
helping as well.
You know, what I've been thinking about a lot is social websites have popularized these
micro interactions. Like 15 years ago, the worst thing is like a like, I guess upvotes
have always kind of been around, but not really. And they give you some information, like somebody
likes this thing, but it's not that much information. So in any hackers, I've been thinking, like,
what if I had a feature where like, if you followed somebody, a little text box popped
up, and it's like, why did you follow this person? And you just like enter a few words?
Or if you like a post, it's like, what did you like about this post? I wonder if people
will be willing to kind of like, say a few words about why they liked it or why they
followed it. And that would be kind of a good signal for others.
And that's also when you submit the episode as well, like, obviously, we pull the episode
description out of the RSS feed and stuff. But there's a box where you can say why you
like that episode as well. So as you submit it, you can kind of add some extra information
about it. And then we do have some commenting features on each episode as well. So if you
come and listen to it, and you think it's an awesome one, you can you can kind of say
why you thought it was awesome as well. So kind of thinking about that, you know, obviously,
you can't make people do that stuff. But it'd be nice if you could. But but yeah, so it's
one of those things, hopefully, I'm just thinking as as we get more audience as we get more
traction, that kind of thing will just kind of happen naturally as well. I do think one
of the things that the site's missing right now, and again, it's kind of on on the roadmap
as well, like, I want to be able to ping you when an episode that you've hosted or you've
been a test on I want to want you to be able to made aware of that. So people are talking
about it that you're aware of that as well. So so just that kind of interaction that feedback
loop, I think needs to be closed a little bit. But some working on the mechanics of
that as we speak.
Well, listen, mom's exciting stuff. I'm excited to see where it goes. Why don't you tell listeners
what your advice would be for people who are early on who haven't worked on 80 side projects
who aren't, you know, smack dab in the middle of a successful podcasting website? What should
an early stage in the hack be thinking about? And what's your advice for them?
Yeah, I mean, I think yeah, I think I think I've said all along on these things. It's
like do the things that that you want to do, right? Like don't go chasing the hot category
or the hot, you know, I want to build Facebook for this or Uber for that. Like, I mean, it
sounds fantastic. And you think you can catch like a hot, you know, kind of hot segment
or something like that. But ultimately, even if you get a small amount of success, it's
not going to be the big success that kind of everybody wants the thing. And then I think
if you focus on something that you're really passionate about, and you focus on the things
that make you happy, I think it's just going to make whatever you do more successful. Maybe
not in the short term, maybe maybe you want to see that immediate return. But I think
longer term, I think you'll see that that reward comes from your happiness as well.
mobs. Thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Can you tell listeners where they
can go to learn more about what you're up to with pod hunt?
Absolutely. Yeah. So obviously on indie hackers, I post all of my milestones as well. podhunt.app
is the URL. You can follow me on Twitter. It's my full name. I'm about shurik bowl.
So twitter.com slash I'm about shurik bowl.
All right. Thanks so much, bubs.
Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Listeners, if you're interested in coming on to the podcast, like mobs to have a quick
chat with me, go to Andy hackers.com slash milestones and post a milestone about whatever
it is that you're working on. It can be pretty much anything. People have posted milestones
about launching or finding their first customer. They posted about their mailing list or hitting
1000 followers on Twitter. They posted about getting to $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 a month
in revenue. The sky's the limit. So whatever it is, you're proud of whatever milestones
you're hitting, come post them on any hackers.com slash milestones. And other any hackers will
help you celebrate. We love supporting each other and encouraging each other when we hit
these milestones. And what I will do at the end of every week is look at the top milestone
posted and reach out to people to invite them to come on to the show for a quick chat. So
once again, that's Andy hackers.com slash milestones. I'm looking forward to seeing what
you post.