Starting your own business and growing it to $50,000 a month in revenue is something
that many of us have only dreamed of doing, but Jason Grishkoff has actually done it.
Teaching yourself to code from scratch and then going on to build and design your own
websites that attract millions of visitors is again something that a lot of people would
love to accomplish and Jason has done that too.
Having a magic bullet that kickstarts your business's growth into overdrive is something
that most founders fail to achieve, but Jason has done that twice.
I'm Courtland Allen and this is the Indie Hackers Podcast and today I'm going to be
talking to Jason Grishkoff, the founder of indyshuffle.com and submithub.com.
Jason has a ton of valuable stories and experiences to learn from and we were only able to get
about halfway through the list of topics that I'd planned in advance to talk about so you
should definitely listen all the way through to the end of the episode because some of
his best advice comes near the end.
Hopefully I'll be able to have Jason on again in the future so we can finish our conversation
but in the meantime I hope you guys enjoy this one as much as I did.
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Okay, what's up everybody, I'm Cortland with the Indie Hackers Podcast and today we've
got Jason Grishkoff, the founder of SubmitHub with us.
How you doing Jason?
I am peachy, how about you?
Doing great.
You're joining us all the way from Cape Town, South Africa.
Indeed.
Which is amazing.
Yeah, and it's about 10 hours later over here than it is where you are.
Yeah, so it was fun trying to schedule this and figure out how to sync up our time zones.
No, it's easy man.
I guess I have to deal with this pretty often because the internet is global but still quite
US-centric.
Yeah, it is.
It's pretty normal.
So you, I've already interviewed for Indie Hackers back in October for SubmitHub and back
then you were doing $46,000 a month in revenue after only running the business for 8 months
which I think is awesome.
A lot of people with NVU being in that position and SubmitHub is a way for people who haven't
read the interview.
It's a way for artists to submit their music to be featured on popular music blogs and
websites.
Zach, Karat, Jason, would you say I've got the gist of it?
That is the main original essence of what the platform provided and today I think it
still rings true.
It's one I'm still pushing.
And it's evolved a little bit, hasn't it?
A little bit.
I mean, we also, I think at the core of it, it's about connections and allowing musicians
to connect with industry professionals with whom they would have had difficulty connecting
in the past.
And so that can be blogs, it can be record labels, and pretty soon I think it's going
to be radio stations as well.
Oh cool.
Yeah.
Wow, so you guys are just like super expando mode.
You guys.
Yeah, yeah.
Like me.
You.
No, I've got some support now, so we're okay.
Great.
So I want to start this interview by just asking you some simple questions.
For example, what is your whole life story up until this point and how did you get to
where you are now?
Oh wow, so simple.
Um, I think, I think, well, it comes back in a wonderful circle because you might be
asking why am I in South Africa and I think listeners may have deduced at this point that
I've got something of a weird accent that borders between American and something else,
which is South African, go figure.
So to sum it up in one minute, um, I grew up in South Africa, I went to a Waldorf school.
So I've got a bit of a creative, uh, fundamental structure to my education.
And in 1997, my family immigrated to the States.
So my parents and I've got a younger brother as well.
And I think it was always inevitable because my father is American.
And so it was in the books that eventually we would move back to the States given that,
uh, I suppose it's almost cliche to say, but the American dream, right?
Uh, the few countries in the world that can offer as great an opportunity in educational
foundation and future career as America can.
And so my dad always knew that at some point we'd be moving back to the States.
So moved to California when I was 12 in 1997, went to high school, ended up at university
in San Diego at UCSD, studied history and political science.
And I decided I wanted to be a strategy consultant.
So I, I did a bunch of interviews and a lot of the guys, I was taking the angle that,
uh, okay.
So, you know, most of those guys are economic background and I'm coming in with a liberal
arts major.
I was taking the angle that clearly you want someone to think differently within your company,
not just an economics background, but something more holistic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I got rejected, I think close to 60 times.
Oh, wow.
I was, I was pumping out resumes and cover letters as fast as I could.
And I managed to get a few interviews, uh, I think even at Bain and KPMG and I got flown
out to the East coast a couple of times to do interviews.
And every time I just got rejected.
And eventually I found this, this consultancy in Washington DC that did something called
executive compensation, which I had been clueless about up until the time, but what their company
did was provide consultancy for other corporations who needed to justify their exorbitant executive
salaries.
So they'd say, we want to pay someone $500,000 a year.
Can you make it look like this is legit?
Can you make this look, uh, yeah.
So, so I got, I got hired to do that and I went into DC, did it, uh, it was a lot of
Excel spreadsheets, collecting data, kind of pulling peer group samples, trying to shape
the peer groups and comparisons and, um, right.
I hated it.
I hated it.
And I think my, my, my coworkers noticed I hated it.
And one other thing that I think a lot of people might relate to this, but when, when
you finish university and you, you leave, a lot of people move to different cities for
jobs.
And when you get to that new city, you often don't know anyone.
Maybe you've got some weak connection from high school or second-class and that was very
much me in DC.
I had no friends, hated my life.
I was depressed.
I left college, man.
College is the best, yeah.
And now I've left it behind.
So when I was in DC working this terrible corporate job where I had to wear a suit every
day, I decided to kick off a blog just to keep in touch with my friends.
And so that's how, that's how Indie Shuffle was born.
And what's interesting about it is that Indie Shuffle actually led to me getting fired from
that corporate job and led to me getting hired at Google.
Oh wow, I want to hear the firing story first because I wasn't aware of that.
So while I was working this, this gig, we would often have to travel to and from different
jobs.
And I remember we were consulting for Fannie Mae, no, Sally Mae and Freddie Mac.
That's it.
Something like that.
Those, those big loan companies that were going out of business.
This was about 2007, 2008 as the crash was happening.
Ah, the worst time.
Yeah, totally.
And so we're consulting for these guys and on these long commutes, I'd be sitting with
my boss talking about this really cool blog that I'd kicked off to communicate with all
my friends.
And after a while she stopped me, you know, the third or fourth trip, kind of talking
about the progression.
She said, um, I'm concerned that you're not focusing enough on your professional career.
And instead you're just playing around with a stupid website.
And we have a major concern about that and we think it's probably time that you consider
quitting your blog.
What?
Yeah.
That's ridiculous.
So you just are not allowed to do things outside of work.
Right.
And so at that point, I was like, well, if you guys, I hate this job anyway, go ahead,
put me on a performance plan.
So they put me on a performance plan, which is, I think anyone who's ever been on a performance
plan, it's a clear sign that you're on the way out.
Oftentimes oftentimes it's because of a personality mismatch rather than an inability to do the
job.
But those two can be tightly interlinked.
And in this case, every time I messed up at work, I had this, I don't know if you've ever
heard of the halo and the horns theory.
No.
Okay.
So it's cool.
I learned it once I was at Google and it made so much sense, but, um, if you're at work
and you do something really great out of the, out of the gates, you build up a reputation
that you're always good at what you do.
And so when you do mess up, people go, Oh, no, that's cool.
Jason, you know, everyone messes up.
It's cool.
If you messed up, it's like, remember that one time that he totally killed it.
We know he can do better than that.
It's great.
But if you've got the horns, every little mistake you make becomes the biggest deal
in the world.
And every time that you do something well, it goes unnoticed.
So it's more like, Oh, well, finally you did something right.
And when you do, yeah, dude, that's totally what I expect from you.
You mess up everything.
So you had the horns.
I take it.
At this company, I definitely had the horns, um, like most of my coworkers hated me.
I'll give you the most ridiculous example I ever had was at lunch.
We were talking about something and I mentioned that one of my favorite things to do at UCSD
was lie down on the grass and watch people walk by.
Yeah.
Just people watching.
And their reaction was, ew, ew.
Oh my God.
That's so creepy.
Why would you just watch people?
And like, Oh my God, like the bugs, like, Oh my God, how can you be?
And so, wow.
And so it's made me realize that oftentimes performance issues at work are very much so
related to personality clashes and not necessarily just work because everyone, no matter how
good they are, messes up.
And um, yeah, I think it's, it's more about perception and, and SF they just call it culture
fit.
Yeah.
Um, or at Google, they call it googliness, but it was totally, it was culture fit.
Um, so anyway, I was on the performance plan and I got a LinkedIn message back when LinkedIn
was cool and it was from Google and they said, we're trying to find someone to do executive
compensation internally at Google.
Are you interested?
And of course, you know, I had to catch my breath, calm myself and go, um, do Google.
Absolutely.
Yes.
I would love to interview.
Um, funny that you email me executive compensation is my life calling.
It's my passion.
I'm doing very well at work.
It's absolutely, they would hate to see me leave.
Um, but I'm willing to interview just to see what it's about.
That is awesome.
And, uh, what a break.
Yeah.
Okay.
I hope they're not listening now.
Um, no, but it is so much about cultural fit and how that affects it because once I interviewed
with Google at the time, they were still stuck in that phase of, of going through like 10
or 11 interviews for every candidate, which I think they've gotten a lot better at.
And much of it was testing for cultural fit.
And what I found as I was interviewing was that the people I was interviewing with were
passionate about music.
And here I was building a music blog on the side and immediately that cultural fit kicked
into place.
And I felt like I was welcome.
Like these were people I wanted to work with.
Like I might actually enjoy coming to work.
Right.
Right.
So next thing I knew, this was 2010.
Um, I was moving from DC back to California to San Francisco and, uh, I started at Google,
which was frigging rad.
Super cool.
Yeah.
You mentioned in the interview that we did earlier, you were meeting all sorts of like
high level Google execs because your job was to determine their compensation.
So you had to interact with them.
Who did you meet?
Um, in my first week, I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who was still CEO at the time.
And I thought that was going to be pretty normal and it turns out it wasn't pretty intense
first meeting.
No, I think I was, it wasn't, it wasn't, it sort of, I'll draw a parallel when you're
working in the music industry and you're actually quite entrenched in the blogging or you get
to a point where I am, if you have a chance to meet some of these great artists at this
point, I become jaded and I've sort of expected that it's normal.
And you break down that whole celebrity, um, intimidation type of factor that kicks in
and you no longer feel it anymore.
And so if I were to meet someone today, like extreme example, Barack Obama, you'd get this
celebrity shell shock to it.
And I think some people would feel that way interacting with Eric or Larry or Sergei,
but because of the nature of what I was doing, I had taken it for granted in a way I just
thought it was normal.
That's what I did.
So that's like a perfect segue back into Indie Shuffle because I really want to pick your
brain on Indie Shuffle.
I think I can learn a lot from it and our listeners could too, because it's a content
site kind of like Indie Hackers, but you feature music, you know, new songs, curated playlists
instead of business interviews like I do with Indie Hackers.
Is that correct?
How would you describe Indie Shuffle?
I think it's gone through a couple of different phases and the contents always stay the same.
You're right.
That's what we do.
We feature good new music.
There was a point where I was trying to position us as a music streaming service and I'm shifted
away from that because it's a ridiculous statement when you're having to challenge against companies
like Spotify and Apple Music and Google Music and YouTube Red and all these companies.
What we do at its core is we discover the best new music, the stuff that you won't find
on Spotify yet, the stuff that no one's heard of and we try to keep the quality really high
and it keeps to the core element of what blogs in the music industry have always been.
And I totally agree with you on the high quality thing because I was on there yesterday preparing
for this podcast and I started listening to songs and I must have been on there for like
an hour and a half just listening to different music that you posted on there, checking out
your playlist.
It's an awesome site.
Sweet.
That's the point.
Yeah.
That's our angle.
You did a good job.
It's awesome.
Cool.
So what's the backstory on how you created Indie Shuffle because you had like a liberal
arts degree in college, then you went into consulting.
At what point did you decide maybe I should get into tech or creating websites and in
your interview you're talking about using React and Meteor so you're a programmer today
but how did you start down that path?
I think if you chat to most programmers today in the late 20s, early 30s, I'm 31 now.
So most of us, I'm guessing you're a similar age.
29 will be 30 in March.
Cool.
So similar, right?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've always really, since you were a cognizant
individual, there have been computers around.
MS-DOS, Windows 95.
I'm continuing through that and for myself, when I was quite young, I was building Geocities
sites from my band, like a high school band type of thing.
I was playing Counter Strike and then I got into Counter Strike full time and the next
thing I knew, I was a professional Counter Strike player.
You were a professional gamer?
What?
Yeah.
Really?
No, but this is before it was cool.
Oh my God.
I played a lot of Counter Strike.
I was terrible there.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
No, so I was professional.
We were ranked.
I was getting interviewed and I got noticed by a company who was kicking off a server
company.
They were hosting servers for people to play on and they needed someone to come in and
help with their marketing and I think that was my first entrepreneurial journey.
I think it was about 17, 16 or 17 and they asked me to come in and help out with this
and they were two programmers running these servers and what they wanted me to do was
market it such that people would buy the packages so that they could play Counter Strike on
these servers and coupled with the band websites that I was working on, that was my first introduction
to tech and in a way it faded because that company ended up getting DDoSed to hell by
Chinese hackers.
I don't know.
Which I think is par for the course in the gaming industry and my partners who I think
very technically advanced today at the time they were only 19 or 20 so they didn't really
know how to battle a DDoS attack.
No.
No.
It was much harder back then too.
Yeah, so that ended up fading a lot and through most of university I actually didn't really
touch tech.
It wasn't until I moved to DC and kicked off the music blog that I began to dabble
in coding again and from high school to the blog a lot had changed.
I don't know if you ever messed around with Geocities sites but I recall you had to create
different iframes within your website if you wanted a sidebar and a top menu and then if
you wanted to have angled things you would make it in Paint Shop and then copy the image
over.
Yeah.
The old days were rough.
Thank you.
I was making websites in the 90s just for fun or for school or for my parents friends
and I remember the pre-CSS days when everything was a table so you had to add table rows and
table cells if you wanted to shift things over.
But I was such a rookie I couldn't even told you what a table was.
I had no idea.
I probably didn't learn that until two months ago.
So what happened was when I launched indie shuffle I got kind of hooked on building a
better and better platform on which to present my discoveries and I was sourcing most of
my music through BitTorrent at the time on a really cool platform called what.cd which
actually just shut down about a month ago and I was uncovering a lot of really cool
artists on this.
I mean this was before SoundCloud existed, before Spotify existed, this was like an amazing
time in the Internet and I wanted to present it in a better and better way and I think
that's how I started to get into coding was I built it on WordPress and I'd look at the
sidebar or the theme that I did and I'd say well I want that background to be black or
I want that text to be white or and then I would have to go learn and enter the code
and I almost felt like I was reverse engineering everything as if.
Yeah I understand that feeling exactly.
That's exactly how I got started.
Is that a Ben Affleck movie or something roughly in the early 2000s where you had to reverse
engineer something?
Probably there's a lot of Ben Affleck movies.
So I always felt like I've always tackled coding to the frustration of many of my friends
who do code from a reverse engineering angle and I've never entrenched myself on the fundamentals
so I'm probably a pretty frustrating person to talk to from a coding side particularly
because most of these coders have never really built something cool.
Right.
I think that there's this big divide or kind of conflict.
I follow Peter Lovells on Twitter as I'm sure many of our listeners do and he's got this
kind of a get shit done mentality when it comes to programming and the first priority
is really building your product adding the features to your product and getting them
in the hands of users.
Doing things like choosing the newest framework or writing the most unit tests while those
like matter and professional software development environment when you're a founder I don't
want to say it doesn't matter it does.
Having good good code is actually very important and will save you time in the long run but
if you obsess over it then you're going to be neglecting other parts of your business
that are extremely critical.
It matters so much and at the same time it matters not at all and I think I got at this
in the original interview we did for me the MVP is so essential.
Build your product first, worry about scalability and how to develop it thereafter because you
shouldn't be worrying about scalability when you have zero users.
Exactly it doesn't matter yet.
And I know you might be kicking yourself in six months when you go oh crap we have to
rewrite the whole thing but what a wonderful position to be in and you're never going to
get there if you spend 12 months trying to craft the perfect framework because I guarantee
you by the time you get to the 12 month mark before you launch you'll be like oh crap someone
just launched a better framework.
Exactly it's so I think people just underestimate the difficulty of actually building a business
and building a product that customers want to use and so they feel like it's okay to
spend their wheels on all sorts of other tasks and I think these other tasks just are more
tractable.
If you're a programmer you're used to deciding on the language and framework and structure
of your code and so that feels like an easy thing to do but at the end of the day it's
irrelevant if the product you're building is like ownership shares and stuff like that.
Yeah exactly I mean these are just irrelevant details that I mean they have an effect but
at the end of the day like you said if you don't actually build a product that people
want if you're not putting on your marketing hat and figuring out how to do sales and figuring
out who your users are and talking to them and understanding your product then all this
other stuff is completely irrelevant and just a waste of time.
I mean people will spend literally days or weeks deciding on what their name is and what
their logo should be.
Oh god.
Do you know to this day SubmitHub still doesn't have a logo?
Yeah I noticed that because I always do the logos from the end of the actors interviews
and I remember doing yours and it's just like the word SubmitHub.
You're the only one who's made a logo for me thanks.
But I think you get to the point of after that interview a lot of people reached out
to me trying to get me to code parallel systems for them and a lot of them had some pretty
cool ideas for how SubmitHub could apply to different industries but I think the crux
of it is okay A I don't have time to do that I'm working on my own thing and B I'm really
not concerned about their ability to spin it out and do it on their own or competitors
for that matter because this takes so much work to build up that I don't think anyone's
going to be able to just come along and copy it now and it's funny actually yesterday literally
yesterday I discovered another website called submit to blog.com and what's hilarious about
it is if you go visit it the title tag is still SubmitHub because they have copy pasted
all of my code and just tried to replace it with their own stuff oh my god I just opened
it up and it's you're right it says SubmitHub yep and that is ridiculous and they're launching
soon they've got a Twitter they've got a Facebook but I guarantee you they have no idea how
it works once you log in how does a blog see how does a blog filter through submissions
what's the copyright process look like they don't have a copy they don't even know that
exists because I've never really talked about that outside of the platform and you probably
don't even know that there's a there's a robust copyright sign-off thing that like spits out
PDFs and does all this fantastic stuff within SubmitHub so channels can upload to their YouTube
or their SoundCloud and without legal issues and yeah they're just copying the tip of the
iceberg and they have no idea I saw this and he's like oh it's such a great idea I could
do better than that I welcome that because Jesus this takes a lot of work yeah it really
does yeah I just think the entire phenomenon of people copying all the superficial features
of a website or a business and thinking that that's going to be enough for them to succeed
is it's just indicative of the fact that people really really are bad at understanding what
it is that makes the business work right they like I said earlier they do the things that
are tractable that seem easy and because they don't see other things that are going on behind
the scenes they just assume that doesn't exist and that goes for people who are ripping off
websites but it also goes for people who are building businesses for the first time and
end up spinning their wheels on all sorts of mundane tasks that aren't important so
don't worry about the copiers imitation is the highest form of flattery I really welcome
them to try but okay and it's very true it looks there's so many better developers than
I am out there who could they would look at my code and go dude that's not how you write
react who cares my answer to that be well it works so it's the ends justify the means
in a sense they do so I mean I think people are really just asking the wrong question you
know they're trying to solve the wrong problem they're just solving the problem they're used
to which is how can I be a successful and productive software developer when the question
you need to be asking if you're an indie hacker if you're starting your own business is how do I
build a successful business and that is a very different question that's going to oftentimes
have different answers so yeah that's just something that people don't really get and
programmers especially yeah that's cool anyway that's how I learned to code I reverse engineer
everything and and try just make it work yeah it's super cool to hear how you've learned and
there are all sorts of different ways to learn for example I've taught four people how to code
including my brother in the past three years and all of them wanted to get jobs within six to eight
months they've come over and I just teach them in my living room and give them assignments
and three out of those four ended up getting full-time jobs working at startups in the bay area
but far more common than having a tutor or being taught I think is for people to be self-taught
right to do like you did and reverse engineer I mean I went personally I went to school for
computer science which is great but that was more theory than anything and from a practical
standpoint I was programming and creating websites as a teenager way before I went to school so if
you're listening and you're not a programmer but you're considering learning I think that you
should totally go for it because I mean hopefully my background and Jason's background are inspiring
but you can just start by learning something useful but by size like HTML or CSS which you
can grok the basics of and I mean the absolute basics in just a few hours and if you're making
a website or paying somebody to make your website or using wordpress or something just that tiny
amount of knowledge I think will help you and the other thing I want to say is don't be discouraged
by people online who are going to be telling you that you need a ton of knowledge and that
you know these people who obsess over best practices and that say that you need to do
everything the exact right way etc etc because that's just it's crap like the number of companies
that are amazing today that were started off of pretty crappy code in the beginning is uh
staggeringly huge so it's totally doable and it's fun yeah especially once you get the hang of it
I have I have three anecdotes coming into mind the first one is um coding's cool because it's
a micro reward system so you're constantly working on small little pieces and every time you finish
them you feel good um I can't remember the other two but one of them one of them was and this is
interesting the reason I got serious about coding was because I hired a team in Bangladesh
six people I hired them full time for one year to rebuild indie shelf from scratch and get us off
wordpress and it was the most frustrating experience I've ever had and I am so grateful
I did it because I had to jump in so many times to fix things that I learned how to code properly
not technically but like I actually learned how to do things and so at the end of one year
I was able to say guys thanks for setting up the framework and everything I need as a foundation
and from here I'm just going to tear it apart mess it up and make it work the way I wanted to
and it was cool because up until then I was thinking this was after I quit google I was
like sweet I got some money send some cool contracts with indie shuffle for advertising
I'm gonna hire a team and um everything fell apart so I ran out of money and I had to take
that coding into my own hands and it's yeah able to do it because I was constantly trying to fix
things that I didn't like about the Bangladesh's approach not because they were doing it wrong but
just because I was a nitpicky client yeah exactly you're probably a perfectionist I imagine
yeah so back to indie shuffle on and let's talk about the growth side of things because you
mentioned that when you launched the shuffle you got kind of hooked on this game as you
called it of generating visits what were you doing to grow indie shuffle as a blog and make
it more popular oh man this is like the secret sauce that people look for right right
you want to know the answer yeah the answer is that there is no secret source it's just
about persistence you have to attack it from any angle you can constantly push things
and just see where it works and so I'll give you some examples of what I did
uh I learned quite early on that the more I published songs the more people visited
so I learned up front that pumping out content generates more traffic both from seo and just
from the existing fan base who want to come back and see what's new um in a way blogs have died
today but facebook has sort of replaced this where they've got this wonderful thing on god I hate
facebook as an aside but when when you're on facebook that home button at the top is constantly
updating with like a plus 20 or 13 so you can see these new stories coming up it's absurdly addictive
and right but blogs we're trying to capture an early essence of this where you could visit every
day and sometimes twice a day and sometimes three times a day and you'd see new content
and so I learned early on that the more content I could push out the more visits we would get
but naturally as as one individual working an executive compensation job that was a bit
difficult so what I did was I took any revenue that indie shuffle earned and I pumped it back
into paying people to post content for me like a modest amount ten dollars per review and
I was able to run it sort of a zero profit type of thing but my target was two posts per day and
then five posts a day and then roughly two years into running the website I was I was nearly at ten
posts per day and that's huge it was with knowledge that with everyone you do maybe one out of ten
will blow up but the other nine are going to bring in some incremental traffic and they're going to
keep the people who use your website satisfied so that's one thing I did the second thing I did was
constantly improving the website and I'm still doing that today seven years later eight years
later constantly improving things making it work better faster more fluidly more intuitively and I
think me as a user I really love it when I visit a website I use all the time and they've changed
something like a design element or it just looks slightly different and it feels fresh and new and
so with indie shuffle I've been keeping that up we've gone through countless redesigns which have
all been pretty much done by me while I'm stoned and well the design looks really good thanks man
I was still a beautiful website so I find that for inspiration when I'm trying to do a new design
element or something different because I'm so involved in a site from day to day it helps to
try and step back and look at from a different perspective and eating a space cake can do that
for you and then you'll spend like the next two months trying to process through that that vision
that you had that night but I think what you see on indie shuffle today has a lot to do with that
that's awesome and then the third is like inbound traffic how do you get people to visit your site
who aren't already users who don't love the platform itself and that spans from seo to
social networking and there's there's no real magic arrow there you just have to consistently
keep trying to hammer it from every side so solid seo is a great one but you've experienced this too
on hacker news a successful post on hacker news can make or break that article and a lot of it
has to do with the timing that you publish that on there and the content and the way you write
the title and unfortunately today like clickbait has become pervasive on the internet but hopefully
in two years it will be something completely different and that's the bottom line is people
are looking for a magic bullet and there isn't one it's about waking up every day and just
attacking it from many angles that's that's funny because that really is the magic bullet then
realizing that you're going to have to do some exploration and you're going to have to do some
work and that the first thing you try it won't necessarily be the best way to grow your business
i know with nd hackers for example i've tried tons of channels i posted on all sorts of different
forums and communities and social media and the one that works the best for me by far
is hacker news and i would not have realized that if i didn't try that along with a bunch of other
things so i'm curious with nd shuffle is there any sort of channel or strategy that was better than
all the others yeah yeah definitely definitely it was a website called hype machine which is still
quite big today but what they do is they aggregate sort of like in a form of an rss feed like dig
they aggregate all the music blogs and they've handpicked who gets to be in there so it's not
all the music blogs they've gone i think about 700 in there who they've handpicked and what they do
is they try to collect information on what those blogs are posting and then bring it all together
cohesively to say something like 30 blogs have posted about this song in the last two weeks
and their charts are really influential have been for the last few years in what you listen to today
the things that you kind of see at coachella and music festival etc many of those discoveries have
made their way to the forefront through hype machine and indirectly because blogs who hype
machine scans have covered them so if if if 30 blogs pick up on a single track hype machine is
going to indicate that and all the record labels and spotify and apple etc are still to this day
watching hype machine for their cues on who they should be paying attention to now like who's next
and um it's changed quite a bit over the last year i think submit hub is has actually played
a role in how that's changed but for us hype machine through all its different iterations
and its evolution has been one of the strongest uh kind of foundations of our traffic and why
we have visitors today because we used to be up and i think today we're the most followed
active blog on hype machine and that's because in the early days i was gaming the system i was
trying to hack it the same way you are like what time should you post uh what title should you put
in i was trying to do all of that early on in 2010 2011 and we were getting tons of traffic
from it we were getting two or three thousand visits a day so i'm i'm eternally grateful to
anthony and hype machine for providing such a cool product for the music industry
and um that's an advantage i was able to leverage that i don't think many people can leverage today
especially because they've they've lost a lot of their traction as well thanks to spotify so it
seems like the overall story behind how nd shuffle grew was mostly just the content part just
producing high quality content at as fast of a rate as possible and after that uh places like
hype machine will pick up on it which is a little bit of gaming the system included yep but this
reminds me that i wrote a blog post not too long ago i think it was a few weeks ago my november
month in review where i looked at everything that i did in november and my original plan for november
was to just hit every single distribution channel and constantly all day promote indie hackers and
post frantically everywhere that i could think of and at the end of the day none of that ended up
moving the needle as much as simply doing a really good interview and sharing it in the usual places
i think this is probably the case for a lot of content sites or for anyone doing like a product
or service where you're trying to also use content marketing to drive traffic you can always find
ways to game different systems and drive traffic and that helps but at the end of the day if you
don't have great content or if you're not posting your content frequently enough then people aren't
going to come it's a bit of that 80 20 principle as well right so 20 of your content generates 80
of the traffic but it's probably the other 80 that takes all your time yeah exactly so you mentioned
submit hub kind of changing your face in the music industry in a way and i want to talk about like
how you how did you start submit hub how did you even get the idea it was out of frustration was
the main reason i started it so as indy shuffle grew and grew um and it wasn't just me but we
became the target of these massive campaigns to promote new artists and and it generated huge
businesses for these these pr companies who could now charge money to clients and say look
you try to email indy shuffle but they never respond but i know how to get a response from them
and it got to the point where late last year we were fielding something like 300 plus submissions
per day of people saying hey can we get on your blog i'm sorry and i imagine you're getting a
taste of this now as well as indy heckers grows there are more and more people who many of them
have interesting stories and they feel like it would be a great fit for your blog and they're
acting in a self-interested manner but you on your side also have some interest in it
but at a certain point you just can't handle it anymore you just don't you only have the
capacity for so much and these guys are hammering you so indy shuffle was in this situation where
we were getting 300 submissions a day and i'd created a fake email address submissions at
indyshuffle.com where people could email us and it just disappeared into oblivion and that's why
i pushed everything i always knew in the back of my head that there had to be a way to harness that
and there were a few people who'd approached me prior to that actually
i got some i got some flack for this from a guy who had approached me about three years ago with
he was partnered with the guy who started who was employee number one at dropbox
yeah i'll forget his name but asked him most you know website yeah yeah yeah him and the
other dropbox guys were a couple years ahead of me at mit right that's him so he had been trying
to develop an app that filtered your inbox for music submissions and put it all into a good feed
and so i i chatted with them a bunch and they were cool guys and i was like this is a great idea
it's got solid potential i just feel like you need to flush it out a bit more and do this type of
stuff and um then i forgot about it and this frustration mounted in me more and more that i
was getting bombarded and so late last year i decided to develop an application so i could learn
a new coding stack i was i felt like indy shuffle was dying in a way because our advertising revenue
was was drying up because god that's a whole different story but display advertising is the
death of the industry and i hate it totally different tangent and um i wanted to do something
different i wanted to diversify i wanted to put my eggs into a different basket and so i decided to
learn react and meteor and build a stack on that and i thought a great thing to tackle would be
this problem of submissions and um full circle like once our indy hackers interview went live
they emailed me asking why i didn't give them credit and i i had actually forgotten about it
up until that point so look what's interesting is that they weren't the only one to approach me
with a similar idea there were a lot of people who realized that the whole industry of trying
to contact bloggers was broken and that bloggers were feeling overwhelmed and yet there was huge
potential for anyone who did get featured by the blogs to make a career and and so there were
people trying to tackle this problem but none of them were in the industry themselves and they
didn't really understand how it worked and so when they approached me i would always kind of
roll my eyes and go cool well let me know when you've got it up and running and um yeah flash
forward last year on november 9th or so i launched this mvp where people could just fill out a form
instead of emailing me i set up an order responder on the submissions and indy shuffle address
and i said hey we don't check this you can fill out this little form right here on
a website i've created called submit hub and we're guaranteed to listen and then from my side
i had all those come through as a consistent feed where i could just hit play give it a thumb up a
thumb down and that was it and so overnight i went from ignoring hundreds of submissions to
actually listening to every single one and it changed the way that we blogged our music
because we we stopped paying attention to what everyone else was posting
we had so much already coming to us through this feed on submit hub and i think flash forward
today um a year later and there are about 250 other platforms using submit hub to to do the
same thing and so they've all in a sense they've stopped paying attention to what like what
everyone else is pumping out and that whole idea of um groupthink has sort of died in a way which
is ironic because people were concerned that submit hub would create groupthink and i think
it's done quite the opposite it's given a rise to diversity in new music that hasn't been seen for
a very long time yeah that's a lot and it's all really interesting and i i think what stands out
is yeah boom how do you how do you say that cohesively but um lots of people had the idea
and and and this was one of the first times to cohesively bring it together and what makes that
so interesting to me is that probably the biggest filter between founders and the hackers and
actually building a successful business is not the stuff that comes after they start the business
even though that's all extremely difficult but most people get stuck in the idea phase
trying to pick an idea to work on or trying to come up with an idea in the first place
which can be difficult because not everybody has an obvious problem that's valuable to solve in
their own life that they can learn from i struggled with it i struggled with it it didn't dawn on me
instantly i spent two or three months trying to hack different things together just to just because
i wanted to do something different and and just one day it kind of was like oh yeah i should solve
this did you keep a list of ideas while you were running indy shuffle just because you always knew
that one day you would do something different and submit hub was kind of at the top of that list or
was it more of a process of figuring out what thing going into it i felt a bit panicked i think
because indy shuffle was losing traction and today flash forward a year it's doing great i'm
actually fine i feel very comfortable with it but at the time i was thinking jesus like this is my
sole source of income i quit google for this and i'm writing you know like median us income from
this right now um that's not comfortable like you don't feel good about that coming from the silicon
valley and so i was a bit panicked and and submit hub was never at the top no but once once i clicked
on the idea i got so hooked so hooked i couldn't i couldn't stop coding and i'd like i started
dating my girlfriend at the time and thank goodness she didn't like thank goodness it
was early days and we only had to go on dates once a week because the rest of the time
i was i couldn't put it down i just couldn't it's because that learning curve was so high i was
learning react for the first time i was learning media for the first time i was building a product
from scratch and it was just so cool i was so hooked yeah i know that exact feeling in college
i built my very first web application and it wasn't anything super serious i was just learning
new things and having fun um but at the time facebook had just released their api uh so you
could build apps on the facebook platform it was the very first time very first release of the
facebook platform and my roommate and i built this app that we called fmail which was super
stupid it was just check your gmail and facebook but we did a good job on the design and made it
look just like facebook had basically built gmail inside of it and at the time you know when we got
started all i knew was html css and javascript but i'd never done anything on the back end
so i had to learn all this stuff about how to use api something like php from scratch and i learned
about ajax and i started learning about sql and it was just this never ending it was just i got
so hooked because i mean this whole process of having an idea and working on it and then building
it up from scratch it's just so addictive especially if you can get into a regular rhythm
of working on it it gets you hooked and i think it boils back to that micro reward system that
i referenced at the at the beginning of this interview you get hooked on it yeah it's almost
like uh goodness for that yeah it's almost like uh like legos or something you know you build
something and then it exists but imagine like if your lego creations then came to life because you
built code and it's like constantly working in the background forever until you shut it off
you know so like having that content feedback the hour break it does that a lot uh so uh one thing
that happened after you did your text base interview for andy hackers was it i submitted
it to hacker news and it did really well and i can't remember what exactly i named it it was
something like how jason grischkopf built grew submit hub to you know $40,000 in revenue in under
a year and a lot of people took issue with that they said you know this is a stupid clickbait
headline it's unrealistic and jason didn't build it in a year and it took him you know he had
indy shuffle for seven years before that without indy shuffle submit hub never would have happened
which is to be fair valid point so i just want to get your your feedback you know your comment on
this without indy shuffle would you have been able to build submit hub and if so like how long would
it have taken you um i can i can answer that in two ways the first way i can say no because
i wouldn't have cared about it and i think that's a really important part about building an app is
having some sort of attachment to it a lot of people go into things trying to solve a problem
and fill a niche because they want to build a business and they see an opportunity for it
but they don't really have any attachment to it and they get that in order to build that business
they're gonna have to be doing this all day every day saturday and sunday for the next few years
and they gotta not get sick of it and don't get me wrong i get sick of it all the time
but the fact that i can keep coming back to it is a testament to the fact that
i actually i really love this industry and i love what i do in it it's cool i often catch myself
going like shit like it's except through musical day and code and i still make enough money to eat
that's rad and um i don't take that for granted and so no without indy shuffle in this in this
answer i don't think i could have done it uh because it just it just would have felt like
another project that i was doing um the other answer let's just say that i really loved music
but i didn't have indy shuffle um gosh it would have been difficult but i man it presupposes that
i knew how the industry worked and the thing is that's a very important part regardless of how
much traffic indy shuffle gets and how many emails it gets i knew exactly how blogs take
their submissions what's it like to be a blog getting submissions because that's the problem
i was trying to solve how do i make that an enjoyable and worthwhile experience and i mean
the answer to that was to incentivize like blogs get paid to listen and that was the first one to
do that in a sense and gosh i don't know i'll take that comment back people will probably chew into
that because i'm sure people tried but because the first one to make it work on scale and and a lot
of that did have to do with the fact that people wanted to get on indy shuffle so let's flip it
differently a lot of people are approaching and saying hey why haven't you spun out submit up into
this industry and i've thought about it like what if i did submit up for instagram well step one
would be i'd have to get a bunch of stakeholders who are interested in doing it and this is actually
that the the phase i'm about to go through now for submit up for radio which i i'm planning to launch
next year we've done a bunch of interviews with people involved in the industry but
we can't really launch it until we've got a bunch of stakeholders on the radio side so if i launch
submit up for radio and i've got two radio stations on there like come on right it's just
not enough i need i need to launch with at least 10 and so now i have to go convince 10 people
in the radio industry of which i'm not a part that they should start using submit up to solicit
their submissions and it's a similar thing and i'd bring it back all to to one core discipline
of an entrepreneur and that is discipline just discipline do it over and over and keep doing those
terrible mundane tasks that you don't want to do over and over and over like to launch submit hub
i hand tailored more than 1 000 emails to blogs it took me about four months five months of doing
it every day to get through this list like it didn't just launch overnight there weren't people
begging at my door i had to go and like email these guys and they didn't respond so i would
tweet them i'd facebook message them i'd send sound guard messages i'd send another email then
i'd try to find another contact and we're still sort of doing this today those those 250 blogs
and labels didn't come over night and right i don't want to i don't want to sound defensive
on this and and i i read a lot of those comments and i understand where they're coming from could
i have done this without indy shuffle hell no could anyone do this without indy shuffle
yes i mean like the bottom line is it all depends on how determined you are and
that determination could be mis it can be misplaced don't get me wrong people do that
all the time there are a lot of determined people out there who don't have success
because they're putting it into the wrong areas and which are the right ones i don't know this
gets to my point earlier where like how do you generate traffic there's no magic bullet you just
try a bunch of them because you never know which one's going to pay off and some of its luck and
some of it's not but like people some of those comments would like it rubbed me the wrong way
because i put a ton of work into coding this i was able to funnel a lot of traffic from indy
shuffle and i had the reputation and i don't take that for granted both of those were useful
but people didn't come flocking to me in fact they were incredibly skeptical about the system
yeah and i didn't launch the money component until february so that's that's where this whole
eight months number that comes in um i didn't launch that until then but people were very
skeptical and it took a lot of work and and like clever tricks in a way i don't hate using the word
tricks but i was trying to convince like so some of the most skeptical people were publicists
they're the ones who artists hire to try and get in touch with the blogs because blogs never
respond so you hire a publicist because a publicist knows their phone number or they recognize the
publicist's name and those guys are some of the most skeptical so early on one of my tricks was to just
so i had this cap where you could only send two submissions every four hours and i removed the
cap for publicists if you emailed me and we had a chat i'd do you the favor of removing it and so
in a way i was like sweet talking the most skeptical component of my customer base to
try and convince them that this wasn't the the evil disruptor they were worried about and right
right today they're they're like the most eager consumers on this website i'm not sure they're
telling their clients they love how effective it is and even though the rejection rate is really
high um they keep coming back because they get a much higher response rate through submit hub than
anyone has ever gotten emailing blogs yeah it's streamlined i mean because without submit hub they
have to do something akin to what you did to launch submit hub which is find all of these
email addresses and then just send email after email after email which sucks and the irony is
that uh 95 at the time i never got a response and and like because these blogs don't check their
emails anymore i found it so frustrating and occasionally like once or twice i got responses
from these blogs being like yo stop spamming me i'd be like dude no i'm not spamming you i'm trying
to be a friend i'm trying to give you a way to actually earn a thousand dollars a month
and right like i mean at this point i mean submit hub is paying out almost a thousand dollars a day
to the blogs and the guys who are on there have found it a life-changing thing but i get it it's
not for everyone so i don't push too hard at that point yeah it does make me feel like shit it does
it does it's really i'm pretty sensitive about any hackers too if someone says something bad about
it or something bad happens dude take it personal extra baby because because the whole premise of
submit hub is that people are constantly rejecting songs and so i am on the receiving end of a lot
of hate mail and i've built up a bit of a tough skin to it right i mean you have to but just to
go back it's funny because i was impressed with myself for for how i launched indie hackers i
think i found about 140 emails of different businesses online that i thought would share
their revenue and then i spent a few weeks sending all of these people personalized emails but hearing
that you sent a thousand emails over the course of four months is crazy well i could have done it
all with just one spreadsheet and emailed them all but i decided that i wanted to hand tailor
every email and then follow up with a tweet a facebook message and a soundcloud message
so that's why that's why it took so long i did the same and by by 40 emails i was sick
by 80 i was ready to throw up after like 100 or so i was like i'm never sending another email again
in my life i think that's why it took four months because you can do 10 a day and just be like
that was too much work it takes it takes an hour of an hour oh it's just not that much work but
it's draining repetitive work uh-huh very little reward right and this is a perfect example of one
of the things that people underestimate when they spend all their time on programming or they spend
all their time copying the superficial details of a website like the guy who cloned submit hub
i'm sure he just read your story and was like oh it's so easy i could do this in a week
and he has no idea how to get people to his website yeah well he's he's planning on charging
pounds instead of dollars so maybe his pitch is that the blogs will earn more money but what he
doesn't even know is like these chat rooms that i've built and and what's really cool about submit
hub is that there's a community now and um i've already shown his website to all the blogs and
they've had a fat chat about it it's fun it's cool and they love it they love picking it apart and
there's a community it's really rad that blogs can talk to each other again because that's what
kind of kicked it off when i started blogging there were these really cool networks where
blogs could all chat to each other and that disappeared for a couple of years and now it's
back yeah we're not fighting with each other we're all doing this together and it's cool
and so it's it's been a really fun experience in that sense but it's not done it's not done
what did you use to uh to build your chat rooms using slack or did you
no i'm cool so it's what's really cool about meteor is that it's constantly polling for
updates and you can subscribe to the database which makes it super simple to build a chat
client uh-huh yeah so i mean it's just checking for updates to that that database so if you've
got a chat between someone as soon as a new piece of data gets entered into that query it's just
gonna pop right through and you've got a you've got a chat room and so um when did i code i coded
it in june just because i the the reason i coded it was because i thought well the whole point of
submit hub was to get rid of email submissions so why when i approve a song does it go to an email
it should just go to a chat right and what's rad about is that at the end of the day you actually
get to have a chat like uh it's i've modeled it to look like facebook messenger in a way
but you're having this facebook messenger chat with the artist who created the song that you're
proving because they don't have to hire a publicist anymore to contact you right so if anything it's
like made the music community tighter but it's i think i alluded to this earlier it's it's
eliminated this group speak and i think it's confusing a lot of the people who rely on blogs
for a and r because the diversity is just blown up because any indie artist can now reach the
blogs and on indie shuffle we're covering such small acts compared to what we used to we'd be
like oh sweet a new disclosure track a new churches track right and um today when that
stuff comes out we just roll our eyes and we're like nah my cue's full and that just sounds like
the same old shit right well submit hub is great because i mean i was on there yesterday and one
of the features that you built into it is this chart section so you can go to the chart section
and it ranks songs by how popular they are on submit hub which really means how many blogs
that they've been submitted to and what is the acceptance rate of these songs and i thought
this is a great way to discover new music because i can just see how popular these songs are across
the blogosphere so have you ever thought about rolling that out into its own music discovery
feature oh gosh um honestly i just it took me a day to code that and i haven't given it much love
since it's it's cool it's got the country i'm looking at it now it's got country flags next
to each song yeah it does i've forgotten i did that so i can see like the the number one track
in indie rock comes from belgium that's rad um no i haven't thought about it because because
indie shuffles my baby for that what i what i was sort of doing here is giving a nod to hype machine
and and hype machine success is predicated on the popular charts and that being an indicator of
what is relevant right now in the industry and so i was just throwing this up as a quick nod to
that because i thought hey this might serve as a good indicator to record labels so that they can
see just another source of information of of who's getting attention and i've actually fielded
some phone calls from sony music who have definitely been paying attention to this yeah
i'm sure other people are too and um i myself never look at it so that's because as a blogger
when i log in i've got the submissions feed like right now we've got more than 70 tracks
waiting for us to review and um we have to respond to all of them within 48 hours so
right that's a ton it's it's like this constant feed of new music coming through and so
one of the things i have to balance is uh fatigue amongst bloggers anyway i also have to balance
fatigue on this interview right we've gone over right i was just about to say we're over an hour
and i've got like 10 other things i want to talk about there's just no time
uh we'll do that in the second podcast yes let's do a second one would be awesome to have you on
awesome only only if the listeners are interested and they're not too caught up on my um i think
they'll be interested this is a really interesting interview i learned a lot and i think a lot of
listeners will too it was great having you on cool yeah it was awesome um let's do drunk indie
hackers history next time yeah i'll have some wine like you did and no no it's too early for
you i get to do it and you have to be the voice of reason hey if you enjoyed listening to this
conversation you should join jason and me on the nd hackers forum where we're discussing the episode
and answering your questions too just visit www.ndhackers.com slash forum thanks for listening
and i will see you next time you