What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland 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 examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today I am talking to Greg Rogge, the founder of a website called Learn UX.
Greg, welcome to the show.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
So we got coffee when you were in San Francisco a few months back.
And I believe at the time, you told me that Learn UX was averaging over $10,000 a month
in revenue, and you're only working on it basically one day a month.
Is that true?
Yeah, that's partly true.
It's nice to talk about this and think about this this way.
And this is how it works right now.
I basically spent one day improving Learn UX, so recording new tutorials, basically
updating the content that I have on the site, and also answering some questions.
And so the things that are not automated that I have to answer myself.
But beforehand, I had to spend a lot of time creating the content.
So I probably spent about 1,000 hours to create the content and create the website and put
it live.
And from there, I made everything so that it's running on autopilot, and I don't have
to really work that much on this project anymore.
Super cool.
So that's like the closest thing to passive income you can get to.
A day a month is not that much to keep it maintained and keep it up to date.
And even 1,000 hours, I think that's about six months of working 40 hours a week, which
is a pretty reasonable time frame to create something that can basically make you 10 grand
a month on autopilot.
So I really want to dive into how you actually build a business that's so passive because
I pretty rarely talk to somebody who's done that.
But first, let's talk about what it is exactly.
So Learn UX.io is the website.
UX stands for user experience design.
I think pretty much everyone knows what a user interface is, but not everybody knows
what user experience is.
So in your words, what's the difference between UI and UX?
I'm going to explain it with a short story.
So imagine you have an app, and UI is user interface.
So it's everything that you can see.
So it's the colors, the typography, basically how smooth it works.
But UX is broader.
So if I give you this app, and after five minutes, I just ask you, OK, how was it?
And you give me an answer.
So that's basically UX.
That's how you feel about the app.
That's the overall experience.
So you might say that UI is basically a subset of UX.
UX is broader, and UI is just the interface, the colors, the typography, and stuff like
this.
UX is the overall experience.
And your website is literally teaching people how to get better at user experience design
through videos that you record yourself.
Yeah.
So that's basically it.
That's a library of high-quality courses that I recorded myself, and the courses cover UI
design tools and also some topics from UX.
So you have tools like Sketch and Framer and Principal Adobe Experience Design.
So now it's Adobe XD.
And the difference between Learn UX and other resources, I really focus to bring real-world
examples and some beautiful examples and some practical approach to learn UI design.
And this was the idea that actually came pretty naturally.
So this is a mix of what I really love doing, basically, UI design and education, which
I have been doing for many years now.
And I started by defining the problem.
So I basically thought that there is a lack of materials for professionals, but also people
who are willing to be professionals, as UI and UX designers, there is a lack of knowledge
in terms of the newest tools.
There's a lot of tools that are just basically brand new, and they have to constantly update
their knowledge.
But on the other hand, there weren't a lot of materials that were great quality and really
logically connected, specific, like well-paced, engaging, and good quality.
So I spent a lot of time creating the content and preparing the content.
So that was the main part from this 1,000 hours.
And then it took me a long while to record them.
It was one of the toughest things, I guess, in my life to record all those courses.
But I feel that this was really the advantage of this project and why it went so well is
I really put the content first and the quality of the content really matters here.
I talked to Vlad Magdalene, the founder of Webflow recently, and he was telling me how
he was inspired by the single YouTube video of a guy named Brett Victor giving a talk
about programming and design environments.
That kind of launched his entire career.
And I think about my sort of journey as an eddy hacker, and I was inspired back in 2008
by a video of David Heinemeyer-Hansen giving a talk at Y Combinator Startup School, who
is basically yelling at all these startup founders saying, hey, you don't have to raise
money.
You can just build something that generates revenue on the internet and do it yourself.
Is there anything like that that inspired you?
Is there any sort of talk or person or idea that got you started on this course?
To be honest, I don't think that there was a single thing for me.
I've been doing this for years, and I've been seeing some patterns.
I also saw some leverage that I have because I used to record courses for years now.
And I've been designing UIs, and I've been searching materials for myself, basically.
There was no one inspiration I got, but I really feel that this was pretty natural.
And apart from this, if you're talking about the YouTube videos and getting inspiration
from there, there's also a thing that was really unique about LearnUx because I basically
started a YouTube channel for LearnUx with four videos.
And after probably every month, I got about 5,000 or 6,000 subscriptions from those four
videos alone, and one of them hit 100,000 views, I guess.
So I think that this content-first approach is pretty prominent on LearnUx.
This is something really valuable, and I really made this huge effort to create 10x better
content, and it kind of paid off with the videos on YouTube as well.
You don't have to create hundreds of them.
You just need to create four, and you can get a really big audience from there.
In my case, I believe over 10,000 subscriptions on this channel.
What was your plan when you went into creating these YouTube videos where you're like, hey,
I'm going to make these videos, and if they work out and do really well, I'm going to
build an entire website full of courses and make money off of that and help people learn?
Or were you doing it for some other reason?
I already had a plan.
I already knew that I'm going to create this website with those courses, so I did the research
before.
I knew that people are paying attention to the new tools, and there is a lack of materials
like this, so I already knew that I will do it in some way.
But I started with some easy steps that would validate the idea, so I first put some Medium
articles, I recorded those videos, and then I combined them, basically mixed Medium articles
with YouTube content, which was kind of like recycling this content, and it went pretty
successful on Medium.
There's a little tip there also, because there's no way to put, for example, some kind of pixel
inside your Medium articles, but if you embed YouTube video, you can then remarket those
people, because you can create a Google app that will remarket people who watch your video,
and that's how you can basically embed the video inside of Medium article and then reach
out to those people.
So what I tried to do initially is basically I started recording, but at the same time
I tried to evaluate the idea that I had, and I tried to validate it as much as possible
before I put a lot of effort into creating all the content.
Would you say the idea you had back then is different than what you actually ended up
with, or did all the evidence and all the validation and tests you ran really just confirm
sort of your first shot at what the idea would look like?
What I managed to do with this validation techniques was mainly getting out to an audience
and gathering some audience from there, and not really validating the idea, which didn't
change that much.
So I thought that someone will give me some advices, someone will give me hints on what
they want, what really has to be done, but no one was really doing that.
If you ask people what do they want, they rarely tell you, so this is also true.
And you have to ask better questions or just observe what they do and how they behave and
then decide what they want.
So I basically stick to my plan.
And I think that the side effect of putting all those materials out was that I quickly
built some subscribers.
I always ask them for an email, or I basically ask them to subscribe to some, on the medium
you cannot ask for email, they can't leave an email, but you can embed some form or something
like this.
So there were people pretty exciting about what I do already.
It wasn't like I launched something from day one, I tried to reach the audience, I tried
to communicate it a bit earlier.
So you weren't really validating whether or not this is the right product to build, or
what kind of features it should have, rather than you were validating, are people excited
about this?
Are the people you're trying to write for, does your message resonate with them, do they
exist in the kind of numbers that you need for this to be successful, and are they going
to subscribe and watch your videos?
Yeah, you might say that my initial idea of validating it and sending out some forms,
what do you want, was like, no, no, it didn't really work out.
It was like more telling people that, look, here I am, I'm going to do something, I'm
going to check whether this is interesting enough, if this reaches enough big audience,
and yeah, that was it.
So I've been talking to any hackers, obviously, for years now, I got a lot of meetups and
I asked people who haven't gotten started yet, why haven't you started?
Because a lot of people are super excited and energized by this idea that they can create
their own online business, and they can start off as a side project and make enough money
for them to basically be their own boss, and be a free sort of sovereign individual.
But then they still don't get started.
And far and away, the number one reason people don't get started is because they don't know
what to work on.
Like, I don't have any creative ideas, and they're kind of waiting for inspiration to
strike.
And here you are, you've been working in UI and UX design for a while, and you look out
and you say, hey, I want to create a resource to help people learn how to do this thing.
But one could argue people already know how to do this thing.
There's already millions of people doing UI design, there's already like tons of resources
for people to learn.
Why did you even in the first place consider that this would be a viable idea?
And I guess more broadly, how can other people look out on the world and see ideas like this
that are right in front of them?
Yeah, it's pretty difficult to define what to work on if you don't have any idea.
I pretty much believe that all of my good projects, they began from my own urge to fill
some blanks in the market, and by deeply understanding the field that I'm working with.
So basically, it's like solving your own problem, except that by teaching people how to solve
it, it might not be your problem anymore because you already know it.
And that's pretty much all of my projects, that's pretty much all I do.
I try to pass the knowledge that already helped me.
So I think the best idea for the project is basically that you know that it's effective
and you don't have to research for some ideas on what to basically do.
The thing you said about not launching anything, I kind of agree that it's really just about
starting something, about putting something out there.
But also, I'm a strong advocate of not rushing that much.
When you're at speed, everything is blurry outside.
It's really hard to concentrate.
So if you slow down and focus at your thing and you discover the flow, then I think you
can end up with really interesting product.
And it's always best to create a product that's an answer for your problem, that's solved
your problem.
Obviously, everyone will say that.
And also to make the product for people who you're going to like working with, because
I love UI and UX designers.
There are my guys, we hang out.
We basically go to the conference together and we can talk for hours.
So that's pretty much the audience I want to talk to with my product as well.
I don't want to go for a product that's trendy because there is money in it, for example.
And then you end up with people who you don't really care about and you don't really want
to talk to them.
In terms of the speeding, I think that there is more to it.
Today's startup culture is all about pushing it quick.
Now YC Startup School started again and it aims again, I think, at four weeks from idea
to validation.
So four weeks of work and then you launch MVP and this is the market first approach,
you might say.
If there's an exceptional market, even the crappy products or idea will kind of stick.
And then as a VC, you can put a lot of money in it and a lot of resources and it might
just play well.
But that model is basically meant to serve VCs and out of, I don't know how many companies
are there now for Startup School, but probably 30 or 40,000 companies.
So they don't really need a lot to succeed, right?
But for you being one of them, the odds might be 1 to 10,000 and I don't really know a better
definition of lack than this.
So at the opposite side, you have this product first approach where you put a lot of effort
in your product and the development of the product and you polish it, kind of polish
it first and then you launch it when it's ready.
And as long as you've done your homework, so you did the research, for example, solving
your own problem, talking to potential clients, delivering value, et cetera, you don't really
need to hit this exceptional market to be really successful, right?
And against what's common knowledge in the startup world, I bet that this market is everything.
It's really for exceptional markets and not really for indie hackers who will suffice
with smaller markets, but niche enough to not be crushed by huge players and probably
survive this way.
And I really think that was the case for Learn New X and I pretty much did it because I took
this product first approach.
It can be pretty dangerous if you think too much, if you procrastinate, if you put a lot
of work and then something ends up not being really successful.
But to be honest, I've seen a lot more companies and you can tell me that probably because
I think I've seen a lot more people succeed with this product first approach, putting
a lot of work in the product and then the ones that just put something out to the world
like a quick MVP and then try to polish it and then try to work on it.
You had a lot of guests in your podcasts and I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
Well, you actually wrote a really good blog post or article on indie hackers years ago,
I think just a couple months after you launched Learn New X and you were talking about the
process you went through to get the product built and how you validated the idea and every
step along the way.
It's pretty fascinating because you went super in-depth about everything you learned.
And I think what struck me was how meticulous you were at the strategy and planning thing.
You really weren't just throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what stuck.
You're being very thoughtful about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
And that didn't mean that everything necessarily worked out.
But it did mean that you were aware of why things could work out.
You weren't just kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that you would get lucky.
And when I interviewed people and talked to them about their business ideas, I see the
whole gamut.
I talked to lots of people who didn't put that much thought into what they were doing
and they kind of got lucky because the things they didn't think about worked out well.
And I talked to I think fewer people who were really thoughtful about things and who planned
it all out.
But I would guess that if you were to look at the denominator, which is really hard to
see, out of all the people who succeeded because they got kind of lucky, how many people tried
that approach?
I don't know how many people are trying.
It might be much higher than the number of people who are trying to be strategic.
And so even though you might see more people who just kind of get lucky, your success ratio
might be higher for the people who are planning and really trying to think things through.
So I think it's really hard to say, I'm kind of like you, I'm more of a meticulous planner.
I don't want to leave things to luck.
I want to make sure the product's good and I want to understand who my market is.
And I want to try to understand what the distribution channels are and what's going to work and
try to as best I can come up with all three of those things together and figure out if
it makes sense.
And if there's any holes in there, look for reasons why it won't work.
Because I think it's a safe bet, right?
Because it's really rarely that, I think, yeah, that's one or two or three out of 30,000
companies really who just hit that hockey stick effect or product market fits right
away.
And it's safer to basically prepare yourself and to learn more about what you can do, what
you can launch.
And yeah, obviously, the more you do, the more products you launch, you get this intuition.
I think that I'm slowly getting this intuition.
But also, I think, more and more things you realize later that they appear random.
There's this book, it's called Black Swan.
I don't know.
I forgot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So one of the takeaways is that almost all of the predictions fail.
And big things that can change history, those great things can happen as a result of mixture
of linked events, but often unexpected events.
And like the butterfly effect, right?
If you take small steps, you can often reverse engineer those events and drag them down to
a minor cause like connecting this flapping wings of a butterfly to a hurricane in China
being a cause in New Mexico.
But the thing is, it only works backwards.
So you mentioned my posts on Medium.
And this is what I do.
I try to give all the knowledge, all my learnings, I have to put it out.
If I learn something, if I get something valuable, I have to put it out.
I have to record a course, create a tutorial, I have to write a Medium post, and I go meticulous.
But I'm not saying that everything I did there and everything I put in the post is good for
today.
And this might be sad, but you can't really establish a framework for future success from
past things, from past learnings like this.
So predicting a catastrophe every time you see a butterfly is useless.
But the same thing applies to all those things you read about how to go from $10,000 to $100,000.
It's really tough to give a good advice.
And I figured out that the best advice might be the one that basically is a case study
of something pretty technical.
So for example, I put this and this amount of money to Reddit or Quora advertising.
And I put the correct, the same copy that I put out there for an ad.
And then I can say that from this, I got that many people signing up, that many people paying.
This is something that my teacher is something.
But it's really difficult to give some great advices.
Yeah, I mean, you don't know how advice is going to work out in the future for other
people who are not you in the exact situation that you were in when you did this thing.
And even when you look back on why your particular project succeeded, it doesn't necessarily
mean you're going to correctly analyze why it succeeded.
Now I think about the past of indie hackers all the time, and sometimes they'll tell people,
you know, I did this thing, I did that thing.
But who knows if I didn't do that thing, if it still would have worked out.
Maybe it would have.
It's really hard to say.
And in your particular case, I think what's interesting and consistent across all the
different projects you work on is that you're really an educator.
Like you said, if you learn something, like it's, you have this burning desire to basically
tell other people what you learned and how you did it.
And education is just such a powerful force in the world.
Like if you're driven to teach other people, you're probably going to be pretty successful
because people love learning, people love figuring out how they can improve their lives
and their careers and their relationships.
And they're obviously willing to pay a lot of money to learn things, otherwise courses
and colleges would be out of business.
And so the fact that you have that kind of bent, maybe if you were wrong about everything
else, all your strategies and tactics didn't make sense.
And we're completely in the wrong direction.
The fact that you've like glommed onto this desire to teach other people might be enough
to sort of swamp all the other factors and overcome them.
Yeah.
And I always tell it to people because sometimes I even try to pass some knowledge.
I try to teach something that I've just learned and had some success with it.
And it's pretty powerful, but people are not really encouraged to do this because they
think that they are not experts in the field.
They didn't spend like years on the topic and they don't find themselves good teacher
in the subject.
They are intimidated.
So I don't think this is the case.
I pretty much work with probably 100 authors here in our studios in Poland.
And I've worked with experienced ones, with inexperienced ones.
And I often see that people are really experienced in the field.
They probably have some difficulties transferring the knowledge.
They don't really see this line between basics and advanced stuff, and everything is basically
easy for them.
So I think that it's even better to teach what you've already learned, so even not being
an expert on it.
But if you know that this brought some effect and this, for example, so let's say you want
to teach people how to write code.
I think that even if you don't know the next framework, if you don't know React, but you
are a software engineer, you are a frontend developer, and you are just learning React,
and you are in a great position to teach this technology because you know all the problems,
all the common problems that people face when they learn.
So it's not necessarily great to be, you know, you can be, obviously, you can have a lot
of experience and still be an exceptional teacher, but it shouldn't intimidate you to
start teaching others that you don't really have that much experience.
And I keep saying this to people, and I think that everyone can teach something, has something
to teach, and this is a great way to start your online business or just pass the knowledge
on the internet.
Now you have so many different opportunities to do that.
So in other words, if you're one of these procrastinating indie hackers who doesn't
have an idea, you can just teach something, no longer have an excuse, figure out what
you want to learn, or something that you're already good at, and figure out a way to teach
other people.
And what's great about teaching is there's so many different places where you can teach.
You can teach people over an email newsletter, you can teach people through YouTube videos
or setting up your own website, like Greg did with his courses, you can teach people
over Twitter, you can teach people in person.
No matter how many other schools or educational websites or products exist, there's always
some way where you can teach people through a new channel using your own style and your
own experiences and probably find some people who are willing to pay to learn.
So I think that's sort of my favorite way for people to get started with their very
first business.
Yeah, that's it.
That's a great way to start.
And also, you can say that there are many courses on the topic that you want to cover,
but still, it's a good thing to put it out, put the content out.
And this is because people like to learn from different people, also similar to them.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing to have another course on React or Angular or whatever,
because someone would like your teaching style or yourself as a teacher.
And there's a lot of people out there who might say that, who might just choose you
as a teacher, so for whatever reason.
So that's always a great way to start.
Yeah, I was just in South Africa earlier this year.
And it really opened my eyes to the fact, something like 4 billion people, still aren't
even online yet.
Like the number of people who are coming online every day, who are hungry to learn things
and improve their skills is massive.
And like you said, they want teachers and they want things that resonate with them.
If you could target a course or something that you're teaching to these new people or
any specific niche of people, they're going to choose you over all the existing stuff
because it really resonates with them.
I would also say that it's really, and I have experience in that because I also, for
the past 10 years, I've been recording courses in Polish.
I run a pretty big website here with video courses on different topics.
And it's really great to start from the local market as well.
So this might be an interesting thing.
So running the project locally, it may sound pretty weird, but initially for me, for example,
I never thought of running business in English.
And that might be because of, I don't know, I didn't know English so well.
When I started and I started pretty early, it was pre-YouTube, I was recording things.
So partly it was cultural.
Maybe I got it from home from my parents, but basically I also tried to give back to
the community that shaped me in Poland and basically gave me all the skills that I have.
I learned programming, I learned design through the help of those people.
And doing things locally might be really beneficial, I guess, because there are a few reasons.
But the one I find really important is how rewarding it can be.
And there has been many people I met during the events and conferences who basically benefited
from my work.
And sometimes it somehow influenced their life or in a positive way, or they found a
new job, or they opened their own business.
And it gave me really huge drive.
If I started in English, I'd probably only see comments.
It's not the same, right?
But I met those people.
I can tell you a story, actually.
There's a story of a guy, he retired as a fireman, and he had some time to kill.
So he started to learn technology.
And at that time, it was pretty early back in 2005, 2006 probably, because it was pre-iPhone.
I've been a teenager and I recorded a course on the groundbreaking technology, which was
Flashlight, I don't know if you guys...
I'm pretty old, now I realize.
What?
Flash?
Yeah.
Flashlight was technology that would enable you to build apps for mobile phones.
It was basically a lighter version of Flashlight that worked for Nokia's old phones before
iPhone.
So I spent a few months developing a course, and this was the most exciting times of my
life.
And I said, mobile apps, this is the next great thing.
But I put it online, and just like a few people enrolled into this course, including the firemen.
But this was pretty much of a disaster.
I spent a lot of time on this, and no one really cared, right?
So I've been, I think, devastated, you might say.
But 10 years later, I met the same fireman, and I didn't know him.
He recognized me in one of the best offices in the world, so I met him.
And he basically recognized me, he ran towards me, and he hugged me.
And he explained that he purchased this course, and he explained how the course I made kind
of inspired him to start the company.
And now he runs one of the biggest dev shops with mobile apps in Poland.
You know, putting something on the internet is like sending a message in a bottle across
the ocean, and lots of those bottles will drown or end up being unseen.
But sometimes someone will see it and just return the message, right?
And I bet it's true also for indie hackers, man.
There are hundreds of people who can give you similar stories with indie hackers, and
I think you should be really proud of it.
I like the point about doing things locally.
This is a local fireman who you ran into in an office in Poland.
And with indie hackers, it's not a very local project.
I did not make it for other people in San Francisco, but when I go to other parts of
the world and meet all sorts of indie hackers working on their own projects, there's just
nothing that can really replace the feeling of meeting somebody in person who's seen what
you've done online.
And I wonder how much, you know, having that experience has motivated you to do what you're
doing now with Learn UX and with your other projects, you know, what is it that gets you
out of bed to work on these projects, and how much of that is a component of helping
other people, and how much of it is a component of helping yourself and improving your own
life?
That's a valid question.
Actually, I thought about it a lot the other day.
I think that it really gave me a huge drive to pursue what I do and the stories of people,
what they say when they meet me, how it influenced their path.
Obviously, it's, I'm not that important, you know, they could have learned from YouTube,
you can learn anything anywhere, but the stories that I hear, I think it's the biggest drive.
I've never cared more about anything, I guess.
So, making it local is a good idea for multiple reasons, but to make it straight, right now
I probably wouldn't start it in Polish, okay?
I'm not.
Yeah, I'd probably go global first, I'd do English, but it's a great idea to, if you
are, for example, creating content, you can always localize it to your mother language,
and you can simultaneously create an English version and your language version.
And this is, the language is pretty important, and recently I've been searching for a Chinese
nanny for my two-year-old son, and there's a huge, like, huge study on how certain language
can affect thinking and acting.
And for example, like Chinese, there are tonal language, Chinese is tonal language.
It means that you can say, one syllable can basically mean different things, depending
on how you intonate it, right?
So it's proven that it develops the hearing, the music skills, and things like that, and
that's one example.
But once in a while I surveyed a large part of my audience in Poland who spoke a good
English, and they clearly stated that they'd still prefer a course in Polish.
So maybe as a founder, indie founder abroad, you also have some edge over those big companies,
like American companies, right?
Those people don't really know your language.
They will probably never localize their product as good as you can.
So this is also a great advantage.
And really, you have to think of different languages as different ways of thinking.
And even if, that's another story.
I'm a lawyer.
I finished law in Warsaw, and I was translating contracts.
And the contract that has four pages in Polish usually has one page in English.
So it's pretty much, it's very different how you state the sentences, how you explain things,
and how you understand things.
And if you take Chinese, for example, this is a completely different language and completely
different structures that you might use.
So I think that there's a huge advantage in local markets.
And companies that, for example, might probably be able to compete with, so big companies
with online video courses like Skillshare or Linda or Udemy is doing this locally, but
they won't take as much effort, and they probably won't be as successful as I'm on my local
market.
This reminds me of kind of what you were saying earlier, which is, you don't want to be opportunistic
about ideas.
You want to do things that resonate with your personality, with what makes you feel good.
But at the same time, there's so many opportunities.
You start thinking this way, and you're like, well, what about this language?
What about that language?
But everybody listening has something that makes them unique.
They have something that they really care about, something they're passionate about.
And it's almost always the case that you can start a business that has some of your own
personality and care in it.
With me, friendly hackers, for example, it's like I live in San Francisco, everyone around
me has obsessed the startups.
And I just happened to be like the one person I knew who didn't really care about raising
venture capital.
I just cared about generating revenue.
That was the spin that I put on basically helping people start startups.
And for you, it's like there's probably lots of people who are helping people learn UX.
But for you, you're in Poland, and you really care about this local field.
And so you started courses and videos in Polish helping people around you.
And so I encourage everyone listening to think about what makes them unique and don't run
away from that.
Like inject that into your business and do something that you're authentically passionate
about.
Because it's going to be a slog.
I know with Learn UX, we're going to get into it.
But your first early days making these videos weren't exactly the most fun thing that you've
ever done.
And now you can sort of rest on your laurels and say, okay, I work one day a month.
But in the beginning, it was like a huge slog.
And if you're doing something you didn't care at all about, I've struggled and imagined
that you would have gotten through it.
Now, if someone tells you that if you do what you like, you'll never work a day in your
life.
It's a lie, man.
It's a lie.
I love creating content.
I love putting it out there.
I love high quality content.
But I hated it in the studio when it took three months.
And I was repeating myself over and over again.
And I was like, it was frustrating.
My English was so bad.
And I had to repeat.
And I have to rerecord every time.
And I really hated it.
And then I hated it while I had to fix all the marketing stuff and sales and probably
deal with some paperwork and set up a company and accountants and things like this.
Man, I hated it.
So basically, this is the outcome.
I love the outcome.
And I'm grateful for the outcome and what I feel when I finally see it live.
But the process, sometimes it's really painful.
And you have to account for that.
It's not the most beautiful thing.
And the other thing I tried to do is that's why I tried to automate all of the boring
stuff.
And that's why I tried to write some pieces of software that will help me run this seamlessly,
especially the boring parts.
So how do you get through this process of working for months, doing something that ostensibly
you love, but in reality, the actual nitty gritty of it is just boring and frustrating
and you don't have any customers yet and you're not getting paid.
What drove you to keep going despite those months of just drudge work?
Yeah, I had to finish.
It's like you, I don't like to spend time, you know, I don't like to give up.
It's not the thing that I don't really like to give up.
And I really pursued this idea because I believe in the idea.
So I knew that when it's painful because I did it in the past, I knew that if it's painful,
the results might be really good.
If it goes too easy, sometimes it's just pure luck, but oftentimes you will fail.
So I believe in hard work, you can get lucky on the way.
That's fine.
But I think that the safe bet is just work it out and blots, sweat, tears, just eventually
come up with a good product and then, yeah, and then trust in your guts and follow it.
Just be systematic.
Just don't give up at the beginning because it might be hard at the beginning, but ultimately
it will pay off.
That's a good point, but if you don't want to rely on luck, you really need to put effort
into what you're doing.
And also, if you want people to talk about it, to share it with their friends, to tweet
it, to retweet it, to just basically be excited about what you're doing, you also need to
put some hard work into it.
And I think that doesn't necessarily mean you need to work hundreds of hours per week
or anything crazy.
You can work a totally normal schedule and just focus, ruthlessly prioritize, cut out
all the other stuff that's not really core to what you're working on and make sure you're
focusing all your attention on the main thing so that you can work hard enough on that to
do a really good job.
And that's what you did with Learn UX.
You spent three months just putting together these videos and making them the best that
they could possibly be.
And even the UX of your website, you're teaching people UX and so you figured you needed to
have really good UX yourself and so it's a beautifully designed website that you obviously
put a lot of time and care into.
Somebody who's not working hard is not going to be able to compete with that and somebody
who's not focused, who's doing a million different things, is also not going to be able to compete
with that.
Another thing, actually, this is one of the experiments I run on Learn UX because there
were many of them, but I decided to make the website itself a bit unique and I spent some
extra time on layout and most of those learning sites, they have some simple landing page,
they're all the same, they give you some credits about the author, they give you some info
about the course and that's basically, they are really the same, the one I created was
pretty much different and I knew that UI and UX people, they really care about details
like this.
They are also searching for an inspiration on the website such as Dribbble, such as Awards,
you know, the FWA and I thought that would be really cool if I sign up for some contests
like CSS Design Awards and I actually received a few awards and it gave me the exposition
to UI and UX designers and some high quality links as well.
So I got, I think that I got more hits from single website like Awards or CSS Design Awards
than from Product Hunt, which I think I was first five on Product Hunt, but I don't remember
exactly, but I got a lot more traffic from those websites and those were people who were
really interested in my product.
I think I got about 8,000 hits from Awards the day or in the week that they gave me the
award and those were UI, UX designers.
So exposing the website to them in this way, it gave me a lot of subscriptions and a lot
of people interested in the idea as well.
So looking back with the benefit of hindsight, you're working super hard to get this website
out.
Is there anything you think you could have just skipped?
Any of the hard work that you didn't need to do for Learn UX to get to the point where
it is today?
Yeah, I think a lot of things I could skip or just don't spend as much time and effort.
There were things I thought matter, but they were not so important, I guess.
So first, I guess that I put a lot of effort in communicating to other people who are UI,
UX designers that I'm going to do this.
So probably a month or two before, I basically recorded myself.
I took an iPhone, I recorded myself and sent out personal message to all of the influencers
I knew from the UI and UX world to announce them that Learn UX is coming.
And to be honest, I don't really know why now and a lot of people do it.
I guess a lot of people reach out to, they try to reach out to some influencers, but
no one will answer your call.
It's like you are just...
So I think the good advice would be to just put it out there, then search for some people
who would support your ideas, if they can see it, they'd probably be interested or not.
But just reaching out to people was really time consuming and no one really cared, and
I wouldn't care.
And so right now I know it.
But there was a lot of things that I would probably skip and influencers were one of
these things.
Yeah, you're trying to generate buzz before your product, before it even launched.
It doesn't seem like it went well.
How did your launch itself go when you finally released Learn UX to the world?
I did this...
Oh, and this is another thing that went pretty much wrong, I guess.
So I tried to make this big launch.
I put a counter on a website.
So and then I probably did some announcement that I'm going to launch this website here
and there, and it was super stressful.
I think that at the time that the counter went down to zero, I was probably the most
stressed person out there, and there were only like 10 more people on the website.
So I would never do it again, and I would just put it out, don't tell anyone, just polish
the website, fix some bugs, and then spread the news, because the launch itself was really...
It's really not that important, I think.
And a lot of times you can see websites that has a great launch and they grade on product
hand, they do grade on hacker news or something like this.
And then after a few days, you can see the traffic is going down and you get really frustrated
and depressed.
First, you are on this high, but then you go pretty low and this can be...
Yeah, so I wouldn't aim for a big launch anymore, I would just try to launch as often as I can.
So instead of launching, doing a big launch, just aim for one launch a week so that you
can launch a new feature every week or every two weeks and it will get better from there.
Yeah, I completely agree with this whole idea that people put launch on a pedestal as if
it's going to solve all of their problems.
I'm going to have this one big launch day and then I never have to figure out how to
grow my product again.
Everyone's going to keep coming eternally after my launch day and the reality is even
if you do have a big launch day, that's just one day.
And after that, you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to get people
to come back to the thing that you're building unless you have some incredibly viral sensation,
which in all likelihood, you don't.
Most apps aren't that viral.
So I wonder what your strategy is nowadays.
Your launch is a thing of the past.
How do you continue to get people to come back to what you're doing at Learn UX?
So every once in a while, I sit down and I try to update the material.
And I think once every two years, I'll have to rerecord all the content because all of
it.
Yeah, I think that probably all of it would go down.
I think that the tools change, the processes, I want it to be current, to be of an exceptional
value, and something from three years back is not anymore in the software world, especially.
So yeah, I think that I will rerecord the content, but it wouldn't take me 1,000 hours
anymore because I have some smart ways to organize myself around the content.
And probably I then lock myself for a month and then rerecord the things that I need to,
and that's it.
But I want to keep it current.
But the thing is, you asked me about passive income.
So a lot of people will tell you to basically put all your resources in one project and
update it constantly.
The thing is, obviously, there's no such thing as passive income that you, I don't know,
you might be aiming for a billion dollar exit from your company and then, OK, you don't
have to work anymore.
But it's not the case for most of us, and it might be just lucky.
And how I define passive income is I can work whenever I want.
So I can set up for a three-month work from January to March, and then I can take holiday,
then I can work on some other projects.
And I know that I have this time fixed for the project that will then generate some revenue.
And probably passive income, for me, is mainly about organizing myself so that I have time
for everything whenever I want.
And of course, especially indie makers are often deeply involved in the project that
they create.
And they want to put a lot of effort in it every day and refine it so that it's perfect.
No IT project is ever perfect.
And basically, you have to admit that.
So what I also discovered over those years is the more you scale the project, also the
more cost it generates, and the more effort it generates.
So there is this exponential growth in costs for a medium-sized project.
So if you have the company, your company starts to earn more.
But then you, as a founder, you start to earn less.
So I know it's strange, but this is how it works.
And it's relatively easy, I guess, to grow your project to 1k, 2k, 5k, or 10k MRR, while
still keeping it low cost.
And then you can use some ready-made solutions for e-commerce, accounting, customer service,
automate everything, and keep it simple.
And you can have 1, 2, 5, 10 projects like this.
It's pretty easy.
And then you can organize your time around these projects and work wherever you can.
So this is ultimately the holy grail of passive income for me.
James Clear has this great tweet and really point that he's written about in some of his
books and blog posts that real wealth is not about how much money you have, but it's about
your freedom, basically, to make choices about how you live.
And what you were saying is like, you want the freedom to choose what months, what hours
you're going to work, where you're going to work from, what you're going to work on.
Because you've created these sources of quote unquote passive income, you have that freedom
to choose.
Yeah, that's absolutely the way I think of it.
I once came upon For Our Work Week, which you obviously know.
So at first, I thought that this must be for people who really hate their work.
And then I read the book, obviously, I realized that it's about working efficiently.
And so I preferred my work weeks to start like four hour work weeks.
I could start them Monday morning, and then I could start another four hour work week,
the same day, afternoon, right?
And then deliver the value.
But it's all about staying focused and staying efficient at what you do.
So what I really try to do is not to procrastinate too much and really put the time where it
belongs to.
You mentioned competition.
I think that those who are doing better job than you do probably work harder, as you said.
But also, it's possible that they just work on the right thing while you are pretending
to work or procrastinating or organizing yourself around your work and stuff like this.
So I really try to, I really focus on working efficiently and then leaving the time for
the other things.
And this might be work as well, because I really like what I do and why would I just
spend four hours a week on that.
So let's talk about some of the practical realities of how you're able to work so little
on Learn UX.
What are some of these techniques you're using to work more efficiently?
And what are some things you're not spending your time doing that other founders might
be spending time doing?
I try to automate as much as I possibly can.
And I try to use a lot of no code tools and low code tools to put this project on autopilot
with marketing, customer service, with accounting, and things like this.
There are a lot of things that you can automate.
Probably you can automate 90% of the online business, depending on what the business is.
But in my case, automation is really the launchpad for anything else, because it gives me time
to spend and focus on the other things.
And I'm using a lot of different tools.
I can code myself.
So I can code small pieces of software that will help me.
But there is also a lot of no code tools or low code tools that will allow you to connect
some things.
For example, I use Zapier and Integromat a lot.
And those tools allow me to basically glue together different tools.
So mailing lists with spreadsheets with different things that I use for marketing.
And I can have a chatbot on chatfuel that will allow me to get some customer service.
I use Intercom a lot.
And there are tools to organize yourself and to botch answer questions and automatically
answer questions.
I use a lot of marketing automation, some flows that I built around emails that I sent.
Probably no ConvertKit.
I know that you use ConvertKit, right?
So you can automate a lot of things with tools like this.
But on top of that, there's another layer that I often use.
And as I said, I'm using Zapier or Integromat to glue those tools together.
Because ultimately, you want to have one output from all those tools.
And this is what I do.
And this works really well.
You can automate a lot nowadays.
Yeah, you showed me Integromat when we hung out last year.
And I was blown away.
It's actually a super cool visualization tool for making a lot of these automations.
And it strikes me that you know how to code, right?
You can actually write code yourself.
And yet you're still using a lot of these no code tools, presumably to save yourself
time.
And it kind of goes back to what you were saying, where it's not just about working
hard, but you also have to prioritize what should I work on.
Just because I can code something doesn't necessarily mean I need to code it from scratch.
If there are already existing tools where I can just sort of duct tape things together
that might free up months or weeks of your time to spend on other things.
The thing is, I've learned to code when I was 15 or 16.
But then I switched to web design.
And although I probably could code anything, I don't find it too exciting.
And it was taking too long.
For me, I kind of missed this instant gratification that you get from graphic design, motion design
and UI.
And when I discovered those automations, both Chrome, AWS Lambda, I suck in it for a long
time.
I was really like, it felt like the missing piece of the puzzle in my life just got in
place, right?
So the results are really quick, and there's a little code required to make software that
actually works.
And this is the huge advantage that those tools can give you.
Still, you have to understand some things that are going on under the hood and understand
the web, how web works, how APIs work, how you can connect and combine those tools.
And the greatest benefit of no code is when you really know how to code and you basically
take shortcuts with those tools.
It's a pretty rare combination to both know how to code, but also not be so passionate
and obsessed with code that you don't just use it as a solution to every single problem.
So I think most no coders don't know how to code.
So they're just like, you know, maybe they're confused about some of those technical details
and how the web works, but most developers I know are either afraid of no code or very
skeptical of it and have no interest in learning any of it because it's not their passion.
I think that your business, if you run an online business, it can really hugely benefit
from hiring those no code tools.
And I know it because I've automated a lot of my business in Poland and probably saved
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So it's really something that you should take into consideration.
So what you do right now, there's a lot of confusion around no code because it's still
new and under this no code flag, you often put tools like Squarespace and Retool.
And first is just a simple visual template editor for everyone.
And the other is letting you build complex UIs for database management driven by JavaScript.
So this is really different software and there are two aspects to it.
So the first is tools for people who have a little or no coding experience, and then
they can use web builders, which are a lot better version of WYSIWYX that we know from
10 years ago.
And they can make landing pages, organize mailing lists, and so on and so forth.
But now they can even go further with Webflow, you spoke to Vlad, Webflow is really great.
It allows you to create database and e-commerce.
You have Bubble or Adalo, which will allow you to create an app with some more advanced
components as well.
But what's even more exciting is the second aspect of no code tools that gives you this
superpower to the people who already know how to code, they know how web works.
And thanks to the APIs that are everywhere right now, you can connect multiple tools,
you can code small apps or use those solutions such as Zapier or Integromat to glue them
together.
And you can use tools like Kritel to create a UI that manages your database or something
like this.
But this is completely different word, right?
The tools for no coders and for people who are familiar with the idea.
Yeah, there's a huge range out there of different tools you can use.
And I think it's easy from the outside looking in to form these judgments about what's used
for what, but you kind of have to just try it to really understand where it's useful
and where it's not.
And it has its own learning curve.
Even if you're a developer, you're still going to have to take the time to learn how Zapier
works or how Webflow works or how Integromat works and you can't just skip right by that.
But anyway, we're running low on time.
I'd love to have you on the podcast again at some point because I feel like we barely
even scratched the surface of how LearnUx works and how you have other projects and things
you're spending way more time working on.
And those would be fascinating to talk about too.
Before we close out here, I want to get just some of your general advice.
You spend so much time building these projects and learning a lot about UX and generating
passive income and helping others learn to improve their careers.
What do you think other indie hackers listening should take away from your experiences and
your goals as they try to build their own online businesses?
So the one advice I already gave you and I want to underline it once more is really not
to rush, to take your time, not procrastinate, but basically take your time, put the project
out there, but not really try to make it in three or four weeks and basically take some
time to create really valuable content.
And I think that in most cases, for me, it really paid off.
But another advice maybe would be not to worry too much.
So sometimes something can occupy your mind for days and people can write mean things
and you can also have this problem with knocking to many doors and hearing know a lot, which
is common when you run internet projects.
And I think that it's really useful to, as a founder, get the state of the mind that
will help you to patiently create your product and not rush, but also clear your head from
time to time and not worry that much.
I've seen a lot of founders were really stressed out and it's really very difficult.
Being a solo founder, especially, there's a lot to take.
There are things that still juggle in your head and you hear it all the time.
You hear about depression and anxiety in the context of founders and company owners.
So I think Learn New X is successful because of how much attention I pay to it and how
I basically try to not kill this project by interrupting it to grow by itself.
I think it's really valuable to let it go sometimes and not to respond to everything
that you have to respond.
You don't really have to.
You just need to put your head to work and improve the product and that might be my advice.
Something that I'm still learning how to do, to just sit back and let things run on their
own every now and then and not stress.
I was just on vacation earlier this year and vacations for me are a pretty rare thing.
And there are days where I didn't work on any hackers and it was pretty weird to do
that and see things not explode.
And then I come back home and it feels like I have to work on this thing for 10 hours
today otherwise this email's not going to get responded to or this other thing's not
going to happen and usually it's okay to just let it go.
So I love that advice Greg.
I hope to see you back on the show sometime soon.
He let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with Learn
New X and your other projects as well.
Sure.
So you can reach out to me at Twitter.
I'm at Greg underscore ROG and you can go to Learn New X dot IO or call this dot how
and just send a message.
I'm here and I'm very happy to answer all the questions.
I've been in a position where I tried to reach out to many people and I couldn't get an answer.
So I now I read carefully all the messages and I tried to help as much as I can.
So yeah, feel free to reach out to me.
Thanks so much Greg.
Thank you.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to Greg and
let him know.
He's on Twitter at Greg underscore ROG.
Also if you're interested in hearing my thoughts and take away from this episode, you should
subscribe to the IndieHackers podcast newsletter.
You can find that at IndieHackers.com slash podcast.
Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next time.