What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
Derek Reimer, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you on.
You're like one of the people who I'm the most tangentially connected to through the
podcast because I've had your podcast co-host Ben Ornstein on the show at least two or three
times now.
Yeah.
I've had your ex-co-founder, Rob Walling, you guys started the company drip together
on the show like three times now.
Yeah.
And this is my first time having you on the show.
Yeah.
So it feels like it's a long overdue meeting.
I figured it was about time to come on and officially meet you.
I've been a fan of your work for a long time and obviously aware of you and the IndieHackers
community.
So thanks for happy to be here.
I was actually just talking to Rob, and he suggested you come on the show.
He's like, why don't you have Derek on?
I'm like, why don't I have Derek on?
And Ben said the same thing the last time he was on the show.
Today you're working on SaviCal, which is a super cool app.
What is SaviCal exactly?
Yeah, so SaviCal is a scheduling tool that allows you to basically create a scheduling
link and send it to someone else and show your availability, subtracting out when you're
already busy on your calendar and basically coordinating a time to meet.
And we kind of have some fresh takes on it.
Obviously it's a well-established category.
There are a lot of different tools in the market, and so we kind of have some particular
opinions about some fresh ways to do it.
Right.
And I know you're not super transparent with revenue numbers, but you told me you're willing
to give a ballpark.
Where are you at in terms of your success and growth with SaviCal?
My milestone that I'm driving towards is official default-alive status, I guess, where I can
profitable on paying my salary and all the expenses of running the business.
And we're right about there, so we crossed 10K, heading to 20K MRR.
That's the most exciting place to be, because then you're kind of looking to your future
like, well, what do I want to do?
I want to do anything.
Right.
Exactly.
Because essentially, your life is in your own hands now.
You're not accountable to anybody for your financial independence.
And then you've got to make some tough decisions, right?
You don't want to keep making this bigger, you want to shift directions, you want to
hire and grow, you want to keep it going at the same pace.
Yeah.
That's what Ben and I on our podcast, we keep, like the last couple of times we've recorded,
we keep coming back to this kind of central question of like, all roads lead back to what
do I really want out of this business?
And figuring that out is actually very difficult because me, like a lot of indie hackers and
founders of bootstrapped or quasi bootstrapped companies, like we kind of hold in tension
this, this ambition to grow something big, but also kind of maintain a healthy balance
and a calm, a calm working environment.
And sometimes those two are in tension with each other.
So it's always a fun game to figure out.
And sometimes it changes, you know, like early on, you might be like, I just want healthy
sane balance.
You know, I want a great life.
And you're like, get to that point.
And you're like, I want some challenge and I want to like go for something bigger and
more challenging.
And like, that's totally normal for things to change once you hit one particular goal.
So I've listened to you and Ben on your podcast, the art of products, an excellent show.
And your format is kind of just like, as Ben puts it, two dudes talking.
Yep.
And back when I was listening at the beginning, you're working on your company level and Ben
was working on Tupel.
And it was this weird juxtaposition because Tupel was taking off.
Like Ben was like making money hand over fists, like all his customers are super jazz, everything
was going well.
And then you were like in this kind of like sad, sad, depressed state where you're like,
oh, my company level is like not working.
What am I going to do?
You're trying to salvage it.
It was just such like a juxtaposition between like the two of you.
And I felt like bad listening to you because I was like, I really hope that Derek makes
it like, I hope he figures it out because Ben's doing so well.
And like now seeing that you have figured things out with your next company, Savvy Cal,
like it's all good.
It's all good vibes.
I think it's almost better to like listen to like a failure story when like a success
story comes after.
Yeah.
When you know that there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, trust me.
It was mentally difficult.
I think something that we really strive to do on our podcast and I think is an important
like responsibility of working in public is trying to show both sides of the coin, you
know, and not just project the good things, but hopefully tell the raw honest story about
what's not working well.
And, but yeah, it was, it was difficult to show up on the mic every week and especially
when things started to get real, started to really come to a head on like, okay, I think,
I think I'm going to have a lot of trouble bringing this to market and getting, getting
real customers.
What do I do now?
One of the parts we can probably dive into that story a little bit more, but like one
of the parts of the level journey that being able to deconstruct what went wrong and kind
of lay the whole story out there and not, you know, obviously you can learn personally
learn a lot from, from your own failings, but then being just making the decision to
like be open about that.
It made me feel good that potentially I could help some other founders who might run into
some of the same, same roadblocks that I did.
I think it's worth going through like the story of level and then the story of Savvy
Cal.
Cause I mean, you haven't been working on Savvy Cal for that long.
You started it last year, you're already past the 10 K a month in revenue mark, which is
super cool.
So I want to like, look at the differences between like, why did one business not work
and why did the other business like, why is it working so well?
And so maybe the place to start is at the end of your very first business that I'm aware
of drip, you started drip, it was an email marketing tool.
You build with Rob Walling, wildly successful.
You guys got acquired by lead pages, I think.
And I don't, you guys have never shared like revenue numbers, but I imagine like you did
pretty well and that you're sitting there, you know, earning your money, getting your
earn out and thinking about like what the next thing to do is, how did you decide like
what to do after you sold your company?
Yeah.
So I kind of had this itch like during my time of, of working, um, you know, at drip
and then, and then lead pages lead pages was a team of 150 people and we were like a team
of 10.
So we kind of got absorbed into that.
And suddenly like I was in a, I was in a Slack workspace with over a hundred people in it
and watching kind of everything, um, all the business kind of increasingly being run on
Slack and we were sort of not fully in the office all the time together.
So a lot of stuff, a lot of communication being pushed onto chat as a medium and I became
very, very intensely aware of all the ways that that, um, is a challenging environment
to work in without a lot of discipline.
Right.
So, so even, even though we tried to all be respectful of each other's time and attention,
like I just, I was having a heck of a time trying to, trying to not constantly drop the
ball and get distracted by, um, by Slack.
And this was in like 2015, 2016 or something when Slack was like relatively new to catching
on.
Yeah.
We had been Slack users for a long time, but of course when you're a team of 10, it's everything's
just easy.
Most conversations are in the general channel and it's like no big deal.
And then you just get, then you get all kinds of different styles of communication all mashing
together and it kind of becomes chaotic.
And so I sort of had, was forming this hypothesis around like, okay, obviously remote work is,
here to stay even at that, but now it's more so than ever.
But even at the time that was, that was a growing trend.
And so I was kind of sensing that there was increasing need for good tooling around to
facilitate asynchronous communication and remote work.
But I was just pretty well convinced that Slack was not the end all be all that a lot
of people were making it out to be, and that we could do better on the product front.
So I couldn't get that out of my mind.
And I was leading up to what felt like the natural stopping point for my, for my tenure
at drip.
Like we had, we had successfully transitioned to the new team and, and I just was feeling
like it was time to, to move back onto something.
And in retrospect, I would have done this a little differently.
I didn't take any kind of break at all.
So literally the week that I left is when I sort of published the, the level manifesto,
put that out into the world and started, started kind of talking about the next act.
And I would have been better served, well served by a little bit of downtime to just
step back, assess, think, think really hard about this and check my assumptions.
But, but there I was easier, easier said than done, especially when you're super excited
about the next thing.
And I know a lot of people who like sold their companies and made a whole boatload of money
and that they're suddenly in this position where they have to decide like what next it's
kind of similar to like getting to the $10,000 a month mark with their company.
It's like, okay, well what next?
And there's like generally four approaches.
It's kind of like, number one, you graduate to like the next level in your field.
So for a lot of founders, that means like, okay, what's beyond a founder?
I guess I become an investor or something.
That's what your co-founder Rob did.
Now he's like investing lots of money into startups.
Number two is like, you kind of keep doing the same thing, but maybe you get like a little
bit more ambitious.
You do something different.
So that's kind of what you're doing.
You're like, no, I still want to be a founder.
Like I want to keep starting companies.
This is what I love doing.
Like, let me start another one.
And then there's like a third and a fourth option.
Option number three, switch industries entirely.
Just like go become a writer or an actor or a painter or something and just be like, I'm
done with this.
And the number four is just like retire, go live on a beach, do nothing, which to be honest,
I know zero people who've done.
Even people who say they're going to do that.
They just eventually do something else.
Like it doesn't necessarily work out that way.
What do you think caused you to go down like the second path of continuing to be a founder?
What even is the difference between you and Rob, who decided to be an investor, like what
drives people down either road?
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think Rob, he Rob's about 10 years older than I am.
And he, he kind of had a headstart in, in the industry.
So he was a mentor of mine.
I looked up to him, I read his book before we started working together, it was fun.
And so I feel like in our conversations, I always teased him like, ah, you're going to,
you're going to want to get back into the game.
You're going to want to build another SaaS company.
But I mean, as we know, it's these building, these companies is a, it takes a lot of energy.
It takes a lot out of you.
Can be pretty stressful.
The highs are good.
The lows are pretty tough to deal with.
And I think Rob is feeling like I've done that.
Like I've, I feel, I feel good.
I hope he's listening.
Rob, you're an old guy.
That's the difference.
You've had your time.
Yeah.
And, and I feel like he's kind of gets the best of both worlds now as a, as an investor,
he's an investor in Savvy Cal and, and lots of other companies.
And so now he gets to lend his advice where it makes sense, but without having to feel
all the ups and downs.
Right.
It is kind of nice as an investor and advisor where you can give high level strategic advice,
but then you don't have to sit there and send out like 200 cold emails.
Like you're not doing, you're not doing like the sluggish, like thankless work.
You're doing like the fun stuff.
Yep.
Yep.
So coming out, coming away from the drip acquisition, you know, I feel like I have more, more products
in me and also just the ambition to, to build something meaningful.
And it was kind of, it's kind of a test for me.
Like before drip, I experimented with, with a couple of failed attempts at startups.
I was just shortly out of college and spent a couple of years like making all kinds of
mistakes and the classic mistakes of not validating things in advance or focusing on marketing
and all that kind of stuff.
And then kind of took this journey with drip alongside Rob and built a product on the side
while doing drip, which felt like a little bit validating because it was something that
I sort of brought to market and saw a little bit of a little bit of success from it.
It wasn't a knock it out of the park, but it was a, it was a nice like little mini exit.
But to me, it's like, I feel the challenge of like, okay, this is my, this is my time
to step up and be the founder of something, you know, on my own and see what I can do.
So I do take it a little bit as a personal challenge too.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense, especially like once you get like Rob talks about the staircase,
you know, you start with something small, take that first step, you get to something
like, you know, a little bit bigger.
Like once you have these wins under your belt, like it feels so much more compelling to just
do something a little bit more ambitious and to kind of like, I don't know, almost like
prove yourself to who like, I don't know, maybe to yourself, but I felt the same thing.
Okay. Like I need to prove like even in the early days of indie hackers, I was interviewing
all these SaaS founders who were making money and like after any hackers, I need to start
my own SaaS business and prove that I can do the same exact thing.
And the question is kind of like, why, you know, why do this?
Yeah, it's funny.
It's a, it's a very, I think it's maybe something in founder DNA, something intrinsic to us
that just drives us to do these crazy hard endeavors.
I'm not sure what it is.
Would you describe yourself as like a competitive person?
I would say I'm moderately competitive, but I'm not, I'm definitely not the most competitive.
I'm friends with, I have a friend who's in like SaaS sales and that gives me an example
of someone who's, who's very competitive, always kind of playing the game, the game
of the chess game of, of, uh, of business in SaaS.
And I feel like I do feel get competitive about the areas where I feel like I have,
I have a potential edge, like especially when looking at kind of big incumbents in the industry,
I don't know, a little bit of the David and Goliath dynamic.
That's what really kind of motivates me.
And you kind of have that with every company that we're talking about, like drip.
Okay.
It's email marketing and industry where like MailChimp already existed before you started
drip.
So like you were the David and they were the Goliath and then level.
Okay.
Like Slack was already a huge behemoth and you create level to sort of take on like the
bigger guy and then Savvy Cal, right?
Like Calendly and the Qity, like there's already big scheduling software and then here you
are with like, you know, like your very new entrance.
So it seems to be like the, the framework that you love the best is taking on these
huge players.
Yeah, I would say so.
So now you're at this point and your story where you've left drip, you're like, I'm ready
to do something else.
I'm going to keep being a founder and you've got more ideas than you.
And you ended up deciding to do level.
You published this manifesto.
That's kind of like anti Slack.
Describe to me this manifesto.
Cause like not very many businesses start with a manifesto, I think probably more could,
but it worked really well for you.
It's very much spoke to a problem that I think people felt viscerally, especially, especially
people who consider themselves to be makers, right there.
There was sort of this undertone that I was detecting of like a very deep dissatisfaction
with interruptive ways of working.
And that is sort of the, that's sort of the natural way that a product like Slack works.
Like it's just sort of designed to send you push notifications and, and be immediate.
Like it's just sort of baked into the product.
And at the time there were floating around a term called like Slack lash or whatever,
like this kind of kind of growing grassroots movement towards like trying to put up defenses
against Slack.
So the manifesto was like, remember when you first signed up for Slack and, and I sort
of walked through this little story of like, at first it was good.
You were just, there was just a few of you and you would chat.
And then over time things started to devolve and I kind of just, the story that people
could walk along with and, and really, and really feel.
And it seemed to resonate a lot.
Like it got a lot of several thousand email addresses over the course of a few months,
lots of just kind of anecdotal validation from people saying like, Oh yes, this is such
a big problem.
Like I can't, I can't wait to see what you're going to build.
I would love to use it with my team.
And so the indicators were like looking very positive initially and user validation is
super important and market validation.
And I was aware that like getting, trying to eliminate biases from that was important.
I think I didn't quite have a fully mature framework around how just to like route around
that, which I learned the hard way because I collected pre-sales, did a bunch of interviews,
tried to speak to the underlying problem and not my proposed solution.
And yet, um, as it turns out, as I learned once I had an MVP ready, like, um, the actual
market response is quite different than, than what I was hearing.
Yeah.
And it's this idea that like people were super motivated to read your manifesto that like
there's the slack clash and everyone was talking about like distraction at work and everyone's
talking about like interruption of free work.
I mean, I literally just got a slack notification while you were giving it a speaking term.
It was super distracting, right?
Like everyone knows it's distracting and there's this kind of pattern.
I think whenever anything gets big or catches on, it's kind of predictable that there will
be a backlash, you know, okay, social media is big.
There's going to be a bunch of people who hate social media.
Cell phones are big.
There's a bunch of people who hate cell phones.
And then I tend to fall into the camp of like the counter counter contrarian.
So it's like, whatever it comes out, everyone hates it.
And then I hate the people who hate it just because for no real reason.
Uh, and so like I've embraced all this distracting stuff, but like the result is like, I'm constantly
distracted.
Why did you decide to like write a manifesto?
Cause there's so many different ways that you could potentially launch a business or
test out your idea.
Like the only other people I know who've really started with like a manifesto or people like
John O'Nolan from ghost who wrote a manifesto against a WordPress and everyone piled on
cause they all hated WordPress and they wanted something better.
I think Ben also Tupel sort of like wrote a manifesto against like Slack acquiring a
screen hero.
And like, that was kind of like, you know, something that tapped into like this anger
that people felt like, why did you feel like that was the way to go?
I felt like it was the power of storytelling.
I've kind of learned that over time through podcasting, through just watching, honestly,
like watching kind of Rob's example of marketing drip.
And we always, for the longest time, we just had like a long form sales letter as our drip
homepage.
Um, when normally people would have gone to the traditional like SAS homepage with a little
block up in the hero and all that, we just had a bunch of texts.
And so like Rob has always been very, um, that was sort of his, his style was to be
very kind of like story oriented and kind of more traditional like sales letters type,
type of stuff.
And so that was sort of my background too.
And I just felt like telling a compelling story would give me an indicator on whether
people were really like nodding along with this.
And if I could get people nodding along, then, then I felt like I felt confident that, that
I would have a market to sell to didn't quite pan out.
Um, and so I think I want to bury the lead too much, but like the kind of the, the big
takeaway was that people lie to you for your best.
But they think they're there, um, have your best interest in mind.
They're trying not to hurt you and they want to be encouraging.
And I think people aren't totally aware of their own purchasing dynamics either.
Like, so in this case, I had a lot of managed to convince a lot of like champions in companies
to, to really buy into the vision, right?
And totally resonated with the, with the idea of saying that like Slack is distractive and,
and I want something better organized.
But a lot of those people, one didn't necessarily have buying power and didn't necessarily have
the clout inside of their organization to get the buy-in from literally like every manager
or every decision maker who would need to be on board with like ripping out the guts
of their whole like company communication platform and replacing with something else.
Cause it's not something you can exactly dabble in.
You can't just like switch part of it.
Cause then you, you still have to keep Slack.
If everyone, everyone else in the company is still in Slack and some other department may
reach out to you there.
Like you can't either run both in parallel, which is just sort of worse or you have to
convince everyone to switch over wholesale.
And then I think also like just a lot of the people were willing to complain publicly and
tell me express that they, they agree with, with what I was putting out, but ultimately
like it wasn't enough of a problem for them to go through, jump through the, the friction
of switching and all of that.
I probably could have sussed out earlier on, but I was sort of blinded a bit by my own
optimism, I think.
Well, I think if you get a bunch of people, cause like the call to action at the bottom
of your manifesto was like, sign up for my mailing list.
If you agree, basically.
And when you get a lot of people who are all like, yeah, I'm feeling you Derek, like this
is exactly the problem I experienced.
And you have like this like innate founder optimism too, where you're like, this is it's
going to be so good.
It's going to be super successful.
I want to build this cool, amazing thing.
It's like really, really hard to kind of like simmer down and like cut through the noise
and figure out the right question to ask, to make sure that people actually will buy
this product.
Cause it doesn't matter if like people agree with your message, it matters is that they'll
like take out their credit card and pay you the monthly subscription fee for whatever
you build.
And one of the, um, one of the resources that was shared with me kind of later on in, in
the level journey, it was sort of an eye opening moment when I read it.
It's a book called the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick should be required reading for every fact
founder, who needs to talk to customers ever because it's not, not just for early product
validation, but even I think for the process of like sussing out, doing a, you know, customer
interview and figuring out what are people really asking for?
What's the underlying problems?
Is it how, how badly is that problem affecting them?
It just gives you a framework for basically asking questions that are so bulletproof.
You could even validate an idea with your own mom, which is where the, uh, the title
of the book comes from.
I love that concept because her mom was like, the person is going to be the nicest to you.
She's going to tell you everything you want to hear.
You're going to be like, what do you think about my startup idea mom?
And she's going to be like, it's amazing.
But my takeaway from the mom test and I've had Rob Fitzpatrick on the show to talk about
it.
It's funny.
Like we joke cause like the episode is about an hour long and that's also about how long
it takes you to read his book.
It's super small.
It's zero to the point.
Like you could just skip the episode and go read his book, but he's really all about asking
for proof.
Like you don't ask somebody, would you use this or what do you think about my idea?
You ask them questions like when was the last time you paid to solve this problem, you know,
or give me an example of like an alternative product you're using, et cetera.
And if people don't actually have the receipts, then they probably aren't serious.
Yep.
How did you figure out that at a level people weren't serious?
Cause I mean, there's a decent amount of time to pass between you writing that manifesto
and getting all these email signups and you learning that like, Hey, this might not be
the right idea.
Yeah.
Knowing when to pull the plug is hard.
And when like when to dial back your own optimism and kind of face the reality, right?
Yeah.
So after reading that book, then I, I basically took a step back because I was kind of in
the mode of like trying to, trying to recruit people off my list to sign up, become paying
customers and use the MVP.
And I was really struggling hard.
Like I made it through a good chunk of the list that had been most engaged and was not
really getting any bites.
And so took a step back and started doing some more, more rigorous interviews, applying
the mom test and hearing just a lot of red flags, a lot of like, well, yeah, I mean,
I haven't actually looked for an alternative solution, which is it.
That's one of the big things.
Like, yeah.
Have you, have you paid for anything or have you even done like a Google search, like Slack
alternative and like, well, no, not really because you know, we're so entrenched.
And so I started to hear that stickiness just come up over and over again.
And the funny thing is like, I still think that it's a viable business in some form under
certain conditions.
I think that there, and there are, there are others.
There's twist from, from the todoist team.
They've been around since a little bit before I started working on level, I think.
And I think they're, they've been somewhat public with their numbers.
It's been a kind of a slog, but I think they're, they're gradually growing and making some
inroads.
So I think it's like a viable problem, but then the question becomes like, is it viable
for me as a founder under the constraints that I'm willing to operate under?
I was not willing to raise traditional venture capital to do this.
I think that's maybe what it would have taken just to have more, more time, you know, money
gives you more time and yeah, I think it would take lining up the timing with a certain wave
of momentum in the industry where there's enough people dissatisfied and willing to adopt
something else.
And so I just kind of determined like after doing those interviews, I was already a year
into it and it just felt too risky to basically take another, what I felt like would be maybe
another year or two of effort to maybe yield a business that's viable.
Yeah.
I remember you talking about like building, building out level and like, you were just
talking about like, I need to build, you know, this feature and that feature.
And like you were kind of sucked into this point where it was like, it's a potentially
endless slog of features that you need to build to make customers happy.
And then you were sort of retrospective blog posts.
You talked about the fact that they were actually kind of like maybe two profiles of customers.
They were like the really large teams who were like Slack sucks and it's super distracting,
but we're not going to switch to your like newly built solution unless we have like these
thousand features that you don't have yet.
And it's like, well, you don't necessarily have the resources at the time to build that.
And then there were like the small teams who actually could use something really small
and simple, but they didn't feel the pain of Slack because like they had a small team.
So it wasn't that distracting.
Like me with ND hackers, it's like, we've got like four or five people on our Slack
and it's super easy.
And then I switched over to like Stripe Slack and it's like this chaotic beast with like
10,000 channels.
And it's like, well, how do you, who do you build for?
If you build for the small teams, like you can build a product, but they don't care enough
to switch.
And if you build for the large teams, like you're never going to actually be able to
build all the features that they need.
Cause by the time you're done with that Slack will be so far ahead.
Like it just, it's like kind of damned if you do damned, if you don't.
So what do you, what do you do when you realize like, okay, I've been working on this for
a year.
It's not working out.
I don't really have the patience to try to build this product for these large teams.
Like how do you reckon with that as a founder?
Well, you rent a cabin in the woods, step one, which I did.
I actually did.
I'm not a little like retreat.
So it's like, okay, I need to, I need to become comfortable with this decision.
And I can either, I can either have a freak out moment and completely retreat away from,
from this endeavor, or I can kind of just take a step back, breathe, evaluate, and try
to get it, get a clear mind to make a decision on this.
And that's what I did.
And I actually, I actually spent time writing that, that retrospective post.
And I sort of took me a couple of days of, of just kind of working on it and, and then
just doing other reading and hiking and other things to get my, get my mind clear.
And I felt like by the time I finished that, I was like, if I can, if I can write retrospective
where there's a clear kind of there's clear logic to, to the decision.
And at the end of like conclusion at the end of this post is that like, yep, this is why
I made the call to move on.
Like if I could compose this, then I would feel comfortable in me that I, that I was
actually ready to, to call it on it.
And then the bonus is that I got this deliverable on the other side, which was a post that I
could share with the community that did get a lot of positive response.
People, a lot of people resonated with the story.
Yeah.
I think Rob ended up posting it to Hacker News and I got like 500 F votes and then a
ton of comments.
It was public, you know, the very like top front page of Hacker News, thousands of developers
and founders like reading kind of your retrospective and then giving like, you know, their own
feedback as to why level didn't work out, et cetera.
What if you like to read those comments and be so public with what happened?
I think it was a mostly positive experience.
Honestly, like there were definitely some, some dismissive comments, you know, some like,
well, only put in a year.
And then, you know, of course most people recognize like, well, no, this is, this is
still a year's worth of time, you know, and definitely it was interesting to see kind
of the, the varying perspectives from, from the more traditional Silicon Valley lens versus
kind of the more indie hacker lens, you know, two very different ways of viewing this whole,
this whole story.
And then I think like 10 days later you had another post that went to the top of Hacker
News called finding my next bootstrapped business idea.
You're kind of outlining your process, like how to go about looking for a business idea.
And you had a lot of good stuff in there.
You know, you talked about the fact that the market already needed to exist.
You talked about a lot of like the internal motivations too, like why am I even doing
this?
You know, why do I want to start a company?
What's going to make me happy?
What are my ambitions?
How do you, how do you think about that today?
It was really helpful to go through that exercise because I think it's, it's, it's important
to know, like first know yourself, know what you want out of it.
Um, I, so like, yeah, one of the things I put in there was like, this needs to be kind
of like some explicit timelines on, on being able to reach certain milestones was really
important to me.
So especially when you're not dealing with an infinite runway, um, or you're not willing
to like go out and raise the money to give yourself a really, really long runway.
Like getting to those milestones quickly was really important.
So it was like part of it was just digesting, like lessons learned on what not to do again.
And some of it was like, just sort of, uh, I feel like a maturing my reaching my own
maturity on like on mindset stuff, which is always a work in progress.
But yeah, I think founder market fit is, is so important to, to try to strive towards
first and foremost, and then kind of let the rest fall from there.
You kind of tell that like you've been through the wringer a bunch of times, like when you
are a founder and you have this list of like, I will not do this.
This is my constraint.
These are my cutoffs.
Like every grizzled founder has a list of things like they're not going to do anymore.
I just want to read through your list in the blog post because you've got a bunch of stuff
here.
You've said the product should not be mission critical.
You don't want to build anything where like you having downtime is going to like affect
your customer's businesses, which is like probably like a stress thing because it's
super strong.
Like if any hackers goes down, like I'm sad, but like no one's life is ruined.
Like no one has to go to any hackers and like, it's kind of good.
It's kind of relaxing.
Yeah.
You said your MVP, your minimum viable product must be shippable within a few months.
Uh, you said the market must already exist.
He said that making a sale shouldn't require more than a few decision makers.
You don't want to have to deal with whole giant pipeline of people.
You have to convince to buy your app.
You said that native apps should not be a minimum requirement.
People come to expect the native desktop app and like the Android app and iOS app and like
you just didn't want to have to build all that to sell your product.
And then finally you said the market should overlap with your existing audience that you've
already built up over years of building products and building in public and tweeting and speaking
and all sorts of stuff.
That last one is another, another piece.
Like there's this debate always goes on of like, is it, are you required to build an
audience in order to build a successful software company?
And I'm definitely one that would say like, no, you're absolutely not required.
What you should do, what is the smart thing to do is to always just look around you at
like, what are your unfair advantages that you potentially have and try to make the most
of those.
And for me, like this was a pretty, pretty considerable one.
Like, yeah, I've been investing in the podcasting for, for a while and kind of publishing online
and I could do myself a service by, by trying to find something that I could sell to those
existing people who are already kind of in the, in the circles.
How did you go from this point where you're kind of wandering through the wilderness?
I mean, you're literally in a cabin in the woods trying to think about what to do next
to deciding that you're going to do Savvy Cow, which is what you're working on today.
That was the most challenging time to be honest, because I wanted to get down to work on something.
Like I wanted to really sink my teeth into something, but I really didn't know what I
was going to do.
And I sort of had the summer in front of me and spent a lot of time like in a hammock
thinking and with my idea notebook and kind of scouring back through past ideas and, and
just kind of dreaming and having the pressure to come up with an idea is really hard.
But I was like, what are, well, I have a couple options and it's like plan B, plan C, they
weren't all that bad.
You know, I could go, could go get a job.
And I think there's absolutely zero shame in doing that.
That's where entrepreneurs a lot of times get some of their fresh ideas is from working
in someone else's company and observing all the things that are broken, you know?
And, and so I think that's a perfectly like reasonable path to go.
And I, I did entertain that.
I also don't want to treat ideas as too precious in their own, right?
I just wanted to kind of follow a framework of like, let's explore problems.
And cause there's tons of problems all around and kind of explore and see what, see what
I uncover.
And, and so I ended up working for a little while on a product called static kit.
That was a, um, it was a suite of tools for, for people using like static website technologies.
So like being able to embed forms and rich client side stuff on your static site.
I didn't really have a super clear vision for where to take that, but it was sort of
like a, an in-between, like I want to, I like this kind of technology space and I want to,
I want to play with some of this, some of this stuff and just kind of keep shipping
stuff into the world.
And so I did that for a while and I think it was still like a positive experience, even
though it wasn't like a, it wasn't a knockout success, but it kind of kept me busy and kept
me thinking for a little while.
I think that being like so public with everything, cause I'm, you're like relaying all these
experiences on your podcast, you know, that motivated like you to basically keep trying
and not go get a job.
Cause if like, no one knew what you're up to, you would probably would have been easier
to be like, I quit.
I'm going to get a job.
I'll come back next year.
I think that was definitely a factor.
Yeah.
And I did think about like stepping back from the podcast for, for a little bit of time
during that period.
But I was like, you know what, I, I don't want to get out of the game.
Ultimately, I was still, I still felt a strong pull to, to be in it in part because of, because
of the podcast and things like that.
And I thought that is a good forcing function, I think, but, but not always easy, not easy
on the ego either.
You know, I love, I love like social accountability.
I love having any sort of like, I don't know, pride or shame or status or reputation, like
any other people you can bring in to what you're doing.
Because if you think about it, like we all have that at like jobs, you know, if you have
a job, you probably have a boss, you probably have coworkers, you have other people who
can kind of see the output of what you're doing.
You know, maybe it's hard to explicitly always know that that's what's motivating you, but
it probably plays a role.
And then the second you become a founder, like unless you're broadcasting what you're
doing to lots of people, you kind of lose that motivating factor and it's just you.
And sometimes it's like easier to let yourself down than it is to let down an audience of
like thousands of people listening to your every word on your podcast and investor.
So like I, I raised some tiny seed funding basically shortly after the, um, after the
levels, the level wind down.
And that was sort of like a, that was Robin Einhart making a bet on me as a founder, you
know, and saying like, we think you're going to do some interesting things.
And so that was both a stress reliever, but also like caused me to put a lot of pressure
on myself, I think, because now, now I, now I'm dealing with other people's money.
I have other people have skin in the game here.
And so it's funny how a lot of times some of the things that should be a relief are
also like a big stressor.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I feel the same way with indie hackers at Stripe or it's like, Oh, this would be a relief.
I'm like done with the solo part, but it's like, no, actually it's big company bought
my company and I feel a lot of pressure to make it like a worthwhile purchase for them.
And I think that pressure is kind of good because like a lot of ways as an indie hacker,
if you were aiming for freedom or you're aiming to look like a really good lifestyle, you
kind of start your business and almost like on day one, you kind of feel like you've made
it.
You're like, I don't have a boss anymore.
I quit my job or, you know, I'm working for myself, you know, and it's really easy then
to just take all the pressure off yourself and be like, I'm going to live a life of freedom
and ease.
But like, you probably can't really do that until you've gotten to where you've gotten
with Savvy Cal, you know, until you've gotten to the point where you're profitable.
It's probably dangerous to start thinking that way until you've already been successful.
So ironically, choosing to be an indie hacker probably should mean choosing to put a lot
of pressure on yourself and to be accountable to other people until you get to that point.
Yeah, I think that's kind of the, maybe a hidden, a hidden secret or quality about indie
hacking, right?
Is like, there's a lot of people who kind of see the, you know, there's like the pockets
of like digital nomads and people who are like, I'm going to do the geo arbitrage game
and keep my expenses low and get just enough income so I can, I can have this, this lifestyle
of adventure or whatever, whatever you want to optimize for.
But I think also the, those of us who kind of get into this game of like running our
own companies also get tugged by that ambition factor.
And like, before you know it, like we actually do want to, want to do really interesting
things that stay challenged.
And that challenge kind of just draws you towards, towards more and more ambitious things,
which does kind of encroach a little bit on the, on the carefree, easy lifestyle part
that kind of entices a lot of people, you know, weird, almost opposite sort of what
your goal is.
You end up getting dragged into it and it's kind of like our own fault.
Like we do it to ourselves, but maybe there's just something more interesting about it overall.
Like maybe the dream that we want the super carefree easy life is not necessarily what
we want.
I think that might be sort of like the, yeah, the dream of like retiring on a beach after
you sell your company, which like, no, no one ends up actually doing that or being happy
doing that.
At least the kind of person who's going to create a super successful company is not the
kind of person who's wired to go do nothing for a very long time.
Yeah.
I think it's most fulfilled by challenging endeavors, ultimately.
I think I remember listening to a podcast, um, from, she was like the right hand executive
at Netflix and kind of talking about how like, like, yeah, the best days when you, when you
come home from work, the best days are when you're like collapse on the couch.
She was like, Oh my gosh, that was such a hard thing.
We just did.
And we accomplished it.
It's not the days where like, Oh, nothing really happened.
And I went in and sat at my desk for a little while and left early.
Like those aren't the fulfilling days or the ones who remember.
And it's like, it's weird because there's also like a lot said about sort of the toxic
Silicon Valley startup culture where everybody's like overworked, you know, and they're sleeping
under their desks and the whole team is staying up late.
Uh, but often when you talk to people in those situations, like that is like, those were
the best times.
Like the people really remember those times that they're bonded together.
It's almost like a tribal, you just go through hardships with people who are your comrades
and who are your colleagues.
And then you come out the other end and like, that's what you remember.
So let's talk about the, uh, the beginning of savvy cow, because eventually you decided
to start savvy cow and it's kind of fit your pattern.
You know, there already was one or two big incumbents in the space.
You were already doing this.
Well, why did you think that the world needed another scheduling application?
Yeah.
So I had become, I had been a user of, of Calendly for many years.
We integrated with them, um, at drip early, pretty early on, cause we were using them
for demos and we needed to like track that.
Like when someone scheduled something, we automatically put them in a workflow.
So I was like very, very aware of, of the tooling and kind of the problem space.
And of course I've used it to schedule customer interviews for all the products I've done
in the past.
So sort of understood like the underlying problem here, but the thing that really got
me intrigued by it was kind of observing like the weird power dynamic issue that arises
around using scheduling links.
So there are some, some pockets of the industry where people just literally refuse to use
them because it's just too faux pas, like it's too, too laden with landmines.
Like you might end up offending somebody.
And so they just always fall back to the inefficient way of scheduling times.
And then other people like are just, I want to use it, but other people are super hesitant.
And so it's just, it was a curious thing to me that like, there's this tool that, or this
whole class of tools that save people a ton of time.
And yet there's all this resistance to using them.
And it's both a product problem and a people problem.
Like there's, you know, there are like elements of etiquette and ways to like just communicate
well so that you don't turn someone off when you're sending, sending your communication
and including a link.
But like, so I think it's, it's twofold.
And I think that I wasn't seeing a lot of innovation happening on the product front
around like trying to actually make this better, make this a more collaborative experience,
reduce friction as much as possible for the scheduler.
I kind of felt like things were just sort of status quo for a while.
And yet this is a highly demanded tool.
I mean, I didn't plan on it on demand increasing even more during the pandemic because I started
like right around the beginning of the pandemic actually.
So that's what kind of got me interested in the problem space.
And I also kind of compared it against my, my rubric that we went through some of these
criteria that I've been building up over time.
Like people can use it in, in a single player mode, you know, an individual can just start
sending out links for themselves and then gradually their team can, can hop on.
It's important, but not like if I need 10 minutes of downtime to do some database maintenance,
it's not a big deal.
And so it kind of checked a lot of the boxes.
And so then just a question became like, well, do I even stand a chance against, you know,
extremely successful and an overall well-liked competitors like Calendly?
Right.
And can you explain to people like how an app like Calendly works?
I assume most people have like used this, but probably a lot of people have no clue
like what this a promise is even solving.
So I mean, you basically create your account and you attach, you link your calendar to
it.
So you, you authorize your Google calendar or Outlook calendar, whatever you use.
And then you create a link and the link basically has, it gives you your availability minus
any existing events you have on your calendar so that people can find a time to make it
so much easier to scale.
Cause I use this with like the podcast.
I'm like, Hey Derek, let's find a time.
I sent you like a savvy CalLink and you click it and you just like know exactly what times
are free on my calendar that I've specified and I don't have to do anything.
Then I just look at my calendar the next day, the next week, and like your event is on there.
It's like having almost like a, like a personal secretary or something or assistant who's
just helping scheduling.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And that's what like, you know, you're kind of more classic busy executive may, they may
have a personal assistant.
So instead of using a link, they would just like copy their assistant on an email thread
and say, all right, I'm going to hand you off to so-and-so to coordinate that nowadays.
The assistants are just using Calendly and savvy Cal on the lake too.
They're just like, okay, here's a link you pick something you're kind of staring this
idea in the face.
It's doing really well on your checklist.
I think probably the only item on your checklist that it might not be like perfect on is the
fact that like, you know, it might be mission critical to a small degree.
People might be upset if it goes down, but like you said, it's not the biggest deal in
the world.
Uh, but you've got to face down this huge incumbent that people kind of like it works
well enough.
Like I probably haven't had very much time using Calendly where I'm like regret using
Calendly.
Uh, what's your playbook for building an app that takes on a huge incumbent?
Like how do you know if it's a good idea to try to build something in a space where people
are already solving that problem really well?
I'm hesitant to say that it's a repeatable playbook because I think it's, you know, every,
every app is a little different.
Every industry is a little different.
But what I recognized here that gave me, that gave me confidence was that I sensed some
stagnation at some of the bigger incumbents slowing down a bit.
And that's kind of a natural thing to happen as you grow in size.
Like Calendly has hundreds of thousands of customers and you know, millions of people
using the product and you just, it's just hard to like turn that ship quickly, you know,
and be able to respond quickly to, to what customers are demanding.
And I started looking around and seeing a lot of, while there is a lot of love for the
product, there's also a lot of dissatisfaction out there on forums.
So you can kind of, I kind of did the thing of scouring places where people are talking
about not just Calendly, but all the, all the tools, you know, and, and a lot of people,
you know, publicly asking for things, expressing dissatisfaction with things on, and these
threads just kind of sitting around for a couple of years with no real response.
And that's, that's a sign that like this company is both really successful, like they're, they're
doing really well financially, but they're not responding so quickly anymore to what
customers are wanting.
And I think that's, that's where, that's the crack where an indie hacker has, has an opportunity
to like, and so I didn't know if it was going to look like, you know, carving out this little,
this little niche and was Savvy Cal going to become like scheduling for X, you know,
something very, very narrow and specific.
I wasn't sure how narrow I would have to go.
I mean, this product lends itself to more of a horizontal type of positioning just because
it is so broadly applicable.
And so that was sort of, I sort of held loosely onto that initially and just, you know, like
I think April Dunford's positioning book, which is one of my favorite resources.
She kind of talks about like intentionally keeping your positioning pretty broad because
you're trying to have like a big fishing net to, to capture a lot initially.
So it was like, kind of keep the net wide, but be on the lookout for very specific things
and ultimately kind of double down on, on something.
So I kind of chose this angle of like the awkwardness piece and really just kind of
tried to get my MVP done as quickly as possible, honestly, because beyond that, like talking
to potential customers, I got a lot of people expressing skepticism, like, I don't know,
man, I think this one's locked up already.
And so it did take a little bit of a leap.
I mean, right at the top of your landing page, it says sending your schedule scheduling link
shouldn't feel weird.
Like you're a hundred percent and the awkwardness and the feeling of it.
And like reading that, like I feel, I mean, I feel that pain, right?
I'm like, okay, that's definitely a problem that I've had with scheduling links.
It definitely feels a little bit awkward.
That's kind of a cool way to carve out your own niche in an industry that's already got
like, I wonder, what does Calendly's homepage say?
What is their sort of claim to fame, Calendly.com there says easy scheduling ahead.
So they're about ease of use, right?
It's super simple.
It's, it's easier than other apps.
You just have like your own sort of your own benefit.
And I think I got to, I got to draft off of a lot of the awareness that they've built
up too.
You know, like I'm primarily getting people who are coming from Calendly have been dissatisfied
with it, looking for the power dynamics stuff to be resolved.
And I mean, they, I think in the early days of Calendly, it was like, they were having
to teach people what this tool even is and how it works.
And so that's, that's another thing, like you ideally want to be in the position where
Savvy Cal is today, where it's like, there's a bunch of people who are already very aware
of this problem space.
And now there's like, they're looking for something a little different, um, on a few
things that, and if you can execute on it, that's where the opportunity lies.
I'm looking at this like an action because their homepage is all about educating people,
even still, it's like, you can schedule meetings without the back and forth emails.
And you can, you know, here's how it works.
It's what you do.
And your whole thing is a hundred percent predicated on people already knowing this.
Like, okay, scheduling your link shouldn't feel weird.
That only makes sense to people if they know what a scheduling link is.
And you say like, finally, a scheduling tool that both the sender and the recipient will
love.
Again, that only makes sense if people already know what this is.
So you're selling to like a kind of a more educated, more experienced market of, I guess,
disgruntled, uh, scheduling tool users.
Yeah, exactly.
How do you avoid some of the mistakes you made in the past though?
I mean, like for example, with, uh, level, one of the hard things was like, you just
had to spend a lot of time building features because you're taking on this incumbent like
Slack had already had a ton of features that people expect.
And it's probably the same with Savvy Cal.
You start off day one and like, guess what, like all, especially since you're sort of
catering to like these existing users, you already know they already have like some minimum
level of expectation for like, what does this do?
Everything that Calendly does, which might be a huge, like months log slog for you just
to copy all these features.
That was something I was deliberately trying to get out in front of this time around.
And really the way I mitigated it was engaging with anyone who came in, came in the door,
put their email address on.
I tried to spark a conversation with them to figure out like, okay, what exactly are
you looking for?
What's the minimum that you need in order to, to use this product?
And so I did push it pretty aggressively when, when I first started inviting people in June,
July, I was just a couple of months into the product.
And it was missing a ton of features.
I mean, we're still playing catch up on, on a lot of the long tail of features, you know,
that the people, people expect, but, but I found like there's actually, you know, kind
of the 80% rule.
There's a lot of people that are not, that are not using that other 20%, those other
20% of features.
It seems like a majority of people are just kind of, they just kind of need to be able
to present their availability and all the rest of the stuff.
It's like nice to have.
So trying to get clarity as early as possible on like, how essential is that?
Like is it a nice to have or was this a deal breaker?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I'm the, I'm the kind of person who doesn't really
need, like Calendly has a million features that I just don't need and all sorts of integrations
and things like, yeah, some people need it, but like, I just need the basics.
And then since you're kind of focused on like the scheduling screen, like I send somebody
the link, they click the link and they get like, you know, they see my calendar, but
like that screen that you have is super friendly.
It's like super customizable.
There's all this stuff that I can like put on there to make it like a good experience
for them so that kind of delivers on your value proposition of like, okay, it shouldn't
feel weird.
I shouldn't feel awkward.
I shouldn't feel like I'm insulting the person by sending them this link.
What about growth and like marketing?
Because the other thing that's hard is like, okay, well, yeah, the incumbents are sort
of creating this market.
They're educating people, but also like because they're the ones educating people, like everybody
knows their name and especially with the scheduling stuff, it's like a little bit viral where
like when somebody sends out a scheduling link, everybody now, the recipient sort of
hears about that.
It's kind of like greeting cards.
Nobody buys greeting cards and just keeps them for themselves.
Like everybody who buys a greeting card gives it to somebody else.
So it's like a naturally viral product.
How do you like this brand new player who no one's ever heard of cut through basically
the noise and like get people to start using you instead of counting?
How do you get people to even find you?
Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a great question.
I think that that quality of like every time someone uses my product, they're inherently
exposing it to other people.
That was one of the big kind of selling points to me in choosing to take on this endeavor
because that kind of viral loop is extremely powerful and in listening to like kind of
deconstructing how my competitors have grown, like that is kind of the number one by and
large kind of growth path for them.
So for me, it was kind of about working as hard as I could to recruit as many people
from my sphere who are listening to my podcast, following on Twitter or whatever to start
using it and, and then just inherently spreading it to, to their second degree contacts and
on that worked out because that's like the, it's the holy grail of like every software
engineer wants to build an app that once you build it, it just spreads itself and it's
just growing on its own.
You don't have to do anything because it's just naturally viral.
I think it's I do think it's working.
It's extremely hard to track, um, in a way that's like, that's not totally invasive of
privacy.
I felt like we've kind of taken a stand of like trying to, trying to use privacy aware
tooling as much as possible.
I'm a big fathom analytics fan, um, but like, yeah, figuring out all the multiple touches
that people have with the product and like, was that touch where they received a scheduling
link and scheduled something how, at what point did that touch occur in their awareness
cycle?
It's very hard to, very hard to suss out.
I want to get more sophisticated about it, but like anecdotally, we started, um, asking
kind of a question we added to our onboarding.
How did you hear about us basically to get, get some qualitative data on that.
And it definitely gets, gets cited quite a bit of like, Oh yeah, I used a, I used a link
for someone else.
So I think it is, I think it is working.
What else are you doing?
Are you doing any like content marketing or you doing like social media marketing?
Do you have a mailing list?
Like what else are you even trying to do besides relying on the word of mouth, Chris?
Yeah.
So what we've done, um, we've experienced some podcast ads, which are also very difficult
to track.
Um, aside from using a, using a coupon code when, you know, when you hear it mentioned
on the, on the ad.
Um, but I think that is definitely driving awareness.
We're working on some strategic SEO stuff.
So just kind of digging in, doing our keyword research, digging into that and, and, um,
making some strategic landing pages.
Um, we are kind of spinning up when the process of spinning up an affiliate program right
now.
Um, so it's sort of like a, it's a grab bag of things.
I like to, I love to reference the, the attraction book by Justin Maris and Gabriel Weinberg.
Um, and sort of their, they're thinking on like, you know, trying to craft things as
experiments as much as possible to suss out the viability of traction channels.
And that's sort of where we're at on, on trying to figure out like, what's, what's the real
breakout, like insert $1, get $3 back out the other side, uh, fly going to be, um, yeah,
just explore and exploit.
You got to explore a bunch of different options.
You got to put in enough effort such that like you can actually test it out and come
to like some sort of like believable conclusion as to whether or not it will work.
Um, but like not so much effort that you don't have time to try other channels and try other
things.
And then when you find something that works, you do exactly what you're saying, press the
gas pedal and go like a hundred percent on that.
But it's pretty like inspirational and heartening to see that like you haven't necessarily found
some like magic bullet and yet you still been able to get to like this level of success.
Like even the other things you haven't done, like you haven't perfected your user tracking
and figuring out where people are coming from and yet you're still able to make a profitable
company.
Like you don't necessarily have to do the entire kitchen sink to get to the point where
you have a successful business.
Yeah.
So much of business success, I feel like is like a, despite all of the things that we
have locked in, you know, like so many businesses and, and this is what I've learned in working
in, you know, drip post acquisition, seeing what lead pages look like on the inside.
I mean, most companies are pretty chaotic on the inside and there's, there's just a,
there's a lot of moving parts and a lot that, that doesn't end up working out.
And yet thankfully businesses just tend to march forward.
Well, it's pretty cool to see like how far you've come despite all this stuff.
And I think obviously you have a pretty bright future.
I mean, like any direction you go in seems like it's going to be promising.
Where do you think things will go from here?
Like, what are you excited about with Savvy Cow now that you've gone to this point of
profitability?
Yeah, this does feel like kind of a, kind of an inflection point for the business.
Like we've, we've made it past that, that like 10 K mark where it's like, okay, if,
if you can make it past that and growth is not plateaued, like you're, I think we're
onto something.
So I feel like it's that, that box is checked, which is a, allows me admittedly to breathe
a sigh of relief a little bit, you know?
And now the question becomes like, how do I think about expanding the team?
So that's kind of what I'm thinking about right now, like I'm wearing too many hats
right now.
So it's, it's, you know, I'm going to, I'm getting some help on support and starting
getting that ball rolling next week, I think.
And, and then looking to make my first engineering hire to really help contribute to the product,
which is, it's daunting because I know what a big deal it is to, to kind of make that
first, that first hire, you know, and I'm thinking about like, how do I want to, what
do I want my day to day to look like, and honestly, my, my fondest memories from building
drip were the earliest days where there was a couple of us that would come into an office
a couple of days a week.
We were still flexible.
We would work remotely a ton, but like being able to collaborate in front of a whiteboard
and then go grab happy hour later in the day was just, was really nice.
And I think, I think there will be a little bit of a resurgence of, of some partial like
in-person work with some of that like high fidelity human communication stuff.
That's really hard to replicate virtually.
And so yeah, I don't have that part figured out yet, but it's something I'm thinking through.
Like, yeah, that's kind of the fun stuff to think about because if you start a company,
you can structure it however you want.
And you can make it.
I mean, if you really don't want any human contact, you can be like, I want a remote
company.
We're not going to do video chat.
Zoom is not allowed.
Do your own thing.
And you only hire people who thrive.
Like if that's the life you want, you could do that, you know, if you want to hire people
who are local, who are extroverts, who want to meet in person, and you can do that and
have like a really great soul.
Like you can do literally anything that you want with your company.
And so like, you know, kind of that post where you're writing down like, what do I want with
my life?
I feel like that's a question you should probably always be asking yourself as a founder.
Like I'm still asking myself that with indie hackers every month, try to figure out where
I want to go.
You've been through a lot as a founder, you've had lots of ups and downs.
What's one takeaway you think a fledgling new indie hacker could take away from your
journey so far, Derek?
I think the probably the biggest piece of advice I would give is to, if you're like
me and you're an introvert and your natural tendency is to like to dive into the code
and kind of focus on product is to get outside of your comfort zone a little bit and really
try to actively engage in the community, whether that's online on a place like indie hackers
or in your local town.
I think if I reflect back on my own journey, like the biggest, the biggest driver towards
my success has been kind of the different kind of small groups that I've been a part
of mastermind groups and seeking mentorship that really helps you to, to like sanity check
your own assumptions and, and keep you on the right path when you have other people
who are kind of intimately aware of the stuff that you're working on and kind of sanity
checking your, your ideas.
I love it.
I've had the same exact experience introvert as well, spent years locked in my apartment
building stuff without talking to anybody and it didn't work very well.
And then the second I started something where I'm talking to people for a living, it worked
really well.
So introverts out there and make sure you're actually connecting with people and sharing
what you're up to.
Derek Rimer, thanks for coming on the show.
It's been a pleasure having you have to have you again.
Same way I've had Ben and Rob on a whole bunch of times.
I got to catch up.
Yeah.
Where can listeners go to learn more about what's up to you with Savvy Cal and everything
else nowadays?
Yeah.
So the, the, the product is at Savvy Cal.com.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I have a special coupon code for, uh, indie
hackers audience.
Just use indie hackers in the checkout flow to get your first month free.
And um, and then you can find me on Twitter at Derek Rimer.
Sweet.
I'll put the indie hackers coupon code and the show notes as well.
Thanks again, Derek.
Awesome.
Thanks for watching.