What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. This is a quick chat episode of the podcast where I bring
on a founder who's been posting milestones about their progress to the IndieHackers website,
and we get to see what it's like to actually be in the trenches trying to build something
from scratch as an IndieHacker.
Today, I'm talking to William Candelan, the founder of Start React Native, where he sells
courses and starter kits for programmers who are trying to learn React Native. And in the
latest milestone that he's posted to his timeline, he explains how he reached 20,000 subscribers
on his YouTube channel, so I'm sure we'll talk about that. William, welcome to the show.
Hello, Cortland. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for coming on. Your product page on IndieHackers says you're making about $6,000
a month. Is that accurate?
That's correct, yes.
And are you full-time on this and just working for yourself, or are you still working another
job?
I do still do some consulting. At the moment, I consult for Shopify. Recently, Shopify made
an announcement that they are betting on React Native as a technology for their mobile apps,
and I consult for them on the theme of gestures and animations and making sure that things
are performing okay and runs smooth as butter.
That's a cool role. Shopify is a great company, and since it's consulting, it's almost like
that's your side hustle now, and making the courses and YouTube videos that you make is
now your real job.
That's a great way to put it. My side hustle is my mind hustle and vice versa.
Well, you're basically living the IndieHacker dream. I think most people really want to
get to this point where they're making enough money from their business that they could
go full-time on it, or they are full-time on it, and anything else they do is really just
unnecessary and on the side. How does it feel to have made it here? I know you've been working
on your YouTube videos and your courses for almost three years.
I'm really feeling very fulfilled, and I'm really just very happy in general. I'm so
happy, and I'm indeed, like you just said, living my life in my own terms and really
enjoying it in the city that I love, beautiful Zwes Zaland. It's interesting because I'm
feeling so happy, but also I'm like, but you should still thrive trying to go for ambitious
goals and trying to push it and to be ambitious. It's almost hard to do because I'm feeling
so happy. I'm having a great time.
That's where I was with IndieHackers almost three years ago. I'd just gotten to the point
where it was like, oh man, this is paying my rent and it's paying all my bills. I made
it.
It was the exact month that IndieHackers got acquired and I joined Stripe and then I was
like, all right, back to the grind. I got to hit these goals. I got to get to this place.
I had sort of an external influence, but for you, that all has to be internal. What are
you striving to do? How are you pushing yourself now that you're already at the point where
you don't really need to?
I'm doing these videos on YouTube and in terms of technical content and the things I'm demoing
and presenting, I am so passionate about these demos and ideas that I get to research these
programming puzzles and I get paid to do it almost. On the technical side, I'm very excited.
I'm very proud of the level of details I'm putting in some of these examples and I put
a lot of details and precision in the technical example. Now, I would really like to explore
more like the content production and trying to improve the production of my video quality,
the sound quality, how things are edited altogether using soundtracks and so on. I feel like these
coding screencasts, they have some particular challenges to be really entertaining and engaging.
I really wish that I can grow my channel and grow the business that goes with it so I could
really explore how entertaining they can be and seeing some YouTubers, much bigger content
creators that are pushing the envelope in terms of making these programming videos entertaining.
It seems like you can actually go pretty far in terms of entertainment value with these
programming videos.
There's something about the human condition where we're always looking up to the people
who are ahead of us. When you're first getting started, you're like, ah, dang, I really wish
I could just get started. Who else has gotten started? But then once you've made it, you're
still looking at people who are getting more views on YouTube or whose companies are making
more money or more users or more customers. You're like, what are they doing that I'm
not doing? And it's a double-edged sword where the cliche is like, oh, at some point you
need to learn to be happy with what you have.
But also, I think it's really motivational, inspiring to have something that you care
about and something that you're driven towards. And I think having these inspirational figures,
in your case, these bigger YouTube channels or these bigger, more popular course creators,
and saying, oh, how much room there is for you to improve will always give you a goal.
So you're never really bored. You're never just satisfied. And that's kind of the beauty
of having your own business.
I agree. It's all about finding a balance and being satisfied with what you are doing,
but also striving for more.
So let's talk about how you got started in the very beginning. Do you start down this
journey thinking I want to be an eddy hacker and be financially independent?
Absolutely not. At least I don't remember that I had these goals. So I cannot say for
sure, no, but I don't remember. What I really remember is that I started to do these coding
videos. And even without any long-term goals, I was loving that I was getting value out
of it on the short term anyways. And the value I was getting is that I was using my laptop,
just the microphone from my laptop, no gear, nothing. And I was doing basically the programming
I needed to do anyway. And for me, it was such a focused environment because when you're
recording, you cannot check Facebook. You have to explain your thoughts out loud. And
actually, that's the best way to unlock some problems. I mean, you're a programmer too.
I'm sure you've experienced it, but sometimes to explain a technical problem to someone
just to explain it, you've solved it in your head.
Yeah. I do a lot of writing to myself. I have notebook after notebook on my computer. I
just write things down because it's kind of like a short-term memory aid where it's hard
to keep these things in memory, but you put it on a page and now you can reference it.
And that just helps me code and work through tricky problems. But it's pretty similar to
explaining it to somebody else.
I got started to do these simple screencasts in end of 2017. And summer 2018, I did this
contracting job for a startup in Zurich and that was really ambitious mobile app project.
And because the project was so ambitious, suddenly I started to look at the apps on
my phone very differently because if I was using Uber or Spotify, I was like, I was not
using it anymore. I was thinking, how do they do it? How do they provide such a user experience?
And I got so excited to search these examples that I started to share them on Facebook in
a series called Can It Be Done in React Native? Where I take examples from apps that people
know and love and I show how it can be done in React Native using the primitives of the
React Native technology. And this is where things suddenly I was not doing my work and
putting it live on YouTube. I was really making YouTube videos as tutorials essentially.
I mentioned earlier that you posted a milestone to Andy Hackers about how you grew to 20,000
YouTube subscribers and your milestone you broke down your growth into phases. So phase
one was when you just had a few thousand subscribers and that was you just recording yourself doing
a bunch of work. And phase two is what you're talking about now where you actually transitioned
to making videos for other people to actually watch and entertain and teach them. And I
want to zoom in on phase one because that's how you got started. Why were you just recording
videos for yourself? Was it only because you knew that recording screencasts would allow
you to work without being distracted or were there other reasons too?
Both. I really enjoyed the distraction free environment. But I also remember talking with
friends and also in the Acre friends that we were talking about transparency and the
benefit of being transparent. And we were talking about these companies for instance,
which are like all their revenue numbers open and all their analytics completely out of
the open. And I remember that I was thinking, how can I apply these values to myself? And
at the time, what I could do was I was not yet in the Acre. What I could do was to simply
do my work online and share it with people in out of the open in the open.
I think so many people see this culture of transparency and building in public. And they
say, you know, that sounds great, but it's not for me. It's going to be so much work.
I already have enough work to do on my own. I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing and you
know what I'm working on in public. And I think they're missing out. It's so advantageous
to do what you did, because you were just doing work that you were going to do anyway.
And then you were recording videos to share it in public, but also just to hold yourself
accountable so it made you more productive at your job. And then, of course, if you're
trying to learn something, you're trying to accomplish something, there's probably other
people in the world who are trying to do the same thing. And if they see you putting out
great videos or writing great blog posts about that, of course they're going to follow along
because why not? Then they're going to ask you questions. And they're going to ask you
to make certain videos or write certain posts. And before you know it, you're building this
audience and you're learning about what their problems are and about what they need kind
of automatically on the side of you just doing your normal work. It seems like it's such
an advantageous thing to do.
I completely agree. Today, I really am in a position where because I'm doing these videos,
people are pushing the information to me and I don't have to pull anymore. And my specialty
in this YouTube channel are gestures and animations. And now instead of me trying to find out what
are the latest novelties in gestures and animations, people in the command section are pushing
the information to me, sending me examples of people working on exciting innovations
in this area, contact me to show me what they're working on and so on. And it's such a great
place to be in when you learn in the open. And one thing which I really love as well
is when you're wrong. People, you know, they check what you're doing. And if you're wrong,
they're telling you, which is amazing because if you're not being transparent, you're not
going to get any input.
You have no clue.
Yes.
So are there early videos of yours I can find where you were just saying the wrong stuff
and coding the wrong stuff and you just put it out there anyway?
Both. So they are because the space of, you know, these programming videos is evolving
so fast. There is content that I'm doing that become obsolete very quickly. And that's fine.
And also that's why I'm trying to strike a good balance between the time I'm spending
doing these videos and the quality of production. You need to find a good balance because if
you spend too much time and you're trying to do the perfect video, but in six months,
this particular topic is kind of obsolete or the way we do things has completely changed.
It can get too expensive to do these videos. But I have to say that recently I was researching
some examples and I had to go back to order videos because you always think, I don't know
if you have this feeling, but you always think that the stuff you've been doing in the past
is silly and now you know everything.
Yeah, of course.
And I was looking at these old videos and I was like, Oh, wow, that was actually like
pretty good. So both, I would say.
Let's talk about some of the just logistics of being kind of an early stage anti hacker.
I guess at that phase, you weren't even an anti hacker. You weren't making any money.
You were just putting these videos out. How did you find the time and how did you find
the money to do this and work it into your schedule?
So that's interesting because it's a bit a similar story I think than yours because you've
mentioned it a couple of times in your podcast and every time you mention it, I'm like, Oh,
that's exactly what happened with me.
So I've quit my job and I had a little bit of runway to think about what's next. I was
not thinking about becoming an anti hacker, but I was thinking more take some time to
see on the technical side, what's going on, what is interesting, and maybe we'll find
a job in this area. And at the beginning, I didn't have so much runway, but at the beginning
I was just like, and I think you mentioned it so many times, I was just yoloing and it's
only when the bank account started to go down that I started to think, okay, can I generate
revenue?
And I got really excited about this particular technology, React Native.
So when did you start to generate revenue? You mentioned that you started making this
new series of videos and then your milestone on any hack if you said that those really
took off, people really like them. How did you turn that interest into money?
I started to build these templates for React Native. So again, here I was the same way
I was doing videos and even if no one watches a video, I'm still getting value out of it.
I was building React Native templates, which I was using to capture all the latest best
practices, APIs in React Native, which I was using for myself in my own projects. So I
needed to do this work of having a monolithic repository that captures the template of what
is a React Native app and how it should be structured and always putting it up to date.
And I started to sell this as a template. So in every video, I would promote the templates.
And these videos, I was really also doing it to challenge myself. I really enjoyed working
on these hard animations and gestures. And because I was really challenging myself, people
were having a hard time to follow because they didn't necessarily know the fundamentals
that I was using behind the scene. And in the comment section, they started to ask me
more and more after each video, oh, we are not finding you on Udemy. Where is your online
course? And that's when I decided to build an online course.
That's such a great lesson to learn there, which is that you're kind of starting with
your distribution channel first. You're building an audience first. You're putting out these
videos and as a result, you get all these people who are following you who want to know
more information. They start asking you specific questions and telling you what their problems
are. And then that gives you the idea for a product that you can build and sell to people
that's going to be valuable. They're telling you in the comments, hey, well, I don't understand
this. I need something to teach me the fundamentals. And you're like, oh, maybe I should create
a starter kit. And suddenly you have a business on your hands. And on top of that, not only
do you have a good business idea, but you already have a distribution channel with people
you can sell it to. Did all of your early customers come from your YouTube channel?
Or did you find other places to bring in customers?
So far, 100% of my customers come from the YouTube channel. And if you want my website,
there is not a lot of context provided about what the online course is, who's teaching
it, even about the pricing model and so on. And so I know that people who have enough
context to sign up to my course come from my YouTube channel. And one unexpected benefit
of building this course, because I was doing these videos. And in these videos, I was just
trying to get things to work. And so I thought I had developed some sort of good expertise
on this topic. But while building the course, I realized I learned everything. Because then
when you try to teach the fundamentals, you realize that actually you don't, I didn't
add such a strong grip on this topic. And actually, I learned so much trying to teach
different fundamentals of gestures and animations.
It goes back to what you were saying earlier about you making these videos and screencasts
in the first place that when you try to explain something to someone, you end up learning
a lot. And I've heard this consistently from people who are teaching others online or making
courses or writing books or educating that you end up learning a ridiculous amount when
you're trying to teach, which I think is an encouraging fact because it tells other people
who maybe want to teach that you don't need to be an expert when you first start the process
of going through this and trying to create a course is when you become an expert.
Absolutely. Right now, so I live in, so I'm French originally, I live in Zurich where
so they speak Swiss German, it's the main language in this part of Switzerland. And
I'm learning German, regular German. And it's a bit of a struggle. And I wish I could apply
these values of learning in the open. And because I feel like my German would suddenly
improve like crazy, but it's hard to find the opportunities to do it.
Yeah, you just got to find a bunch of French people who want to learn German and start
trying to teach them. Yeah, exactly.
So how did you get started selling courses? Because even if you know that people want
this stuff, there's probably a lot to learn. There's probably a lot of uncertainty in the
beginning. Like what are the first steps you should take? What was your approach back then?
On the content of the course, I really went back to all the videos I've made. And for
each video, I wrote down which are the fundamental recipes which are used to build these complex
examples. So I had a list of all these foundational elements. And then I started to put them in
a sequence that makes sense in terms of telling a story and approaching things in order that
makes sense. And then the content I first, I knew I could use a service to put the content
online. I think it looks like there are great services like Podia, Teachable, where you
can put and sell online courses. But because I'm a programmer, as a guilty pleasure, I
decided to build my own website, something very simple. This is why right now there's
not a lot of, I mentioned context on the website and it was not intentional. It's just I was
trying to build an MVP as fast as possible. And so what are the minimum elements I need
to build on the website? You need to sign up, you need a checkout page, you need some
video hosting. And I used Firebase, Stripe, Vistya, glue it all together and voila. And
then I went back, once I went live, I went back to the comments on YouTube and says,
okay, here it is. Because people were asking me the comments, when will you release your
online course? And then I said, here it is. And wrote a couple of, I don't know, maybe
50 comments or something.
How long did it take you to get this very first version of your course up?
Between two to four weeks, something in between.
Super fast.
Oh, thank you.
You're consistently good at doing this MVP thing. I think it's one of the most off-repeated
lessons in all the IndieHackers podcast episodes and any startup material you read online.
Build the minimum viable product, don't spend six months or 12 months building some complex
thing and then finally launching it. Everybody reads this, but they still end up doing these
extremely complex things and it takes them six months before they figure out that it's
not working.
And in your case, your MVP was really you just making videos for yourself on YouTube
and you didn't have any grander aspirations. It was just like, oh, this is cool and useful
for me to do myself. And that's really your MVP. And most people start way further down
the line than that. They might start where you are today or they have a whole website
devoted to courses and material.
But for you, you started way back earlier. And then even when you did your course, you
didn't spend like five months recording like the world's best course ever. You did like
two to three weeks. What could you get out quickly to sort of test your idea and give
to your subscribers? What do they think about that first version of your course?
So this is one of the great advantage to sell to developers because we love solving puzzles.
So even if your course is not perfect, they're actually really enjoying researching things
by themselves. And I had an example with one particular lesson, which was at the beginning
very buggy and was overall very problematic. And first of all, so people mentioned it immediately.
They were having questions and things were not working out like while trying the example.
And first, I did like try to do some quick fixes, but I realized it didn't work. And
then I fixed the overall lesson. I solved more of the fundamental problems with it.
So it took a while. And so people were messaging me about this particular video and so on.
What was amazing is that people were spending a tremendous amount of time to research it,
trying to fix it by themselves. Some people, which I messaged once the lesson was fixed
on me. Oh, I learned so much trying to fix this broken lesson, essentially. And what
kind of other target segment would you have the same kind of response? Do you imagine
if you put your car into the auto repair and then it's still broken and you say, oh, thank
you because I learned so much about make an itch.
People overestimate how polished and how perfect everything needs to be. And I think you're
completely right. If we choose the right customer segment to sell to, especially developers,
God, developers just love Googling things and love researching things, love fixing things.
They're totally right there. So you get a lot more leeway. And I think more broadly,
you almost always want to target these super enthusiastic, tech savvy, early adopter people
when you're first building something because they're just more forgiving and they're willing
to take a chance on you.
You've been super transparent kind of the entire time you've been doing this. I'm looking
at your indie hackers product timeline right now. And you've got a little note from August
27th, 2019, where you published your first online course. And you said your pricing model
was inspired by brilliant.org. What's your pricing model for your courses? And why were
you inspired by this other website?
The pricing model is $23 USD per month. If you are billed annually, it's $9 USD per month.
So roughly one time payment of $108 USD. And you have the lifetime subscription for
$600 USD. There are two things which I really loved about this pricing model, that there
is a big gap between the billed annually and the monthly payment, which I see some other
pricing models. And the gap between the monthly price, if you are billed annually or monthly,
is not that big. And here I really liked that the gap between the two values is $9, $23.
It's a fairly big gap. So this, it really appealed to me. And then I used the second
thing which I really liked, which I learned actually from Alex, from creative team. And
I applied to before to selling the starter kits. So I knew this was working is to have
a big upsell, like the lifetime membership. Because you always have people who want to
support you, who want to get the upsell. And so they are always valuable to have. So this
pricing model I really liked and I went with it.
I talked to a lot of people who spend a considerable amount of time learning from others, learning
from predecessors and their leaders in their industry and taking back as many lessons as
they can before they get started. And I talked to lots of people who are just wing it. They
just start like, I'm going to do everything based on my intuition from scratch, whatever
works for me works. Where would you say you fall on that spectrum?
To be completely honest, exactly. Like you said, it's a spectrum. And I feel like I'm
on the side of the spectrum, which should be a little bit more coachable. I'm a little
bit more winged kind of guy. I see it also. So I'm an indie actor. I'm also a big fitness
enthusiast. And it's the same with fitness. You can spend a lot of time learning about
everything about nutrition, about anatomy, about the body, about the science behind the
sports and so on. Or you can only spend your time being a gym rat quote unquote, just not
trying to understand the theory behind, but just putting the work in the gym. And obviously,
when you're in the gym or when you're in India, you need to strike the right balance between
the two. And I feel like I'm a little bit on the side of more like putting the reps
in, but maybe I should also spend more time studying the game kind of. And I feel like
in the indie actor community, I'm not sure what you think, but people are also maybe
on the other side of the spectrum, a little bit more like spending a lot of time learning,
but not maybe putting the reps in. I don't know what you think.
It's a huge mix. There are so many people I talked to who just haven't gotten started.
Like I've been reading about this for years. I read this book, I read that blog post. And
for them, they're like way too far on the spectrum of spending time learning from others.
And it's like, just do something. If you only do one thing, it's better to act and not read
anything than it is to read and not act because you can't succeed if you haven't actually
acted.
But then there are plenty of people I talked to on the forum and at meetups who have been
working on things for years. And they're just trotting territory that's already been trodden,
making mistakes that have been written about. And if they just knew one or two things, and
they would not have wasted six months, you know, building something that was way bigger
than an MVP, or building a solution in search of a problem, because they never really understood
what problem they were solving with their product, etc.
So I think it's a balance. And that's the tricky part. You have to identify kind of
what camp you fall into and ignore advice that's not good for you. If somebody comes
on the podcast and they're like, Hey, my best advice is just get started. And you're someone
who already has been starting, then that advice is probably not good for you because you're
already there. But if someone comes in and they're like, Hey, my best advice is read these
books, etc. And you're someone who literally never reads anything, and you've been struggling.
And maybe that advice is good for you.
At the end of the day, I guess there are no secrets. It's all about finding good balance.
Who would have thought?
Who would have thought? What a conclusion. So what do you think the hardest part of growing
a YouTube following to 20,000 followers is? And also, what's the hardest part of starting
a course?
One of the big challenge is, and I think we touched on it already, is you have to embrace
vulnerability. Because when you get started, it's very easy to look silly. Sometimes I
find, so for instance, I bought a new MacBook Pro recently. And so I started to watch tech
reviews on YouTube. And suddenly YouTube would suggest me with all these big tech review
YouTubers. And one thing that I did is that for at least two of these big YouTubers, I
went on their page and watched the first videos they've ever made. And it's a great reminder
that this big journey, they start with a single simple step. And I find it to be very inspiring.
And yeah, one of the big biggest challenges really to embrace vulnerability, because it's
so easy to look silly. And to be afraid of what people will think when you get started
with these videos, where the quality of production is not necessarily very good, because you
have to go incrementally, you don't necessarily have the best gear to record and so on. But
I think that if you can go over this hurdle, you can go very far, I believe.
What about with your courses? Is it the same sort of issue there that you're embarrassed
about what you might be putting out? It might be wrong, it might not be up to snuff? Or
is there a different challenge with getting started as an educator?
For me, I love, and that's why the content on YouTube is free, I love challenging myself.
So these make me very excited. I may have a bit less excitement to teach the fundamentals.
I guess it's like, you know, if you're a lawyer or a doctor, you want to work on the big cases
or you know, yeah, and it's a bit like this also with so the online course for me, it's
a bit less fun to really teach the fundamentals. This is why it's behind the paywall.
If you're going to do something that's not your favorite, you better charge for it.
Yes.
So let's talk about growth a little bit, because I know people struggle a lot with growing
their subscriber counts, growing their revenue. I've surveyed lots of indie hackers, and this
is by far the number one concern of people who've already gotten started. I just can't
seem to grow, no one's using it. What are your biggest tips for growing a YouTube channel
as someone who's grown into 20,000 subscribers?
I would have only very simple advice, follow the voice of the community. So when I started
to do these Canadian Unreactive videos, it was very clear like the way. So I didn't add
this huge growth jump. No, but the way people were interacting with my content was the tone
was immediately very different. And I knew I was onto something. Just because the shift
of tone that happened with my audience. And yeah, do things incrementally, I would say.
What do you think your first viewers came from? Because I've been considering getting
into YouTube a little bit with indie hackers. And part of me is afraid because I think it's
going to be a huge time investment. These channels always look like they're going to
be super simple from afar, but then you get into it and you're like, oh, this is a whole
ecosystem with lots of professionals who are putting in tons of work. And if I want to
compete here, I've got to put in tons of work.
How do you get those very first YouTube viewers? Are they finding you through the search engine?
Are you promoting your videos on Twitter? How do you get a foothold to start growing?
So originally, I started to promote my videos through Twitter, Reddit, and I was blogging
on medium. So I would also advertise the videos on medium. And then so that was the only way
it was advertising the videos. And then at some point, I realized that some videos were
getting way more views than others. And if I were to rank my videos in order of what's
my favorite one, what's the one I'm the most proud of, this was not matching the rank of
my views. And by investigating, I realized that it's videos which had SEO value in the
title that were getting way more views than other videos.
For example, I did a video where I show how people can implement the Spotify player. So
the video is titled Spotify player, can it be done in React Native? This has essentially
zero SEO value. If people want to find out how to do what I'm doing in the videos, they
will type. So the UI component is called bottom action sheet using this particular library
in React Native. And when I realized that, I started to do smaller videos which have
titles, which can be found through search engine. And so today I have two types of videos,
the can it be done in React Native series, which is really like tailored for the community,
but people share on social media and so on. And then I have these smaller videos, which
can be found through search engine. So it should choose series and essentially, and
choose almost completely different channel of distribution.
There's so much I can say about that. There's like a ton of lessons to extract. One of them
is consistency. The fact of the matter is you just kept putting tons and tons of videos
out there on a regular basis for years. And I think if you're not consistent, if you quit,
you know, a week into something or a month into something, you're not going to ever get
the opportunity to discover what works.
Number two, you're experimenting. So you weren't only doing one type of video and hoping that
would work. You were trying to do lots of different kinds of videos. And that gave you
the ability to see what the different responses were. And like you said, the best videos that
resonated the most with people and that were found the most weren't the ones that you were
the most proud of.
I think it's very common that we as founders are confident that we know what people want.
But the reality is that we don't understand what people want. And we have to learn by
putting stuff out there and experimenting. So I think it's pretty cool to see that you've
done that.
I've done that with the indie hackers podcast to some degree, like in the beginning, it
was only normal interviews. And since then, I've been doing different types of interviews
and seeing the same thing. These episodes get way more downloads than these other types
of episodes. And I wouldn't be able to learn that without experimentation. So I think that's
a great takeaway from what you've done.
And then the third thing is that once you experiment and you see what's working, you
double down on that. Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's business partner. And he has one
of my favorite pieces of advice of all time, which is what he calls the fundamental algorithm
of life. Repeat what works. And it's so easy to see that things are going well and say,
Oh, this is going well. This is fine. Let me work on this other thing that's not going
well. But you should do the opposite. You should say, Hey, these videos are crushing
it. Let me do more of these videos that are doing really well, because that's how you
learn and that's how you improve. So it's cool to see that there's so many lessons to
be gleaned from how you're able to grow your YouTube channel.
You mentioned that maybe for instance, you were thinking about starting a YouTube channel.
Do you feel like because you already have such a big following, that it's more pressure
on you, there are more expectations or not at all, you feel free to experiment with different
ideas, different...
I think if you had asked me six months ago, I would have felt like there's a lot of pressure
like, Oh, I've already got a certain standard. If I'm going to go to YouTube, it needs to
match the same standard I have elsewhere. Whereas I've been doing more experimentation
on the podcast. And that was a little bit scary. I didn't want to mess up a formula
that worked. But now that I've done that, and nobody died, I'm still here, I feel more
confident about experimenting in other places. I think the bigger concern is one of whether
or not it's worth the time.
So if you already have 40, 50,000 listeners on a podcast, do you really want to go to
some completely new channel and start from scratch? Or do you have zero people and go
through the slog of building up your numbers from zero to something that matters? And you
know that quite frankly, it's just a drop in the bucket and it's going to take maybe
months or years to build to something where it really matters.
So that's kind of my main concern. I don't want to invest a ton of time into something
that's not really going to pay off. But I think you need that consistency and you need
that investment. And perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe I can just sit down and record like a 10 minute
video of me talking and giving advice and talking about the things that I'm learning
and thinking about. And it's no skin off my back. And it's a super small investment. And
people like it. And I just do that once or twice a week. And it grows. So I think it's
something that I'll have to try. But it's tough. I mean, I think as a founder, you always
have to focus. And there are always going to be sort of opportunities pulling at you.
There's always going to be, you know, what about LinkedIn? What about Pinterest? What
about Instagram? You know, what about Facebook and YouTube? And you don't have time to do
all of those things. And so you got to prioritize and figure out what's worth investing the
time in.
Did you have a particular affinity with podcasting? Because I mean, you're not the podcast host
originally. And the first time I listened to you, I was only listening to a few podcasts,
Jim Ferries, Joe Rogan. And not to have a fanboy moment, but I was really blown away
by all talented you were as a podcast host. But I imagine that there is a lot of work
that goes into it. It's not like you're automatically talented and doing an amazing job.
First of all, thank you. I don't think I was that talented in the beginning or even now.
But no, I really didn't listen to very many podcasts. And I didn't even want to start
a podcast. I only started it kind of for reasons dissimilar to why you started your course.
You didn't really want to teach the fundamentals that people wanted you to. You saw that as
an avenue. I didn't really want to have a podcast. But because I was putting out all
this content on the website, I was having a lot of people respond to it and give me
their feedback. And the number one request was start a podcast. I want to listen to this
in audio form. I don't want to just read all the time. So I think it's a good example of
this principle once again, that affected both me and you, which is if you put stuff out
online and you're building in public and sharing what you know, you're going to get feedback.
And that's going to give you good ideas for what you should do in the future.
I want to ask you one last question about growth, which is related to kind of your revenue
growth with your courses, because you've gone to 20,000 YouTube subscribers over the past
three years, but it seems like your courses have grown significantly faster. Has it been
the case that you've gone from $0 a month to $6,000 a month in just the last six months
or so?
When I first started the course, obviously they were, it was a big bump, right? Because
suddenly you're announcing something. It's exciting people, your early customer gets
in. So I generated a $7,000 in 30 days, which was great. And yeah, since then the growth
model is very simple and I've experimented with it. The more I spend time doing content
on YouTube, the more revenues I get. It's simple at that. And you can look at my Stripe
Graph on India Acura product page and my videos, publish dates on YouTube. It's one-to-one.
Very easy. So I know that as long as I'm building a great course and I'm putting great content
on YouTube, everything is going to go well.
Putting out more free content on YouTube, your driving sales of the paid content and
your course.
How much do you update your course? Is this something that you just kind of record once
and it's fine? Or are you constantly going back to try to fix it and improve it and add
lessons or add new courses?
I add two videos a month. So generally speaking, when I set my objectives for the month, I
try to do four videos on YouTube and two videos for my online course. And some of the new
videos are often, sometimes not often actually, but sometimes are me improving on an existing
video. But I have a plan for more videos. But right now, it's just an online course.
But the vision I have for it is really a paid membership in the sense that I plan to add
so many more resources related to React Native under this membership. I plan to add the starter
kits and maybe other online courses and so on.
So right now, it's a paid membership for this particular online course. But in the near future,
it will be if you're a subscriber of my channel, you can be a paid subscriber and have access
to all this exciting content in the space of React Native.
It's so smart to have these add-on packages becoming part of a community because it gives
people recurring value over time and it kind of justifies your ability to charge a subscription
fee. Adam Wadden just released a UI component library called Tailwind UI. Adam's a guest
we've had on the show in the past. And he's made something crazy like $500,000 in the
first few days, but he released a community membership as part of the plans. So it's either
150 bucks or 250 bucks, depending which plan you get, but both of them include access to
this Discord server. We could chat with other people and you could talk to Adam and make
suggestions, et cetera.
And I know Peter Levels did the same thing with Nomad List. He at first had just a list
of locations for digital nomads to visit, but then he added a community, he charges
a subscription fee for membership, and that's why people keep coming back to the site over
and over.
The fact, so I saw this tweet from Adam and the fact that he's sharing these numbers openly.
Isn't that thanks to the work you're doing with Indiaacre and promoting this openness
and he didn't choose to be like this, isn't it? That people would share so openly that
amount of money they're making. And now we don't even think about it. We just talk about
it and we get so many numbers.
I remember a time where the culture was completely different around this. No?
Well, there's always some people who've been sharing transparently and a lot of them inspired
me. So there's Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11. He works with me at Stripe. He's
been on this podcast before in one of the early episodes, but way back in the day, he
had this app Bingo Card Creator, and he was one of the first to just share all of his
revenue numbers and blog about what he was doing. He just didn't care. And it was super
inspirational. There's Peltier Guilizone. He's been doing this for 10 years. He's also
been on this podcast. He runs a company called Balsamic. There's Peter Levels, who I just
mentioned. He was super inspirational for me when I just started.
And so I can't claim to have started any of this. It's more like Andy Hackers is riding
a wave. And nowadays, I try to focus on growing that wave as much as I can and keeping it
going. But it's just like listening to people share their revenue numbers. It puts so much
in context. You suddenly understand where they're coming from, when they're telling
you their story, their advice makes more sense. You can put it into perspective. And it's
inspirational because you can map their revenue numbers onto your life and just imagine, okay,
what would it look like if I had a side project that was making $5,000 or $10,000 a month?
So I encourage anyone who wants to share their revenue numbers to do it. It's super helpful
for the community. It's inspiring to others. And even if it doesn't always seem like the
right decision as an individual, especially for early stage, there's usually positive consequences,
not negative ones. And I'm really grateful for people like Adam, who's super advanced
and he's making millions of dollars. And yet he still shares with all of us just to let
us know what's possible.
It's incredible. Yeah, exactly. We see it and we are like, oh, this is real. Thank you
for showing us that this is real. I have on my India Care product page, I have the striped
verified revenue, which I really loved because it's really gamification around something
that is very real, which is the money I'm making. And I just find it so great. And I
understand that it can make people maybe uncomfortable because at the end of the day, it's something
very intimate as well. It's a topic that is very delicate.
Yeah, sharing revenue is funny because it's not actually all that new. Like every public
company, for example, you know their revenue, but when you're an ND hacker, it's super personal
because it's like a one or two person business. And suddenly your company's revenue is equivalent
to your income. So you're just going to tell everybody what you make. But like you said,
I think it's super inspirational to see all these revenue numbers. And I'm glad that we
live in a world where that's more common and people are more okay with being transparent
because it's not only helpful for everybody who's trying to build, but it's also helpful
for people like you who are the ones doing the sharing, like you're posting these milestones
on ND hackers. And I can see in the comments, people are giving you tips and suggestions
for like how to improve your YouTube setup and how to record higher quality video, etc.
So it's pretty crazy to live in this world where entrepreneurs are helping each other
out. It's almost like open source entrepreneurship. It's been a thing with developers forever.
We share our code, we share all our secrets, but in the business world, it's always been
like more normal to have secrets and not to share what's going on. And I love that it's
becoming normal just to share everything behind the scenes.
You mentioned something interesting about Adam building the community around this product.
The way I set it up for my online course is that I am thinking a GitHub private repository
and all repositories with the Stripe subscription. So it's not wild like a Slack or a Discord
chat, but people can post issues. They contribute tons of stuff to the material of the course.
They can help each other out. This model of synchronizing membership with like private
GitHub repositories, I really like it because you have a community, you interact with your
communities, interact with each other. It's not too wild because you know the GitHub is
very good. It's very structured. I mean, they are doing it already for huge open source
projects. So I'm really enjoying this model.
Yeah, it seems like it would work really well. And you've kind of empowered people to interact
with each other and help each other out. And I think a lot of people talk about luck and
entrepreneurship and what helps you to get lucky. And I think the more you're interacting
with people, the more that you can sort of build an audience or a community or share
in public, then the more opportunities you have to meet that one right person is going
to give you the best idea or contribute the best pull request to your repository or do
something that really helps you.
And I found that helped me with indie hackers a lot. Like I was interviewing people in the
early days. And I didn't even think about Hacker News as like a distribution channel
for posting interviews. And one of the people that I interviewed did that on her own. And
that kind of like was how I discovered my growth strategy for indie hackers. And so
I think with you, the fact that you're interacting with so many people and talking to them and
letting them contribute is also going to increase your luck surface area. And it's yet another
reason I think we've listed probably 10 so far in this episode, why you should build
in public and why you should interact with people.
This is crazy because I found out about indie hackers through Hacker News. And it sounds
like it was almost a happy coincidence that it happened.
Could have never happened if I didn't get lucky and have somebody who was working with
me have that idea. But anyway, William, we could probably talk all day. This is going
to be a quick chat episode that's longer than any other quick chat episode. But I'd love
to have you on the podcast again at some point in the future to check up on how you're doing.
Before we close out here, are there any words of advice that you think beginning indie hackers
should take away from your story and what you've learned so far?
Two things, really embrace vulnerability. Because I really think when you get started
and you have no momentum, maybe no customers, no revenue, it's so easy to feel like what
you're doing is kind of silly. And you really have to try to build some confidence or some
feel at ease with the fact that you're making yourself vulnerable. I think it's one of the
biggest hurdles. And especially if you know society, people who have like copyright jobs
that might look down on you for trying to do something different, living your life in
your own terms. And at the beginning, I think it's very easy to feel like you're doing something
wrong because you're not following the same path than everyone else.
And the second advice is I can really say that, like I mentioned at the beginning of
the episode, I'm like so happy living this indie hacker lifestyle. And I can honestly
say that I wouldn't be here today if it was not for indie hacker and the community you
are building. So I can only encourage people to use it because it's really finding out
about these interviews originally which were shared on Hacker News. So you would see that
suddenly these girls to live your life in your own terms and doing what you enjoy doing
and making a living out of it were not like dreams to pursue, but really concrete girls
that you could achieve following like also actionable items and really specific steps.
And that was just so inspiring for me. And also I learned so much like practical things
out of it. So I can only encourage people to use the community because it has really
meant a lot for me.
Be vulnerable and use indie hacks.
Exactly.
Pieces of advice that I can get behind. Thank you so much, Will, for the kind words and
for sharing everything that you've learned with us. Can you tell listeners where they
can go to find your YouTube videos and your courses and anything else you're working on
online?
Yeah. So hopefully my YouTube channel will be linked in the show notes. And so subscribe
and smash that like button like this in the community. And you can also find me on Twitter
to have more granular updates on what I'm doing, what I plan in terms of next videos
and so on.
All right. Thanks again, Will.
Thank you so much for having me.
Listeners, these quick chat episodes are open to anyone who's running an early stage company.
So if you're interested in coming on and telling your story, go to ndhackers.com, create a
product page and post some milestones. And every so often I pick the ones that are the
most helpful, the most inspirational, and I invite the founders onto the podcast. Once
again, that's ndhackers.com. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next
time.