What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from
AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast. On this show,
I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what
it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How did they make
decisions both with their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes
their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn
from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Sergio Matei Diaz. Sergio, welcome to the show.
Hi, everybody. I'm Sergio Matei. I'm an entrepreneur and student, and of course, an
Andy Hacker.
And you're also the founder of Maker Log, a community that helps makers very similar to
Andy Hackers. So we're kind of related products. We're both catering to makers. We're both helping
to inspire them and pump them up and help them to be more productive. So it's pretty cool to have
you on the show, and I'm sure we're going to have a lot to talk about.
Absolutely. I've been watching what Andy Hackers has been doing. It's also been a constant
source of inspiration. I remember when I first added the Maker Log product to Andy Hackers,
and I had no stats to go along with it. So yeah, it has been fundamental in my progress
as an Andy Hacker.
Tell me about why you started Maker Log, because when I started at Andy Hackers, it was primarily
to help myself. I knew that I really wanted stories about founders that would inspire
me and teach me how to do what everybody else was doing. Why did you start Maker Log?
Well, Maker Log was all started when I first found the Maker community per se. So since
I was a child, I had been building little things for me and my friends. In fact, I've
always had a knack for business and technology. So I grew up watching Facebook and all these
huge companies coming up, and I wanted to make my own versions of them. So I started making
little products when I was a kid. I thought I made Facebook killers and whatnot, which
were obviously not true. But yeah, so eventually after a while building startups and slowly
progressing, I found out about the Maker community through very curious means. So there's this
very famous marker that everybody knows, levels, peer levels. Go follow him on Twitter if you
don't. Awesome guy. So he had launched this thing that was called Hoodmaps. And I checked
out his profile. I was like, oh, he's a maker of Maker community. What's this? And started
exploring the whole community. And I stumbled upon this site that was called Whipchat by
another awesome maker called Mark Holbrodge. So essentially I was like, oh, this is a site
that is a community for makers. And wow, it's a maker community. Cool. I want to join. Sadly,
it was really expensive. So I just decided, you know what, I really like this concept.
I'm going to build my own little productivity app like Whipchat for myself. Right. And start
building it. And at the time I was in this another maker community called the Maker's
Kitchen. So I had built it and I started using it and I started posting about it on the Maker's
Kitchen. Right. And people started picking up on it. Right. People wanted to try it.
Some people were like, oh, this is really cool. Kept using it and using it. I started
building more features and whatnot. And eventually it was made public and launched and it's been
growing since then. It's funny you're inspired by Whip. I was a member of that community
back before Mark started charging for it. Luckily he snuck in there. I'm also a member
of Maker Log. But I'm sure people listening, you know, might not be a member of either
community. So give us a sense of what goes on here. If I'm a brand new Maker Log member,
I sign up for the community. What am I going to be doing there?
Well, Maker Log is essentially a worldwide community of like makers shipping products
together in public. So it turns out shipping in public, logging your daily tasks and letting
other makers, for example, comment on them, praise them or, you know, generally just being
really public about the process of building your products is a great strategy for staying
productive. So we also have this thing called the Streak Model, right? Which is also, you
know, taken from the genius of Whip. Which essentially allows you to gain streaks for
every day that you ship consecutively. And it's really, really effective at maintaining
productivity over long spans of time. Essentially, it's just that. A community of makers building
in public and maintaining streaks.
Let's talk about these streaks for a little bit because that is like the main sort of
feature that I think of when I think of Maker Log. Like I'm going to ship, I'm going to
check out some tasks today and then tomorrow I'll come back and I don't want to lose my
streak so I'll check out some tasks tomorrow over and over again. And people have built
up and seen streaks like hundreds of days where they've worked on their projects.
The Streak Model is really great because it also allows for gamifying your productivity,
right? So you see, when you log on to get MakerLog.com, you immediately see on the sidebar
top streaks and you see that and you're like, you know what? I want to beat them, right?
So you're able to gamify productivity in a way. And it turns out really valuable for
indie hackers that are trying to bootstrap their businesses because they generally stay
really productive over these long spans of time.
Yeah, I saw a post on Twitter. I can't remember who posted it, but he basically was asking
a question, has anybody seen an example of a social network that makes you more productive?
And I think he was just sort of railing against sort of the Instagram and Facebook culture
where everybody's spending so much time, you know, envious of others and posting photos
and doing stuff like that, but it's really kind of sapping humanity of its productivity.
Then I look at something like MakerLog or WhipChat or indie hackers and all these communities
are explicitly geared towards making people more productive. And I don't know if there's
any more hardline sort of feature to do that than the streaks, which are literally saying
like, hey, the only way that you can win at this game, the only way that you can really
be on the top and be popular here is if you are putting in work every single day. Why
was it important for you when you created this community to, I guess, make sure that
other people could be more productive?
Well, it all started because I really just wanted to become more productive myself. I
also struggled with that problem, right? So I'm a maker in my free time. I am a full-time
student basically, and I've been a full-time student. Well, I've been a full-time part-time
maker for as long as I can remember. And something that really does sap my time is, you know,
scrolling endlessly through feeds. And my generation grew up with that and it's a hard
problem to fight. Maker log helps me really become much more productive due to its streak
model. You know, I also think it's not just only the streak model, but that sense of public
accountability that comes with making everybody see what you do on a daily basis, you know,
knowing that if you don't post one day, there'll be a huge gap in your feed and, you know,
people will just know that you're unproductive. All of that plays into creating a very interesting
alternative, a niche alternative to mainstream social media, or a productive alternative
to mainstream social media.
One of the things that makes social media so addictive is the fact that we are inherently
social creatures who care an immense amount about what other people are doing, especially
if those people are people that we look up to or if they're friends or relatives. And
that domain is so different than work, especially if you're an indie hacker. Work tends to be
a pretty solo endeavor. You've got your own to-do list that no one else is looking at.
No one else is even assigning tasks to you, really. It's all internally driven. You've
got your own email inbox. You've got probably, you know, a solitary environment. You're probably
not working from an office. And what you've done with Maker Log is you sort of flipped
the script here. You made it so that all of these tasks are social. So I'm not just working
on my tasks by myself, but I'm showing them to other people. I get to see other people's
behind the scenes tasks instead of just seeing, you know, whatever marketing message they're
putting out on Twitter. I get to see, you know, what actually went into that product
on launch. What were they doing in the days leading up to it, etc. And I think it's just
a great perspective to have to see what others are working on. What are some of the coolest
things you've seen people working on and their task lists on Maker Log?
Well, there's a lot of diversity within Maker Log. There's people that aren't strictly tech
people, right? So you have designers, we have people building physical businesses. We have
a huge variety of people on site that are shipping something in public, right? There's
a lot of projects. There's a lot of individual content creators, which is really cool. In
fact, one of my favorites is definitely Fajar Sittik. So there's this person from Singapore
that is called Fajar. You should all check him out on Twitter, Fajar Sittik. He essentially
is a content creator and influencer and also a bit of a digital nomad. So seeing him ship
all of his personal projects, seeing him ship all the content creation he does, which is
an incredible insane schedule. Dude is pumping out podcasts, videos. If you can create it,
he will ship it, right? So seeing all of that stuff is really, really inspiring. And generally
there's a large amount of projects. Leave Me Alone from James Diving's and Danielle.
That's also been an insanely successful product. In fact, they launched something today. There's
a lot of products. There's a huge intersection between industries here and people inspiring
each other.
How did you find these people and convince them to start using Maker Log? Because there's
so many different makers all over the world. Quite frankly, they arguably have better things
to do. They should be working on their projects. They should be hacking away. How do you get
a community like this off the ground and get your first users in the door?
It all comes down to really just creating a sense of community. Traditionally, making
is a really lonely activity generally. You create products. For a long time, I was creating
products really in a really lonely way. I would launch them into the void. I would get
feedback from close people and my family and friends. And I think Maker Log just panders
to that. Maker Log solved this problem. I think a lot of people from the Maker Community
felt that same thing I felt for a really long time. That making was really lonely, that
I had nobody to connect with, nobody to discuss these things I was building with.
And when I started finding about the Maker Community and how it actually exists, there
were a lot of people feeling that way. And I guess that kind of helped boost Maker Log's
growth.
Yeah, I think about this when I think of any product, any company, what problem does it
solve for people? What is the actual desire that they have that's currently not being
fulfilled that is going to get them to use your particular creation? And with something
like Maker Log or even Indie Hackers, it's actually quite a lot of problems. A huge one
is the one that you mentioned. People are lonely and we're social creatures. We don't
really want to be alone all the time, especially for working on a new project. We don't have
coworkers. We don't have an office we can go to. So you're solving that problem for
people.
No, just the problem of being productive. How do you motivate yourself to get to work
on something every single day if you don't have a boss who's timing you, coming into
the office or expecting you to turn in some deliverables or coworkers who are depending
on you?
And I think having this accountability, this public streak system where others can say,
hey, why did you leave streak? What happened is super motivating. And it's actually just
a sort of a great trick for making sure that you can live up to your goals and your expectations
that you set for yourself as a maker.
Absolutely. Quite frankly, when you're starting up, we all know that starting up is like a
very risky activity, right? The odds are stacked against us. You need something to motivate
you and Maker Log for a lot of the time for me, it's the thing that motivates me. Not
because I've made it, not just because I made it, but because I log in and for example,
I'm feeling down. I log in and all I see is people shipping things. I see people getting
things done. People that say, hey, I received my first client. And suddenly I feel like,
you know what? I really want to ship right now. I find myself opening VS code or something
and get started. And next thing I know I'm coding. So Maker Log, it's a whole thing that
inspires you. It's a place where you find inspiration. It's a place where you find motivation
through gamification of productivity.
It helps us who don't have bosses stay accountable too, because we need to be accountable somehow.
As you mentioned, I think it helps us combat the risks and downsides of being entrepreneurs,
which are finding inspiration. And of course, as you mentioned, not having a boss, which
is kind of more of an upside, but at the same time and accountability sense, it can be a
downside for those of us who just need that kick to get started.
So the tricky part with any sort of social product like a community is all of the problem
solving aspects, all the value that you're describing, being motivated by seeing other
people, having accountability, being inspired, that comes from other people. And on day one,
when it's just you coding Maker Log, no one's using it, it seems like it could be pretty
tricky to get those first few users in the door and have them keep coming back to a community
that's essentially empty. How did you get over that hurdle with your community?
Social media. The first big boost of users, aside from getting on Maker's Kitchen and
getting them to be early adopters, was social media. So it turns out that most of the Maker
community, which is Maker Log's niche, is on Twitter. So a genuine interest, and this
was something I learned when I was marketing Twitter that I really never had even thought
about before. This is also a little inspired on Peter Level's methodology of being a really
honest marketer. So at first, all I would do is go on Twitter and look at what people
were building. I could start following a bunch of indie hackers and makers. I would look
at what they were building, and I would think like, oh, this is really interesting to share.
So I started sharing people, I started motivating people, and all from not just trying to market.
Because of course, it is marketing. That's what it is. But also from a genuine place
of interest. And I think that was a big part of what made Maker Log really special at first.
And it still is part of Maker Log's core marketing philosophy. We try to be as genuine as possible.
We are generally interested in people's projects because indie hacking, we're all in the same
kind of boat together trying to make it in this world. And the initial strategy was definitely
to just be genuinely interested in people's projects. And that actually helped Maker Log
get a really long way. In fact, probably most of the followers that we got in the first
place were just people that I retweeted personally just coding and having TweetDeck on another
space on Magos. But yeah, it all came from a place of being genuine with the community
and not trying to see more than I was too. Because Maker Log started out as just me making
a thing for myself. And I never really tried to hide that. So it also kind of plays into
that sense of genuine marketing. Maker Log has always been a small thing. It's growing,
but we don't try to hide that we're small.
What does small mean to you? Give us a sense of Maker Log's size and what's your revenue?
Well, we're currently, our MRR is close to $200 or $150. It does fluctuate a little.
But sure, it's not a lot compared to other things. But generally, I'm pretty happy with
it and it's growing slowly.
What is the business model exactly? Who pays for Maker Log?
Well, gold members. We have a gold membership that gives you a lot of things like that elusive
dark mode, which everybody likes. Dark mode, removing ads, milestones, posting milestones,
which are kind of like updates. A few little features that people really like and just
generally wanting to support the platform. Most of the people that pay for gold are just
people who really want to support Maker Log's mission of staying a really open and inclusive
platform.
Let's talk about effort and hustle a little bit. Because as somebody who started a community,
just listening to you tell your story. I know it's an incredible amount of work to get a
community off the ground. Quite frankly, when you don't have a lot of people in your community
in the early days, you have to be bringing all of that energy and effort and communication
and sharing to the forefront.
So with Indie Hackers, that was me on the forum making all sorts of posts, dozens of
posts every single day, hundreds of comments with you and Maker Log. That was you on Twitter
promoting people's projects and celebrating them and motivating them and inspiring them.
Where did that energy come from with you in particular? I mean, you didn't have anyone
who was looking at your streaks yet and who was supporting you. How did you find all of
that energy to be such a hustler?
A genuine place of interest. I really, really care deeply about the Maker community. I care
about seeing everybody being successful. I care about everybody trying new things out,
experimenting, creating projects. I really enjoy going on Twitter and seeing what people
are building, not only because I want to see other people succeed because it's inspiring.
Just as I got really inspired by looking at the Maker Log feed, I hop on Twitter and
I start marketing, quote unquote, but it's just me looking at things that I really like
and retweeting them.
Generally, a place of, this sounds kind of corny, but a place of love. I really am grateful
for finding the Maker community because I was really lonely before it. Maker Log was
my way of giving back to this new community of people that I found.
Tell me about the way that you've infused your personality into your community because
every community kind of takes on some of the personality attributes of its creator. I know
that Maker Log has its own very specific culture. What do you think belongs in Maker Log? What
doesn't belong in there? What characterizes its culture?
I think what belongs in Maker Log is everybody. We strive to create a really inclusive culture.
In fact, the reason Maker Log was created, as I said earlier, because other communities
were a little exclusive in that sense. We strive being inclusive. We love seeing really
hardworking people, really talented entrepreneurs. Pretty much everybody in Maker Log creates
something. That's amazing. It's amazing hopping on there and seeing what everybody's building,
what we don't want in Maker Log are spam bots. Go away.
Yeah, I don't want those either.
Generally, yeah, we strive on being really inclusive. We just want anybody who creates
a product tech or no tech. In fact, if you're doing no code, that's actually really cool.
No code, design, physical businesses, there's some of them out there. If you create something,
you belong in Maker Log and we will welcome you with open arms. In fact, I love because
Maker Log has a little button at the end of the register thing that allows you to just
tweet, hey, I just joined Maker Log, hashtag together remake. One of my favorite things
is going on Twitter, seeing those things and replying to them, welcome home. Because generally,
Maker Log strives to be really inclusive and I love bringing new makers in.
You know, it's been said that if you build something for everybody, you're really building
something for nobody, that people like niches, people like really specific products and services
that appeal to them. And they are always going to choose something that's specific to people
like them over something really general purpose that applies to everybody. And yet you with
Maker Log have been able to build something that is super open and inclusive and that
people really like. So what's your secret? How do you build something that people like
while also being open and inclusive to everybody?
Well, generally, Maker Log kind of the streak model in the first place, which is at the
core of Maker Log right now, encourages quality over quantity, right? So people that tend
to interact the most are people who have either a really high streaks or that really are generally
interested in other people's projects. If you go on Maker Log, you are not going to
go there probably to waste your time. You're going to go there to either A, get inspired,
ask for help on the forums, for example, or post some achievements and tasks you've done.
So the fact that Maker Log is so limited in terms of, well, not limited, but so the fact
that it encourages this productivity culture, which is a huge part of the whole thing, right?
The culture that it encourages is a huge part into why people see a lot of value in Maker
Log as a productivity to the culture that it encourages in terms of becoming a sustainable
business in terms of becoming an indie hacker and a successful maker, right? I think it
all comes down to culture, generally.
So it's not that Maker Log is for everybody, but it's for everybody so long as they care
about quality over quantity and so long as they care about actually shipping and building
real projects.
Yeah, of course. I think that that's one of the strengths of Maker Log, right? If you're
not a Maker Log, you're probably being productive, which is really helpful in terms of keeping
quality up on the site. And I moderate a lot to make sure that people, for example, don't
spam on the feed, which is a problem that happens when you start growing and it gets
a little annoying. But luckily Maker Log hasn't hit too many roadblocks.
Yeah, trust me. I know all about spam.
Oh man, I can't not imagine.
Moderating a community is very rewarding, but there's also a lot of challenges, especially
as the community grows, because when you have 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people in your community,
you start having to deal with these 1 in 1,000, 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000 people where they're
just outliers.
Let's talk about monitoring.
There's been a lot of challenges.
Yeah, I bet. Let's talk about some of the social challenges with moderating a community.
And having it take the shape that you want, because, for example, you've got this streak
culture, this sort of hustle culture where you're motivating people to work harder, to
work longer, to not miss a day, which is really great if people are trying to be more productive.
But there's a downside to that too, which is that potentially people can burn out. People
can work too hard. People can get too obsessed with putting in the work and working long
hours and not focus enough on making the right decisions or taking care of themselves. Have
you seen that become a problem at all with Maker Log?
It has been a problem. Over time as Maker Log started growing, I started noticing that
I encouraged a culture that I didn't necessarily like. So the streak model, while it has a
lot of ups, it has a lot of downs too. And one of those downs is that generally it can
tend to cause burnout. When you see people having 365-day streaks, crazy stuff like that,
you start to wonder, there has to be a lot of balance there. And as we all know, everything
in life is about balance. And sometimes makers in that whole motivation to hustle and get
things done, we can get a little too carried away. So Maker Log has tackled this problem
trying to innovate around the streak model in a way. So I started thinking, what is the
way that we can encourage people to rest while at the same time keeping that incentive to
come back and continue their streaks?
So one of the things we came up with, well, I came up with, was basically rest days, which
work kind of like vacation days. Essentially over time as your streak grows, every 10 days
you gain one vacation day, which you can use to take a day off and not break your streak.
So it has helped a lot of makers out with their health, especially since a lot of people
really just don't want to lose their streak, right? So that's the one thing you've got
to really acknowledge when working the streak model. People hate losing their streaks. There's
a lot of angry support messages to back this up. Generally, people hate losing their streak,
but a way to encourage health while letting people keep their streaks is just by allowing
them to take breaks without breaking the streak. It has turned out pretty well. We called it
Strakes 3.0 and it really has helped boost overall health in the platform.
What about you? You said that you've been burned out before. You've been overworked
and maybe hustling a little bit too hard. How do you recognize when you're burned out
and also what's your strategy for maybe taking a step back?
Oh, man. So for a while, when MakerLox started growing really hard, I started putting a lot
of work into it, a lot of sleepless nights, especially since I was studying. I'm a full
time student, so I have a lot of studying to do. I started putting a lot of extra time
and generally not caring for myself well as I should have, right? So I got a little too
carried away there to the point that it was just unsustainable. The stress was getting
a lot to me and I just said, I'm going to take some time off. And this was little after
realizing that Strakes 3.0 was needed and that the culture I was pushing was not necessarily
something I aligned with. And the fact that it happened to me personally confirmed it.
I didn't have much balance at the time. And I took like four, five months off, which is
an awfully long time. I thought MakerLox would just crumble in the meantime. Actually,
this is kind of funny, kind of a funny story. I don't know if this happens to a lot of people.
Makers kind of feel a lot of guilt when they step away from the products, which is kind
of a big part of why makers don't take breaks. We feel this guilt that we're not working,
we're not hustling and whatnot and we're kind of wasting time even though we're just focusing
on ourselves. And that was something I had to battle through those five months. That
feeling of you're not being productive, stop what you're doing. It was really tough, but
eventually I got through it and I started finding balance in my life. I found a lot
of things that worked for me. I found a lot of things that made me more productive, more
energetic, more focused, and it's been going well. I reconnected with family and friends
and I came back with a new approach to MakerLox and generally this year we're probably going
to push a lot more health-related stuff because I think it is the path forward for this community.
I think I cannot continue pushing that culture when I saw the effects it had on me, right?
And even though streaks are really useful and I still love them, which is why the Rust
Ace feature has been really useful. The model desperately needs to work. The hustle culture
is a culture I do not approve of. I don't think that hustle grind hard mentality is
a great thing. And I'm working really hard to fight that on MakerLox and make sure that
everybody takes their breaks and everybody has their balance and encouraging that through
the platform, which is a huge challenge considering we're a productivity platform, but we wouldn't
encourage healthy productivity. Another thing I've seen you be vocal about
on Twitter and elsewhere is what you call launch and dump culture. So what's that about?
My problem with launch and dump culture, what I call launch and dump culture is essentially
that the maker community at times can be a bit of an echo chamber. So MakerLox, well,
not specifically to MakerLox, but the maker community in general. It's everywhere. Yeah,
product time and the hackers happens on every platform. Of course. So the maker community
has a bit of a problem, especially with makers launching their products. And this happened
to me actually with makers launching the products in the community and believing they are validated
just because of the amount of cloud they receive or feedback from the community, even though it's
pretty much all an echo chamber. Launch and dump culture is strongly correlated to this. So it's
essentially launching projects just to kind of feel validated in the sense of feeling validated
within the community, not just necessarily validating a product idea per se, a sustainable
business. That's just a thing I personally have a problem with, not the official community of MakerLox
in any way. I think makers can just create whatever they want, whatever they wish, whatever
they want. But in my opinion, I align more towards creating sustainable businesses. And
the echo chamber has been a problem constantly in trying to educate people into what validation
is in terms of creating a startup. And it's really a missing meeting, right? Launching on
something on Twitter and the maker committee and everybody retweeting it, a launch day and
people going crazy, right? And you can mistake that for validation, even though it's not. So
it's something I've been trying to educate, you know, and change the culture around it to turn
MakerLox into more of an honest feedback tool, but not a validation place. You don't go on MakerLox
to validate your products unless you're targeting the maker community, which is not a great target
either. You know, it's fascinating how many of these sort of Goldilocks problems there are where
you don't want things to be too hot, but not too cold either, right? You don't want to hustle too
hard to the point where you're not making good decisions, you're not sleeping, you're burned out.
But you also don't want to not work or ever get motivated to get started on your dream or
get started on your dream. And so you have to find like the right zone. And with the
launch and dump culture, it's kind of the same thing. Like you want to talk to other makers,
you want to rely on their support and their feedback to feel good about what it is that
you're doing. But you don't want that to completely replace your need to build something that's
useful for your actual customers. And if it's just your colleagues pumping you up and saying like,
Hey, you launched this thing, that's great. But no one's actually using it. And you're sort of
doing what you're saying and being validated entirely by the feedback from your colleagues
and not from your actual customers. And you're going to end up building things that no one really
wants and not maintaining your motivation and launching things and then dumping them the next
week. I actually faced this problem when I was launching co-work, which we're going to talk about
later. So what happened with co-work is I set my mind out to not validate based on the initial
launch reaction from the maker community, but likes can be a powerful tool, right? So you kind
of think that the whole echo chamber kind of tricks you into believing that your product is
validated and then people really do want it. And it's all about balance. And this is really,
as you mentioned, it's all about balance. You have to look past all of this stuff. Sure. You can
receive feedback from the community. You have a balance in the sense of receive feedback from
the community. Feel good about yourself. I mean, you created a product and people are changing your
on. People are inspired by your work, but don't take it as validation. As you said, balance out
your thoughts here, right? That is probably my biggest lesson that I've learned in a while,
now that it's undergoing a pivot. And I figured out how wrong I was in a lot of things, right?
And that whole experience alone made me realize that, hey, this is a culture problem that I need
to tackle because a lot of makers are probably going to fall into the same trap. Echo chambers
are powerful stuff. So let's talk about co-work, which is this new product that you started
building and you had a different validation process for it. What is co-work? Why did you
start working on it? Co-work is basically a productivity tool for research teams. So that's
quite an odd audience for me to tackle. But so after co-work kind of did not work, it was an
usually tool for remote teams to stay together, basically a maker-long enterprise, right? Which
I thought was amazing as every entrepreneur thinks when they built their idea. It didn't really work
out. I started building features and whatnot, but I wasn't really listening to the actual science.
I had zero customers about after two or three months and I said, you know what? No. So I entered
into this customer discovery bootcamp that was recommended by people at the amazing University
of Puerto Rico Center of Innovation. Shout out to those folks, really amazing people. They recommend
this camp. That's a customer discovery bootcamp for validating your product ideas through a whole
lean focused approach. It's called iCorps. It's here in Puerto Rico and from Grupo Vallacán,
which is a local kind of a charity for entrepreneurs. We're pushing forward the whole entrepreneurial
ecosystem here in Puerto Rico. Generally, once we started talking to customers, because at this
point I had a teammate, I still have a teammate. Once we started talking to customers, we realized,
oh wait, nobody wants this. We realized that we were tackling the wrong problem and the wrong
people. So short listening and we found that academic research teams have a lot of problem
coordinating their tasks, not just in coordination, but also in time management. So we found kind of
a bit of a problem there in EnReech, which is really interesting tackle. So we started pivoting
and yeah, that's where we're at right now. I'm currently building an MVP to validate this or
start the learning process because a lot of things, iCorps taught me a lot of things and
the lean start methodology has really influenced the way I think.
I'm looking forward to start learning from the MVP and seeing if I can find a problem to tackle
and some customers to build a business around. So I went from maker log for the enterprise,
which after a few months you didn't get any customers for, then you joined this basically
customer development bootcamp. You learned how to talk to customers, validate an idea,
sort of building a tool for scientific researchers. And now you're pivoting again.
Well, going back to the whole equi-chamber thing, I think that number one, if you're in a community,
if you're in a maker community, indie hacker community, anything of that sort, don't mistake.
That initial rush of makers like promoting your projects as validation. It's not. Talk to your
customers. Absolutely go out there and talk to your customers. It's the best thing you can do.
The community are not your customers, so you can absolutely listen to them. You can get feedback.
I mean, people spotting little bugs on your homepage and whatnot, it's really useful.
But don't mistake it as validation is probably the best, the most important thing I've learned
in the past couple of months. Another thing I learned was that sunk cost fallacy is a powerful
thing. One of the things that was really hard for me to accept when I decided to pivot to co-work
was that, okay, so I had the customer data. I had empirical data, massive spreadsheet of people's
actually people's problems and their feedback. So I was looking at this empirical data and
I couldn't spot anything, anything to tackle because I was still in that sunk cost fallacy
of co-work will work. My idea is great and whatnot. That was very wrong. And I learned to not be
afraid of listening to the data you have. Empirical data is data. That's probably one of the biggest
lessons to data is data. When your customers are telling you something, don't go for your vision.
Listen to the customers. They're the ones who are going to buy your product. And just generally,
I often say that in the past few months, I learned to become a true entrepreneur,
becoming data-driven, listening to customers, going after and doing those customer discovery
interviews, a lot of them, like a hundred, was one of the best things I've ever done
in terms of me coming out of my shell and learning to listen to customers and forgetting that even
though vision is a great thing and you've got to have it if you're going to become an entrepreneur,
customers are the one who matters here. They have the wallets. And if you're going to build
something, it's going to be for them. So listen to what they tell you.
It all comes back to what we were talking about earlier. Again, just balance. You can't go 100%
vision as an entrepreneur. You have to balance that with real data from your customers. And
I see the same thing a lot. And I've also been in the same position a lot where I've had this sort
of blind optimism, this absolute confidence that whatever it is that I'm building is going to work.
And there are projects that I worked on for literally years that were not working. They're
very clearly not working. If I hadn't been so bought into the sunk cost fallacy, I would have
just cut my losses and started something new. And when I did, things worked out really well. But
I took years to get there. So I can't agree with that advice enough. Absolutely. Sunk cost fallacy
is really, really powerful. For me, it was a matter of looking at the data right in front of
my eyes and not wanting to act on it. Exactly. That was really tough. Looking at the data,
telling you, hey, your vision was wrong. Everything you're doing is absolutely wrong. And still
thinking, but I built this, but I built it. I wrote so many hours. I wrote so much code.
But one of the most precious things in life is time. And eventually, you might have spent a
month building the MVP, but if you're going to waste years chasing something that will never
work, that costs right out. Stop what you're doing and focus on something else. It's an investment
in your success. It's one of the most, I think, insidious things about hustle culture gone wrong
as well, where a lot of people, it's not that they're not working hard enough. It's that they're
not working on the right things. They haven't asked the right questions. They don't have the
right hypotheses. And so what they really need to do is take a step back and change their approach.
But there's so much of a focus on, hey, if things aren't going well, what you need to do is just
work 90 hours a week instead of 60 hours a week. Then things will break through. And number one,
that usually doesn't help you when you just end up adding lots of features or doing lots of things
that don't matter to an already bad idea. But then you feel worse because you invested so much
time and effort into it. It's harder to pull away. You feel worse when things don't work out.
So you got another reason not to try to solve every problem by working as hard as possible.
Yeah, that's another problem. You just touched on another problem of the hustle.
Hustle really hard on grind mentality. A lot of entrepreneurs think that the solution,
especially engineering-focused entrepreneurs, right? Us engineers, we tend to think that
these kinds of problems can be solved by just adding features. You might be adding features,
but the core value proposition is just not there. You're not offering value, right? And you will
end up with, at the end of the day, you'll just end up with enterprise software that nobody wants.
Exactly. So tell me about what's going on in your life right now. You've still got
Maker Log. You've still got co-work, which you're working on pivoting.
What are you really working on the most? What's absorbing most of your time?
I'm currently working on two things at the moment. Well, three things. Maker Log, getting
a new version, a whole reassign, and rethink of the Maker Log interface and the core idea of
the community. Getting that out the door right now is currently one of my biggest priorities.
Building the MVP for co-work. So as I said, co-work is currently pivoting,
and I want to start that learning loop as soon as possible. So I'm building an MVP. It's really
simple. I often joke that us engineers, we have a little demon right in the left. Do you know those
movies where the guys have demons right in their shoulders saying, oh, do this. And then the angels
right here, oh, do that. I've been fighting that engineer, a demon, a little engineer that stands
on my shoulder and says, two little features. Stop what you're doing. Keep building. But no,
this time I'm actually building an MVP. So building that MVP to start learning as soon as
possible is one of my biggest priorities. And last but not least, turning my ventures data-driven.
So for a long time, I was focusing a little too much on vanity metrics, and I was measuring the
wrong things. Instead of measuring user behavior and core metrics to optimize, I was looking too
much at the gross, which is something I learned back in iCores. So focusing on the statistics
that matter, measuring and experimenting a lot is part of my mission for this year.
Tuning maker log into becoming much more profitable while still maintaining the inclusivity aspect.
And yeah, just generally optimizing, optimizing this year and experimenting a lot, not just with
tuning core metrics, but also pivoting co-work until something sticks. And
trading new things from new problems that I find that customers may have.
It's a lot of stuff. I mean, having not one project, but two projects, and also wanting
both of them to become data-driven. How do you avoid burning yourself out, working too many hours
while having all these projects, while also making sure that you're productive enough to
actually move forward and it's not going to take you five years to get to where you want to go?
Balance. Definitely balance. I try to squeeze out the most of my day, but I also prioritize
friends and family and my partner, which has been a huge help in the process. I prioritize them
over anything making related, going out with the friends, going out to the beach,
hanging out with my partner, focusing on what really matters in life, right? And prioritizing
that over my work when in the past it was the inverse has been instrumental to keeping my
health in check. Also maintaining routine. I found that I really do work better with routine.
I set up my university schedule, so I finish most of my classes really early in the day.
So I have the rest of the day to plan and do whatever I need to do,
which can be marketing, coding, ops, anything. And at the same time,
plan to do things with friends and family. Generally just balance. This year in the past
few months has been all about finding balance for me and it's really giving great results.
I feel much more focused. I feel great, honestly. And that's definitely going to reflect on my work
on Maker Log. Yeah, you look happy. You look like you have all the energy of a healthy college
student. I don't know very many people who could juggle having all those projects and a personal
life and a partner and go to school at the same time and yet you're managing to do it and you're
a pretty prolific maker as well. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to paint a roasty picture
either. It gets tough. It gets really tough to managing so many projects and dividing my time.
I have a lot of problems, especially dividing my time. Figuring out what to work on next. Coding
is really attractive with marketing, for example, but I have to market too. Finding time to stream
on Twitch because I also stream on Twitch a lot. Follow me, twitch.tv. Planning time for all of
those things is hard. It's not a roasty picture at all, but I am confident that I can be healthy
while I'm at it and feel happy because of the balance that I am finding. Yeah, that prioritization
work is extremely tough and I think focusing always ends up meaning as an entrepreneur that
there's a lot of stuff you want to do, a lot of stuff that people might say you should be doing
that you still just don't have time to do. It never feels good not doing things that you feel
like you have to do, but that's what focus is about. You can only do the most important things.
A lot of people listening in are fledgling founders. They're trying to figure out how to focus,
they're trying to figure out how to prioritize, they're trying to figure out how to come up
with maybe even just one good idea, whereas you're working on several. What's your advice for someone
who's just now getting started as a maker? What do you think they should take away from your story
and your learnings? Join MakerLog. I say that as a bit of a joke and also plug, but finding a
community that supports you and encourages you to do what you love and helps you inspire you
into finding passion to apply to other projects is really, really instrumental to at least
all I've done. I'm confident to say that this period of self-growth couldn't have happened
if I had not had the community behind my back. Find a community that really supports you.
Find a community that you can be inspired by, feel more productive when you're in it, and join
places like MakerLog, join places like IndieHackers, plug to you guys, you guys are awesome. Find
people you can really connect with because it really does help. Another thing is find balance.
Don't prioritize your work over everything because it seems attractive to spend entire nights
coding and getting things done and it really does give you a nice little dopamine boost to
take something off your checklist. But it's not healthy on the long run and I learned that the
hard way. A few hours of break weekly or a few days of break weekly could have
solved that problem altogether. Prioritize your family, your friends, your family over hustle
because at the end of the day, this is something that MakerLog does struggle with too.
We see that people are being really productive. We see that they're doing everything. It makes us
want to hustle and grind really hard too, but think about yourself too. Think about your health,
think about your mental state, and think about how to stay healthy in the process. MakerLog is
definitely going to focus on that this year, trying to help encourage this whole health-first
culture. But yeah, I think those are my biggest lessons.
Join MakerLog, find a community of people who inspire you but
don't get carried away and make sure to maintain balance.
Absolutely.
Sergio Mate, thank you for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Can you tell listeners again where they can go to find MakerLog and what you're up to online?
Okay, so you can follow me on Twitter, twitter.com slash Mateeng. You can also find me on MakerLog,
getmakerlog.com slash at Sergio, and you should also really join MakerLog in our community of
really encouraging people. We love seeing new projects. We love helping makers achieve their
dreams. If you're a no-code person, if you are starting to learn to code, we can give you
resources. We can give you that framework of support that, you know, everybody, every human
essentially needs. We all need these social interactions. We all have that need to feel
supported, to feel like we have a circle of people we can trust that can encourage us.
MakerLog fills that gap for a lot of indie makers, and I hope it can fill yours too.
All right, thanks again, Sergio.
Thank you so much, Cartland, for having me.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you should subscribe to the indie actors podcast
newsletter. I send an email every time a new episode is out so you know exactly when they're
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on each episode. You can find that at ndhackers.com slash podcast.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.